This might be how writing fulfils itself

I first came across Stephen Mitchelmore's blog This Space on one of those long, anxious evenings, when the only thing that was going to settle me was to read something new about one of my favourite writers. This was also around the time when I had become tired of being the only one I knew who liked the books that I liked. As soon as I tried to explain to my good friends that a particular book didn't interest me at all, no matter that it was 'profoundly moving' or 'fascinating', it would always seem, in contrast to what they had just said, that I was also admitting to my own pathetic diminution as a person, and I started to think that the little corner of my room where I stacked my favourite books (which were mostly written by dead people -- even I could see that) was a kind of morbid, crusted-over lair.

And yet this same corner was where I sat and wrote -- and where I still sit and write -- since it takes time to begin to know, to describe and hence to know a bit better, why it might be that some of us are wary of all these too easily proffered signs of affective or 'solid' meaning in novels. This realisation is hardly a new phenomenon in the world: after all, hadn't Kafka noted the heartlessness behind the overflowing sentimentality of Dickens (although, yes, Kafka is another of those dead writers...)?

It's become clear to me that any very patient, generous and creatively intelligent attempt to write about any of this, in the way that Stephen Mitchelmore has done in his blog and now in his recently published book This Space of Writing, enlivens the world that we live in so much more brilliantly and immediately than many of these apparently 'moving' or 'hard-hitting' or 'fascinating' novels. But how can that be? Perhaps it's the work of the writing that does it: the very process and experience of writing that demands that we stay attentive -- not only to the words themselves (which are so often at the point of escaping us) but, as with so many inexplicable aspects of our existence (our dreams, impressions, fleeting thoughts), also to exactly how the writing has affected us. Our whole being reacts to it. After all, as Mitchelmore tells us in a piece about V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival, for the writer, 'whether positive or negative, the encounter demands a response. He becomes a writer in order to respond'.


As I write this, now, in this same darkened corner of my room on a day of incredible humidity, I have been remembering that, despite my seemingly dismissive exterior, I was no doubt intimidated for quite a long time by the way that truth and authenticity seemed the exclusive preserve of emotionally replete and satisfyingly fact-stuffed fiction. After all, aren't such qualities the essential building material of so many prize-winning novels, as well as the very criticism that awards those prizes in the first place? If this is literature, I would think, what did I know or feel that might allow me to dare to do anything with it? Precious little. For one thing, I knew almost nothing about most facts and objects in the world around me: I didn't know one eucalyptus from another, and for some plants I only knew the embarrassingly racist common name (this was before I had become so dependent on Google). I also had no patience whatsoever for heart-swelling moments of revelation and 'closure', and particularly not for that celebrated third person writerly tone that, as Mitchelmore notes, is so wittily, and often wistfully, masterful -- so infused with knowingness. Simply put: I was bored and irritated, or rather too dully and too slavishly impressed to do much more than doodle at pieces when I sat at my desk. These were the years when I read about salt and Danish snow and the making of glass and knots and photographic plates -- when I swung from wishing I owned the whole of The World Book Encyclopedia, just so I could bone up on the right bits of fascinating details of unadorned 'reality' to stick in my paragraphs, to being caught up in the anxiety of how I could ever hope to participate in what Mitchelmore calls 'the prissy connoisseurship of fine prose in literary fiction' (since I never seemed to feel the expected way of feeling, and had neither patience nor interest in acquainting myself any further with the particularly fine textures of raffia, silk or maiden hair ferns). The end of writing, it so often seemed, was that we might all 'bury ourselves in dentrology', as Mitchemore puts it so astutely. What were we, otherwise, to do?

It has occurred to me that the mostly unquestioned dominance of these two organising principles in so much 'literary fiction' -- the supposed 'reality hunger' and 'prissy connoisseurship' that Mitchelmore describes for us -- are fundamentally wrong-footed misunderstandings of what Susan Sontag, in her brief but important 1966 essay 'Against Interpretation', calls for when she states that in 'place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art'. Art works are art works, she wants to tell us. We can only know them through our senses -- they are above all objects in their own right -- and when we try to get 'behind' them, to decode what they might be 'about', we're missing something fundamentally important about them. But then, as established writing culture might counter: aren't the extensive catalogues of 'unprocessed' reality (the ones that present us with details about shellac glazing, metereological codes, cocaine consumption, ritualised death), as well as the very sensory evocations of beautiful beautiful prose that enact a sensitive appreciation of all the objects in the world about us -- aren't these eminently important foci in works of writing keeping us busy with these objects as objects, the world as the world? Isn't this an erotics of art par excellence?

Peter Brooks had answered her call in his own way, too: he uses a reading of Freud to celebrate, and promote anew, the emotional and sexual pneumatics of teleological plot, of the 'right' ending: Lizzy marries Mr Darcy in the end, not Mr Collins, after all. This, surely, is an erotics of art. Or is it? In her essay, Sontag calls some novels and theatre pieces 'the literary equivalent of program music'. What can she possibly mean? And why is she so keen to draw our attention to form?

Of course, if we really look hard, we should be able to see that, in a novel or a story, we are not actually looking at the shellac, or touching the powdery cocaine: there is writing in between us and these supposedly very tangible objects. Writing is the only object in front of us -- it is the object that has us hankering after Mr Darcy. Without an awareness of the mediating shape or thing of the writing itself -- what she calls 'transparence' -- Sontag seems to be suggesting that no matter that we might feel this close to the astonishing textures of Danish snow or a-bed at Pemberley, we might be no more connected to the shivering strangeness of existence and the work that is made in that existence, than those of us who, last Christmas, succumbed to the exhilarating promise of 'mindful' colouring in. 'The world, our world', she writes, 'is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have'.

As I read through the collection of pieces in This Space of Writing, many of which are, but not confined to, reviews of works by Naipaul, Knausgaard, Josipovici, Munro, Bernhard, Kafka, Ford, Beckett, Lin (since they are also extensive meditations -- long trajectories of thought -- that hold all of these works in their widely crossed netting and transparency), I could see that, above all, Mitchelmore is particularly attuned to the form, the feel and the voice of a piece of writing -- the form/feel of its voice -- and that the sum of all these encounters makes his own writing here as tremulously alive and clear as so many of the works he writes about. After all, as Mitchelmore admits, 'sentences affect my experience of the world'. Instead of fumbling around for the feather and bolt contents in the plastic box of a book, whose clear sides we might all take for granted, Mitchelmore takes the whole box in hand and, like Nabokov, relies on the surer sense of his spine to know what it is he is holding.

It is the book itself, then. Literature. Writing. We learn that 'the only way to go is through literature, by becoming apparently more literary, to provoke perhaps even more anxiety...'. And this is why I am so glad that Mitchelmore has made a book out of these selections from his blog. It perhaps makes no sense that the book is valuable in a way that is different from the blog, if many of the pieces are more or less the same, and the book has so many fewer pieces in it anyway, but it is valuable. The book is its own very particular object. I would also add that the blogosphere itself is productive of anxiety -- and even more, I would say, that the notional idea of 'even more anxiety' that Mitchelmore hints at. In fact, for the last long while, I've been so taken up with several large projects that I have become very aware that the blogs I follow are churning their silent scintillations all around me and yet without me, and my knowing this is the case -- and even knowing that blogs are, essentially, a loose and varied form that carry on with their own momentum, whether we check in with them or not -- doesn't make it one whit easier to click into the space of the net to see what has grown here since last I looked. Hence I am so very glad to have this physical copy of This Space of Writing. It sits where it sits in my room and never gets any larger or looser than it already is. A book is contained -- the parts have been selected from the much larger work of the blog -- and I can enjoy all the complex trajectories and connections and echoes in it for the way they won't escape me -- at least not until the effect of reading moves beyond my capacity to track it.

So: there is, simply, the now. The process of it (the reading and the writing). As Mitchelmore concludes at the end of what might be one of the most luminously spare pieces in his collection: 'Reading, breathing, walking, clearing. This might be how writing fulfils itself'.

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.

Which they believe to be a revival of the old manner

After reading Flowerville's cutting of Hans Blumenberg I couldn't rest until I found this journeying piece from Proust's Contre Sainte-Beuve (in the chapter on Nerval):

Today there is a school of writers who, being in rebellion -- it must be said, to good purpose -- against the bloodless Battle of Words now in vogue, have imposed a new manner, which they believe to be a revival of the old manner, on the art of letters; and these are their tenets; that in order not to overweight a sentence one will keep it from expressing anything whatsoever, that to sharpen the outline of a book one will exclude any impression, any thought, etc., that cannot be straightforwardly expressed, and, that to preserve the traditional mould of the language one will be ready at all times to accept existing turns of speech, without even troubling to think them over. If this results in a brisk style, a grammar of respectable coinage, a free and easy demeanour, there is no special merit about it. It is not difficult to cover one's journey at a canter if before starting one jettisons all the valuables one was charged to carry; but the speed of the transit, the graceful ease of arrival, are of no great significance, since there is nothing to deliver.

The satanic provocation yields before an angelic one

Winfried Menninghaus's 2003 study, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, includes a chapter on Kafka where he argues that 'Kafka's art consists precisely in making the presence and the strongly affective value of a disgusting subject matter, openly presented as such, almost entirely invisible, imperceptible'. (227) He traces what he calls a 'libidinal fixation' in Kafka's relation to writing:

Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward... for serving the devil. This descent to the dark powers, this unshackling of spirits bound by nature, these dubious embraces and whatever else may take place in the nether parts which the higher parts no longer know, when one writes one's stories in the sunshine. Perhaps there are other forms of writing, but I know only this kind.... And the devilish element in it seems very clear to me. It is vanity and the craving for pleasure (Genußsucht) which continually buzz about one's own or even another's Gestalt -- and feast on it. The movement multiplies itself -- it is a regular solar system of vanity.... The writer... has no ground, no substance, is less than dust. He is only barely possible in the broil of earthly life, is only a construct of the craving for pleasure. (Kafka, from Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, p. 334-335)

After investigating all the wonderfully smeared, obese, deformed objects of such 'dubious embraces', Menninghaus suggests that, for Kafka, the very use of writing is to work 'the nether parts' to a careful purpose:

...what if The Trial and The Castle were also, first of all, novels which operate -- in a form that simultaneously discloses itself and makes itself invisible -- to process the vexed relations between disgust and sexuality, disgust and food, disgust and the injured, or tortured, body? (273)

Menninghaus's analysis nudges its way into the Kafkan oxymoron of 'deceiving... without deception' (Letters to Felice, 545), where he reveals how the 'invisible frankness of Kafka's texts' is 'played off... against' the texts' 'absorption in visible aesthetic "deception"'. (280) His exploration of erotics and disgust in Kafka concludes by reminding us of the way Kafka's treatment of the vetula forms a fiercely guileless cleft between the opposing intentions of romantic and classical aesthetics:

Kafka's writing answers the question how the disgusting old woman can obsessively occupy the place of desire, can appear in "innocent" openness, and yet become invisible again in the type of second-order observation which is the work of literary representation. Kafka's work interweaves the romantic license to display the disgusting with the paradoxical return of the classical intention to neutralize it. The satanic provocation yields before an angelic one, whose infernal character consists precisely in its simulated innocence. (281)

Merely by dining out often in the company of a physician

They are almost hidden in the vast work of Proust, these few short words that, together, suggest the dogged but also quietly enterprising nature of what he calls 'talent':

To my parents it seemed almost as though, idle as I was, I was leading, since it was spent in the same salon as a great writer, the life most favourable to the growth of talent. And yet the assumption that anyone can be dispensed from having to create that talent for himself (de faire ce talent soi-même), from within himself (par le dedans), and can acquire it from someone else (le reçoive d'autrui), is as erroneous as to suppose that a man can keep himself in good health (in spite of neglecting all the rules of hygiene and of indulging in the worst excesses) merely by dining out often in the company of a physician. (Within a Budding Grove)

Anxieties of the writing life

The blurb on the back of Brian Castro's novella, Street to Street, claims that it is a 'comic-tragic enactment of the anxieties of the writing life' -- an observation with which Castro scholar, Bernadette Brennan, would no doubt concur, since '[f]or Castro, grief and anxiety', as she writes without further explanation in her review of the work, are the 'critical edges of writing'. And yet, or so I first thought, my reading experience of Castro's novella was a dilatory rather than a harried one -- there seemed to be nothing of the sort of driving voice that we might find in works by Sebald, Woolf, Proust, Svevo, Duras or, Castro's favourite as he once wrote in HEAT: Thomas Bernhard. The voice in Street to Street is elegiac, gently comic, fond, and yet all the time accompanied by the lingering smell of booze-sodden cardboard, nineteenth century skirtings, mid-twentieth century bathrooms, and sudden, lonely stretches of misted boggy roads. After all, an aged black dog called Dante accompanies the protagonist -- the writer-academic Brendan Costa -- to the very end, and the book, as we learn, is narrated by his affable, floppy-eared, soft-bellied friend and academic-in-decline who is known as the Labrador. If I did sense the thin wire of anxiety in the book, I thought, it was only in those frequent occasions when the narrative moved so seamlessly between Costa and his mirroring biographical subject, the brilliant, alcoholic poet-academic Christopher Brennan, or vice versa, that I constantly had to look back a little and check: an effect that never failed to unsettle me and which, as a result, gave the whole piece, as it developed, a hallucinatory and hence rather beautiful double outline. Castro's work, like that of his protagonist, Costa, is alive to the deceptively shambling and usually opaque, goggling aspects of those feelings that are hardest to hold onto:

Costa was not offering a biography of Brennan, not even a minor, muddy one, picking the stones of false memory. He was thinking of one loose thread: the way a life unravels, falls apart, becomes dissolute, not for all of the obvious reasons like alcohol or disastrous relationships or depressive illnesses, but through mood. Conditional, jussive, optative, subjunctive, irrealis. His life had not happened, is not likely to happen etc. A grammar of moods. (17)

Feelings that take very palpable form:

He was outside himself too much; his inside was becoming a hollowed shell he would hold up to his ear in old age and hear the murmur of failure, the sea of forgetting and obscurity. In Memoriam. The shudder of Tennyson's lines. (97)

He told Mallarmé how alcohol had hidden the realisation that the back of one's head was something which, upon apprehending it and perceiving its strangeness, delivered to the subject the most overwhelming insight and dismay. But the back of one's head was not about realisation; it was about concealment.... The back of his head was what he didn't want to see.... He had bought a bowler hat and had worn it everywhere. But when he looked in the mirror he didn't see bourgeois civility, only self-deception (130)

If anxiety in a text can be traced to the finely wrought workings of perspective and a muted but unsettling affect, Castro's novella draws a long quiet draught of it.

The writer is a phobic

'The writer is a phobic,' writes Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 'who succeeds in metamorphizing in order to keep from being frightened to death; instead he comes to life again in signs.' Without writing, then, does the writer curl in the corner -- the writer, without writing, trammelled by nightmares of wolves in trees -- or is there still that pregnant secret, like the Blanchotian child's vision of an 'absolutely empty' sky?

Its tumescence in the throats of serpents

Near the end of Maud Ellmann's The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment, her own writing moves so sinuously -- indeed so beautifully -- through the transformations of edible substances that you can almost see how the hands of Richardson's Clarissa, Kafka's Hunger Artist, the inmates of the H-Blocks of Long Kesh and Coetzee's Michael K, would have rushed to shield their eyes and then their mouths:

What is food, that it should be so fearsome and desirable? And why are all these hunger artists so desperate to resist its captivation? Food is the prototype of all exchanges with the other, be they verbal, financial or erotic. Digestion is a kind of fleshly poetry, for metaphor begins in the body's transubstantiations of itself, while food is the thesaurus of all moods and all sensations. Its disintegration in the stomach, its assimilation in the blood, its diaphoresis in the epidermis, its metempsychosis in the large intestine; its viscosity in okra, gumba, oysters; its elasticity in jellies; its deliquescence in blancmanges; its tumescence in the throats of serpents, its slow erosion in the bellies of sharks; its odysseys through pastures, orchards, wheat fields, stockyards, supermarkets, kitchens, pig troughs, rubbish dumps, disposals; the industries of sowing, hunting, cooking, milling, processing, and canning it; the wizardry of its mutations, ballooning into bread, subsiding in soufflés; raw and cooked, solid and melting, vegetable and mineral, fish, flesh, and fowl, encompassing the whole compendium of living substance: food is the symbol of the passage, the totem of sociality, the epitome of all creative and destructive labor.

The sentences frighten us

When we have sentences in our heads we still can't be certain of being able to get them down on paper, I thought. The sentences frighten us; first the idea frightens us, then the sentence, then the thought that we may no longer have the ideas in our heads when we want to write it down. Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is to write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

Thomas Bernhard, Concrete

And what's more, Rudolph, when we write other people's sentences down, we feel calm for that moment, but it's only a very brief respite.

Read slowly to avoid complications

As publishers keep pressing on us taller, fatter and wider editions of books that might once have fit in our bookcases but now have to be shoved in side-on so that the bubble-wrap feel-it-for-yourself cover of Michel Houellebecq's latest novel can only been known as Territory -- and that visible only because its neighbours happen to be older and smaller upright volumes -- it is a wonderful thing to come across a magazine of weird literature, as the editors call it, which could be tucked in on any part of your person or your house or flat, no matter how small. It is a marvel, too, because nearly every page in this tiny tome has something that you might want to tear out and affix to the cover of a notebook or the wall beside your desk. Since most of the pieces of 'words', 'flash', art, 'illiterature' and more -- the term 'poetry' is eschewed -- could roll into the pit of your palm, they tempt the light-fingered and those whose art or word-making relies on springing from something lively. A 'Disclaimer' near the beginning of theNewerYork reads: '[Read slowly to avoid complications. You won't like some of this work.]' and then some erasures. I won't try to reproduce the erasures.

No sooner are you, than you are no longer, a writer

At the near centre of Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster, this necessary counter to every misguidedly encouraging self-help writing programme:

What Schlegel says of philosophy is true for writing: you can only become a writer, you can never be one; no sooner are you, than you are no longer, a writer.

Since:

The mortal leap of the writer without which he would not write is necessarily an illusion to the extent that, in order really to be accomplished, it must not take place.

Because:

What happens through writing is not of the order of things that happen. But in that case, who permits you to claim that anything like writing ever does happen? Or is it that writing is not such that it need ever happen?

For, even -- or perhaps, above all -- when considering Kafka, who at one moment wrote that he was Literature:

How absurd it would be to address this question to the writer: are you a writer through and through? In everything you are, have you yourself become writing -- vital and activating? This would be to condemn the writer to death or foolishly to deliver his funeral eulogy.

And so, inevitably, this Blanchotian, sentence, which has Kafka in every part of it:

Whoever writes is exiled from writing, which is the country -- his own -- where he is not a prophet.

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?

It is with their own flesh that they feed their books

In her essay 'How Do Salamanders Die?' in HEAT 9, New Series, the French-Australian writer Catherine Rey contends that 'writers work on themselves, on their own souls, it is with their own flesh that they feed their books.' And, a little later: 'all novels are autobiographies and all autobiographies are novels.'

But we must 'never forget that something dangerous lurks behind the finest texts'; Michel Leiris's preface to L'Age d'homme, she writes, has helped her to 'live and write'. She quotes:

What goes on in the field of literature...is it not bereft of value if it remains 'aesthetic', anodyne, free of sanctions, if there is nothing in the act of writing a work which would be the equivalent... of what is for the torero the bull's steely horn, which alone -- by virtue of the physical menace it harbours -- confers a human reality on his art and prevents it from becoming something other than the futile grace of a ballerina?

In the only two books that have been translated into English so far -- The Spruiker's Tale and Stepping Out -- there is cruelty, anger, rebellion. Catherine Rey's writing is energised by a voice so continuous, so charged, it is almost without breath:

Plenty of artists will palm off adulterated goods on you wrapped up in pretty packaging -- art is a means of buying yourself a conscience on the cheap, the charlatans who get rich on the world's misery know this. But writing doesn't deliver you from anything, writing is not a form of salvation, writing doesn't wash away your filth. What you write is you, so much so that the older you get, the less you hide. The more you have a duty to refuse to divert, in Pascal's sense of the term, for diversion creates distance whereas what's required is precisely the opposite: what you need to do is to get nearer to yourself. And not to be afraid of giving yourself to be read, for you have to know how to give. To reject clichés and to lay your cards on the table by revealing the inner things, indiscreet, shameless things, that we normally conceal. Otherwise literature's a dead loss. (Stepping Out, p. 179)

'I write because they haven't yet cut out my tongue,' concludes the narrator of Stepping Out. 'I write because I'm still not frightened.'

Mr. Pamuk, are you a naive novelist or a sentimental one?

The title of Orhan Pamuk's 2009 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, comes, as he explains in his first lecture, from Friedrich Schiller's essay, "Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung" (On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, 1795-1796). The word 'sentimental' here is a false friend, as Pamuk explains. In Schiller's essay it is intended 'to describe the state of mind which has strayed from nature's simplicity and power and has become too caught up in its own emotions and thoughts.' Pamuk writes about how Schiller had envied what he saw as Goethe's effortless brilliance -- his naivety -- which he saw in contrast to his own more complex tendency to think too much. Pamuk then goes on to reflect:

While reading "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry" thirty years ago, I too -- just like Schiller raging at Goethe  -- complained of the naive, childlike nature of Turkish novelists of the previous generation. They wrote their novels so easily, and never worried about problems of style and technique. And I applied the word "naive" (which I increasingly used in a negative sense) not only to them but to writers all over the world who regarded the nineteenth-century Balzacian novel as a natural entity and accepted it without question. (p.18)

Surprisingly, then, in his Epilogue to the lectures, Pamuk writes:

When I was in my twenties and first read the essay by Schiller that informs this book, I wanted to become a naive writer. Back then, in the 1970s, the most popular and influential Turkish novelists wrote semi-political, semi-poetic novels that took place in rural settings and small villages. In those days, becoming a naive writer whose stories were set in the city, in Istanbul, seemed a difficult goal to achieve. Since I delivered these lectures at Harvard, I have been repeatedly asked, "Mr. Pamuk, are you a naive novelist or a sentimental one?" I would like to emphasize that, for me, the ideal state is one in which the novelist is naive and sentimental at the same time. (p. 189)

Which Pamuk do we believe, the one who speaks first or the one that writes afterwards? Or perhaps there is only the classic Pamuk predicament: that while he thought he despised these naive, childlike writers, all along he just wanted to become one of them -- that he wanted to become somebody else.

As I prepare to transform my thoughts into words

It is interesting that, according to his lectures published in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, the visual is so important to Orhan Pamuk, not only in the writing of his own novels but of the form, as he sees it, in general:

Here is one of my strongest opinions: novels are essentially visual literary fictions. A novel exerts its influence on us mostly by addressing our visual intelligence -- our ability to see things in our mind's eye and to turn words into mental pictures. (p. 92) 

Certainly his own process of composition, as he describes it, would seem to bear this out:

When I write a chapter, a scene, or a small tableau (you see that the vocabulary of painting comes naturally to me!), I first see it in detail in my mind's eye. For me, writing is the process of visualizing that particular scene, that picture. I gaze out of the window as much as I look down at the page I am writing on with a fountain pen. As I prepare to transform my thoughts into words, I strive to visualize each scene like a film sequence, and each sentence like a painting. ( p. 93 - 94) 

Many of his novels -- at least those that have been translated into English -- do have a strong visual character. Here I am thinking of My Name is Red and The White Castle -- especially of its final, elliptical scene -- moments in Snow and, similarly, moments in The New Life -- where certain very visual images (particularly of objects) resonate throughout the writing -- as is also the case in his most recent novel, The Museum of Innocence, which might have been constructed, or at least yearned to have been constructed, out of the objects or images of these objects alone.

What is most fascinating about his stated opinion in these lectures is that Orhan Pamuk sees the visual primarily in terms of landscape painting. 'Most novelists,' he declares in his first lecture, 'sense that reading the opening  pages of a novel is akin to entering a landscape painting.' And, in the fourth: 'looking at a landscape painting is much like reading a novel.' From both these lectures and his memoir, Istanbul: Memories of a City, we learn that, in his youth, before turning to writing, Pamuk had wanted to be an artist: in fact, a landscape artist. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that he should see what he is doing in these terms. Snow, which he has described elsewhere as his first and only political novel, begins with a visual description of the landscape passed in a journey through a blizzard between Erzurum and Kars. After all, as Pamuk writes on the opening page, 'our traveller [had] glued his eyes to the window next to him.'

In all his novels, however, the voice of the narrator and/or the protagonist soon presses further forwards of any suggested landscape: the narrative moving quickly into the nebulous no-place and often distorting obsessions of the mind. The narrator interrupts Ka's journey in Snow with his reflections as soon as the eyes at the window have fallen asleep. On the first page of The Black Book, after a brief evocation of the streets of Istanbul, the narrator writes that Galip 'wanted to explore in full sunlight the willows, the acacias, the climbing rose in the enclosed garden of Rüya's tranquil sleep' and thus begins a labyrinthine journey through the obsessions of Galip and everyone he meets during his search for his wife in the landscape of Istanbul which he both sees and fails to see for itself. Even in My Name is Red -- which is the novel significant, as Pamuk claims in his Epilogue, for being the one during which he 'developed [his] ideas on the visual aspects of narration', the opening chapter 'I am a corpse' enlarges more upon the obsessions whirling around and through the rotting head of the corpse than the well or the landscape around it where, we have been told, the corpse has been thrown.

Significantly, the one novel of his, at least in English, that Pamuk doesn't get round to mentioning in the course of these lectures is the novel which promoted him to bestseller status in Turkey, although not yet in the West: The New Life: a novel whose intense, forward moving narrative blurs the division between scenes and suggests less a sequence of tableaux -- and much less a film in any conventional sense -- than the somnambulant obsessions and gothic distortions of dreams. 

For the record, it is also interesting to remember that this book, as we learn in Pamuk's Other Colours: Essays and a Story, was conceived and written, as if to provide some respite, during the two year hiatus it created in the writing of his more consciously visual novel -- at least in its intentions: My Name is Red.

The vivid illusion that the world has a center and a meaning

In the recent publication of Orhan Pamuk's 2009 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, he writes that when he was starting out as a novelist in his twenties, he was somewhat intimidated by the importance and role given to the notion of 'character' in E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, where the character of the protagonist with all his or her peculiar and artificial quirks is supposed to determine every other aspect of the novel, including the plot:

I sensed that human character was not nearly as important in real life as Forster said it was in literature. But I would then go on to think: If it's important in novels, it must be important in life too -- after all, I don't know much about life. [Pamuk's italics, p. 64]

It was only as he experienced more of life, and as he wrote his novels, that he found that despite aspiring to create great memorable characters such as Anna Karenina, it wasn't the peculiarities of character which interested him. Character, he discovered, was greatly over-rated. Pamuk explains that this view of character -- a view which is based on a highly artificial construction, and yet has, as he writes, 'aspects bordering on the mystical'  -- has come to dominate creative writing courses, where students are often taught lists of rules and dumped with assumptions that no one has thought to question. In the Epilogue to this collection of lectures he returns to these courses that seem to run on the edge of things, making do with the leavings of others: describing how Forster's book 'has been dropped from the syllabus in university English departments and exiled to creative-writing programs, where writing is treated as a craft and not as a spiritual and philosophical act' -- whether 'real or imagined,' he might have added, as he later describes the 'center' which, for Pamuk, turns out to constitute the generative heart of the literary novel.

One of the most carefully developed ideas in this series of his lectures is this one that literary novels, as distinct from genre novels -- whose purpose, it seems, is to make us feel at home -- are written to both suggest and conceal that they have a secret centre from which viewpoint the entire novel can be understood. Returning to Aspects of the Novel towards the end of the series, he uses Forster's idea of a guiding principle to investigate this aspect of literary fiction that he feels has been neglected by both literary critics and historians:

I have taken issue with E. M. Forster's idea -- the popular notion that, as the novel is written, the major characters take over and dictate its course. But if we must believe in a mysterious element in the writing process, it would be more appropriate to believe it is the center that takes over the novel. Just as the sentimental-reflective reader goes through the novel trying to guess exactly where the center is, the experienced novelist goes along knowing that the center will gradually emerge as he writes, and that the most challenging and rewarding aspect of his work will be finding this center and bringing it into focus. (p.157)

There is, he writes, no single centre to a novel; he even writes that this centre can be a masterful illusion:

The greatest literary novels -- such as Anna Karenina, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain, and The Waves -- are indispensable to us because they create the hope and the vivid illusion that the world has a center and a meaning, and because they give us joy by sustaining this impression as we turn their pages. (p.173)

Notes on Notes on Stendhal

Proust, in his Notes on Stendhal, is appreciative of Stendhal's 'eighteenth-century style of irony', 'pessimistic morality', and 'Voltairean elegance' (even as he points out that Beyle disliked Voltaire). He notes also:

Rejection of all but spiritual emotions, renewed vitality of the past, indifference to ambitions, and tedium of scheming either when near to death (Julien in prison; no longer ambitious. Love for Mme. de Rênal, for nature, for reveries) or consequent on indifference caused by being in love (Fabrice in prison, though here the prison represents, not death, but love for Clélia).

He describes too a third reason for this indifference to ambition in Stendhal's work: 'emotion at the sight of nature and almost always on heights'; and yet Proust can't help observing that these 'feelings are straightforward, in keeping with picturesquely situated places' as already, here, he is anticipating his own preoccupations in In Search of Lost Time: the emotional responses that can arise, unexpectedly, from more ordinary, unpicturesque experiences, such as the smell of petrol, a biscuit dipped in tea or the feel of uneven paving stones underfoot.

Proust writes that Stendhal's maxim is 'never repent', which the latter evidently shares with his character Gina, the Duchessa of Sanseverina:

There were two salient points in the Duchessa's character: she always wished what she had once wished; she never gave any further consideration to what had once been decided. She used to quote in this connection a saying of her first husband, the charming General Pietranera. 'What insolence to myself!' he used to say; 'Why should I suppose that I have more sense today than when I made up my mind?' (The Charterhouse of Parma, Part 2, chapter 8)

This very un-Proustian determination to move forwards without looking back that allowed Stendhal to write The Charterhouse of Parma, supposedly, between 4 November and 26 December in 1839 -- a César Aira ahead of his time -- leads to the insouciance of sentences such as:

We have forgotten to mention in the proper place that the Duchessa had taken a house at Belgirate, a charming village and one that contains everything which its name promises (to wit a beautiful bend in the lake). (Part 2, ch 10)

In his long essay Contra Sainte-Beuve, Proust writes about how Sainte-Beuve, a well known literary critic in Stendhal's day, preferred to judge a writer's worth by analysing the writer's character via interviews with friends and anecdotal accounts -- a practice, for all its absurdities, not so very different to much current literary journalism, where the exotic details of an author or the biographical or historical subject often attracts more interest that the writing itself. By this method Sainte-Beuve pronounced that Stendhal's novels were 'makeshifts' and 'detestable', and as for the man himself:

Beyle had a fundamental rightness and sure-handedness in his treatment of intimate relationships which one must never fail to acknowledge, the more so when one has spoken out one's mind about him.

As Proust immediately adds: 'All things considered, a good fellow, that Beyle!' Not quick to anger, luckily for Sainte-Beuve.

It is Sainte-Beuve's signal failure to appreciate the literary worth of writers like Stendhal through this method that seems to have set Proust writing, via Contra Sainte-Beuve, in the direction of his great novel of extended ironic complexities, In Search of Lost Time, where nobody is how they seem and great art is made by weak, even laughable little men like Vinteuil because, as Proust writes in Contra Sainte-Beuve:

a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.

Even to write at all is to subject yourself to its ironic possibilities.

You don't know what you know

Perfect, I think, this distillation by Mark Thwaite from Donald Rumsfeld, of all people, and Slavoj Žižek:

you don't know what you know, nor what you don't know, nor hardly even who you are, and it is only in the writing that you might find out.

Only a sort of optical instrument

And Proust on a related object:

L'ouvrage de l'écrivain n'est qu'une espèce d'instrument optique qu'il offre au lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que, sans ce livre, il n'eût peut-être pas vu en soi-même.

The work of the writer is only a sort of optic instrument which he offers to the reader so that he may discern in the book what he would probably not have seen in himself.

Le Temps retrouvé