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.

The frown in Beckett's What Where

Today, at the Australian premiere of the new English language film production of Beckett's What Where, which is yet to be released, the actor who played V and hence was on screen for the entire running of the single eight minute take -- for which it had been necessary to make twenty seven attempts -- told us after the screening that he'd lost his voice as the filming progressed and even now (nearly one year later) it had not recovered. The actors had had to strip all the emotion from their voices. They also had to stay completely still during takes; they weren't to blink -- even when their eyes were closed, they had to keep their eyeballs from moving.

In the accompanying documentary, the director (Asmus) describes the way that, unlike for his other television productions, Beckett did not arrive with a predetermined plan for What Where. Originally the actors were to be upright, as in the staged show -- at one point, we learned, Beckett had even thought of giving them fezzes to wear (an allusion to 'the political situation in Turkey', according to Asmus) -- but in the end, in the German production, as we heard from the Australian producer (Uhlmann) today, the actors were confined to dentists' chairs -- just as in this production they were made to sit in chairs that had added contraptions to keep the heads still that the cinematographer/ editor (Denham) had made. Uhlmann told us that it had been Asmus's suggestion to Beckett -- once it had become clear that there were no longer to be heads with bodies on the screen as there were on stage, but heads alone -- that the actors close their eyes rather than bow when their faces re-emerged from the dark.

After the screening, one of actors told us that he'd noticed (in the finished film) the slightest suggestion of a frown on one of the other actors when he re-emerged with his eyes closed -- a frown which Uhlmann and Denham admitted that they had never noticed (and which Asmus would very likely have wanted to expunge had his attention been drawn to it in time) -- and that this had made him think that this character -- whose name he'd forgotten just as he'd already forgotten the name of his own character -- that this character, alone among all of them, had moral integrity.

The substance of all writing lives

To read Brian Castro's piece in the Sydney Review of Books on W. G. Sebald's A Place in the Country is to be filled with a rapt anxiety, as if you've just been given what turns out to be a nestled series of semi-transparent boxes that you have to hold onto with your fingertips in case, just by trying to keep the pieces from falling out, the whole thing breaks in your hands. Of course, I will have to read the essay again. I imagine it was the lepidopterist in Nabokov that understood rereading to be the only way to keep such shells from getting crushed. It is enough that Castro's prose is as shaped by the slow-developing beauties of 'scribal-ambulism' that he identifies in Sebald, Walser, Rousseau (the boxes could well be infinite):

Sebald’s beginnings have a sinuous resistance to beginning. After all, if writing is such a compulsive burden, then at least walking exercises a different compulsive faculty that exorcises thought. Scribal-ambulism then, may have a curative effect on melancholia, but one that Rousseau found was, in the end, untenable. The clarity of the world, for which this ultimate autobiographer yearned, the transparency he sought, could not be sustained. As Jean Starobinski asserts, the inner life and external reality cannot be compatible. Interiority is essentially a failure in relating to reality, and this is the substance of all writing lives.

That is why the beginning of each ‘walk’ taken by Sebald, by Walser, by Rousseau, embodies anxiety. It is a preparation for meeting the shock of the real and its resistance to being possessed by the mind. Anyone aware of sensible seeing would understand the furtive nature of writing, its opposition to clarity and transparency, its irrational refusal to speak for its author, its invention of a negative dialectic. There is a lot of fiddling about in order to get into a place, and that ‘place’ is ultimately a place in the language which will not yield to a universal historiography – Starobinski, for example, avoids dates in his study of Rousseau.

I will ask: is it possible to (re)read and walk at the same time? I would like to do that.

Within the narrow range of these two eyes

Some years ago, when J. M. Coetzee's book Slow Man first came out, I took a Murrays coach down to Canberra for the day -- I only intended to stay the day, such was my dedication, I liked to think -- just to listen to Coetzee speak at the National Library. No one had warned me. I had no idea that the talk I was travelling over seven hours in one day to listen to would never materialise: that Coetzee would only read from his new book Slow Man (which I had finished reading on the coach down) and would say not a single word more than that. Actually, this is not true because, not long after I resigned myself to this long day's journey with little more than a small white-haired man reciting in the darkened lecture hall heart of it something that I had already read for myself, I got to hear him speak five unexpected words to me.

I had joined the book signing queue in the library foyer. An attendant, having announced that Coetzee would only be signing one book for each person, then walked down the queue asking for and writing our names on yellow post it notes that he attached to the front of our books. When at last I got to the front of the queue I was struck by how quickly Coetzee was able to take in the spelling of my name -- he hardly looked at it -- before writing his dedication in my book (admittedly my name is very short). But then, as I stepped aside, my turn now over, I saw a copy of his book of essays, Stranger Shores, in the Library bookshop window and went in to buy it. I then did the unthinkable by rejoining the queue. This time, when I made it to his desk, Coetzee again hardly looked at my name, but he fixed me with his pale unmoving narrowed eyes and said, 'This is your second time,' before writing, all the same, a second time, in a second book for me.

Anthony Uhlmann's essay, 'Signs for the Soul' in Sydney Review of Books on Coetzee and Murnane -- principally Coetzee on Murnane -- cannot help therefore but evoke two pairs of unmoving narrowed eyes for me: Coetzee's by the glass walls of the National Library foyer and those that, Murnanesque (that is, in my mind), hold an entire world steady, as a plate of glass pressed horizontally to their surface (famously he has never worn sunglasses, and photographs always show him with eyes and mouth narrowed against the persistent weather of outer Melbourne). Breaking the spell, though, I reach for my copy of HEAT where I find the ordinary but Murnane-written words in 'The Breathing Author':

Apart from what lies right now within the narrow range of these two eyes (points again to eyes), everything that I am aware of or have ever been aware of is somewhere in the far-reaching landscape of (my) mind. Of course, I acknowledge the existence of other minds, but such is my view of things that I can only see those minds and their contents as being located where all other imagined or remembered or desired entities are located -- in the landscape of landscapes; in the place of places; in my mind.

Uhlmann rather beautifully sets the two authors facing each other:

While all writers necessarily make use of both methods in generating a sense of the meaningful in their works, there are different degrees of emphasis, so that readers might notice one kind first and skate over the importance of the other kind in particular writers. In terms of emphasis, Coetzee seems to be a writer who values the external: his works enter into a dialogue with what is outside, though what is outside his works are not only real world problems, but other works, other books. Foe (1986), for example, refers to Robinson Crusoe (1719) and The Master of Petersburg refers to Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872). In terms of emphasis, Murnane seems to be a writer obsessed with the internal: the networks of images he creates – his marbles, his plains, his horse races with their silks and patterns of movement – recur not only within individual works, but throughout all of his works, creating a field of meaning that seems somehow self-contained. Yet, in fact, Coetzee depends as much on internal resonance, just as Murnane depends as much on external resonance, to create meaning.

Coetzee can enter into a dialogue with Murnane in a way that Murnane, who claims he no longer reads new fiction, cannot with Coetzee. And when Coetzee refers to other writers in his books, he never really refers to them, even when he names them. Rather, he offers deliberately distorted images of them – so that his character Foe is not Daniel Defoe but an idea of the writer, and his Dostoevsky is not the historical author but an idea of the writer. Yet perhaps this deliberate distortion is a kind of dialogue: a doubleness that enables meaning to emerge. Coetzee shows us how people communicate even, and perhaps especially, when they fail to understand one another.

Or is it that Coetzee’s principle figure is that of the writer (the one who sits in a room and sends out messages to the world from the self), while Murnane’s is that of the reader (the one who sits in a room and takes the world inside the self). Yet both are others of the self, and the figure that makes the writer other for Coetzee is the reader. The figure that makes the reader other for Murnane is the writer.

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.

A photo of a facsimile of a drawing

And, to complete this uncharacteristic run of images: a photo of a facsimile of a drawing done, as the Franz Kafka Museum tells us, while the artist was working at the Assicurazioni Generali (1907-08), with glass, dust specks and damp stains (either facsimile or authentic).

The Franz Kafka Society has a facsimile of Kafka's library, which is open, as I discovered from the sign in the bookshop one Wednesday afternoon, on Tuesdays only.

You might then be able to imagine how I felt the next day when I decided to ask whether it were possible after all to have a look at the library, since it was my last afternoon in Prague and the adjoining bookshop still appeared to be open -- there were no barriers at all between the one and the other -- only to be told that, since it was a quarter past five, the facsimile library had only just closed.