Excerpts from Pieter Vermeulen, Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel (Palgrave Macmillan 2015):
Lars Iyer: toward farcical life
A careful reading of McCarthy and Shields makes clear that their works deliver an affective dynamic that cuts across the borders of the individuals they present, and that exceeds their works' official messages. A third prominent intervention in contemporary debates over the end of the novel, Lars Iyer's 2011 essay 'Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss', is more clear-eyed about the power of affect to undo the alliance of feeling and the individual, as well as about the importance of that force for the question of the (im)possibility of the novel today. As the text's self-deprecatory subtitle ('A Literary Manifesto after the End of Literature and Manifestoes') indicates, this sobriety reflects the fact that Iyer is uninterested neither in epater le bourgeois nor in announcing a new departure for literature. For Iyer, these are struggles belonging to a past when 'Literature' was still alive. Today, it is not only the novel that has ended, but the whole literary regime in which a radical break with the novel, such as that performed by Eliot, still made sense. literature today no longer has a hold on the lives of individuals: 'The dream has faded, our faith and awe have fled, our belief in Literature has collapsed'. Iyer's essay lucidly registers that the ambition to bury the middlebrow novel is a belated attempt to reanimate that dream - to affirm the continued relevance of literature while declaring the death of its most popular form. Such illusory ruptures today mean no more than 'play[ing] puppet with the corpse'; staged attempts to bury the novel are covert ways of re-sacrilizing with one hand with what one wishes to profane with the other. Instead of writing the next chapter in literary history, 'the only subject left to write about is the epilogue of Literature'. For Iyer, 'Literature is a corpse and cold at that', and taking that lesson seriously means that one does not even bother to bury that corpse.
Iyer's 'literature which comes after Literature' does not feel the need to concern itself with the perpetuation of its own existence. The paradoxical strength of this position is that it thereby liberates writing to attend to other needs - to those aspects of contemporary life that can no longer be heroically transformed or redeemed. In the next chapter, I show how J.M. Coetzee's late work gives shape to this awkwardly persistent life that 'faces its own demise and survives'. For Coetzee, this materializes as a species of 'creatural life'; Iyer, for his part, refers to it as 'gloomy, farcical life': it is a life 'whose vast sadness is that it is less than tragic', or indeed less than novelistic, and for which the loss of tragedy makes itself felt as farce.
Iyer ends the essay with 'a few pointers' about what a post-Literary literature should look like. Remarkably, many of these elements correspond closely to the 'key components' of Shields' new poetics. Iyer's insistence on 'unliterary plainness' resembles Shields' 'deliberate unartiness'; his injunction to '[w]rite about this world' resonates with Sheilds' emphasis on reality; and his imperative to '[r]esist closed forms' echoes Shields' investment in '[r]andomness, openness to accident and serendipity'. The difference is that Iyer's openness is a willingness to engage with 'the draft of real life - gloomy, farcical life', while Shields' is a readiness to render individual experience in confessional form. Iyer notes that '[t]he author must give up on aping genius. Rather show the author as ape, the author as idiot'. For Iyer, the author is implicated in the farcical life to which his writing must respond, not its sovereign observer - an insight that Coetzee, as we will see, embodies in the personal of Elizabeth Costello. Liberated from the obligation to either debunk or promote sovereign selfhood, Iyer's position opens up a broad range of affects; farcical life is 'sickly and cannibalistic, preposterous and desperate, but it is also, paradoxically, joyous and rings with truth'.
Iyer's own trilogy of novels. (Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus, published between 2011 and 2013) has drawn comparisons to the work of Thomas Bernhard and Samuel Beckett. The books narrate the uneventful friendship and inconsequential conversations of Lars and W., two British academics and intellectuals surviving in the ruins of the contemporary university. The books consist of sections that are only one or two paragraphs long; their very loose sense of order or development, and their elaboration of a limited set of motifs (Judaism, Hinduism, German idealism, Kafka, the university, alcohol, ...) betrays the novels' origin in a series of blogposts that Iyer published in the years leading up to the publication of the novel. Even if the provenance of these chunks of texts is more straightforward than in Reality Hunger, Iyer's novels more successfully manage to escape the monological mode that overtakes Shields' book. They do this by almost never allowing their first-person narrator, Lars, to speak for himself; instead, Lars mainly renders W.'s verbal abuse of him, mostly in free indirect discourse (in which Lars is referred to as 'I'), sometimes directly (in which he appears as 'you'). Most first-person pronouns are in the plural - Lars himself is little more than an empty shell, and his 'I'm mainly appears in W.'s (that is, 'double-u's/double you's') discourse. Iyer's decision to lend his first name to his narrator reflects his awareness that authors are affected by the degradation and discomfort that their writing occasions. Both Spurious and Dogma open with Lars repeatedly being called 'stupid' on their first pages. Still, in the domain of the farcical, the two characters are riveted to one another precisely because it is the realm of farcical life, and not of an individual subjectivity: 'You can exorcise a ghost. But how can you rid yourself of an idiot?' (Dogma 31).
Most of the novels are taken up with inconsequential, rambling, and often highly intellectual conversations, which regularly deal with German philosophy and literature. There is a pervasive sense of bathos, as this high-minded talk is embedded in the pedestrian triviality of the actions of and the relationship between Lars and W., whose only way of connecting is by verbally abusing Lars and denigrating his (stalled) intellectual achievements. Their dialogue is propelled by intellectual cliches: 'long periods of warehouse work and unemployment' bring you 'into contact with the essence of capitalism' (Dogma 12); 'The Anglo-Saxon mentality is opposed to abstraction and metaphysics [...] It is completely opposed to German profundity' (Dogma 81); Kafka's The Castle 'was literature itself!' (Spurious 19). these remainders of literary life float through the novels without informing transformations or provoking reactions - they are just part of the infertile cultural landscape in which the two characters live out their tragicomedy of contemporary intellectual and academic life. Their lateness offers no consolations: 'What did we expect? Some Kant-like resurgence, late in life? Some late awakening from our dogmatic slumbers?' (Dogma 47).
W. and Lars are literary characters who have come too late for literature. They are 'landfill philosophers' (Dogma 55), living 'each day as though it were the day after the last' (214). Even though the novels (especially Spurious) evoke ideas of apocalypse and of the messianic, their sad fate is that their lateness will not end: 'It's time to die, says W. But death does not come' (Dogma 223). Human life no longer has a purpose and a meaning that literature can give significant shape, and yet it persists. Lars's and W.'s gloomy, farcical lives are suspended between lofty insights that they do not comprehend and the basest animality - it is divided 'between the highest thought and the basest idiocy' (207). Lars and W. 'felt things, great things' (212), but they cannot ascribe meanings to the limitations of significance to which they are remorselessly exposed: 'Like great, dumb animals, we were only feeling [...] What could we understand of what we had been called to do?' (208). For Iyer, the contemporary novel exposes a form of life that is protected neither from insights it cannot comprehend nor from its proximity to animal life; it is no longer a human possession that can be clearly separated from the realms of animal and supernatural being. In the next chapter, I theorize this precarious mode of persistence as 'creatural life', and I track J.M. Coetzee's literary figurations of it. Iyer and Coetzee share an awareness that the form of life to which the contemporary novel responds can neither be shaken off (as McCarthy wants to believe) nor valorized as significant individual experience (as in Shields): instead it is a farcical and creatural life to which the remainder of the novel finds itself attuned. (pp. 43-46.)
The disfigurement of human life by the anthropocene and the post-human comedy echoes tonalities and dissonances that this book has addressed before. If McGurl applauds genre fiction for its willingness to 'risk ludicrousness' ('Posthuman' 539), Lars Iyer's staging of farcical life and Coetzee's evocation of creatural life explore tonal and affective possibilities that make ludicrousness part of the repertoire of contemporary fiction. For Iyer and Coetzee, farcical and creatural life name a condition in which an outworn form of life(such as the novel) can no longer be comfortably inhabited, but cannot for all that simply be abandoned. This powerless persistence of disgraced forms of life also marks human life in the anthropocene: customary models of intention and agency, of responsibility and chance, are thrown into crisis as human life needs to think of itself as also a geological force, without that new designation cancelling its former attachments. The anthropocene reminds the human that it can never simply coincide with a particular form of life. The questions of the human, of form, and of scale come together in the close affinity between the anthropocene, on the one hand, and the novelistic elaboration of creatural - or farcical, or ludicrous - life on the other. (p.140)