An old interview (2013) by Foyles now with missing parts left in:
'Exodus' is the third in a trilogy - will we be seeing more from Lars and W. (and perhaps those elusive Essex post-graduates) in the future?
That’s all from Lars and W. for now. You have to know when to quit! Think of the last few seasons of The Sopranos! Having said that, there are some interesting real-life events coming up which might lend themselves, one day, to fictional treatment. For example, we’re bringing some of the Italian philosophers I mention in the trilogy to Oxford in April. And there are some parts of the backstories of Lars and W. still left unexplored …
This book is almost as long as Spurious and Dogma put together, and feels more expansive somehow - was there a reason for this wider scope?
I wanted to say everything, in some way. To say it all in this strange new style I’ve developed, to say everything it can allow me to say. And I wanted to draw together everything I’d written so far, to follow all the hares to their lairs …
Would you say Exodus is a more serious work than the previous two novels? There seems to be a more overtly political aspect to this one. Do W.'s feelings about the current state of academia in this country chime with your own?
The trilogy is set in neoliberal Britain in the mid- to late 2000s, but I also wanted to explore the way its characters had been shaped by the turn to neoliberal capitalism in the Thatcher years. There’s some of this in Dogma. But Exodus deepens this account of the characters, depicting a younger W. studying in the 1980s, as part of a group of highly politicized and utopian Essex postgraduates, and a younger Lars, studying in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in a rapidly regenerating Manchester. For his part, W. still burns with the desire for politics, but the case of Lars is more difficult to determine. Lars seems too ravaged by what Wendy Brown has called ‘quotidian nihilism’ – a general, barely individualised sense of despair - to have any real faith in political transformation.
You ask me whether I share W.’s feelings about academia. Like many others, I am worried by what Bill Readings long ago diagnosed as the collapse of the ‘idea of culture’ on which the modern university was based. The notion of ‘excellence’ that replaced this older ideal is a technocratic one, being concerned with narrow notions of productivity and market performance. For me, as for my characters W. and Lars, the humanities are in danger simply of servicing neoliberal capitalism, training students to fit in with the new ‘knowledge economy’ rather than encouraging them to more general ethical and civic reflection, and weeding out would-be academics who are not content simply to produce yet more academic papers, monographs and funding proposals.
You've mentioned daily cartoons like Peanuts as influences in previous interviews - I certainly saw elements of Garfield and Jon's relationship in that of Lars and W., a kind of outwardly relentless cruelty punctuated by moments of affection... Do you agree? Would you consider printing Spurious as a cartoon?
I’ve always thought of the W. and Lars material as a kind of comic strip. That’s how it functioned on the blog, back when I wrote in a greater variety of styles – it was supposed to be a kind of light relief, my equivalent of the ‘funnies’ at the bottom of the newspaper page. I wanted it to work in exactly the same way as Schultz’s Peanuts and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat: each daily ‘strip’ (in my case, each W. and Lars blog post) was to be free-standing enough to introduce new readers to these characters and their situations, but, at the same time, part of a longer story arc, part of a larger ‘mythology’. When I found it difficult to come up with new twists on the W. and Lars relationship, I reminded myself of Schutlz and Herriman, and what they were able to do with a tiny number of characters and a restricted range of situations.
But the trilogy could not be printed as a cartoon, for the same reason that it couldn’t be made into a play, or a film: so much of its effect depends on a narrative distancing, which means we can never be sure of the veracity of W.’s account of Lars. Is Lars really as fat as W. suggests, or as stupid? For me, it’s vital that the audience is unsure about the answer to these questions.
All three novels are written from an interesting perspective, from Lars' point of view but mainly reporting W.'s speech - yet somehow it feels natural. Why did you settle on this way of writing?
The critic and novelist Gabriel Josipovici praises those kinds of narrative which free us from believing that the stories we tell about the world are anything other than stories, thereby allowing the world to be what it is. I hope my fiction is freeing in this way, even if the ‘otherness’ of the world, in my work, is presented as a kind of horror.
I wanted to give a sense of Lars’s presence beyond the stories W. tells about him. I wanted him to be there
My novels are centred on conversation, around the reporting of conversations. For me the human capacity to communicate is of central importance, even if it seems so obvious that we forget it. The narrative technique I employ is supposed to remind the reader of this capacity, in all its wonder.
At many points in my trilogy, nothing seems to make sense to my characters. They feel bewildered – they feel that time is out of joint, that there is no intrinsically meaningful action that they can perform, that nothing is worthwhile. Sure, W. is capable of great hope, of believing in the possibility of writing a great philosophical work, or being part of some great revolution, but he slumps back from those moments into a kind of listlessness, regathering strength only by tormenting his friend Lars, and by sharing his frustrations. For his part, Lars is sometimes presented as a contemporary equivalent to Rabelais’s Gargantua, obsessed with his appetites, but Lars, too is someone who falls victim to ‘quotidian nihilism’.
In the narrative technique I use in the trilogy, I wanted to convey to the reader the sense both of the political and philosophical energies W. feels able to summon, but also of the failure of those energies – to give a sense of W.’s efforts to project political or philosophical meaning into the world, but also of the ultimate otherness of the world, its refractoriness and even indifference to those efforts. W. is constantly running up against this meaninglessness, he’s constantly rebuffed – not least by the Gargantua-like Lars, who seems to incarnate this meaninglessness, or at least enjoy a privileged link to it.
Lars is linked in the trilogy to chaos, to the passage in the book of Genesis about ‘welter and waste’, about the world ‘without form or void’. The character of Lars, considered from W.,’s point of view, in the trilogy, as well as the damp in Spurious and the rats in Dogma and the building noise in Exodus, were ways, for me, of presenting the world in its remoteness, its otherness – the world as it is totally refractory to human concerns. Commenting on the damp and the rats in my first two novels in an essay in The New Inquiry, Saelan Twerdy writes, ‘reality is infinitely more complex and multilayered than our frame of reference normally allows for and the forms of our entanglement in it often escape us.’ I think he is right, and appreciate his reading.
But I had something else in mind in deploying my particular narrative technique. My novels are books of chatter. We hear W. speaking. We overhear the conversations he has with his friend. We encounter their banter, their faux-profundity, their sense of fun in their exchanges. In focusing on the to-and-fro of these friends, I wanted to convey the importance of human communication in allowing us to speak of the chaos that lacks both form and void. I wanted to convey the significance of friendship as it permits such communication – of a joy which remains after despair – the joy of being able to talk (and write) about contingency and meaninglessness. For me, this capacity to communicate, is part of what allows us to live in the world without experiencing it as a solely impersonal fate, as sheer otherness. In speaking, we clear our little patch in the wilderness, we live our small human lives …
You've touched on the philosophers that are frequently mentioned in all three books. Did you feel it was a risk to include some of the more esoteric references, that the average fiction reader may be unfamiliar with? I certainly had to scramble Wikipedia a few times.
The most crucial philosophical references in the trilogy are to those late-nineteenth and twentieth century Jewish philosophers, who saw the meaning-giving significance of human communication, which they understood as speech. Does it matter if the reader is unfamiliar with Rosenzweig or Hermann Cohen? Not at all! The ‘message’ of the trilogy – of the importance of friendship, of love, centred on speech, is present in the very form of the trilogy – in its most basic narrative technique. It’s my hope that the reader is made to experience what very obscure and difficult philosophers like Rosenzweig have taught without any knowledge of those philosophers whatsoever.
I wanted to talk a bit more about the apocalypse, in its various forms. W. is convinced that the world is about to end, at times almost hopeful for it, and that 'the language of the end times is wholly appropriate to our times'. Do you think that the end of the world is something that we all secretly crave?
The characters do indeed believe that they are living in the ‘end times’, just as many thinkers have believed this before them. W. and Lars really do believe that the apocalypse is around the corner. But there is a crucial difference between W. and Lars and the millenarians that Norman Cohn has written about in his Pursuit of the Millennium (a book I explicitly reference in Exodus): my characters cannot believe that the apocalypse will actually reveal anything, will actually make things clear. Etymologically, the word, ‘apocalypse’, suggests a kind of unveiling, a revelation. The apocalypse is supposed to show God’s plan for the world. But what if there is no plan, and nothing to reveal? It’s no wonder that W. and Lars sometimes give in to despair!
Of course, as the work of Cohn shows us, there has always been a not-so-secret desire for apocalypse. It’s the moment of judgement, when the wicked are punished, and the meek rewarded. Yes, the apocalypse involves destruction, but it is a destruction in the name of a new hope, a destruction in the name of the Messiah, of the messianic age. The apocalypse is a moment in which the Messiah intervenes in human history. But what happens when you have no faith in a final judgement, in the coming of the Messiah, or in the opening of the messianic age? Instead of the ‘end times’, there is only an endless end, the continual resurgence of chaos and meaninglessness.
Things might seem hopeless for W. and Lars – they are overwhelmed by the ‘welter and waste’. But they actually have hope, which takes the form of their capacity to speak, to converse, to communicate. For the Jewish philosophers I have mentioned, messianism is to be found in human communication, in speech. Even in the ‘endless end’ of climatic and financial catastrophe, W. and Lars are still able to speak about the catastrophe. That, by itself, is a source of hope. Granted, it’s not going to prevent the catastrophe in question, but it does allow a kind of distancing from it. The characters, through their humorous exchanges concerning the catastrophe, are, for that reason, never its passive victims.
Let me make the point in another way. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is not simply a play about absurdity, about the fruitless waiting for a messianic figure who never comes. It is about characters talking as they wait, making meaning and amusing themselves in the meantime. It is actually in this talk that the ‘messianism’ of Beckett’s play lies, its lived capacity for hope. Sure, all the speech in the world isn’t going to make Godot keep his appointment. The Messiah isn’t actually going to turn up. But the friendship between Vladimir and Estragon is rich with meaning, with messianism, even if it seems that the characters are obsessed with meaninglessness and failure. Beckett’s play shows us how chatter is anything but insignificant, since it is part of the all-too-human effort to make meaning. Not only that, but it sets this effort against the constantly acknowledged otherness of the world. It is in this tension between meaning-making and meaninglessness, between the human and the inhuman, that Waiting for Godot is alive to me as a work of art.
There is a yearning for other places in other times that dominates all three novels, and especially for 'Old Europe'. Kafka's Prague, Kierkegaard's Denmark... Yet Lars and W. are permanently grounded in monotony - lager on trains and reduced-price sandwiches. Was it important to you to harness them to the here and now, even as they try and escape it?
Yes, W. and Lars find themselves mired in the ‘endless end’ of ordinary life in neoliberal Britain, with all its petty frustrations. W., in particular, dreams of being part of a larger community – whether it be founded on political activism, in the manner of the Autonomia group of Mario Tronti and his friends, or on something more nebulous, as when W. dreams of migrating to Canada, or undertaking an expedition to the legendary land behind the North wind. W. longs to have a whole army of thinker-friends; some great unguessed-at politico-philosophical leap might be possible then, he hopes. Instead, he finds himself stuck with Lars on a train …!
I wanted, in Exodus, to give a sense of the ‘endless end’ of neoliberal Britain, with all its frustrations and trivialities. I wanted to convey ordinary, banal experiences of everyday life – those intervals when nothing much happens. It’s in such banality that you can experience ‘quotidian nihilism’, to be sure, but in which you can also find the ‘messianism’ of banter, the to-and-fro of aimless conversation.
And think my focus on the everyday allows for more than this. Absurd as W.’s dreams might seem, there is a legitimate sense that ‘life is elsewhere’ in these times – that a whole cluster of philosophical, artistic and political possibilities, linked to what my characters call ‘Old Europe’, to Modernism, has disappeared. By bringing together the dreams of this vanished Modern Europe with the mundane world of contemporary Britain, I want to indicate just how remote these vanished possibilities have become. I want the audience to feel these possibilities too, and to feel the sadness of their passing.
Of course, there is a danger, in presenting this remoteness, of falling into the very British trap of laughing at the utopian dreams of would-be intellectuals. There is a danger of reconfirming the hegemony of ‘common sense’ – of saying, in effect: of course we can’t transform the world!; of course we can’t rediscover our political agency! My aim, by contrast, was to give the reader a sense that a real loss has occurred, reawakening a sense of lost Modernist futures, even for those who live in an everyday world as seemingly devoid of possibility as W. and Lars.
