Their diurnal stars are all the shining holies

I've had Lars Iyer's Exodus lying part read (differently part read) at various times beside my bed for the past year. This is not because his novel, as people often complain of novels, 'didn't pull me through' -- or perhaps it is, since 'Literature should be boring!', as W. says in Exodus somewhere. Henry James once described reading Swann's Way as 'inconceivable boredom associated with the most extreme ecstasy which it is possible to imagine' (and my awareness that this is not only true but the highest possible compliment might even be the very reason I am still steadily rereading À la recherche du temps perdu, which will no doubt take the rest of my life -- a rest of my life that I am in no hurry to race to its end).

For all the protagonists' discussions of end times, Exodus is not at all a teleological narrative. I see Lars and W. agitated and blousy: bickering in a mid field of university canteens and parsimonious conference spreads, with a greyish green moor spreading out on all sides towards an encircling horizon (and an empty bottle of Plymouth Gin rolling around between the drain and the glass doors). Their diurnal stars are all the shining holies -- Kierkegaard, Weil, Duras, Blanchot, Badiou, Rosenzweig, Rosenstock, Gandhi, Marx, Žižek, Kafka, Krasznahorkai, Tarr -- as well as the faceless but ethereally beautiful Essex postgraduates. For some reason, I see W. as dry skinned, thin and woody; Lars, we are continually reminded, has a white, soft middle: they are the yin and yang of our emptying world. Theirs is a sidereal time with all stars, for the moment, descending, but there is something that remains, still, after the stars have passed. Try as he might to leave them utterly stranded, Iyer keeps his protagonists warm from the rumours of thinkers, in the thought of thinking, and we huddle beside them, trying to believe, even as we despair a faux Kierkegaardian despair, in all of this faithful thinking for ourselves.

We were ventriloquised

I wonder if the Lars Iyer of the "Nude in your hot tub, facing the abyss (A literary manifesto after the end of Literature and Manifestos)" would feel either amused or annoyed to know that, as I finished Dogma -- his sequel to Spurious -- I was not thinking so much any more of Flaubert or Beckett or even Laurel and Hardy but of some ribald mixture of very contemporary pairings on Anglophone television: Bernard and Manny in Black Books and Jonathan and Ray in Bored to Death. Picture a Bernard criticising a Manny who can draw like Ray and who will take his gentle, devious revenge in a comic strip -- now book -- that will nonetheless bare the embarrassing innermost obsessions that the character Ray might think invisible and which the illustrator-writer Ray -- the Ray we cannot meet on television -- will chortle about, the tears running down his face until they drip onto his large and necessary belly; picture a W. with the endless, abject hopefulness of a Jonathan somehow mixed with the constant Bernardian invective against his hairier nemesis and sort-of friend. And of course all the alcohol as well as the vermin and the dirt and the damp of the Black Books book shop; and the occasional dream of girls.

And speaking of girls: the Sal character really almost breaks the surface in Dogma this time. She is no Fran of Black Books -- that would completely changed the shape and weighting of the novel -- but she has the other woman's mouth. Indeed, as if commenting on her role in the previous book, as much as on her almost unacknowledged but very ordinary and even crucial role in their American lecture tour -- a tour during which Iyer enjoys evoking the ridiculous dancing chicken from Herzog's Stroszek and the double suicides of Bruno and Ian Curtis (these more anxious and romantic Karl Rossmans):

'You twats', she says, 'why did you leave me behind?'

If it weren't for Sal, we are led to understand, W. and Lars wouldn't have even got as far as they did on their tour. She consents to take photos of W. and Lars larking around for Facebook: did she erase them afterwards as she threw away all the Jandek CDs that Lars had burned for W.? There are no photos of Lars among the many photos of friends, or so we read, on Sal and W.'s walls in their huge, three-level house in Plymouth -- fresh and airy, as it seems after the damp and rats of Lars's flat, and with the seeming perfection of W.'s measured approach to scholarship, as well as everything suggested by Sal and W.'s room (so "calm, generous and large-windowed"). Every morning, as we read in Lars's narrative, W.:

... leaves Sal lying there in the warm bed, and goes to work. Is she impressed by this commitment? -- 'She thinks I'm an idiot', W. says.

Already aware that all is about to be taken from him, W. asks Lars to take photos of the house. W. then takes him around his favourite haunts, "to document his Plymouth years" -- the years during which, as W. suspects, the great "idea" that they might have had could well already have occurred to them but promptly been forgotten in a haze, as we imagine, of stupidity and alcohol. Lars is instructed to remember everything now and write it down: a Ray lashed into obedience by a Bernard who is about to lose his shop (and his legs!).

And yet, behind the Bernard and Manny, and the Jonathan and Ray, there are strong Thomas Bernhardian ideas. W. declares that he has invested hope in the idea of Lars's "salmon-leap... In the opposite direction to my dissoluteness and squalor. In the opposite direction to my compromise and half-measures"-- a great salmon-leap that resonates with the extensive exploration of the "opposite direction" in Gathering Evidence. Then, immediately after a section where W. is ridiculing Lars for threatening to surprise him with what he might have to say if he got the chance, there is a page where it is unclear whether it is Lars or W. who is speaking: where, after asking what Dogma "really meant" and "whether it wasn't greater'' than them, the narrator declares:

In truth, we've had no thoughts. We were ventriloquised; we spoke but not with our own voices. We wept, but they weren't our tears. We felt things, great things, but in what sense were those feelings ours?

W. takes up this theme on the following page, but the question of who is ultimately speaking in this novel remains, and this is a serious question, putting us in mind of Bernhard's eponymous The Voice Imitator, where the only voice that this man cannot imitate is his own.

Overall in Dogma there is a kind of on and on feeling: a Lars and W. running to an infinite number of television series with ever more ridiculous insults and situations, even if it will only be a neat Black Books-sized set of three. It wasn't me -- it was him; stop standing there gaping, stupid! But such is the contention of Dogma; such is the literature, perhaps, "on this side of the mountain" as Lars puts it in his anti-manifesto manifesto: "The stars are going out, and the black sky is indifferent to you and your stupidities." This is what we need to write about, we have to understand from the man in the tub.

At the end of Dogma, there is no "sweetness" of an end. Even death eludes them: not only the "sweetness" of the white-bearded Bhishma's timely death, but also the resounding, heroic/anti-heroic death of an Ian Curtis or even one modelled on the bathos-ridden suicide of Bruno in Stroszek that we might have been expecting from the chicken à la Herzog that was proffered at the beginning of the book (the Iyer equivalent of the Chekhovian gun):

What will he say, I ask W., now that the end has come, the endless end? Will he speak of love? Of friendship? Of the life of thought? He'll speak about me, says W. Of not being able to get rid of me. Of my being here, even now...

It's time to die, says W. But death does not come.

It says: a whole form of literary pretence is over

In his interview by Bibliokept, Lars Iyer describes what it means to be 'posthumous' as a reader and a writer, referring to the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig's use of the term and then, resisting Rosenzweig's presumption of an enduring culture of literary master-works, locating us all as posthumous to it:

Reviewing Jean-Luc Godard’s film Every Man For Himself, Pauline Kael writes, ‘I got the feeling that Godard doesn’t believe in anything anymore; he just wants to make movies, but maybe he doesn’t really believe in movies anymore, either’. Without agreeing with Kael’s assessment of Godard, I’d like to paraphrase her formulation: I think literary writers want to write literary fiction without believing in literature – without, indeed, believing in anything at all.

It seems to me that the literary gestures are worn out – the creation of character, plot, the contrivance of high-literary language and style as much as the avoidance of high-literary language and style, and the abandonment of most elements of the creation of character and plot. The ‘short, elliptical sentences’ of which the blogger of Life Unfurnished writes, the ‘absence of fulsome description’, the ‘signs of iconoclastic casualness’, the ‘colloquialisms’, the ‘lack of trajectory’, the ‘air of the incidental’: all are likewise exhausted.

What, then, is to be done? As writers, as readers, we are posthumous. We’ve come too late. We no longer believe in literature. Once you accept this non-belief, once you affirm it in a particular way, then something may be possible.

And yet despite or even because of this resistance -- the affirmation of his non-belief and its ability to flower into what he calls a 'legitimate strangeness', particularly through the work of blogging -- Iyer retains what many might see as an unexpected faith in the century old possibilities of the avant-garde:

Spurious is a book on its hands and knees. For me, it feels like the last book, the last burst of laughter before the world ends. But it also feels like the first one, because it has loosened the hold of the past. It says: a whole form of literary pretence is over.

An enviable energy -- perhaps the only way to blog, to write.

Then a pitiable faculty developed itself in their minds

In his Guardian review, Steven Poole compares the comic protagonists in Lars Iyer's Spurious to Bouvard and Pécuchet in Flaubert's last, unfinished novel:

If Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet had just sat around bitching instead of investigating the world's knowledge, the result would have resembled this novel. It is a tiny marvel of comically repetitive gloomery.

Although, when I read Spurious, so many other comic duos suggested themselves to me, as they have to others -- duos such as Laurel and Hardy, and Vladimir and Estragon -- I had also thought of Bouvard and Pécuchet, if only for the physical echo of these two Flaubertian buffoons, with their mismatched figures and outlandish clothes. Even the inexplicable, unstoppable damp in Lars's flat recalls the dust, the stains and the airlessness of Pécuchet's place in Paris and, later, the gradual disintegration of the country house in Normandy.

While Bouvard and Pécuchet investigate one discipline after another through a great number of books -- with the exception, as Raymond Queneau is said to have observed, of mathematics -- W. and Lars in Spurious circle through philosophy, messianic studies, the films of Béla Tarr and the problem of Kafka -- or more specifically, Kafka and Brod (and, as if to outdo his grand-sires Bouvard and Pécuchet, W. makes continual attempts to teach himself complex mathematics). In Spurious, Iyer, like Flaubert, seems to be centrally, even anxiously concerned with stupidity:

'Do you think it's possible to die of stupidity?' W. sighs. 'Not as a consequence of that stupidity', he notes, 'but from stupidity and shame', W. asks me, 'do you think you could die of shame, I mean literally die?' (Spurious p. 11)

Then a pitiable faculty developed itself in their minds, that of observing stupidity and no longer tolerating it. Trifling things made them feel sad: the advertisements in the newspapers, the profile of a shopkeeper, an idiotic remark overheard by chance. Thinking over what was said in their own village, and on the fact that there were even as far as the Antipodes other Coulons, other Marescots, other Foureaus, they felt, as it were, the heaviness of all the earth weighing down upon them. (Bouvard and Pécuchet chapter 8)

Strangely, the free Project Gutenberg English version of Bouvard and Pécuchet, or perhaps I should say the 1904 edition copyright by M. Walter Dunne which Project Gutenberg is using, finishes at the end of this chapter: where the characters, at the point of stringing themselves up, spy through the skylight in their garret an alluring scene that leads them to the almost stage-lit spectacle of the village in prayer in the church for Christmas Eve:

Their breasts swelled with sobs. They leaned against the skylight to take breath.

The air was chilly and a multitude of stars glittered in a sky of inky blackness.

The whiteness of the snow that covered the earth was lost in the haze of the horizon.

They perceived, close to the ground, little lights, which, as they drew near, looked larger, all reaching up to the side of the church.

Curiosity drove them to the spot. It was the midnight mass. These lights came from shepherds' lanterns. Some of them were shaking their cloaks under the porch.

The serpent snorted; the incense smoked. Glasses suspended along the nave represented three crowns of many-coloured flames; and, at the end of the perspective at the two sides of the tabernacle, immense wax tapers were pointed with red flames. Above the heads of the crowd and the broad-brimmed hats of the women, beyond the chanters, the priest could be distinguished in his chasuble of gold. To his sharp voice responded the strong voices of the men who filled up the gallery, and the wooden vault quivered above its stone arches. The walls were decorated with the stations of the Cross. In the midst of the choir, before the altar, a lamb was lying down, with its feet under its belly and its ears erect.

The warm temperature imparted to them both a strange feeling of comfort, and their thoughts, which had been so tempestuous only a short time before, became peaceful, like waves when they are calmed.

They listened to the Gospel and the Credo, and watched the movements of the priest. Meanwhile, the old, the young, the beggar women in rags, the mothers in high caps, the strong young fellows with tufts of fair down on their faces, were all praying, absorbed in the same deep joy, and saw the body of the Infant Christ shining, like a sun, upon the straw of a stable. This faith on the part of others touched Bouvard in spite of his reason, and Pécuchet in spite of the hardness of his heart.

There was a silence; every back was bent, and, at the tinkling of a bell, the little lamb bleated.

The host was displayed by the priest, as high as possible between his two hands. Then burst forth a strain of gladness inviting the whole world to the feet of the King of Angels. Bouvard and Pécuchet involuntarily joined in it, and they felt, as it were, a new dawn rising in their souls.

It is extraordinary to consider the possibility of a novice Anglophone Flaubert reader getting to the end of this e-book of Bouvard and Pécuchet -- a book not easily available in print, unlike Madame Bovary or A Sentimental Education or Three Tales -- and interpreting the book and, perhaps, the whole of Flaubert's work, from such an ending that was never meant to be an ending: such a piece of pure and deliberate kitsch. The French Project Gutenberg e-book, although also unfinished because Flaubert never completed the work, continues on for two more chapters, through the inevitable religious phase into the frustrations of trying to educate the two young beggars, Victor and Victorine -- in itself a testament to the long, sad vanity of Bouvard and Pécuchet's attempts to teach themselves about the world.

For all we know, Lars Iyer's project with Lars and W. may never be completed either. Spurious, we read on the back of the book, will be followed by Dogma in 2012, but in the intervening time, any readers anxious to find more of the lugubrious, whimsical wit of this seemingly highly educated but still very much baffled Bouvard and Pécuchet -- conspicuous in their floral shirts among crowds of slender people in black, as they say -- can always look to the originating blog.

The false ending of the Project Gutenberg English edition of Bouvard and Pécuchet -- the Christmas kitsch epiphany of this seemingly last and crowning scene -- points to something which troubles Flaubert and Iyer: both troubles and intrigues. Stupidity and happiness have long been bedfellows, as Flaubert once very famously observed to Louise Colet:

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health: these are the three requirements for happiness, although if the first is missing, all is lost.

Etre bête, égoïste, et avoir une bonne santé, voilà les trois conditions voulues pour être heureux ; mais si la première nous manque, tout est perdu.  (Lettres à Louise Colet, Jeudi soir, 11 heures. 6 Août 1846)

No matter how hard W. (via Lars the narrator) might insist that he and Lars are both stupid and happy -- in short, that they are Brod, and not Kafka as they might have longed to be -- the narrative pushes past any possibility of an alluring, deadening, blissful stasis. Just to state such a thing in all conviction is to enact a paradox -- to move the writing on:

'These are the last days', says W. 'It's all finished. Everything's so shit', says W., 'but we're happy -- why is that? Because we're puerile', he says. 'Because we're inane. It saves us', W. says, 'but it also condemns us'. (p. 75)

The novel ends with W. declaring that they are lost, but it is in the infinity of their 'chatter', their friendship and the result -- the writing -- in which they (and we, the readers) are lost:

W. wonders whether we too have discovered the infinite in our own way. Our incessant chatter. Our incessant feeling of utter failure. Perhaps we live on our own version of the plain, W. muses. Am I the plain on which he is lost, or vice versa? But perhaps the plain is the friendship between us on which we are both lost, he says. (p. 188)