Spurious

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'The Love of Fate': a talk I gave to students at the European Graduate School. Pierre Hadot - Marcus Aurelius - Nietzsche. Edited down from a 4 hour session.

As the narrator of The Cheap-eaters says:

Life or existence was nothing other than the unceasing and actually uninterrupted and hopeless attempt to extricate oneself from everything in every possible department and drag oneself into the future, a future that time and again had nothing to offer but the renewal of this selfsame lethal process.

This is why all of Bernhard’s internal wrangling with form, with displacement, with beginning, is so important for the works as literature. The Cheap-Eaters demonstrates that the process by which the novel is written, however futile, is not simply a stylistic feature but co-determinate and co-determining with the activity of life.

Rather than enabling us to forget the debility of language and allowing us to revel in its constructions, Bernhard’s self-questioning in The Cheap-eaters shows us that it is paradoxically by resisting literature’s act of creation that one remains closest to life. The reason for doing so is not merely to demonstrate the incapacity of literature, to reveal the wizard behind the curtain for its own sake. Rather, it is that making literature in this way reveals something fundamental about what it is to be human, about our human condition. In order for the world to mean something, we have to reach reduce it, whilst attempting to reach across, to make our reduction always more than what it is. To speak, to name, to narrate, to write: the ways we interpret and understand the world, all do violence against its richness and potentiality. Bernhard is a writer who reveals this in his self-appointed role as a story-destroyer not because he simply removes a traditional plot structure from his work, but because he attacks the conditions of possibility for that structure in the first place. He goes against the story that literature tells itself. Writing in and through such a catastrophe, what is there left to say? Well, for Bernhard at least:

There’s the non-existent conversation with the past, which itself no longer exists, which will never exist again. There’s the conversation with long, non-existent sentences. There’s the dialogue with non-existent nature, intercourse with concepts that are non-concepts, that never could be concepts. Intercourse with conceptlessness, cluelessness. There’s intercourse with a subject-matter that is unremittingly imperfect. The conversation with material that doesn’t answer back. There’s the absolute soundlessness that ruins everything, the absolute despair from which you can no longer extricate yourself. There’s the imaginary prospect that you have built for yourself in order to be able to keep only imagining it. There’s the attempt to brush up against objects that dissolve the moment you think you could have touched them. There’s intercourse with actualities that turn out to be shams. There’s the attempt to piece back together a period of time that was never unified. There’s always the same groping in your imagination towards a representation of things that by its very nature must prove false. There’s your identification with things that have emerged out of sentences, and you know neither anything about sentences nor anything about things, and time and again you know pretty much nothing at all.

Daniel Fraser

Another recent series of novels about the sad decline of academia also trades in apocalyptic thinking. The books are Spurious (2011), Dogma (2012), and Exodus (2012), by British philosophy don Lars Iyer. The novels center on a series of conversations between two philosophers, men steeped in belatedness (they contrast themselves regularly with Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Rosenzweig), pessimism, and bewilderment. At one point in the first book, they agree: “These are the end times… . It’s enough to be left alone like the alcoholics, but our time will come just as their time will come. We’ll be rounded up and shot, W. says. It’s only a matter of time, we know, before we are found out” (Iyer, Spurious 40–41). Another of their recurrent feelings is self-disgust: “What are the signs of the End?, I ask W. – You. You are a sign of the End, says W. Actually, we both are. The fact that we have careers or flourish at all is a sign of the End. Of course, the fact that we won’t have them for much longer is a sign that the End is coming closer” (41).

The apocalypse mostly threatens W., in Dogma: “There are rumours in the corridors, he says. There are murmurings in the quadrangle. Compulsory redundancies … the restructuring of the college … the closure of whole departments, whole faculties … It’s a bit like ancient Rome, before they stabbed Caesar to death, W. says” (8–9). Later the rumour is that “they’re going to close down all the humanities, every course. The college is going to specialize in sports instead. They’ve brought in a team of consultants to manage the redundancies, W. says… . They’ll probably make him a professor of badminton ethics, W. says. He’ll probably be teaching shot put metaphysics” (97). Things go from bad to (at least symbolic) worse:

W.’s college has become a vale of tears, he says… . Chaos everywhere. Petty vandalism. Dead bodies, face down in the quadrangle, with knives in their backs. It’ll go up in flames, soon, the college, W. says. There’ll be black smoke rising from the lecture halls. And after that, who knows? Cannibalism, probably. Human sacrifice. (144–45)

As the third instalment, Exodus, begins, things have not gone quite so far, but W. now teaches only sports science students, humanities having been abolished at his college; and he predicts that all humanities departments in the country will follow. Not because the government has anything against philosophy or the humanities. No, “they’re simply going to marketise education, W. says. They’re simply going to turn the university over to the free market, just as they are turning all sectors of the public services over to the free market. They’re going to submit philosophy to the forces of capitalism” (Exodus 15). The forces of capitalism, that is, similar to those acknowledged in Australia, where higher education has become “seen by government as an export service industry in which Australia could find comparative advantage, the cultural equivalent of iron ore” (Connell)

There can be few more uncompromising accounts of a destroyed university system than the one that W. and Lars share. The fullest obituary reads:

The corpse of the university floats face down in the water, that’s what I always tell him, W. says. We’re poking it with sticks. None of us can believe it. Is it really dead, the university?, W. asks me. Is that really its bloated, blue-faced corpse? Yes, it really is dead, and there it is, floating, face down, I tell him. There’s no point pretending otherwise, not anymore. The university is dead, and there is its corpse. O, there are signs of life in the university, I tell W. It seems that it’s alive. But that life is the life of maggots, I tell W., devouring the substance of the university from the inside, living on its rotting. (Exodus, 11)

To insist, now, that reading Lars Iyer’s novels is a rich and fascinating experience even for a fellow humanities professor, that reading them is exhilarating, and that it is almost irresistible to begin rereading them immediately after finishing, begins to touch on the paradoxical, indeed ironic, nature of the academic novel. These books testify to some real and terrible changes in higher education. But knowing this does not deprive these books that embody those truths of their appeal, their value. One can read about the destruction of the humanities, even when one is employed in and committed to the humanities, read even about universities dissolving into cannibalism and human sacrifice and – while hating every bit of the process that led us to where we are today – enjoy reading it, as Lars Iyer probably enjoyed writing it, even though his story is dire.

From Merritt Moseley's 'Smaller World: The Academic Novel as Canary in the Coal Mine of Modern Higher Education', published in The Campus Novel: Regional or Global?, ed. Dieter Fucchs and Wojciech Klepuszewski editor. 2019, pps. 20-26.