Spurious

David Morris interviews me for The White Review.

E. J. Iannelli's review of Exodus from Rain Taxi, Summer 2013 print edition (vol.18, no.2, #70):

When Martin Amis's Lionel Asbo was published last year, its cover bore the pretentious subtitle State of England. According to the author, this was an ironic nod to a 'very boring, monotonous' subset of British fiction concerned with precisely that. Of course, Amis's sneering aspersions on the 'state-of-England' novels weren't tempered by the fact that his own father's work might be counted among them. The subtitle also handed several critics a club with which to give Lionel Abso the sound beating its chavvish antagonist so desperately needed.

Unlike Amis, Lars Iyer isn't so bold as to position his bleak comic trilogy as a definitive sociopolitical take on anything. The trilogy itself has no overarching title; the episodic books that comprise it were awarded just one thematically significant award each: Spurious, which debuted in 2011, followed by Dogma (2012) and then Exodus (2013). Instead Iyer leaves the pontificating to his characters, two hapless philosophy lecturers named W. and - in a fittingly meta sort of way - Lars. The pair is very much concerned - to a monomaniacal degree of fixation - with the state of England, symbolized by places like Oxford University, "this facade of old England, this facade of study, this facade of research," which has allowed itself to be steamrolled by the "privatisation of thought," part of a capitalist phenomenon that is driveing the closure of university philosophy departments across the country.

Aside from Lars's corpulence and general wretchedness, this cultural collapse is the duo's sole topic of conversation - or rather, the sole topic of W.'s sententious diatribes, since Lars seems to exist only to serve as his companion's whipping boy and stenographer. As they pine for the halycon days when philosophers were "remade in thought's crucible" and contemplate the future that is destined to spring from this grim present, W. and Lars are moved to an all-consuming form of despair of Kierkegaardian proportions. The profundity of their despair gives them a perverse satisfaction - or at least something else to kvetch about.

Spurious, as the title suggests, was loosely about claims to authenticity. W. dreamed of thinking 'a single thought that might justify his existence' while he and Lars continued a longstanding quest to find someone, anyone they might call their philosophical messiah. In Dogma, the two ventured abroad to America, and, thwarted, set about imagining the foundation of a new philosophical system. Here, in Exodus, this Laurel-and-Hardy duo are wandering Jews - or more specifically, a dubious practitioner of Hinduism and a blowhard with vague claims to Judaism - who, now cast out of the comfort of their ivory towers, are engaged in a peripatetic search for a new homeland. But instead of a Moses to lead them toward the promised land of Canaan, they have W., who pulls them toward a bygone Essex.

The utter hopelessness of Exodus's England - there are extended ruminations on melancholy, despair, and "life-disgust" - is offset by the Beckettian comedy of its bumbling interlocutors, whose peculiar dynamic is reminiscent of Withnail & I. W. is an amalgamation of several comic archetypes: the pompous academic, the obnoxious self-loathing drunkard, the beta male in the company of omegas. Lars is an inherently absurd figure, the sort who only seems to exist in novels and movies. Yet he takes life off the page. The lingering image is one of him transcribing W.'s bloated rhetoric in a pink notebook with a purple pen ("like a Japanese schoolgirl"), suffering W.'s relentless insults without protest ("Do you have a sense of your idiocy?" W. prods during one boozy, gin-soaked interrogation; "Do you grasp just how desperately you have fallen short?"), a copy of the celebrity tabloid Hello! and ample snacks always by his side like a child's security blanket.

Compared to the previous novels, however, Lars is a diminished presence. Not in terms of girth) at one point (at one point, W. makes a show of Googling "morbid obesity," "liposuction" and "gastric bands" to drive a particularly humiliating point home) but rather his very selfhood. He does manage to rise to the occasion for a couple of rousing speeches, much to W.'s vocal surprise, but on the whole he exists under his companion's thumb. Here, in the final book of this trilogy, this self-styled scholar and philosopher has the entirety of his thoughts dictated to him by a man who professes to have no worthwhile thoughts. Here he is doubly in thrall to a washed-up mentor who openly regards him as "a living excuse for his failure, his inability to think."

And therein lies the sly subversiveness of Iyer's tragiccomic trilogy - and it is indeed tragic, given that W. and Lars's lamentations are at least partially rooted in real-world events. When, all the way back in Spurious, W. moaned that "we're fucked, everything's fucked" and insisted to Lars that they "should only speak of each other to others in world-historical terms," he was echoing a more grave and pervasive sentiment that we - that is, not just England in its current state, or America, but all of humanity - are hastening toward end times on all possible fronts: political, social, environmental and, yes, even educational. Amid the onslaught of W.'s facetious blotivation, his droll lists of all the ways in which Lars gives expression to his idiocy, his reflexive parody of the academic philosopher, Exodus and its two predecessors place serious points on the table: the danger of political defeatism, the idea that thought "is indistinguishable from dread," or the question of finding the path to salvation "in truly experiencing our despair."

"Philosophy gives substance to our suffering," W. expounds at one point. "That's what does combat with the senselessness of the world." And there's a genuine kernel of truth in that, despite its supercilious fictional source. With Exodus, as he did with Spurious and Dogma before it, Iyer has shown that a picaresque novel can be as good a vehicle for philosophy as any.

Exodus is reviewed in the Summer 2013 print edition (vol.18, no.2, #70) of Rain Taxi (link only goes to the table of contents.)

Richard W. Jackson reviews Exodus for Book Hugger, part of the Nudge Network.

Moving Ivan Brunetti interview.

Near unique Jandek interview.

Exodus discussed at the Jackson Progressive Blog.

Randy Metcalfe reviews Exodus at Transformative Explications.

Shamed by Exodus.

Paul Davies at Architecture and Other Habits has a few words on Exodus.

And this from Chris Robinson, from the Spring Reading List of the Readers & Writers Book Club, North Country Public Radio:

Lars Iyer, Exodus. It is my job to inform you that there is a contemporary author who writes in a manner reminiscent of Samuel Beckett. That is, Iyer in his trilogy – Spurious, Dogma and Exodus – presents two characters (W. and Lars) that appraise and represent the decline of contemporary Western culture. These books are often hilarious, and unfailingly poignant. Exodus is the best volume of the trilogy and covers the neoliberal destruction of the university and the messianic turn in W’s thought.

To have a sense of the perpetual only in the negative, in what does harm, in what thwarts being. Perpetuity of threat, of frustration, of longed-for and failed ecstasy, of an absolute glimpsed and rarely achieved; yet sometimes transcended, skipped over, as when you escape God ...

The superior saints did not insist on working miracles; they acknowledged them reluctantly, as if someone had forced their hand. Every time we come upon something existing, real, full, we want to have the bells rung, as on the occasion of great victgories or great calamities.

You have dared call Time your 'brother', take as your ally the worst of torturers. On this point, our differences explode: you walk in step with Time, while I precede or drag after it, never adopting its manners, unable to think of it without experiencing something like a speculative sorrow.

The basis of society, of any society, is a certain pride in obedience. When this pride no longer exists, the society collapses.

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.

My mission is to kill time, and time's is to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

The obession of lastness apropos of everything, the last as category, as constitutive form of the mind, the last as category, as constitutive form of the mind, as original deformity, even as revelation ...

I long ago used up whatever religious resources I had. Deisscation or purification? I am the last to say. No god lingers in my blood ...

At the bird market. What power, what determination in these tiny frantic bodies! Life resides in this bit of nothing which animates a tuft of matter, and which nonetheless emerges from matter itself and perishes with it. But the perplexity remains: impossible to explain this fever, this perpetual dance, this representation, this spectacle which life affords itself., What a theatre, breath!

All these people in the street make me think of exhausted gorillas, every one of them tired of imitating man!

Hesiod: 'The gods have hidden from men the sources of life'. Have they done well, or ill? One thing is certain: mortals would have not have had the courage to continue after such a revelation.

[...] Deliverance? One does not attain it, one is engulfed by it, smothered in it. Nirvana itself -an asphyxia! Though the gentlest of all.

As soon as we consult a specialist, we realize we are the lowest of the low, the reject of Creation, a crud. We should not know what ails us, still less what we die of. Any specification in this realim is impious, for by a word it does away with that minimum of mystery which death and even life are meant to conceal.

Fever inspires a man's work - for how long? Often passion causes certain works to date, whereas others, produced by exhaustion, survive age after age. Timeless lassitude, eternity of cold disgust!

The proof that man loathes man? Enough to be in a crowd, in order to feel that you side with all the dead planets.

The only profitable conversations are with enthusaisms who have ceased being so - with the ex-naive... Calmed down at last, they have taken, willy-nilly, the decisive step toward Knowledge - that impersonal version of disappointment.

He who, having frequented men, retains the slightest illusion about them, should be condemned to reincarnation, in order to learn how to observe, to see, to catch up ...

In order to mold man, it was not with water but with tears that Prometheus mixed his clay [...]

Man is unacceptable.

The crucial moment of the historical drama is out of our reach. We are merely its harbingers, its heralds - the trumpets of a Judgement without a Judge.

At this moment, I am alone. What more can I want? A more intense happiness does not exist. Yes: that of hearing, by dint of silence, my solitude enlarge.

'To make an attempt upon one's days' - how accurate this French expression for suicide. What we possess is just that: days, days, and that is all we can attack.

Desolation is so linked to what I feel that it acquires the facility of a reflex.

It is not normal to be alive, since the living being as such exists and is real only when threatened. Death in short is no more than the cessation of an anomaly.

A curious dream over which I prefer not to linger. Someone or other would have dissected it. What a mistake! Le the nights bury the nights.

Hope is the normal form of delirium.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

The originality of a being is identified with his particular way of losing his footing [...]

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?

To torment oneself in the middle of the night, to perform every known sort of exercise, to swallow pills, tablets, capsules - why? In hopes of eclipsing that phenomenon, that deadly apparition known as consciousness. Only a conscious being, only a weakling, could have invented such an expression as to be engulfed in sleep, a gulf indeed but a rare, inaccesible one, a forbidden, sealed gulf, into which we would so like to vanish!

If the waves began to reflect, they would suppose that they were advancing, that they had a goal, that they were making progress, that they were working for the Sea's good, and they would not fail to elaborate a philosophy as stupid as their zeal.

In hell, the least populous but severest circle of all must be the one where you cannot forget Time for a single moment.

At the Jardin des Plantes, I stood for a long time meeting the immemorial gaze of an alligator's eyes.What enchants me in these reptiles is their impenetrable hebetude, which allies them to stones: as if they came before life, preceded without heralding it, as if they even fled from it ...

To die at sixty or at eighty is harder than at ten or thirty. Habituation to life, there's the rub. For life is a vice - the greatest one of all. Which explains why we have so much difficulty ridding ourselves of it.

He who has not suffered is not a being: at most, a creature.

[...] boredom evokes an evil without site or support, only that indefinable nothing that erodes you ... A pure erosion, whose imperceptible effect slowly transforms you into a ruin unnoticed by others and almost unnoticed by yourself.

We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. they alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. [...]

Time corrodes not only everything that lives, but even itself, as if, weary of continuing and exasperated by the Possible, its best part, it aspired to extirpate that as well.

To publish groans, exclamantions, fragments ... makes everyone comfortable. The author thereby puts himself in a position of inferiority in relation to the reader, and the reader is grateful to him for it.

Looking at someone's photographs taken at different ages, you glimpse why Time has been called a magician. The operations it accomplishes are incredible, stupefying - miracles, but miracles in reverse. This magician is actually a demolisher, a sadistic angel with the human face in his keeping.

What you write gives only an incomplete image of what you are, because the words loom up and come to life only when you are at the highest or the lowest point of yourself.

from E.M Cioran's, Drawn and Quartered

In a traditional system, culture exists only in the act of its transmission, that is, in the living act of its tradition. There is no discontinuity between past and present, between old and new, because every object transmits at every moment, without residue, the system of beliefs and notions that has found expression in it. To be more precise, in a system of this type it is not possible to speak of a culture independently of its transmission, because there is no accumulated treasure of ideas and precepts that constitute the separate object of transmssion and whose reality is in itself a value. In a mythical-traditional system, an absolute identity exists between the act of transmission and the thing transmitted, in the sense that there is no other ethical, religious, or aesthetic value outside the act itself of transmission.

An inadequation, a gap between the act of transmission and the thing to be transmitted, and a valuing of the latter independently of the former only when tradition loses its vital force, and constitute the foundation of a characteristic phenomenon of non-traditional societies: the accumulation of culture. For, contrary to what one might think at first sight, the breaking of tradition does not al all mean the loss or devaluation of the past: it is, rather, likely that only now the past can reveal itself with a weight and an influence that it never had before. Loss of tradition means that the past has lost its transmissibility, and so long as no new way has been found to entire into relation with it, it can only be the object of accumulation from now on.

[...] it is the transmissibility of culture that, by endowing culture with an immediately perceptible meaning and value, allows man to move freely toward the future wihout being hindered by the burden of the past.

from Agamben's Man Without Content

[A]n oft-quoted passage from The Recognitions, spoken by the novel’s protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon:

This passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour . . . what is it? What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology?

[...] Gaddis, who justified his decision to enter the public sphere later in life by saying that ‘the time of being the reclusive unapproachable writer is not only over but to press it on could very well appear as a coy plea for attention’.

From a review of Gaddis's letters by Emmet Stinson

... any revolution prevails only if it pits itself against an unreal order. The same is true of any advent, any historical turning point. The Goths did not conquer Rome, they conquered a corpse. The Barbarians' only merit was to have had a nose ...

Despite everything, it would be sweet to know that twilight success in which we might escape the succession of generations and the parade of tomorrows, and when, on the ruins of historical time, existence, at last identical with itself, will again become what it was before turning into history.

As long as history follows a more or less normal course, every event appears as a whim, a faux pas of Time; once it changes cadence, the slightest incident assumes the scope of a sign.

If we insist that history must have a meaning let us seek it in the curse that weighs upon it, and nowhere else.

After so many defeats and conquests, man is beginning to put himself out of date. He still deserves some interest only insofar as he is tracked and cornered, sinking ever deeper. If he continues, it is because he hasn't the strength to capitulate, to suspend his desertion forward (the very definition of history).

What ruins us, no, what has ruined us, is the thirst for a destiny, for any destiny whatever ...

The charm of a life without reflexion, of existence as such being forbidden to us, we cannot bear that others should delight in it. Deserters of innocence, we turn against whoever still resides within it, against all the beings that, indifferent to our adventure, loll in their blessed torpor. And the gods - have we not turned against them as well, outraged to see that they were conscious without suffering from the fact, while for us consciousness and shipwreck are one and the same thing.

No more schools; on the other hand, courses in oblivion and unlearning to celebrate the virtues of inattention and the delights of amnesisa.

What cannot be translated into mystical language does not deserve to be experienced.

It is my elocutionary defects, my stammerings, my jerky delivery, my art of mumbling - it is my voice, my transeuropean r's, that have impelled me by reaction to take some care with what I write and to make myself more or less worthy of an idiom I mistreat each time I open my mouth.

One does not write because one has something to say but because one wants to say something.

Existing is plagiarism.

True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.

To exist is a colossal phenomenon - which has no meaning. This is how I should define the stupefaction in which I live day after day.

We must censure the later Nietzsche for a panting excess in the writing, the absence of rests.

At the Zoo. - All these creatures have a decent bearing, except the monkeys. One feels that man is not far off.

Musical Offering, Art of the Fugue, Goldberg Variations: I love in music, as in philosophy and everything, what pains by insistence, by recurrence, by that interminable return which reaches the ultimate depths of being and provokes there a barely endurable delectation.

To send someone a book is to commit a burglary - a case of breaking and entering. It is to trample down his solitude, what he holds most sacred, for it is to oblige him to desist from himself in order to think about your thoughts.

To be is to be cornered.

E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

Since I crossed the Rhine, I seem to be dead inside, not a single feeling comes the surface. I'm an auomaton; my soul has been removed.... There are no mountains here with an open view. Hill after hill and broad valleys, everywhere a hollow mediocrity; I can't get used to this landscape, and the city is abominable.... Incessant headaches and fever, barely a few hours of inadequate rest. I don't go to bed before two A.M. and then constant sudden awakenings, a sea of thoughts that consume my senses... My mental faculties are completely worn out. Work is impossible.... I'm afraid of my own voice - and of my mirror.... I'm alone, as in a grave; when will your hand awaken me?

Buechner, letter, anticipating the prose style of Lenz.