Whether the book is a lion or an elephant

Recently, the Chinese writer Sheng Keyi told us, through her translator-interpreter Isabelle Li, that:

Before I came to Australia, the organiser of my tour told me there would be reading sessions. So I reread Death Fugue, to choose the sections for reading. To speak frankly, I felt bewitched, as if was reading the work of a stranger. I am not sure I could reproduce this kind of writing again.

She then paused or, should I say instead that Isabelle Li had paused as some of us laughed. At this, Sheng Keyi had smiled awkwardly -- in fact Isabelle Li had smiled before interpreting the Mandarin -- so we were ready for something audacious or at least amusing. Sheng Keyi had then said something self-disparaging in English. In the edited version of her presentation, I see that this awkwardness has disappeared: we feel her hesitation, and even her humbled retreat, which I don't remember from the spoken text. Although I have wondered since whether the sentence that followed the one ending with the word 'stranger' had not been there, I think it must have been and that the writer's own distinctive cadence, which is evident as far as it can be in the printed version of the translated text, had probably been lost as it passed through the enacted cadence of another.

Sheng Keyi then continued:

Hemingway said that a finished work is a dead lion. For myself, I hardly consider whether the book is a lion or an elephant. I always quickly bury myself in creating new work. Only when I have to speak of it, do I think about whether the beast is carnivorous or herbivorous.

This burial in the (presumably) still living matter of the writing whose innards we do not yet dare, let alone want to, rake through with our fingers.

Recently, too, in the The Guardian Belinda McKeon writes:

What unites novelists such as Knausgaard and Ferrante, such as Hardwick and Davis and Offill and Cusk – and, indeed Woolf – is the sense, in their fictions, that writing cannot be anything but autobiographical, and that to try for distance, for the narrative which is somehow purely imagined, would be the most nakedly autobiographical effort of all. In fact, it is always cringe-inducing, always a little shameful, the extent to which writing, all writing, comes from the well of the self. From the way the mind works; from the places to which the mind goes. I panic whenever someone reads a story I have written, let alone a novel; I panic because of what has been revealed of me, of my sensibility. But my panic is none of the reader’s business, and it is none of the writing’s business, either. The writing has its own room to live in now.

I suppose it is none of the reader's business, and nor of the writing's either -- whatever that might mean -- but I think of those odd beasts we form out of our minds: how outlandish they are -- how curious, in fact, that these are the strange and twisted creations we have chosen to tie to our wrists: the ridiculous animal balloons that they are.

The same artifical attempt at the real

It is an interesting experience, once in a while, to read books that are seemingly effortlessly written and effortlessly read. They project the same temptation, as soon as you start them, as card game applications on an iPod; what happens to the boy, you wonder, even though the outcome is usually too cute, too deliberately quirky -- the whole of the story too entirely defined by the same artificial attempt at the real that you have read a hundred times before (I won't identify what I've been reading as it would be unfair -- the book was never meant to be anything other than what it is). This reading I've been doing is reading, certainly, but I know it is not the same as when I read the books that I have herded around my desk.


Surely this doesn't have to be so. After the publication of Orlando and during early paddlings into The Waves -- called then The Moths -- Virginia Woolf notes in her diary on 28 November, 1928:

Indeed I am up against some difficulties. Fame to begin with. Orlando has done very well. Now I could go on writing like that -- the tug and the suck are at me to do it. People say this was so spontaneous, so natural. And I would like to keep those qualities if I could without losing the others. But those qualities were largely the result of ignoring the others. They came of writing exteriorly; and if I dig, must I not lose them? And what is my own position towards the inner and the outer? I think a kind of ease and dash are good; -- yes: I think even externality is good; some combination of them ought to be possible.

And yet she continues, recalling something of Kafka's repudiation of 'the shameful lowlands of writing' after his breakthrough with 'The Judgement' (23 September 1912):

The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes... Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that do not belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit anything to literature that is not poetry -- by which I mean saturated?

The ruins of his lyrical world

While I don't always agree with Milan Kundera (he has too little time for Proust, none at all for Virginia Woolf, and too much, perhaps, for Salman Rushdie), in his several books of essays, I enjoy the way he defends with passion and wit the form which he keeps insisting on calling the novel rather than the modernist or post-modernist or traditional or any other kind of novel: a form, which he sees as the most precious remnant of the European modern era - a modern Europe that miraculously spans continents, oceans and even centuries - more a Europe of the mind, and one in constant danger of being lost or forgotten or overwhelmed by foes.

In all his essays he holds firmly to his sense of what the novel can do - its raison d'être, as he calls it, which is to say 'only what novels can say.' He lists the chief foes of the novel: people with no sense of humour (he uses the term Rabelais coined, agélastes), kitsch, which he defines in his Jerusalem Address as 'the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling' rather than the way it is generally used by Anglophone speakers (which is to describe a kind of tinselly bad taste) and lyricism. In fact, in his so-called essay in seven parts, his penultimate book, The Curtain, he writes:

If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a 'myth,' that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.

However, ironically, this image has a little too much of what Kundera says he detests because, although the biblical story tells of someone at last getting to see clearly, the curtain torn, what is this sense of the world that Paul now sees without hindrance? In Paul, Saul has entered what Kundera elsewhere calls the Lyrical Age.

Perhaps one day Kundera will also write of the moment when Paul, through yet another curtain (or is it in fact the same?), becomes once more the Saul that he has always been.