Spurious

Nietzsche and the Burbs, in Italian translation. 

Review: PDE

At the public school in Wokingham it is time for the Old Mole, the economics professor with her inevitable graphs on government bonds, the performance of the stock exchanges, the real estate bubble. What do they mean? she asks, smiling grimly. Art, Paula, Merv, Chandra, apocalyptic last year students, put forward their catastrophic interpretations: hyperinflation, stagflation, financial despotism, resource destruction, and then fascism, trade wars, real wars… The Old Mole continues to grin. And what can be done? The newcomer raises his hand. He comes from Trafalgar College. Serious stuff, elegant buildings, elegant gardens, elegantly fenced to keep the proletarians out. Stuff a whole continent away from Wokingham and its suburban school. He looks like someone who has charisma, the new, indeed one who is not interested in having charisma and who, precisely for this reason, has charisma. Nothing, he says, that everything goes down the drain, the economy is the problem, the economy devalues ​​everything that matters. 

This is how the most apocalyptic of all of them announces himself to the small group of apocalyptic protagonists of these pages: Nietzsche the nihilist, the boy whose primary need is not to be dead and not to carry the corpse of a world that, according to him, is in irreparable ruin. It is a fateful meeting for Art, Paula, Merv and Chandra. They are not like the insatiable and inert losers who are always checking the phone, always gorging themselves, consuming; they want to lift the stones, question everything, leaving nothing intact. They have a band and they would like to do something new, play the end of things, the music of the ashes, the music after the music. This is why they would like to become philosophers, suburban philosophers, philosophers of Wokingham and the Thames valley! Could Nietzsche be their man, who came to open the heart of the nihilistic storm?

Publisher's blurb

Gellen's essay takes encouragement from Susan Sontag's critique of critical distance by questioning her own attachment to Bernhard's work: "why am I so drawn to him? And why, in turn, am I drawn to writers who are explicitly and implicitly drawn to him, too?". Her answer is that Bernhard and those drawn to his example offer a way out of the purely negative model of failing to write. When I asked myself this question, I realised that my attempts to write something about the chance events in Bernhard's work had always failed to begin because it isn't what had long fascinated me at all. It was that the chance events always happened at the beginning of a prose-text. Beginning is what had long fascinated me, or, rather, how Bernhard's novels continue to begin and don't stop beginning until they end.

It appears to be because twists in the tale, that a staple of storytelling, always appear at the beginning of Bernhard's work, with walking playing a role in them all. He began his adult life by refusing to return to the TB clinic for life-saving treatment. He walked in the opposite direction to what was wise and never went back, and began his life as a writer by going in the opposite direction to singing. He explains in the film monologue Drei Tage that:

the thing I find most terrifying is writing prose…it’s pretty much the most difficult thing for me…And the moment I realized this and became conscious of it, I swore to myself that from then on I would do nothing but write prose.

There is nothing wise in Thomas Bernhard's life and work: he caught tuberculosis also by going in the opposite direction. In the third part of his autobiography, he says that as a fifteen-year-old he chose to work in a bitterly cold grocery store in "the roughest and most dangerous district" of Salzburg after rejecting all the jobs in the safer, wealthier areas, telling the official he "wanted to go in the opposition direction". He uses the phrase thirteen times over two pages: "she offered me a number of apprenticeships, but none of them was in the opposite direction", I did not just want to go in a different direction – it had to be the opposite direction".

I kept on telling her this, but she was not to be put off and went on taking what she regarded as good addresses out of her card-index. I was unable to explain to her what I meant by the opposite direction.   (Tr. David McLintock)

He must have known at some level. It may well be a physical equivalent of Paul Celan's Gegenwort, the "counterword" he spoke about in his Meridian speech, which Dowden compares to in literary terms to Bernhard's "speaking against: against exhausted narrative ploys and forms" and "against Austria's complicity in the horrors of the twentieth century". And given that Celan's example of a counterword is spoken before an execution, Bernhard's life decisions might be compared to the Persian woman's answer to the narrator's question at the end of Yes, or perhaps Roithamer's self-destruction in the forest clearing: in Celan's own words the counterword is "an act of freedom. It is a step."

From Steve Mitchelmore's 'The Opposite Direction'

I could also say, it’s one of my favourite platitudes, I am the unanointed chronicler of a period in which high culture has permanently disappeared. There are still such old folk – myself included – teetering in the queue, paying no heed to their age, ridiculously shaking their medically prescribed walking sticks in the air, furiously wailing that there was such a thing as high culture once, but the bystanders don’t bat an eyelid, they don’t even understand what this man is croaking on about, why he’s holding up the queue in the pharmacy, or at the till in Tesco. The point isn’t that high culture is losing, or is in danger, but that we’ve arrived in a new era, when an area of culture that can’t be infected by the market, or is unable to adapt to its laws, and thus rendered useless, is simply wiped off the map, and all that remains in its place is what we once called mass culture, and we now call culture. That’s what can be found now in the last pages/minutes of the media, where it states which will be the bestseller, or which will catch the attention of those wanting to be entertained. To cut to the chase: today there’s nothing to compare to, to have to say mass culture. Nothing else exists. Homer is a comic, Shakespeare is a so-called difficult question in an idiotic television quiz, and Bach in a board game.

Krasznahorkai, interviewed

In their repetitions, their eddies of obsession, their personal entanglements and subtle variations, each monologist can resemble a comedian delivering seemingly off-the-cuff material, which is in reality highly practiced and refined. Callbacks serve to broaden and deepen the effect of each rant. Positions are taken, qualified, reversed. There is a dimensionality to these attacks, as if an idea has accumulated physical mass. Take Koller, for instance, on “the masses”:

Ninety-nine percent of all people sold out to the masses at the very moment of their birth, so he said. But any person of the mind was obliged to take up the struggle against the masses, to take a stand against them, to declare his opposition to them, at the very moment of his birth; that alone legitimated him as a person of the mind. Anybody who yielded to these masses, be it even on a single point, had forfeited his chance to be a person of the mind and was a mindless person. That every person of the mind naturally always had the masses and hence, to put it dramatically, the whole of humankind ineluctably against him as a matter of course, was transparently clear. . . . Everybody, even those who struggled against these masses and hence against feeblemindedness, ultimately hailed from these masses, and it was only logical and natural at the same time that they were gobbled back up by these masses.

Bernhard offers a formal attentiveness to refrain worthy of the villanelle or the roundel. These furious assaults contain a chorus-like center, an idea or judgment brought round again and again in habituating action; the original position is exhaustively established only to be abandoned after every possible reinforcement has already been made. But the patterning of Koller’s phrasing is as much structural as it is musical. Each recurrence of “the masses” is like a nail driven down at the edge of a billowing tent. It fastens the passage to the page amid great storms of extemporizing. Modification (“person of the mind,” “mindless person,” “feeblemindedness”) and exaggeration (“at the very moment,” “that alone,” “be it even on a single point,” “the whole of human kind”) prolong the attack or position it beyond retort. The final feint at rationality—“it was only logical and natural”—cheekily suggests the whole thing would have occurred to anyone had they only considered the matter more carefully. Bernhard is always extending these invitations to complicity. 

From 'OldMaster', Dustin Illingworth on Berhard in The Baffler.

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

 Charles Baudelaire, Be Drunk

He writes that ‘the sick are inevitably condemned to protracted illness and eventual death. Doctors are victims of either megalomania or helplessness; in either case they can only harm the patient unless he himself takes the initiative.’ It is possible that one may only truly appreciate Bernhard if one has suffered a long illness oneself. One may derive pleasure from him, one may even enjoy him, but one can only love Bernhard if one has spent months lying on one’s back helpless to do anything else, if one has seen the spectre of death toiling beneath one’s own skin, or heard it rattle in one’s chest, fearing that there is no cure. This is the root of his appeal: he makes us laugh precisely when he insists most outrageously that there is no cure, not for sickness or anything else. To again quote E.M. Cioran, whose statement about Beckett applies equally to Bernhard: ‘He is a destroyer who adds to existence — who enriches by undermining it.’ [...]

At around the age of 32, he wrote that ‘Life is the purest, clearest, darkest, most crystalline form of hopelessness . . . There is only one way to go, through the snow and ice into despair; past the adultery of reason.’ Of Strauch, the painter whose endless rants fill his first novel, Frost, the narrator says: ‘He is one of those people who refuse to say anything at all, and yet are continually driven to say everything.’ As Gombrowicz puts it: ‘One can be all the more human the more one is inhuman.’

Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, we glimpse him in certain pictures — wearing a snowball on top of his head, carousing on a hillside in his underwear, eating an ice cream cone, sitting on a park bench surrounded by children, or wearing lederhosen and cracking a joke among friends — and we say to ourselves: this could not have been a serious man. And we are right, in the sense that only an unserious man could have so splendidly dynamited so many façades, so delectably destroyed so many illusions. When we read of his final joke — simultaneously a last excoriation — the prohibition in his will of ever having any of his works published, performed, or even quoted aloud in his home country — we cannot help cackling. Such impertinence delights us. It makes us want to weep with joy that there ever was such a person amongst us as him. For as long as we continue to read him, he will continue to strip away what is stupid, false, and illusory in our own selves; we suspect that his work — that schoolroom in an abattoir, that devil where there would only be God — will never lose its urgency, nor we our need for it.

From Nate Knapp's 'We Earn Nothing But Chaos: Some Notes on Thomas Bernhard'.

This, in part what makes me return to Thomas Bernhard: the ability to risk literature itself in the creation of literature. It is writing that shows that failure, not success, is what goes beyond. The narrator of The Loser suggests that what Wertheimer was unable to grasp which could have saved him from suicide was that:

Every person is a unique and autonomous person and actually, considered independently, the greatest artwork of all time

Literature and art are the only things capable of revealing such a thing to us, but, in doing so they must reject that very statement by creating something other: a shadow, a veil, something dead. The impulse toward art leads toward despair and failure because it denies the recognition of life by seeking to go beyond it. This is why any such work must always be uncertain, stumbling, collapsing, risking its own destruction; because it is the only way to even attempt to get closer toward that very thing from which writing moves away: life. The double shadow of writing cast by Bernhard’s work shows up literature as a frail and fragile thing, a thin pretence. It will not save you. And yet, despite this, indeed because of this, it just might.

from Daniel Fraser's 'A Double Shadow: Re-Reading Thomas Bernhard'

Repetition was the group’s first watchword; it became a declaration of intent in the song of that name, which was widely taken as a manifesto. But the lyrics of ‘Repetition’, released as the B-side of The Fall’s debut single ‘Bingo Master’s Break-out’ (1978), make no case for repetition – ‘the three Rs’ – other than the fact that ‘we dig’ it. The explanation Smith offers for the song in his (ghost-written) autobiography, Renegade (2009) – that it is about the ‘hell’ of living in a flat in Kingswood Road, Prestwich, with his first bandmates – is wholly unconvincing. The Fall’s hymn to repetition was no satire but a profoundly ambiguous statement: both a petition to ‘all you daughters and sons who are sick of fancy music’ and – in the same breath – a refusal to be their spokesperson. The song ends with a sudden shift from the four-note musical motif and accompanying verbal incantation into punk rock chords and direct mockery of lesser artists, such as Richard Hell, who would channel the discontent into some egoistic chant (‘I belong to the blank generation’). The paradox – in which it is impossible to distinguish the inflections of irony from those of earnestness within the same phrase – would come to define Smith’s most characteristic writing.

The same relation to paradox was pioneered in the pseudonymous works of a writer whom Smith never mentions: Kierkegaard, the first great thinker of repetition. Kierkegaard begins his philosophical novella Repetition (1843) with an enigmatic line: ‘Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.’ Repetition does not mean mimesis or representation. Such words are its antitheses, because they imply the self-identity of everything that has taken place, the finished-with nature of the past. Repetition is possible for precisely opposite reasons: nothing that happens is over; everything, including ourselves, is always other than it is. Thus ‘the individual has a variety of shadows, all of which resemble him and which momentarily have equal status as being himself’. While ‘Greek philosophy’, says Kierkegaard (meaning Plato), taught that all knowing is recollection, modern philosophy ‘will teach that all life is a repetition’. [...]

Smith gave many interviews; but only in the first year or two was he unguarded enough to reveal details of his compositional methods or ambitions for the group. One of the most illuminating was a 1979 article by Tony Fletcher in the magazine Jamming!, in which Smith articulates a long-term objective that, for obvious reasons, has been much cited since his death: ‘That’s my fucking aim in life, to keep it going as long as I can.’ More typical was the public conversation at the London Literature Festival held at the South Bank Centre in 2008 to mark the publication of Renegade, at which the interviewer (Ian Harrison, Associate Editor of Mojo) attempted to pin successive categories or images from Smith’s writing onto Smith himself: ‘Are you not appreciated, do you feel that?’ Smith is riled by the line of questioning and brings the interview to a halt. But this reluctance to talk about his personal life is not only a desire for privacy but a principled refusal of the autobiographical gesture. As he says in Renegade, ‘People think of themselves too much as one person – they don’t know what to do with the other people that enter their heads. Instead of going with it, gambling on an idea or a feeling, they check themselves and play it safe or consult their old university buddies.’ This observation, tucked into a paragraph on his hatred of nostalgia, is as close to an explanation of Smith’s worldview as we get anywhere. The extraordinary implication – although so far behind Smith’s vision are we that the idea is barely thinkable – is that the personality of Mark E. Smith was precisely as necessary, or dispensable, to the success of The Fall as that of any one of the sixty-six members who passed through the group’s ranks during its 40-year existence.

from Timothy Bewes's obituary for Mark E. Smith

First interview I ever did, from 2011, with Colin Marshall, newly up on YouTube. 1 hour long.

I will be running a workshop for the European Graduate School on August 25th. Philosophy / creative arts. The Stoics, Nietzsche, Amor Fati, Eternal Recurrence, etc. 

More details to follow.