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.

I was only cured of this mania much later

Since The Life of Henry Brulard is still lying next to this computer, I thought I should add to to Scott Esposito's thoughts 'On How Writers Write' the following observations by Stendhal/ Beyle. On the one hand he laments:

I always waited for the moment of inspiration to write.

I was only cured of this mania much later. [...] This folly seriously affected my productivity; even in 1806 I waited for the moment of genius to write.

[...] If, around 1795, I had spoken of my intention of writing, some sensible man would have told me: "Write something every day for a couple of hours, genius or no genius." Such a remark would have induced me to make good use of ten years of my life which I have idiotically spent in waiting for genius. (p. 144-5)

And yet later:

About 1794, I was foolishly awaiting the moment of genius. Something like the voice of God speaking from the burning bush to Moses. This silliness made me waste a lot of time, but may perhaps have prevented me from being satisfied with the semi-commonplace as are so many writers of talent (for instance M. Loeve-Veimars). (p.229 - all italics are Stendhal's)

And of course a book exists only as a consequence of antitheses

This is what happens when you move from the page onto your own staked paths through the embedded white screens of the internet: an inevitable resonance. Here Stendhal (Beyle), fuelled by contempt, intent on his focus on what 'appears' to him 'at certain moments':

I declare once again, and once for all, that I supremely and sincerely despise M. Pariset, M. de Salvandy, M. Saint-Marc Girardin and the other braggarts, the mercenary and Jesuitical pedants of the Journal de Débats; but that doesn't make me think myself any closer to the great writers. I don't consider myself to have any genius, which would guarantee my worth, other than that of painting a faithful likeness of Nature, which appears to me so clearly at certain moments; in the second place, I am sure of my perfect honesty, of my adoration for the truth; and in the third place I am sure of the pleasure I take in writing, a pleasure which reached frenzy in 1817, at Milan, at M. Peronti's, Corsia del Giardino. (p.188)

And Douglas Robertson's translation of Krista Fleischman's interview with Thomas Bernhard just after the release of Woodcutters in 1984:

FLEISCHMANN:  Woodcutters—the book is subtitled “An Excitation.”

BERNHARD: Yes, because the style of the book is somewhat excited; its very subject, musically speaking, can’t be written about in a peaceful key, and has to be written about in an excited key.  You can’t write about this stuff in complete calm, as you do in conventional prose; instead, you sit down and straightway you’re excited by the very idea itself, and when you actually start writing, you’re still excited by the style.  The book is written in an excited style.

FLEISCHMANN:  And would you say the excitement increases the closer one gets to the conclusion? 

BERNHARD: An excitation is something that keeps increasing until the very end.  And so the book naturally ends in a state of total excitation by the city of Vienna, in embraces and annihilation all at one go, in a hug-like chokehold on Vienna, and [in my saying] Vienna, you are the best and at the same time the most horrible of all cities, as I daresay anybody else would about his home town.

FLEISCHMANN: So [the excitation emerges] out of [these] antitheses?

BERNHARD: Well, yes; those are the basis of a person’s existence; and of course a book exists only as a consequence of antitheses.  If a book, even a book that’s not an excitation, is one-sided, then it’s simply worthless.

FLEISCHMAN: Was it the period you [were writing] about that excited you so much?  Or was it something else that got you so riled up?

BERNHARD: [It was] my memory [of it].  Thirty years after the fact it’s certainly not the period [itself] that excites you, but the memory [of it], which you make present to yourself, and then you notice that it’s all basically [composed of a bunch of] more or less open wounds; you squirt a bit of poison into them, and the whole thing catches fire, and then an excited style materializes.  And then, you know, certain people cross your path and when you see them, they, you know, drive you crazy, and then you introduce them into just this genre of book, namely an excitation.

FLEISCHMANN: But surely with distance one ought to be able to write about the past more composedly.

BERNHARD: That’s the big cliché about contemplating the past, and it’s obviously totally false.  Old people can write books like that when they’re sitting paralyzed in their armchairs, but it’s not my mode, not yet; maybe the day after tomorrow I’ll still be excited; whenever I write anything, even something peaceful, I’m still basically excited.  In any case, excitation is a pleasant condition; when your blood is sluggish, excitation gets it moving, pulsing; it keeps you alive, and consequently keeps the stream of books flowing.  Without excitation there’s absolutely nothing; you might as well stay in bed.

Only in opera buffa can I be moved to tears

Although Stendhal's autobiographical fragment, The Life of Henry Brulard, was eventually published in 1890, I haven't yet been able to ascertain whether Proust ever read it. Had he been aware, for instance, that Stendhal compares a novel to 'a fiddle-bow, the reader's soul is like the violin which yields the sound' -- and this in a context where he writes about the extraordinary effect on his 'crazy' soul of 'Séthos (a dull novel by the Abbé Terrasson)'? In these memoirs, the effect is everything:

I cannot see things as they really were, I only have my childish memories. I see pictures, I remember their effects on my heart, but the causes and the shape of these things are a blank. It's still just like the frescoes of the [Campo Santo] at Pisa, where you can clearly make out an arm, but the piece of fresco beside it, which showed the head, has fallen off. I see a sequence of very clear pictures, but I only know what things were like in so far as they affected myself. And even this aspect of things I remember only through the recollection of the effect it produced on me. (p. 138)

We have a sense that Stendhal as a man was often overwhelmed by his reactions to things and people. For many years he considered himself as someone who hated 'Nature' for no other reason than the disingenuous praise heaped on it by his father and his hated aunt, Séraphie. Grenoble, where he grew up, provokes an almost physical disgust:

Everything that is mean in vulgar in the bourgeois way reminds me of Grenoble, everything that reminds me of Gr[enoble] fills me with horror, no, horror is too noble a word, with nausea. (p. 70)

He has strong reactions to certain writers: 'I loathe almost equally descriptions in the manner of Walter Scott and the bombast of Rousseau' -- reactions he might even, later, come to regret, as when he writes that 'the rhythmic and pretentious phrases of MM. Chateaubriand and Salvandy made me write Le Rouge et le Noir in too clipped a style.' And yet this very antipathy also enlivens him:

I am neither timid nor melancholy when I write, and run the risk of being hissed; I feel full of courage and pride when I am writing a phrase which will be spurned by one of those two giants of 1835, MM. Chateaubriand or Villemain. (p. 187)

He was writing these memoirs, it must be remembered, at the end of 1835 and into the early months of 1836.

And yet for someone so seemingly led by his passions -- or perhaps because of it -- he intensely dislikes the emotional manipulation of certain kinds of writing or even 'real life' experience:

Only in opera buffa can I be moved to tears. Opera seria, by deliberately setting out to arouse emotion, promptly prevents me from feeling any. Even in real life a beggar who asks for alms with piteous cries, far from arousing my compassion, makes me consider, with the utmost philosophical severity, the advantages of a penitentiary.

A poor man who does not say a word to me, who does not utter lamentable and tragic cries as they do in Rome, and who crawls along the ground eating an apple, like the cripple I saw a week ago, touches me immediately, almost to the point of tears. (p. 307)

Perhaps the moment that, for me, most anticipates Proust in la Recherche is where he writes about his obsession with the actress Mlle Kubly and the poor quality posted bills that advertise her appearances:

What transports of pure, tender and triumphant joy when I read her name on the bill! I can still see that bill, the shape of it, the paper, the printed letters.

I went to read that beloved name in three or four of the places where it was billed, one after the other: at the Jacobins' Gate, under the vault of the Garden, at the corner of my grandfather's house. I did not merely read her name, I gave myself the pleasure of re-reading the whole bill. The somewhat battered type used by the bad printer who produced this bill became precious and holy to me, and for many long years I loved it more than finer lettering. (p. 188 - 189)

How Marcel becomes Proust

In one of the narrow aisles on the eighth floor of Fisher stack, at Sydney University, I came across Thierry Marchaisse's fascinating book, which deserves to be translated: Comment Marcel devient Proust: Enquête sur l'énigme de la créativité ('How Marcel becomes Proust: an inquiry into the enigma of creativity' would be an approximate translation, although it is likely that the English title would use 'became'). Here Marchaisse argues that in September 1909 Marcel, still only a thirty-eight-year-old dilettante, experienced a significant breakthrough and how it was not just greater self-discipline that got him at last working on À la recherche du temps perdu, which was clearly of a very different order to his previous book, Les Plaisirs et les Jours, or even the then unpublished but superficially similar Jean Santeuil.

Marchaisse refers to Proust's own claims that la Recherche was basically 'une demonstration' and compares it to Andrew Wiles's presentation of Fermat's last theorem in 1994, where one of the main points of the 'demonstration' was that it was performative. This breakthrough, Marchaisse explains, came about when Proust, while working on Contre Sainte-Beuve, read Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe, a serialised, digressive novel in the first person about the narrator becoming a composer. As a piece of writing, Jean-Christophe seems not to have impressed Proust at all, but never-the-less, as Marchaisse argues, it seems also to have suggested to him a formal solution for how he could bring together in one work what hitherto he had been trying unsuccessfully to do in the separate fictional and critical strands of his writing -- a formal solution which hinged on a careful, highly conscious use of the first person that enabled him to develop an infinitely expandable and yet rigorously determined text analogous to the mathematical marvel of a Mobius band.

Unlike Jean-Christophe, which could never, as a novel, enact the music that the eponymous narrator is supposed to be able to produce by the end of the work, la Recherche enfolds the narrator into the substance of the text that the narrator is preparing to write, which is the text itself. Marchaisse points out that one of the 'signes manouches' that Proust has left in his work of this 'mobienne' intention is the peculiar way, ignored by printed editions, that the last full stop on the very last page of his manuscript does not come after the supposed final word of the novel, 'Temps', but after the word 'Fin' or 'the end'.

I regard, and have always regarded my works as lottery tickets

Next month it will be 179 years since Stendhal began his Memoirs of an Egotist (Souvenirs d'Egotisme, the last a word he borrowed from English) when he was 49 years old and yet it reads as fresh as if he'd just posted it on the internet thirty minutes ago. He wrote it twenty or thirty pages at a time in order to force a spontaneity that might push past the kind of self-aggrandising narrator he despised. In the first chapter he writes:

I am profoundly convinced that the only antidote which can make the reader forget the everlasting 'I's' the author is going to write, is perfect sincerity. Will I have the courage to recount what is humiliating without salvaging my self-esteem with an infinite series of prefatory remarks? I hope so. (p. 33: mine is the 1975 Chattus and Windus edition, translated by David Ellis)

The reader doesn't forget these 'I's', but grows fond of him. This is no rare, fragile, poetic sensibility, but a narrator who cheerfully describes himself as fat, short and ugly and yet worries about the swirling vacancy inside his head when he attempts to examine it:

I don't know myself and it's this which distresses me sometimes when I think about it at night. Am I good or bad, clever or stupid? (p. 33)

The project of writing the memoirs hinges on this candour, although it also could well be undone by it:

What I am writing seems very boring; if it carries on like this it won't be a book but an examination of conscience. I've hardly any precise memories of this stormy, passionate period. (p. 49)

This is a narrator whose memories, as he admits, aren't clear, who changes his characters' names as he writes, who stops every now and then with remarks such as this:

Where was I?... Good God, how badly written this is! (p. 58)

And yet it is the assuredness of the voice, or perhaps of the project itself -- his quest for self understanding as he writes -- that draws the reader along with it. He trusts his instinct over and against the fashion of the day:

I had long arguments with Lussinge. I maintained that a good third of Sir Walter Scott's talent was attributable to a secretary who went to the country and roughed out for him descriptions of the countryside on the spot. I found him then, as I find him now, weak in his depiction of passion, in knowledge of the human heart. Will posterity confirm the judgement of contemporaries who place the Tory baronet immediately after Shakespeare? (p. 140)

This instinct that drives the narrative forwards in the way he wants, omitting what bores him, extemporising on what doesn't, is an approach not too different from what the Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabel calls 'palavering':

I have forgotten to describe this salon, Sir Walter Scott and his imitators would have been prudent and begun with the kind of description of physical surroundings I loathe. I find them so tedious to do, it stops me writing novels. (p. 69)

And yet he did write novels, as we know. Gabriel Josipovici, whose own novel writing evolved from a similar irritation with the conventions of description writing, claims in The Mirror of Criticism that the 'birth of the novel is coterminous with the birth of the extemporal vein' -- a suggestion that the novel might actually rely on this palavering, this following of the instinct and eschewing of those conventional expectations that stultify, for the writer, the work of the writing.

When Stendhal in his forties at last turned from his abortive attempts to write drama to writing novels instead, he seemed to have found his metier. And yet, for all his confidence in his literary instinct -- or perhaps because of it -- in Memoirs of an Egotist he appears insouciant of the immediate and even medium term reception of everything he wrote:

Quite often in society I used to come across people who would congratulate me on one of my works: I'd written very few then. The compliment and my reply done with, we didn't know what to say to each other. These Parisians, who expected some frivolously pat reply must have thought me very gauche, and perhaps proud. I'm accustomed to seeming the opposite of what I am. I regard, and have always regarded my works as lottery tickets. I don't expect to be reprinted before 1900. ( p. 90)

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)