The Man Who Stopped Writing
March 26th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
This appeared in 3:AM Magazine on 11 July 2011:
L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire, Marc-Edouard Nabe, 2010
Marc-Edouard Nabe has always relished playing with fire, but never more so than when he burned what would have been the fifth volume of his journal. His main motivation was to avoid being trapped in a Shandyesque race with time, ending up pigeonholed as a diarist. Nevertheless, he went on to describe this event in Alain Zannini (2002), a novel so blatantly autobiographical that it even bore his real name as its title (Nabe, short for “nabot” — midget — is a nom de plume). The implication was clear: having lived his life in order to narrate it, Zannini had gradually become Nabe’s creation. What, then, would happen if the writer were to stop writing?
This ontological question is raised in L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire (“The Man Who Stopped Writing”), which begins with the author-narrator’s paradoxical assertion — given the length of the book, let alone its very existence — that he has forsaken literature after being dropped by his publisher. “A publisher paying me to write books nobody reads,” he deadpans, “I thought this would go on for ever.”
For the best part of two decades, the real-life Nabe had received a monthly wage from Les Editions du Rocher, but this stipend was suddenly withdrawn when they were bought out in 2005. The novelist responded by taking legal action. Throughout the lengthy lawsuit, he expressed himself by means of posters, which his hardcore supporters pasted all over the walls of France’s major cities. He also maintained the fiction that his authorial days were over, so as to remain in character while secretly writing his novel about writing no more.
The appearance of L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire thus came as quite a surprise, not least because Nabe chose to go down the self-publishing, or rather “anti-publishing”, route. The minimalist jet-black cover has a whiff of piracy about it: no barcode, no ISBN, no publisher’s name or logo; the spine remains bare. On the front, the author’s name is reduced to “Nabe” as if it had become a brand, and on the back you only find a number, indicating that it is the author’s twenty-eighth published work (and seventh novel). The book is only available through an official website and a handful of highly unlikely retailers (a butcher’s, a florist’s, a hairdresser’s and three restaurants at the last count). By cutting out the middleman, Nabe claims to be able to make a 70% profit, instead of the usual 10%, on each copy sold. The initial print run — funded by the sale of paintings (Nabe is also an artist and jazz guitarist) — sold out within a month; there have been three more since. Last year, the novel was shortlisted for the prestigious Renaudot prize — a first for a self-published volume in France — and last month, the online platform morphed into a full-blown company.
This declaration of war on the publishing industry is in keeping with Nabe’s image as an écrivain maudit. “Great artists,” says the protagonist, as Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil manuscript is auctioned off at Sotheby’s, “have but one purpose: to become moral alibis for the bastards of posterity”. Initially accused of being a crypto-fascist (partly because of his predilection for Céline and Lucien Rebatet), Nabe is now frequently depicted as a pro-Palestinian leftist (whose anti-Americanism, it must be said, borders on the pathological). His first television appearance, in 1985, proved so incendiary that he was beaten up by a leading anti-racist campaigner. Every day, he declared — looking every inch the provocative young fogey, complete with centre parting, bow tie and retro spectacles — I shoot up with a Montblanc pen full of “utter hatred of humanity”. A great admirer of Jacques Mesrine, Nabe famously befriended the flamboyant bankrobber Albert Spaggiari as well as the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Following 9/11, he produced a pamphlet entitled Une Lueur d’espoir (“A Glimmer of Hope”) and argued repeatedly that bin Laden was only acting in self-defence. In 2003, he even travelled to Baghdad, where he protested against the invasion of Iraq in typically Gallic fashion: by writing a novel. These antics may have earned him a large cult following, but Mazarine Pingeot summed up the views of many when she declared that Nabe was “unfortunately” a great writer.
Despite running to almost 700 pages, L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire has no chapters or even paragraphs, as though it were shot in real time, like 24, the American TV series the narrator watches. If the dialogue is a little didactic — even Socratic — at times, there are far fewer purple passages than usual. This is the affectless, almost pedestrian, prose of someone who will not even allow himself to sign an autograph or compose a letter any more. The novel is meant to read as if it were unwritten. This tonal blankness (often reminiscent of Houellebecq’s) is marred on occasion by poor punning, but it can also be shot through with flashes of sheer poetry: a vintage sewing machine is likened to a “giant bee in mourning”; a brunette’s hair looks like it has been “soaked in liquid night”.
Structurally, L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire is a 21st-century reworking of Dante’s Divine Comedy, taking us all the way from Inferno to Paradiso via Purgatorio. The picaresque plot begins when the protagonist abandons his calling, and spans seven days during which events that really took place over several years are skilfully conflated. At a loose end, the “post-writer” wanders around town and meets Jean-Phi, a young celebrity blogger who acts as his Virgil, guiding him through his post-literary vita nuova. Nabe’s mouthpiece dreams of a “literary lobotomy” that would rid him of all the bookish references preventing him from living fully in the here and now. Try as he may, Jean-Phi is unable to wean him off his old ways, and each new stroll through the streets of Paris gives rise to a digression about Raymond Roussel‘s birthplace or Proust‘s childhood haunts. However, as the days go by, and his life becomes increasingly bound up with Jean-Phi’s youthful entourage, the narrator rediscovers the pleasure of living gratuitously, without having to worry about transmuting his experiences into words. In the final pages, Mallarmé‘s famous dictum that “The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book” appears on a poster but, crucially, it has been misquoted, so that it is now the book which results in a beautiful world.
The protagonist inhabits this inverted world. Early on, he wonders if his new condition does not necessarily imply that he has himself become a character, as if a writer and his creation were but two sides of the same coin. The names of all the famous living people who appear in the novel have been slightly doctored (Depardieu, for instance, becomes Depardieux). This is no doubt to avoid lawsuits, but it also seems to indicate that they too have stepped through the looking-glass, on the other side of which they are exposed as grotesque parodies of themselves. As one of Jean-Phi’s friends remarks, a mere typo can suddenly plunge you into another universe.
One of the key scenes is a chance meeting with Alain Delons (Delon), on the seventh day. The narrator explains that he is his favourite actor because in all his major films Delon/s goes on a quest for a doppelgänger he could replace or who could replace him. The same, of course, can be said about the novelist’s entire oeuvre, which is haunted by the figure of the double. Narrator and author are as indistinguishable as ever, here, although the former is clearly an anti-Nabe, inhabiting a parallel universe where he has been defeated by his detractors. L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire, proof of the real-life author’s triumph, is an affirmation of the truth of fiction, as well as of the virtues of unmediated life: after all, he wrote his novel by pretending not to. Give Nabe a mask, and he will tell you the truth. Just don’t ask him — or me, for that matter — who the doppelgänger is.
Zannini/Nabe once quipped that Alain Zannini — in which Zannini meets Nabe — was told in the “double person singular”. Sometimes, however, I really is another, rather than just the other half of a divided self. Although no oil painting, Michel Houellebecq is Dorian Gray to Nabe’s picture — the acceptable face of controversy. Or at least this is Nabe’s spin on events. In the early 90s, both men lived at the same address (103 Rue de la Convention in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris) facing each other, like bookends, across a cobbled courtyard. Both belong to the same generation, come from similar lower middle-class backgrounds, had domineering Corsican mothers they rebelled against, established their reputations by courting controversy and chronicled the demise of French joie de vivre. Nabe was, in fact, the senior partner in this relationship, up until the success of Atomised in 1998.
In The Map and the Territory, which finally earned him the Goncourt prize last year, Houellebecq depicted his own murder. Nabe immediately outed himself as the culprit in the course of an interview. What he really meant is that Houellebecq had committed literary suicide, by selling out and writing a Goncourt novel. Losing the Renaudot prize, on the other hand, reaffirmed Nabe’s outsider status. Like his master, Céline, he remains untainted by recognition, alone against the world; beyond the pale. With an eye on posterity, Marc-Edouard Nabe is biding his time.
Reverse Striptease
March 25th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
This is the phantom foreword to H. P. Tinker’s short-story collection, The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity (2007). It went through several incarnations, before the author finally decided he wanted the book to stand alone; forewordless. And this is me in La Baule, on 21 July 2006, writing the aforementioned piece whilst shamelessly flaunting my bald patch (picture taken through the open window by my now-phantom spouse, Emilie Gallix).
Reverse Striptease
…’Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit,’ the Consul liked to say…
- Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Privately Paul Gauguin considers himself an undiscovered genius. “But,” he tells Woody Allen over the phone, “What happens to an undiscovered genius when his genius is finally discovered? What is that all about? Where does he go then?
- HP Tinker, “Paul Gauguin Trapped on the 37th Floor”
In one of the stories collected here, the mourners attending the funeral of an anonymous writer suddenly wonder: “So, what do we know of the author? Do we really know anything at all?” (“The Death of the Author” p. 105). The same question could be asked of HP Tinker himself. Despite the occasional circling Trewin or Prosser, he remains elusive; a cult figure on the literary fringes (1). This self-styled “Thomas Pynchon of Chorlton-cum-Hardy” claims that “writers should be read, not seen” and that “the work should speak for itself” (2). The work itself, however, is wilfully keeping stum… (3)
…”Paul Gauguin Trapped on the 37th Floor”, for instance — which mimicks the clapped-out conventions of celebrity documentaries — takes Joe Orton’s satire of tabloidese and vox pops to its illogical conclusion. A voiceover-style narrative is interspersed with the Post-Impressionist’s impressions and snippets of interviews: “Paul loves to laugh and to make other people laugh. He also loves to dance. He has been blessed with the gift of tap. Not a lot of people know that” (p. 7). These soundbites come courtesy of a gaggle of friends and acquaintances ranging from the plausible (Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec) to the risible (Edith Piaf, Carl Jung or Nico). Such glaring anachronisms serve to break down the barriers of rationality and conjure up a world of promiscuous commingling where the pleasure principle runs riot (4). The mockumentary format is ideally suited to the episodic nature of Tinker’s stories with their air-tight paragraphs à la Flaubert, their picaresque jumpcuts from one incident to the next, or their wild goose chases “via a chain of wholly convoluted plot developments” (“Kandahar!” p. 19).
Direction, or the lack thereof, is a leitmotif throughout this anthology and, indeed, the author’s entire corpus to date. Consider “Le Fantastique Voyage de HP Tinker”, with its self-reflexive Jules Verne-meets-Todorov-on Sarah Records title and disconcerting final sentence: “…I decide to solicit legal advice on precisely which direction I should be proceeding in” (p. 117). “Where are we going?” (p. 17) wonders Paul Gauguin mirroring the reader’s bafflement as the opening story careers towards its unlikely close. The artist’s question echoes the paragraph composed solely of the word “lost” repeated (for some reason) 92 times (p. 14) which, in turn, reflects the labyrinthine “Morrissey Exhibition” with its disorienting carpet scheme: “You can certainly get lost in there. Totally lost. Completely lost. Utterly lost. Horribly, horribly, lost. So horribly lost that you fear you might never find yourself again” (p. 128). The narrator of the ironically-titled “You Can Probably Guess My Trajectory” confesses, “I needed to find myself, or at least somebody similar” (5) only to find himself (or at least somebody similar) accidentally in Stockholm where “the streets thronged with lost sports commentators asking for directions”. The “oddly convoluted directions” (p. 27) he is himself offered give rise to a Proustian travelogue (6) which — as is common in Tinker’s fiction — reduces locales to bare toponymy: “I licked my wounds in Lisbon and Tangiers. Then ate surprisingly badly in Madrid. Next, the warm air of Dakar stang my lungs. (I ignored Istanbul completely.)” (p. 30). “Son of Sinbad” concludes with the very thought that the only uncharted territories are indeed those of the imagination: “‘There’s nothing out there,’ he says, ‘you understand that, don’t you?’ and you say, ‘Yes, oh yes,’ eyes swimming with disappointment, knee-deep in thoughts of yawning oceans, uncrossed beaches, man-made islands, wine-dark women, unfashionably family-orientated coastal resorts…” (p. 49).
Angst proving resistant to geography, the itinerary morphs into a “search for experience”, a “quest for something different” (“Kandahar!” p. 22); rerouted inwards it thus becomes a journey of “self-discovery”, as the peripatetic protagonist of “Vic Chews It Over” — Vic, presumably — puts it (p. 38). However, all this experimentation only leads to an aporetic cul-de-sac that is strangely reminiscent of the fate of post-Symbolist Western literature: “I fell into abstraction. I travelled through complex textures, however dense and demoralising they became. I dug down, deep into the langue and parole of the situation. Words that once meant an awful lot to me, now held little or no meaning in my current context” (p. 30). In a few deft sentences, HP Tinker charts the far-reaching (philosophical as well as literary) consequences of the (Mallarmean but also Barthelmean) disjunction between signifier and signified.
When the misguided anti-hero of “Kandahar!” follows the directions of a Firbankian monk he discovers in his hotel bathroom (eating gazpacho and listening to Limp Bizkit), we know that his odyssey is bound to come full circle: “…and following his directions, I set off on a journey, following and swimming his directions, swimming across an open sea from one island, and jumping from the top of a 120-foot waterfall, swimming his directions from one island to another, crawling past armed guards…but swimming back because it got late, so late the monk was already sleeping in my bed by the time I got back to my room…” (pp. 23-24). We have now reached the “literary pottage” of postmodernism (“Death of the Author” p. 108), the eternally-recycled primordial alphabet soup — and a very weird soup it is too.
Placing undecideability at the heart of his work, HP Tinker positively revels in the negativity of this impasse. “Nobody,” we are told, “is quite sure” what “exactly took place between the paper-thin walls of the Mexican sex hotel” (“Mexican Sex Hotel” p. 52). If Robert Rauschenberg transformed the erasure of a de Kooning drawing into a work of art, the author goes one step further by erasing a non-existent original. His short stories? Allegories pointing — most impolitely — to a subtext which is not really there (8). Rites of passage leading nowhere, except up their own ars rhetorica, like so many quests without grails. Hatfuls of hollow — without hats. The literary equivalent of losing something you never actually had in the first place, and then going looking for it again. At great length.
Most characters here are hankering after some ever-elusive — oft-illusive — goal. The General, for instance, inhabits “an intricate warren” of rooms which form “a mysterious labyrinth he can wander through, dusting and hoovering the narrow passageways as he goes about his business, as if in search of some unknown land” (p. 31). Entering the Mexican sex hotel is “like stepping into another world” of passages “shelving off into mysteriously-darkened chambers” (p. 51). The quest for an “unknown land”, “another world” — the “Swank Bisexual Bar of Modernity” itself, if you will — leads one into a maze from which there is no escape, a “corridor of illusions” (“Le Fantastique Voyage de HP Tinker” p. 114) built to baffle: “What level am I on? You may well ask, on occasion. Is that way up or down? What’s through that door? Where in the name of Jesus am I?” (“The Morrissey Exhibition” p. 128). Spatial topsy-turviness provides a perfect metaphor for the mock-heroic (8) reversal of high and low registers which so often contributes — mainly through incongruous juxtapositions — to the mind-boggling confusion of reader, character, narrator and author alike: “You are totally confused and understand nothing” (“The Countess of Monte Cristo” p. 80).
This descent into nothingness (“The next morning, in the shaving mirror: an empty space,” “You Can Go Home Again” p. 120) is perhaps best illustrated by Tinker’s penchant for pulp pastiche. Take “The Investigation”, a story which brazenly advertises its mock-epistemological dimension: “It is an investigation into meaning…meaning, do you see?” (p. 79). Unlike your run-of-the-mill whodunnit — where Truth is eventually brought to book — this (clearly ontological) investigation reveals nothing whatsoever. On the contrary, refusing to let in daylight upon magic, Tinker adds layer upon layer of opacity as if performing one of his characters’ customary reverse stripteases (9). Unsurprisingly, we learn in fine that “The investigation goes on”, a denouement as open-ended as Tinker’s fiction itself (p. 68)…
So what exactly will you find inside the Swank Bisexual Bar of Modernity? Bawdy moustaches. The wildest of similes (10). Donald Barthelme rutting with a buxom Oulipian in the pale fire of a Nabokovian footnote. Morrisseyspotting aplenty. Devastating satire of Swiftian proportions (11). Lashings of hardcore gastroporn (12). Bewildering Lynchian filmic devices. Uncanny Orton pastiches (13). A recurrent association between artistic creation and immoderate masturbation. Relentless self-reflexivity; postmodernism gone mad (14). A very British brand of Surrealism that owes as much to the Goon Show, Monty Python or Glen Baxter as to the Continental heavyweights. At times, the feeling of Woody Allen stranded on a Carry On film set. Whereas his absurdist forebears could only gratify us with a sardonic grimace, Tinker does laugh-out-loud. Whereas much “experimental” fiction is deserving of study yet tiresome to sit down and read, he reconciles — seemingly effortlessly — the avant-garde with the plaisir du texte. His thrilling “A-level Surrealism” (“You Can Probably Guess My Trajectory” p. 29) — as far removed from the cosy world of Amis or Barnes as it is possible to get (15) — manages the feat of being at once experimental and accessible. The book you are (probably) holding in your hands is what French critics would describe as un OVNI littéraire: nothing less than a literary UFO…
(1) Susan Tomaselli claimed in www.dogmatika.com that “If HP Tinker didn’t exist, you’d have to make him up”.
(2) Quoted from a rare interview published in www.3ammagazine.com in 2001.
(3) Significantly, an early abandoned Tinker novel was entitled “The Man Who Would Be Mute”.
(4) This Paul Gauguin (whose works include Jacob Wrestling Grandma Moses and Woman Chasing Bagel Down Fifth Avenue) designs Clarice Cliff’s corporate logo, ogles Russ Meyer’s Vixen! on TV (“The heroine has unfeasibly large breasts, Paul Gauguin notes, unable to take his eyes off the screen” p. 8), crashes on Willem de Kooning’s sofa bed (after attending Jackson Pollock’s housewarming party — with Man Ray), receives an erotic postcard from Yoko Ono and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from Vivien Leigh (“I was merely struggling with the baby shrimp” p. 11).
(5) After all, “I is another” in these post-Rimbaldian times.
(6) See also this characteristic extract from “The Countess of Monte Cristo”: “Heathrow. Rio. Lisbon. Brussels. Bruges. Rome. Venice. Barcelona. Madrid. Prague. Parma. St Petersburg. Moscow. Cape Town. Then Heathrow again” (p. 87).
(7) The subtext is either distanced and stylised into oblivion, or so obscure that it might as well not exist. “The General”, for instance, was inspired by a real person, but the story is obviously more than a private joke. So: is this objective correlation gone mad, or something else? Perhaps a clue can be found in “You Can Go Home Again” where Noël Coward reflects upon his work-in-progress which is “going nowhere”: “I wonder, he thinks to himself, is the subject too close to home?” (p. 118).
(8) The scuffle described like a Homeric epic in “[Just Like] Tom Paulin’s Blues” is a prime example of Tinker’s take on the mock-heroic (p. 96).
(9) “Every young Parisian girl wore woolly tights and thick overcoats, their pert, erect nipples completely hidden by several layers of obtrusive material” (“Vic Chews It Over” p. 39).
(10) Tinker is the master of weird similes: “…the plot thickening around you the way a good pasta should” (“The Countess of Monte Cristo” p. 78).
(11) 12 “Kandahar!” provides a scathing attack on the collateral damage of the so-called War on Terror: “Everywhere was bombed. My street was bombed. Then the street next to mine. Then the street next to the street next to mine. Night and day, they bombed all the wrong places….they were quite methodical about it” (p. 24). “(Just Like) Tom Paulin’s Blues” is one long, brilliant exercise in pricking an intellectual bubble of pomposity.
(12) The anthology is awash with Fluxus caffs, Franco-Pakistani bistros, Zen-like seafood platters, “media-friendly virtual tapas bars” and “funky post-coital noodle eateries” (“Kandahar” p. 23). Food frequently stands for the victory of base instincts over lofty ideals — a staple of comedy: “Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What are we doing here? What are we going to do next? How can we escape everything that is artificial and conventional? What can we have for lunch? Why is there no food in this house? Did I forget to visit the supermarket? Are these potato cakes stale? Where is the green curry I was freezing? Am I all out of seaweed fasoli? Is a Brie sandwich at all feasible in the circumstances?” (“Paul Gauguin Trapped on the 37th Floor” p. 17).
(13) The recurrent Ortonesque mixture of American Psycho-style granguignol and laugh-out-loud comedy is perfectly illustrated by the opening scene of “The Investigation” which describes a detective contemplating a gruesome murder scene. A woman, hanging from a light fitting has been “expertly skinned”, one of her hands has been chopped off and her mouth is “full of shit”. The detective observes that this is the “sickest sight” he has seen “since he chanced upon the contents of David Niven’s fridge in 1972″ (p. 59).
(14) There’s the guy in “Kandahar!”, for instance, who wants to produce a machine “to go back in time and kill the inventor of the funky bassline” thus giving rise to “a better world, one without the Red Hot Chili Peppers” (p. 20).
(15) Among his contemporaries the most obvious points of comparison are David Foster Wallace and, perhaps, William T Vollmann.
Review of Dogma
March 20th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
This appeared in Bookslut on 5 March 2012 (issue 118):
Dogma by Lars Iyer
For Scheherazade, storytelling cannot end; for Lars Iyer, it cannot begin. Two novels in, and some reviewers are wondering where his trilogy is going, if anywhere. According to Alfred Hickling, in The Guardian, this “lack of direction becomes self-defeating”. He has a point. It is, in fact, the point.
Spurious, last year’s debut, precedes Dogma, its nominal sequel, but it would make little difference if one were to read them in reverse order, simultaneously, or even back to front. Both volumes can be dipped into at random, safe in the knowledge that the very same obsessions and characters will recur, like some trauma-induced repetition compulsion. Readers of Spurious will rediscover Lars and W. — the self-styled “landfill thinkers” — modeled on the author himself and his colleague William Large, two English philosophy lecturers who have both published books on the works of Maurice Blanchot. Their relationship revolves around the cruel but hilarious abuse that W. constantly heaps on Lars, a modus operandi that baffles their North American hosts: “Don’t they understand that it’s the only way we can express affection? It’s a British working class thing, W. told them, but they only looked at us blankly”. Lars is mocked for everything from his lack of style (“No woman would have permitted your vest phase“) to his non-thinking (“‘It’s like Zen,’ says W. ‘Pure absence’”). On the very first page, W. likens the roaring of the sea to his friend’s alleged stupidity: “It’s the sound of unlearning, he says. It’s the sound of Lars, of the chaos that undoes every idea”. They go off on a sparsely-attended lecture tour of the Deep South (“Six bored people, looking at their watches. Did we come all the way for this?”) during which they pontificate over pints of Big Ass Beer, buy souvenir togas in Athens, and are immortalized on the banks of the Mississippi for W.’s Facebook page: “He rides me like a horse. I ride him like a horse. Sal rides both of us, like two horses, with the camera set on automatic”. W. and Lars also attend music festivals, where they neck Plymouth Gin from water bottles, discussing Jandek’s “non-music” (“the ‘non-’ is not privative”) and Josh T. Pearson’s integrity (“He speaks from inside the burning bush”). They look for religion in the everyday (“‘Are you going religious?’ says Sal. ‘I hate it when you go religious’”) and attempt to step into life like Rosenzweig (“This is where philosophy must begin anew, right here in the pub!”). Most significantly perhaps, they launch their own intellectual movement, the eponymous Dogma: “Dogma was greater than us. Dogma was broader, more generous. Weren’t we only swallows in the updraft? Weren’t we leaves swept up in an autumn storm?”
On the final page, W. asks his companion to be his Boswell, thus providing the trilogy with its creative primal scene. Lars, Dogma‘s narrator, plays the part of “the Delphic Pythia, speaking for the Oracle”: he carries out his duties to the letter, almost completely erasing his own voice from the book. Most of the time, it is W. we hear speaking through Lars. He speaks of Lars, but also for Lars — in his place — as though he were a ventriloquist, but the ventriloquist is himself ventriloquized since Lars is reporting all of this. W. even begins to wonder if Lars has not conjured him up “from a sense of his own failure,” and some reviewers have speculated that he may indeed be a figment of the narrator’s imagination. Lars’s very self-effacement provides a kind of passive (possibly passive-aggressive) resistance to W., simply by letting him express himself fully. One is reminded of that medieval depiction of Socrates taking dictation from Plato, in which Derrida makes out “Plato getting an erection in Socrates’s back” (The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond). Moving on from Lars’s hypothetical erection, there are two explicit references to ventriloquism in Dogma. The second one is clearly attributed to W., and provides a nice instance of dramatic irony: “Our eternal puppet show, says W. Our endless ventriloquy. Who’s speaking through us? Who’s using our voices?” The first reference, however, remains anonymous. W’s external monologue seems to have been completely absorbed, here, by a narrative voice whose origin is no longer clearly Lars: “We were ventriloquised; we spoke, but not with our voices”.
Like its predecessor, Dogma is composed of individual fragments that originated as blog posts on the author’s website. In spite of this episodic pattern, the novel is expertly crafted throughout. A few throwaway remarks about the “famous Poles of Plymouth” in the opening pages segue seamlessly into an evocation of Stroszek; itself forestalling the American lecture tour during which W. and Lars identify with the protagonists of Herzog’s film: “They’d come to escape the past! And what did Bruno find? The dancing chicken, W. says”.
Some of these fragments are arranged in sequences, while others could be shuffled around like the loose pages in Marc Saporta’s book-in-a-box. Structurally, as well as thematically, each stand-alone vignette embodies the hope — ever dashed, but eternally springing — of a radical new departure: “We need a realitätpunkt, W. says. A point of absolute certainty, from which everything could begin. But the only thing of which he can be certain is the eternal crumbling of our foundations, the eternal stop sign of our idiocy”.
The very possibility of starting afresh — of turning over a new leaf, and then another — seems to have vanished, hence the lack of direction; of narrative drive. Spurious never really begins: it opens in medias res. Dogma never really ends, as the final Beckettian sentence testifies: “It’s time to die, says W. But death does not come.” The novel stops and starts; it repeats on itself as though it had binged on Plymouth Gin: “Every day, the same failure”. Lars and W. mooch about in the dead time of stasis, a disjointed time, which is not so much dead, as endlessly dying. “But that’s just it: death doesn’t want us, W. says,” in an earlier passage, “It isn’t our time, and it will never be our time.” Things are forever coming to an end, but the end itself never comes: “The conditions for the end are here, W. says, but not the end itself, not yet…” The two characters are suspended in this liminal state, stupefied by the non-stop inertia of late capitalism, “pushing [their] shopping cart full of Plymouth Gin through the gathering darkness,” biding their time: “The apocalypse is imminent, things are coming to an end, but in the meantime…? It’s always the meantime in the pub, W. says”. And again: “Only the disaster is real, W. says. There is no future. And isn’t that a relief: that there is no future? And meanwhile, his long fall. Meanwhile our long fall through the clouds…” And yet again: “Perhaps this is a great waiting room; this, the time before a dentist’s appointment, when nothing very important happens: we leaf through a magazine, we gaze out of the window … But they’ve forgotten to call our names, haven’t they? They’ve forgotten we are here, in the eternal waiting room”.
And what exactly is this mean limbo time? Even the seemingly gormless narrator has an answer, albeit a second-hand one: “The infinite wearing away, I said, quoting Blanchot. Eternullity, I said, quoting Lefebvre”. “We’re dead men,” W. later concurs, “the walking dead.”
Messianism — that desperate hope, or hopeful despair — lies at the very heart of Dogma. “You need a volume of Rosenzweig with you at all times,” W. explains, producing The Star of Redemption from his trusty man bag aboard a Greyhound bus bound for Memphis (of all places). Back in Britain, he boasts that he is “still reading Rosenzweig, very slowly, in German, every morning” despite failing to “understand a word” of it. He describes himself as “a man of the end who yearns for the beginning,” but beginning and end are but interchangeable opt-outs from the “endless end,” symbolized by the “eternal scratching of the rats” under Lars’s floorboards, or the “endless, remorseless teaching” that is the “wreck of the humanities“. The Mersey Estuary at sunset is likened to “the end of the world” or “the beginning,” as though both times were indeed identical. The desire to be born again is just that: a desire to be born again, to be borne back. W.’s longing for the Apocalypse is thus mirrored by his nostalgia for an idyllic childhood (“Ah, his Canadian years!”), his vision of Lars and himself as “idiot Whitmans” in “blousy shirts” roaming a prelapsarian America, and even his matutinal work routine:
- Four AM; five AM — he’s ready for work; he opens his books, he takes notes as the sky brightens over Stonehouse roofs. He’s there at the inception, at the beginning of everything, even before the pigeons start cooing like maniacs on his window-ledge. He’s up before anyone else, he knows that, but there’s still no chance of thinking. Not a thought has come to him in recent months; not one. He’s stalled, W. says. [...] But when wasn’t he stalled? [...] No matter how early he gets up, he misses his appointment with thought; no matter how he tries to surprise it by being there before everyone else.
It is never early enough for W. (who believes things started going downhill in the mid-Neolithic); but neither is it ever late enough. Just as the end keeps on ending endlessly, the novel itself keeps on beginning inexorably. In the paradoxical incipit of Grammars of Creation, George Steiner declares that “We have no more beginnings”: here, we have nothing but beginnings, but it comes to the same thing really. One is reminded of W., “looking for the America hidden by America”: “a perpetually new America stretching its limbs in the sun”. Dogma is also constantly in the process of becoming, which is why — for all the talk of exhaustion and Armageddon — it feels so vital and remarkably angst-free. We learn that Lars had once travelled to Patmos, where the Book of Revelations was written, but ended up by accident on Paros, “the party island.” Short of a revelation, the novel turns into a comic celebration.
Each new fragment harbors the potential to disrupt the continuum represented by the (theoretically infinite) succession of paragraphs. This promise of a revolutionary revelation — the achievement of artistic closure — is never fulfilled, and it produces a daisy chain of failed fragments: a compulsion to retread the same ground. W. claims that our reading is “only the shadow of reading, the search for the world-historical importance that reading once had”. Likewise, Dogma is only the shadow of a novel, the search for the world-historical importance that novels once had. It gestures towards the kind of book it could be if novels still mattered; if only it could take itself seriously enough to really get going. At times, this phantom book shines through the pages “like a watermark”.
Roland Barthes famously argued that “to be modern is to know that which is not possible any more”. By this token, Dogma is resolutely modern. Lars and W.’s saving grace is their acute awareness of their limitations; an awareness that can be extended to the book itself: “We know we fall short, desperately short. We know our task is too great for us, but at least we have a sense of it, its greatness”. In a recent interview at Ready Steady Book, Iyer explained that “Kafka’s work transmits a sense of the importance of notions of God, of belief, even as it deprives us of them”. This is precisely what Dogma does for literature. The book’s apparent lack of direction is part of a strategy to sabotage its literariness; to ensure that it does not become another bogus piece of literary fiction.
For the Romantics, the early German Romantics, in particular, a fragment was a synecdoche standing for a larger, ideal work left to the reader’s imagination. What is missing here is not a bigger, better book that could have been, or indeed could still be, written, but one that is no longer possible at all. In Dogma, W. is nagged by the fear that he may already have had his great idea without knowing it. When he finally loses his university job, he is caught unawares, although it is something he had been predicting right from the start: “He had been waiting for the end, W. says, and still the end surprised him”. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, we move from a sense of impending doom to a feeling that the disaster is already behind us; haunting us: “It’s time, W. says. No, it’s after time. It’s too late. We’re living a posthumous life”. In the final pages, Lars is also described as living each day “as though it were the day after the last”.
According to Iyer, who recently wrote an anti-manifesto on the subject, ours is a “literature which comes after literature”. If John Barth (“The Literature of Exhaustion,” 1967) and the High Postmodernists wrote literature’s conclusion, we are now writing its epilogue. Whereas Harold Bloom’s Romantic poets felt “belated” vis-à-vis their illustrious predecessors, we feel belated with regards to literature itself. For us, literature can no longer be “the Thing itself”; it can only be “about the vanished Thing”. From this point of view, Lars Iyer’s work ranks alongside the hauntological novels of Tom McCarthy and Lee Rourke, which excavate the lost futures of literary modernity.
The Death of Literature
January 21st, 2012 § Leave a Comment
This appeared in Guardian Books on 10 January 2012:
The Death of Literature
The fact that people have been proclaiming its passing for centuries only makes the sense of its ending more acute
[The end: headstone in Lund Cemetery, Nevada. Photograph: Deon Reynolds/Getty]
“We come too late to say anything which has not been said already,” lamented La Bruyère at the end of the 17th century. The fact that he came too late even to say this (Terence having pipped him to the post back in the 2nd century BC) merely proved his point — a point which Macedonio Fernández took one step backwards when he sketched out a prequel to Genesis. God is just about to create everything. Suddenly a voice in the wilderness pipes up, interrupting the eternal silence of infinite space that so terrified Pascal: “Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been done.” Rolling His eyes, the Almighty retorts (doing his best Morrissey impression) that he has heard this one before — many a time. He then presses ahead with the creation of the heavens and the earth and all the creepy-crawlies that creepeth and crawleth upon it. In the beginning was the word — and, word is, before that too.
In his most influential book, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Harold Bloom argued that the greatest Romantic poets misread their illustrious predecessors “so as to clear imaginative space for themselves”. The literary father figure was killed, figuratively speaking, through a process of “poetic misprision”. TS Eliot had already expressed a similar idea in 1920, when he claimed that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different”. Borges (a disciple of Fernández, whom Bloom references) was on the same wavelength (but at the other end of the dial) when he claimed that “each writer creates his precursors”.
According to Bloom, this feeling of “secondariness” is not specifically a Romantic phenomenon, but rather the very engine of literary history. Down the centuries, literature has always been a two-way dialogue between past and present — the former living on in the latter; the latter casting new light upon the former. George Steiner thus contends that the highest form of literary criticism is to be found within literature itself: “In the poet’s criticism of the poet from within the poem, hermeneutics reads the living text which Hermes, the messenger, has brought from the undying dead” (Real Presences, 1989). This implies that writing is not, primarily, about self-expression, but about reception and transmission; as Winnie the Pooh once put it, with uncharacteristic menace, “Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you”. What is striking here is that Steiner — steeped in the Judaeo-Christian tradition; scourge of Gallic theory — should be in total agreement, on this point, with novelist Tom McCarthy, who comes, as it were, from the other side of the barricades. For the author of C — a novel which is all about fiction as reception and transmission — “the writer is a receiver and the content is already out there. The task of the writer is to filter it, to sample it and remix it — not in some random way, but conscientiously and attentively”. Turning chronology on its head, he sees Finnegans Wake as the source code of anglophone literature — a new beginning — rather than a dead end or a full stop. The novel, says McCarthy, has been “living out its own death” ever since Don Quixote; the “experience of failure” being integral to its DNA. If it weren’t dying, the novel would not be alive.
According to Steiner, the rise of the novel was contemporaneous with a growing linguistic crisis. After the 17th century — after Milton — “the sphere of language” ceased to encompass most of “experience and reality” (“The Retreat from the Word“, 1961). Mathematics became increasingly untranslatable into words, post-Impressionist painting likewise escaped verbalisation; linguistics and philosophy highlighted the fact that words refer to other words … The final proposition in Wittgenstein‘s Tractatus (1921) bears witness to this encroachment of the unspeakable: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. Four years earlier, Kafka had conjectured that it may have been possible to escape the sirens’ singing, but not their silence.
Harold Bloom is right: belatedness is not merely an “historical condition”. After all, it was already one of the major themes in Don Quixote. Yet, as Gabriel Josipovici points out, “this sense of somehow having arrived too late, of having lost for ever something that was once a common possession, is a, if not the, key Romantic concern” (What Ever Happened to Modernism?, 2010). Against the backdrop of declining confidence in the powers of language — just as Schiller‘s “disenchantment of the world” was becoming ever more apparent, and the writer’s legitimacy, in a “destitute time” (Hölderlin) of absent gods and silent sirens, seemed increasingly arbitrary — literature came to be considered as an “absolute“. Walter Benjamin famously described the “birthplace of the novel” as “the solitary individual”: an individual cut off from tradition, who could no longer claim to be the mouthpiece of society. As soon as this “solitary individual” was elevated to the status of an alter deus, the essential belatedness of human creativity became glaringly obvious. “No art form,” says Steiner, “comes out of nothing. Always, it comes after,” and the “human maker rages at [this] coming after, at being, forever, second to the original and originating mystery of the forming of form”.
As early as 1758, Samuel Richardson had wondered if the novel were not just a fad, whose time had already run out. By the 20th century, the picture looked far bleaker. Theodor Adorno felt that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. In 1959, Brion Gysin complained that fiction was lagging 50 years behind painting. In the early 60s, Alain Robbe-Grillet attacked the mummification of the novel in its 19th-century incarnation. In 1967, John Barth published “The Literature of Exhaustion” in which he spoke of “the used-upness of certain forms or exhaustion of certain possibilities”. The same year, Gore Vidal diagnosed that the novel was already in its death throes: “we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods”. The death of literature, and the world as we know it, became a fashionable topic among US academics in the early 90s (see, for instance, Alvin Kernan’s aptly-titled The Death of Literature, 1992). Their argument was usually that English departments had been hijacked by cultural studies, Continental theory or political correctness gone mad (Bloom’s “School of Resentment”).
Since then, two things have happened. The novel — which was meant to fuse poetry and philosophy, to subsume all other genres and even the entire universe (following Mallarmé‘s conception of The Book or Borges’s dream of a “Total Library”) — has been reduced to “literary fiction”: a genre that approaches writing as if the 20th century had never happened. At the same time, the digital age has taken information overload to a whole new level. As a result, David Shields believes that the novel is no longer equipped to reflect the vitality and complexity of modern life (Reality Hunger, 2010). Kenneth Goldsmith — the poet to whom we owe the wonder that is UbuWeb — urges us to stop writing altogether in order to focus on recombining the texts we’ve accumulated over the centuries (Uncreative Writing, 2011). We may all be “remixologists” now, but what if (as Lewis Carroll wondered) word combinations were limited, and we had used them all up?
According to Steiner, we are “terminalists”, “latecomers”: “we have no more beginnings“. For us, language “is worn by long usage” and the “sense of discovery, of exuberant acquisition” exhibited by writers during the Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean periods “has never been fully recaptured”. On the eve of the unspeakable horrors of the second world war, Adorno already felt that “the carcass of words, phantom words” was all we had left. Language had been corrupted; irredeemably soiled by “the usage of the tribe” (Mallarmé). Perhaps is it no longer possible for us to follow Ezra Pound‘s injunction to “make it new”.
“Even originality itself no longer has the ability to surprise us,” writes Lars Iyer in a remarkable essay recently published by The White Review. According to the author of Spurious (shortlisted for the Guardian‘s Not the Booker Prize), we live in “an unprecedented age of words”, but one in which Important Novelists have given way to “a legion of keystroke labourers”. Literature only survives as literary-fiction kitsch: a “parody of past forms”; a “pantomime of itself”. In “The Literature of Exhaustion”, Barth had envisaged how the “felt ultimacies of our time” (ie the end of the novel as “major art form”) could become the material of future works. Iyer cranks this up a notch. We are no longer writing literature’s conclusion but its “epilogue”: ours is a “literature which comes after literature”. Where Bloom’s Romantic poets felt “belated” vis-à-vis their predecessors, Iyer feels that we have come too late for literature, full stop. Literature today is thus no longer “the Thing itself, but about the vanished Thing”. The writer’s task is “to conjure the ghost” of a tradition that has given it up. By this token, the novels of Tom McCarthy, Lee Rourke and Iyer himself are not so much evidence of a nouveau roman revival as instances of a new type of hauntological fiction which explores the lost futures of Modernism.
Given that Iyer has published two books on the work of Maurice Blanchot, one cannot but think of the French author’s answer to the question ‘Where is literature going?’: “literature is going toward itself, toward its essence, which is disappearance”. Perhaps the “Thing itself” was about “the vanished Thing” all along – but stop me, oh-oh-oh, stop me, stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before.
A History of Pie Activism
September 1st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
This appeared in The Guardian’s Comment is Free section on 20 July 2011:
From Jonnie Marbles to the Yippies: A History of Pie Activism
The attack on Rupert Murdoch is part of a tradition of patisserie activism — but shaving foam is no substitute for the real thing
[Nöel Godin, political custard pie thrower. Photograph: Van Parys/Corbis]
Jonathan May-Bowles (aka Jonnie Marbles), who attacked Rupert Murdoch during yesterday’s phone-hacking hearing, has all the makings of a formidable flan flinger. In his capacity as comedian-cum-activist, he embodies a kind of Platonic ideal of patisserie terrorism – that strange interface between slapstick and protest.
Pie-throwing as a political gesture has its roots in the Groucho-Marxism of the 1960s student uprisings and, more specifically, in the prankish happenings of the Yippies. Tom Forçade, the founder of High Times magazine, is usually considered to have perpetrated the very first political pie crime in 1970. Aron Kay, who came to be known as “The Yippie Pie Man”, followed suit, covering countless politicians and celebrities (including the mayor of New York City and Andy Warhol) in cream, between the late 1970s and early 1990s. Yesterday, he allegedly posted a message on a website giving his full support to May-Bowles: “Murdoch definitely needed a pie, for sure.” However, it was a Belgian anarchist who really put “patisserie guerrilla” on the map. One could argue that he even managed to turn it into an art form.
In the late 60s, Nöel Godin was, among other things, a film critic who amused himself by reviewing movies he hadn’t seen or that didn’t even exist. Georges Le Gloupier, a fictitious film director (invented by his partner in crime Jean-Pierre Bouyxou), made regular appearances in these reviews.
In 1969, Godin wrote that Le Gloupier had been so outraged by Robert Bresson‘s latest film that he had felt compelled to chuck a “Mack Sennett-style” pie smack in the director’s face. In a sequel, he went on to describe how the French novelist Marguerite Duras had avenged the initial “creamy affront” by giving Le Gloupier an impromptu pastry pasting while he was dining out in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. “Madame,” said the biter bit after licking his frothy chops, “I prefer your patisserie to your novels.”
Through some quirk of fate, the publication of the second article coincided with Madame Duras’s arrival in Belgium on a promotional tour. This proved a godsend to Godin, who decided to give a final twist to this burlesque saga. He ambushed the prime exponent of the “empty novel” and treated her to a real custard pie this time round. A visiting card was nestling in the incredible, edible weapon. It read: “With the compliments of Le Gloupier.”
The seminal Duras drubbing provided a blueprint for all the subsequent pie attacks. A few months later, it was choreographer Maurice Béjart‘s turn to fall victim to a Chantilly crime. By that time, Le Gloupier had acquired all his distinctive features: the refined dinner jacket and bow tie of gentleman-burglar Arsène Lupin, the false beard and spectacles of a cartoon, bomb-throwing anarchist and, last but not least, the absurd “gloup! gloup!” mantra. In the time-honoured tradition of Galatea, Pinocchio and sundry gingerbread men legging it after rising from the pastry board, Le Gloupier took on a life of his own: he started popping up all over the place, unbeknown to his creator, who was often associated with attacks he had taken no part in, but was only too willing to take credit for.
According to Godin, a well-aimed pie can break through the victim’s public image and lay bare his true character. New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, reacted in good-humoured fashion and refused to press charges. By contrast, Bernard-Henri Lévy reacted violently and was flanned on at least five occasions as a result. The vendetta against the pop philosopher turned into a running gag in France.
The movement probably peaked in 1998, with the pieing of Bill Gates. Godin had now become a celebrity in his own right, and was frequently invited on live TV shows to be pied by presenters he had himself pied. The whole thing was descending into farce. However, the website of Godin’s “Internationale pâtissière” continues to advertise the latest pie attacks on a monthly, and sometimes even weekly, basis. The pieing of Murdoch could well be the sign of a revival.
Jonathan May-Bowles still has a thing or two to learn, though. A plateful of shaving foam is no substitute for the real thing. Godin once told the Observer: “We only use the finest patisserie ordered at the last minute from small local bakers. Quality is everything. If things go wrong, we eat them.”
****
Here is a longer (unpublished) version of the same piece:
Jonathan May-Bowles, who attacked Rupert Murdoch during yesterday’s phone-hacking hearing, has all the makings of a formidable flan flinger. In his capacity as comedian-cum-activist, he embodies a kind of Platonic ideal of patisserie terrorism — that strange interface between slapstick and protest. Pity, then, that he didn’t take a leaf out of Mack Sennett‘s book: “A mother never gets hit with a custard pie,” warned the Hollywood director, who knew a thing or two about the use of confectionery as weaponry, “Mothers-in-law, yes. But mothers? Never”. Old men are also a no-no, even if they happen to be at the head of an evil international media conglomerate. Pieing is always a difficult balancing act, a subtle blend of humour and anger, and in this case the first, vital ingredient was sorely lacking. Like the pie itself — a plateful of shaving foam — it wasn’t the real thing. Instead of shattering the spectacle (in Situationist parlance), May-Bowles has simply provided a perfect photo opportunity illustrating the metaphorical humble pie that Murdoch was already eating. Worse still, the media mogul may come out of this looking like the victim.
Pie-throwing as a political gesture has its roots in the Groucho-Marxism of the 60s student uprisings and, more specifically, in the prankish happenings of the Yippies in the United States. Tom Forçade, the founder of High Times magazine, is usually considered to have perpetrated the very first political pie crime in 1970. Aron Kay, who came to be known as “The Yippie Pie Man”, followed suit, covering countless politicians and celebrities (including the mayor of New York City and Andy Warhol) in cream, between the late 70s and early 90s. Yesterday, he allegedly posted a message on a website giving his full support to May-Bowles: “Murdoch definitely needed a pie, for sure!” However, it was Belgian anarchist Noël Godin who really put “patisserie guerrilla” on the map. One could argue that he even managed to turn it into an art form.
Like Aron Kay, Godin was influenced by the slapstick of the Three Stoges and the political ferment of 1968, but he also drew inspiration from the insurrectionary humour of late nineteenth-century French anarcho-pranksters like the Hydropathes or the Zutistes, to whom he paid homage in his anthology of radical subversion (Anthologie de la subversion carabinée, 1988).
In the late 60s, Godin was, among other things, a film critic who amused himself by reviewing movies he hadn’t seen or that didn’t even exist. Georges Le Gloupier, a fictitious film director (invented by his partner in crime Jean-Pierre Bouyxou), made regular appearances in these reviews. In1969, Godin wrote that Le Gloupier had been so outraged by Robert Bresson’s latest film, that he had felt compelled to chuck a “Mack Sennett-style” pie smack in the director’s face. In a sequel worthy of one of Joe Orton’s classic epistolary pranks, he went on to describe how the French novelist Marguerite Duras had avenged the initial “creamy affront” by giving Le Gloupier an impromptu pastry pasting while he was dining out in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. “Madame,” said the biter bit after licking his frothy chops, “I prefer your patisserie to your novels”. Through some quirk of fate, the publication of the second article coincided with Mme Duras’s arrival in Belgium on a promotional tour. This proved a godsend to Godin. The affair was causing so much fuss that the novelist was immediately forced to hold a press conference during which she repeatedly denied all prior knowledge of “Le Gloutier” (sic). Godin decided to give a final twist to this burlesque saga, thus illustrating Wilde’s dictum that life imitates art. He ambushed the prime exponent of the “empty novel,” and treated her to a real custard pie this time round. A visiting card was nestling in the incredible, edible weapon. It read: “With the compliments of Le Gloupier”.
The seminal Duras drubbing provided a blueprint for all the subsequent pie attacks. Le Gloupier’s metamorphosis into a latter-day noble bandit figure had occured overnight. A few months later, it was choreographer Maurice Béjart’s turn to fall victim to a chantilly crime. By that time, Le Gloupier had acquired all his distinctive features: the refined dinner jacket and bow tie of gentleman-cambrioleur Arsène Lupin, the false beard and spectacles of a cartoon, bomb-throwing anarchist and, last but not least, the absurd “gloup! gloup!” slogan. In the time-honoured tradition of Galatea, Pinocchio and sundry gingerbread men legging it after rising from the pastry board, Le Gloupier took on a life of his own, popping up all over the place, unbeknown to his creator, who was sometimes associated with attacks he had taken no part in, but was only too willing to take credit for.
According to Godin, custard pies are the weapons of “the weak and powerless” (L.A. Times). A well-aimed pie can shatter the pompous and vacuous public image of a celebrity in a matter of seconds. Le Gloupier’s targets (politicians, journalists, actors, pop stars, writers) are never selected at random (“Every victim has to be thoroughly justified,” The Observer) and his weapons are chosen with the same meticulous care (“We only use the finest patisserie ordered at the last minute from small local bakers. Quality is everything. If things go wrong, we eat them”). Pseudo-philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy was flanned on five different occasions because he was “totally in love with himself” and epitomized “empty, vanity-filled literature”.
According to Godin, a well-aimed pie can break through the victim’s public image and lay bare his true character. New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, reacted in good-humoured fashion and refused to press charges. By contrast, Bernard-Henri Lévy reacted violently and was flanned on at least five occasions as a result. The vendetta against the pop philosopher turned into a running gag in France.
The movement probably peaked in 1998, with the pieing of Bill Gates. Godin had now become a celebrity in his own right, and was frequently invited on live TV shows to be pied by presenters he had himself pied. The whole thing was descending into farce. However, the website of Godin’s “Internationale pâtissière” continues to advertise the latest pie attacks on a monthly, and sometimes even weekly, basis. The pieing of Murdoch could well be the sign of a revival.
Jonathan May-Bowles still has a thing or two to learn, though. A plateful of shaving foam is no substitute for the real thing. Godin once told the Observer: “We only use the finest patisserie ordered at the last minute from small local bakers. Quality is everything. If things go wrong, we eat them.”
Hauntology
July 7th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
This appeared in Guardian Books on 17 June 2011:
Hauntology: A Not-So-New Critical Manifestation
The new vogue in literary theory is shot through with earlier ideas
[Haunting presence ... Jacques Derrida, who coined the term hauntology, in a still from the documentary Derrida]
Hauntology is probably the first major trend in critical theory to have flourished online. In October 2006, Mark Fisher — aka k-punk — described it as “the closest thing we have to a movement, a zeitgeist”. A mere three years later, Adam Harper prefaced a piece on the subject with the following caveat: “I’m all too aware that it’s no longer 2006, the year to blog about hauntology”. Two months ago, James Bridle predicted that the concept was “about six months away from becoming the title of a column in a Sunday supplement magazine”. Only four months to go, then. My hunch is that hauntology is already haunting itself. The revival starts here.
Like its close relative psychogeography, hauntology originated in France but struck a chord on this side of the Channel. In Spectres of Marx (1993), where it first appeared, Jacques Derrida argued that Marxism would haunt Western society from beyond the grave. In the original French, “hauntology” sounds almost identical to “ontology”, a concept it haunts by replacing — in the words of Colin Davis — “the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive”.
Today, hauntology inspires many fields of investigation, from the visual arts to philosophy through electronic music, politics, fiction and literary criticism. At its most basic level, it ties in with the popularity of faux-vintage photography, abandoned spaces and TV series like Life on Mars. Mark Fisher — whose forthcoming Ghosts of My Life (Zer0 Books) focuses primarily on hauntology as the manifestation of a specific “cultural moment” — acknowledges that “There’s a hauntological dimension to many different aspects of culture; in fact, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud practically argues that society as such is founded on a hauntological basis: the voice of the dead father”. When you come to think of it, all forms of representation are ghostly. Works of art are haunted, not only by the ideal forms of which they are imperfect instantiations, but also by what escapes representation. See, for instance, Borges‘s longing to capture in verse the “other tiger, that which is not in verse”. Or Maurice Blanchot, who outlines what could be described as a hauntological take on literature as “the eternal torment of our language, when its longing turns back toward what it always misses“. Julian Wolfreys argues in Victorian Hauntings (2002) that “to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns” so that “all stories are, more or less, ghost stories” and all fiction is, more or less, hauntological. The best novels, according to Gabriel Josipovici, share a “sense of density of other worlds suggested but lying beyond words“. For the reader or critic, the mystery of literature is the opacity — the irreducible remainder — at the heart of writing that can never be completely interpreted away. The whole western literary tradition itself is founded on the notion of posterity, which Paul Eluard described as the “harsh desire to endure” through one’s works. And then, of course, there’s the death of the author… All this, as you can see, could go on for quite a while, so perhaps we should wonder if the concept does not just mean all things to all (wo)men. Steen Christiansen, who is writing a book on the subject, explains that “hauntology bleeds into the fields of postmodernism, metafiction and retro-futurism and that there is no clear distinction — that would go against the tension which hauntology aims at”.
As a reflection of the zeitgeist, hauntology is, above all, the product of a time which is seriously “out of joint” (Hamlet is one of Derrida’s crucial points of reference in Spectres of Marx). There is a prevailing sense among hauntologists that culture has lost its momentum and that we are all stuck at the “end of history“. Meanwhile, new technologies are dislocating more traditional notions of time and place. Smartphones, for instance, encourage us never to fully commit to the here and now, fostering a ghostly presence-absence. Internet time (which is increasingly replacing clock time) results in a kind of “non-time” that goes hand in hand with Marc Augé’s non-places. Perhaps even more crucially, the web has brought about a “crisis of overavailability” that, in effect, signifies the “loss of loss itself”: nothing dies any more, everything “comes back on YouTube or as a box set retrospective” like the looping, repetitive time of trauma (Fisher). This is why “retromania” has reached fever pitch in recent years, as Simon Reynolds demonstrates in his new book — a methodical dissection of “pop culture’s addiction to its own past”.
Hauntology is not just a symptom of the times, though: it is itself haunted by a nostalgia for all our lost futures. “So what would it mean, then, to look for the future’s remnants?” asks Owen Hatherley at the beginning of Militant Modernism, “Can we, should we, try and excavate utopia?” It might just be worth a shot.
Marc-Edouard Nabe: The ‘Unacceptable’ Face of French Controversy
April 8th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
This appeared in Guardian Books on 23 March 2011:
Marc-Edouard Nabe: The ‘Unacceptable’ Face of French Controversy
An incendiary commentator on modern-day French society, the writer has chronicled the strange death of France’s joie de vivre
[Me, myself and I ... Marc-Édouard Nabe. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features]
Marc-Édouard Nabe has always relished playing with fire, but never more so than when he burned what would have been the fifth volume of his journal. His main motivation was to avoid being trapped in a Shandyesque race with time, ending up pigeonholed as a diarist. Nevertheless, he went on to describe this event in Alain Zannini, his 2002 novel, which was so blatantly autobiographical that it even bore his real name as its title (Nabe, short for “nabot” — midget — is a nom de plume). The implication was clear: having lived his life in order to narrate it, Zannini had gradually become Nabe’s creation. What, then, would happen if the writer were to stop writing?
This ontological question is raised in L’Homme qui Arrêta d’Écrire (The Man who Stopped Writing, 2010), which begins with the author-narrator’s paradoxical assertion — given the length of the tome, let alone its very existence — that he has forsaken literature after being dropped by his publisher. “A publisher paying me to write books nobody reads,” he deadpans, “I thought this would go on for ever.”
For the best part of two decades, the real-life Nabe had received a monthly wage from Les Éditions du Rocher. When this stipend was suddenly withdrawn, following a takeover in 2005, the author decided to take legal action. Throughout the lengthy lawsuit, he expressed himself by means of posters, which his hardcore supporters pasted all over the walls of France’s major cities. He also maintained the fiction that his authorial days were over, so as to remain in character while writing his novel about writing no more.
The appearance of L’Homme qui Arrêta d’Écrire thus came as quite a surprise, not least because Nabe chose to go down the self-publishing, or rather “anti-publishing,” route. The minimalist jet-black cover has a whiff of piracy about it: no barcode, no ISBN, no publisher’s name or logo; the spine remains bare. On the front, the author’s name is reduced to “Nabe” as if it had become a brand, and on the back you only find a number, indicating that it is the writer’s 28th published work (and seventh novel). The book is exclusively available through an official website and a handful of highly unlikely retailers (a butcher’s, a florist’s, a hairdresser’s and two restaurants at the last count). By cutting out the middleman, Nabe claims to be able to make 70% profit, instead of the usual 10%, on each copy sold. The initial print run — funded by the sale of his paintings (Nabe is also an artist and jazz guitarist) — sold out within a month. The novel was even shortlisted for the prestigious Renaudot prize, a first for a self-published volume in France.
This declaration of war on the publishing industry is in keeping with Nabe’s image as a latter-day écrivain maudit. Initially accused of being a neo-fascist (partly because of his predilection for Céline and Lucien Rebatet), Nabe is now frequently depicted as a pro-Palestinian leftist. His first television appearance, in 1985, proved so incendiary that he was beaten up by a leading anti-racist campaigner. Looking every inch the provocative young fogey, complete with centre parting, bow tie and retro spectacles, he declared that every day he shoots up with a Montblanc pen full of “utter hatred of humanity”. A great admirer of Jacques Mesrine, Nabe famously befriended the flamboyant bankrobber Albert Spaggiari as well as Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Following 9/11, he produced a pamphlet entitled A Glimmer of Hope and, since then, has repeatedly argued that Osama bin Laden is only acting in self-defence. In 2003, he even travelled to Baghdad, where he protested against the invasion of Iraq in typically Gallic fashion: by writing a novel. These antics may have earned him a large cult following, but Mazarine Pingeot summed up the views of many when she declared that Nabe was “unfortunately” a great writer.
Great or not, Marc-Édouard Nabe is an important figure on the French literary scene. Along with Michel Houellebecq, he is one of the only authors to have chronicled the strange death of France’s joie de vivre. With its rogues’ gallery of modern Tartuffes, L’Homme qui Arrêta d’Écrire is a roman à clef that lampoons every aspect of contemporary Parisian life, particularly its incestuous literary milieu peopled with floppy-haired Beigbeder clones. This, alas, is one of the reasons why the novel probably won’t be translated: most references would be lost on a foreign readership. The names of all the famous people who appear have been slightly doctored (Depardieu, for instance, becomes Depardieux), signalling that they have stepped through the looking-glass of fiction. As one of the characters remarks, a mere typo can plunge you into another universe.
This grey area between fact and fiction has been the stomping ground of many a French author since the late 70s, when Serge Doubrovsky coined the word “autofiction“. In recent months alone, both Régis Jauffret and Christine Angot have been sued for fictionalising real-life events and individuals. Zannini/Nabe, whose entire oeuvre is haunted by the figure of the double, once said that his novel Alain Zannini — in which Zannini and Nabe meet — was told in the “double person singular”. Sometimes, however, I really is another, rather than just the other half of a divided self.
Although no oil painting, Houellebecq is Dorian Gray to Nabe’s picture — the acceptable face of controversy. Or at least this is Nabe’s spin on events. In the early 90s, both men lived at the same address (103 Rue de la Convention in the 15th arrondissement) facing each other, like bookends, across a cobbled courtyard. Both belong to the same generation, come from similar lower middle-class backgrounds, had domineering Corsican mothers they rebelled against and established their reputations by courting controversy. Nabe was the senior partner in this relationship, up until the success of Atomised in 1998.
Illicit Frequencies, or All Literature is Pirated
February 19th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Here is my interview with Tom McCarthy that appeared in 3:AM Magazine on 13 July 2006.
3:AM: It’s very rare, these days, to see a work of literary criticism being given such prominence. Do you agree that this is probably largely due to the fact that the main subject is not Balzac or Baudelaire — two key references here — but a comic-strip hero?
TMcC: First of all, I’m not sure I’d describe Tintin and the Secret of Literature as ‘criticism’. More as an essay. I like the idea of the essay as a primary literary form. You can trace it from David Foster Wallace through Blanchot all the way back to people like Hazlitt. But yes, the fact that it revolves around Tintin and not just Balzac and Baudelaire has certainly helped it get attention — although it wasn’t strategic to do this. I genuinely rate Hergé’s work, and wanted to read it alongside Balzac, Baudelaire, Bergson, Bachelard and all the rest, hopping from one to the other in a set of playful, serendipitous detours — which is exactly what the essay format allows.
3:AM: Your book is very much in the tradition of Barthes‘s Mythologies (an anthology which you fail to mention). I can’t remember if Barthes actually mentions Tintin anywhere, but he certainly could have done. In a way, the two figures go curiously well together: Tintin’s heyday corresponds roughly to that of Barthes and both, today, appear a little quaint. Was it Barthes who inspired this book? After all, your Tintin is primarily a semiologist who “can navigate [a key word in the McCarthy canon] the world of signs” (Tintin and the Secret of Literature p. 22), a deciphering cipher who embodies (along with Snowy?) the presence of absence — the Melvillian “whiteness of the whale” (p. 161) — but also, of course, Barthes’s “écriture blanche”.
TMcC: I do kind of mention Mythologies when I refer to wrestling and tomato tins early on in the book. I love Barthes: he’s a beautiful, generous writer. He never mentions Tintin directly as far as I know, although Derrida, another big presence (or present absence or whatever) in my book, does, glancingly, in The Post Card. Hergé read Barthes; you can see his influence very directly in the final book, Tintin and Alph-Art, in which language becomes a set of physical signs, giant letters which are held up and scrutinised by his characters.
ODETTE’S BITS
3:AM: Are you the first to draw a parallel between Sarrasine and the Tintin corpus? I haven’t read Balzac’s novel, but, from what you write, La Zambinella seems to bear a resemblance to Proust’s Odette de Crécy. Am I mistaken?
TMcC: As far as I know I am the first to draw a parallel between Tintin and Sarrasine. I re-read Barthes’s S/Z, which turns around that particular novella, initially because I wanted to write about Hergé’s total mastery of plot: the way he misdirects, doubles, occludes, jams and so on, all these devices Barthes describes so well in his take on Balzac. But as I did I realised that there were loads of points of correspondence between Sarrasine and the Tintin books. Balzac’s eponymous artist becomes obsessed by the opera singer la Zambinella, like Captain Haddock does with Bianca Castafiore; he copies her, like the sculptor Balthazar does the fetish in The Broken Ear; he’s murdered, as is Balthazar; the copy is copied and these copies are themselves copied, in both. Fundamentally, it’s about entering the realm of denatured simulation that is art. La Zambinella’s voice draws Sarrasine backstage, into a world of artifice, just as la Castafiore’s voice draws Haddock backstage and on into a world of inauthenticity. And these worlds prove fatal: the castrato la Zambinella effectively kills Sarrasine, and ultimately the not-really-pubescent Tintin effectively kills Hergé.
With Proust, I’ve got to admit I’ve never got as far as the Odette bits in the Remembrance. There are passages I find completely compelling, like the bit about how you can construct a composite memory of a house from various other houses you’ve known or read about or seen in pictures (which is more or less what my hero does in Remainder, but other bits lose me, and I put it down again for two years, then re-read as far as the house bit, then same again: a kind of incomplete repetition loop. Perhaps that’s what Old Marcel would have wanted.
ILLICIT FREQUENCIES
3:AM: Given that the literary status of the Tintin books is uncertain/debatable, isn’t it a little perverse to analyse them in order to uncover the “secret of literature”?
TMcC: Yes — and that’s why I wanted to do it. It would be easy to identify literary motifs in Faulkner or Dickens or someone. But what does it tell us when a corpus that makes no claims to being ‘literature’ displays a symbolic register as developed as Faulkner’s and characters as deep and rich as Dickens’s, not to mention themes and plots more or less identical to Sophocles’s and Shakespeare’s: the fall of the noble house, family secrets coming out into the open, the relation between host and guest gone disastrously wrong and so on? So much of the very best literature opens up illicit frequencies so that meaning can travel along channels other than the obvious or rational. The Tintin books are full of these frequencies, these channels; they even dramatise their setting up, hunting down, rumbling and relocating. And then it struck me that literature as a whole might hide its most intimate secrets in the most illicit of all zones, one tucked away ‘off-stage’, ‘aside’, below the radar of literature proper, which is of course the kind of zone that cartoons lurk in.
3:AM: Could you tell us about the cover of the book and Tintin’s absence from the illustrations inside?
TMcC: The cover is by Jochen Gerner, a French artist. I saw a book he’d done called TNT en Amérique, in which he buried the whole of Tintin in America under black ink but left a few symbols, mainly of money, divinity and violence (i.e. dollar signs, crosses and guns, all done in cartoony style) as markers for what he’d erased — all on the correct pages, corresponding to frames in the original book. So I contacted him and asked him to do the cover, and he was really into it. We looked at the main motifs in The Castafiore Emerald — the window, the piano, the cameras and spotlights that, ultimately, occlude more than they reveal — and he applied his technique (which, after Bataille, he calls ‘déformation’) to these. And in the foreground, as on Hergé’s, the tufted figure with his finger to his lips, saying ‘Shhhh!’ — what in the book I call “the condition of the secret become visible”.
To answer the second part of your question: I didn’t want images directly from the Tintin books inside my book. I was more interested in showing how these images (which I’m assuming most people who read my book will be at least slightly familiar with) mutate into and out of other ones: eighteenth-century portraits of castrato singers, stills from Buster Keaton films and, not least, ‘detourned’ versions of the Tintin books themselves. These last images break down into political activist ones, pornographic ones and ‘art’ ones: an interesting triangle.
THE BOY HAIRDRESSER
3:AM: Given your chapter devoted to “Castafiore’s Clit” (if you ever form a band, promise me that you’ll use that name) and your comments about Tintin’s androgyny, I was surprised you didn’t devote at least a few lines to the once-ubiquitous gay Tintin haircut…
TMcC: A band called Castafiore’s Clit is a great idea. Kind of Jane’s Addiction meets The Thompson Twins. Yes, it’s funny that Tintin has lent his haircut to gay culture. I found out recently that the Rocker quiff of the Fifties was taken directly from Jean Marais’s haircut in Cocteau’s Orphée, another big presence in my book.
THE SINS OF THE FATHER
3:AM: During the Second World War, Hergé had no qualms about publishing his comic strips in Le Soir, a newspaper that was under Nazi control and had clear Nazi sympathies. Interestingly enough, as you point out, Paul de Man also wrote for Le Soir. However, I was surprised that you did not make more of this coincidence. Paul de Man’s undermining of meaning and values having been reinterpreted (and partly discredited) in the light of the posthumous discovery of his youthful far-right views, should not we also be somewhat wary of Hergé’s “retroactive wiping-out of history” (p. 41), the erosion of Rastapopoulos’s “Semitic status” (pp. 44-45) or his reinvention as a “liberal leftist” (p. 46)? After all, anti-capitalism and anti-consumerism which, in your view, testify to the author’s “right-to-left trajectory” (p. 47) are common tenets on the far right as well as the far left…
TMcC: I never went with the argument that Paul de Man’s shameful youthful secret undermines all of deconstruction (is Derrida, a Jew, a secret anti-Semite too?), not least because when I was at university one of this argument’s main advocates serially harassed his female students while simultaneously espousing feminism, which for me kind of discredited anything he had to say. Yes, the anti-consumerist thing can serve a right-wing position as much as a left-wing one, and I point out in the book that Hergé kept the same villains in place throughout his career (secret cabals, men in hoods). But I think his right-to-left trajectory was a genuine one, as was Paul de Man’s. Things are connected. Fascism is a moment that the twentieth century goes through, in the arts as much as anywhere else. Think of Yeats, Spengler, Hamsun, Pound, Céline — brilliant and hugely influential writers who were fascists. Do we discount anything that’s come after them? Of course not: you trace the fallout of the disaster, how it mutates and develops. Think of Heidegger, a one-time Nazi out of whose thought the incredibly compelling ethical vision of Levinas (another Jew) has emerged. Anyway, it would be naive and liberal to want all our artists to be nice Guardian readers. Some people are arseholes. And another thing: Paul de Man doesn’t undermine meaning and value — just certain tired and reactionary notions of both.
[Just for the record: I didn't mean to imply that Hergé's, Céline's or Yeats's works should be rejected because of their political views, although I clearly gave that impression. Like Tom, I subscribe to a resolutely politically-incorrect conception of literature. My point simply concerned anti-capitalism and anti-consumerism (which the far left certainly has no monopoly over) along with the fact that certain thinkers' seemingly-rational ideas are so obviously linked to individual history (Maurras's deafness or Foucault's masochism, for instance) that one should sometimes approach them with a little caution. Another issue we could have raised here is the Arendt-Heidegger relationship, but that would probably have been one serendipitous detour — to quote McCarthy — too many!]
FOUND IN TRANSLATION
3:AM: Remainder — the best novel of 2005 which, due to its republication by Alma Books, looks set to be the novel of 2006 (ironically enough, given the theme of the book) — could be described as the best French novel ever written in English by an Englishman. With Tintin and the Secret of Literature, your approach is once again resolutely French. Almost all of your major references are French (Balzac, Baudelaire, Barthes, Derrida…), and even the vocabulary you use is Gallicized (“fictive,” for instance, which is far closer to the French “fictif” than “fictional”). Where does your familiarity with French culture and the French language come from? Was it deliberate on your part to largely avoid references to British or American literature? Wouldn’t it have been interesting to give a more English perspective on Tintin since Tintinologists have a habit of being Belgian or French?
TMcC: First of all, thanks for your kind words about Remainder, and I’ll try to persuade my French publisher, Hachette Littératures, to use your “best French novel in English” line as a blurb for their edition that’s coming out next September — I couldn’t think of better praise! Yes, most of the points of reference in Tintin and the Secret of Literature are French, although Defoe, Bunyan, Behn and other Anglo early novelists get a look in — plus there’s a big digression through Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I guess I just really like French literature. The English were going really well from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, producing poets like Donne and Marvell and novels like Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but it all went horribly wrong somewhere in the late nineteenth/early twentieth and, while the French (and Americans) embarked on the wildest adventures with thought and form — Mallarmé, Breton, Cendrars, Faulkner etc etc — we got Thomas fucking Hardy and DH fucking Lawrence. The only top-class twentieth century English writers are the ones we claim spuriously: Americans like Eliot and James, Poles like Conrad, Irishmen like Joyce and Beckett…
3:AM: At the same time, there is a sense of humour and earthiness which are very un-French, as it were. After the publication of a strange review in The Economist which presented your book as a send-up of French theory, you spoke to me of the astounding “idiocy of English empirical culture”: do you think Tintin and the Secret of Literature is going to reignite the critical Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes of the 80s and 90s?
TMcC: I think to ignite any thought at The Economist you’d need to stick a ton of semtex up their arses. That review was quite funny, though: it perfectly captured the red-faced, vein-popping fury of Little England once the values on which it bases its entire identity are ever-so-slightly “solicited”, as Derrida would say. English takes on Tintin always present Hergé as a ’satirist’ and only that: a self-sufficient, rational subject who uses words and images as tools to tell us something he knows because he’s worked it out, rationally, you see. That’s the empirical line on literature tout court: the rational expression of a self-sufficient subject — as though we weren’t constantly made and unmade within language, desire, history, symbolic networks and so on. It’s as moronic as crediting a surfer with creating the wave which carries him and allows him to ply his craft — and back into which he’s eventually going to sink.
McCARTHYISM
3:AM: You say that you were introduced to Tintin by your mother at the age of seven. That, in itself, probably says a lot about your social background — that and your early encounter with Hugo Williams (mentioned by the poet in an article he wrote in the TLS about your International Necronautical Society). In France, in the 70s, Le Journal de Tintin tended to be read in Catholic and conservative circles whereas kids from Communist families usually read a comic called Pif. What sort of social and cultural milieu were you raised in, Tom?
TMcC: I come from a liberal arts-steeped middle-class family. My mum would tell us the stories of The Odyssey and The Merchant of Venice on car journeys. My parents were left-ish but not radical. They voted Labour but I went to a private day-school from the age of twelve.
3:AM: You write that “Everybody wants to be Tintin,” but I get the feeling that that everybody applies, first and foremost, to you. You even bear a slight physical resemblance to Hergé’s hero…
TMcC: I went to a fancy dress party dressed as Tintin once…
3:AM: Susan Tomaselli rounds off her review with the claim that Tintin and the Secret of Literature made her feel like re-reading Remainder (your debut novel) rather than the Tintin books themselves. Do you see this as a success or a failure?
TMcC: Success — although she should read the Tintin books too. In a way, I used Tintin and the Secret of Literature to work through some of the themes in Remainder in a more conscious way: the relationship between trauma and repetition, for example, or the idea of inauthenticity which emerged from the de Man essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality”, which I hadn’t read when I wrote Remainder even though it could almost be describing that book. It’s great to be able to switch modes, and come at the same territory from a different angle.
WE WANTED TO BLOW UP TIME ITSELF
3:AM: Your whole oeuvre seems to be contained within this critical essay: Tintin and the Secret of Literature could thus be read as a work of internal intertextuality. First of all, there’s the importance of meridians which points to Greenwich Degree Zero, your recent artistic collaboration with Rod Dickinson…
TMcC: …when we blew up the Greenwich Observatory, or at least produced the documentation of having blown up the Observatory, completing the task of Martial Bourdin, model for Conrad’s Stevie in The Secret Agent. We wanted to blow up time itself. Funnily enough, there’s a scene in The Broken Ear where a secret agent like Stevie carries a time-bomb around and gets blown up by it because he doesn’t realise the town clocks have broken. I love the sequence in The Sound and the Fury where Quentin carries a broken clock around and rides trams in different directions in a sub-Einsteinian attempt to escape time — then dies…
WE WANTED TO BLOW UP BRIDGES
3:AM: Then you’ve got the references to Cocteau’s Orphée and, more generally, your fascination with the “transmission-reception figure” (as you put it elsewhere): “[Tintin] will also be aware, as a radio operator, that the waves which carry his transmissions will travel outwards endlessly through space. Who knows where the signals will end up, or what they will end up meaning?” (p. 91).
TMcC: If I had to select five things to put in a space capsule to show aliens what we were capable of, Orphée would be one of them. It’s the most perfect piece of art, which lays out our existence as being in relation to death, technology, transmission-reception and desire — not to mention repetition. Death, a beautiful princess (and arts patron) falls in love with Orphée so she has another poet snatched to the underworld so he can send illicit, looping radio messages to Orphée which draw him towards her, through a mirror. Cocteau based his radio messages on the ones sent to occupied France during World War Two: these short lines of poetry. Most of them meant nothing, but one in every two hundred meant — only to those who knew — ‘blow up the bridge’. A man or woman in London reads a line of poetry into a microphone and in France a bridge blows up — or not. Poetry — real poetry — should harbour that potentiality somehow.
3:AM: You talk about Alph-Art, the eponymous avant-garde movement of Hergé’s posthumous book, which is “a cover for a giant forgery operation” (p. 158). Couldn’t this also be a fitting definition of your own “semi-fictitious” avant-garde movement, the International Necronautical Society?
TMcC: The INS had its own radio transmission network, operating out of the ICA two years ago, generating messages like Cocteau’s and actually transmitting them over the radio London-wide (and, via collaborating radio stations, world-wide). It looked like a giant factory floor, with workers running everywhere carrying lines of text — lines which, having been plucked from other media sources, were kind of second-hand if not fake. The INS is itself semi-fake, as you point out. Although the fake can hide the real.
THE UNNAMEABLE
3:AM: On page 84, you explain that, according to Freud, trauma produces “a desire for repetition mixed with a need to disguise the scene being repeated”. Could you comment on this sentence with reference to your novel Remainder?
TMcC: It’s not just Freud who says this: even his most positivist counterparts concur. Under ultra-extreme stress, the part of the mind that processes raw data into the narrative thread we call ‘memory’ simply goes on strike and refuses to process. It’s called ‘dissociation’. So the data’s present, but not dealt with, and therefore keeps bobbing up and demanding to be incorporated somehow. As it can’t form part of normal memory, it plays itself out in weird ways — ones that contain elements of the original event but are also scrambled, disguised. And it will keep repeating, albeit in modulated form, until it is accommodated properly. Well, in Remainder the hero has undergone a traumatic event which he hasn’t retained as straight memory but rather as fragments of data: the sense of being about to be hit, blue lights, railings, being held above a tray or bed and so on. These induce a propensity to repeat stuff in him. Another interesting thing about post-trauma is that (to return to a motif we touched on a moment ago) it makes people feel inauthentic, fake, because everything is of a lesser magnitude of experience than the trauma-moment itself, the only ‘real’ thing. And then the subject back-projects for himself a time when he wasn’t fake, and longs for that time. That’s what my guy is doing with his re-enactments: repeating backwards to an imagined era of authenticity — but repeating, more accurately, towards the trauma-moment itself, the true, unnameable moment, the moment of truth and unnameability itself.
THE CHINK ON THE CARPET
3:AM: The re-enactments in Remainder or in your artistic work: mimesis or simulacrum?
TMcC: Aha: very good question, bang on the money. In Remainder, he wants the authentic, so he sets up a zone of mimesis, paying architects and designers to recreate his ‘remembered’ building and re-enactors to ‘be’ the lady he remembers frying liver on the floor below him, the pianist he remembers practising Rachmaninoff and so on. He wants to accede through these re-enactments to a mode of authenticity, of simply ‘being’ rather than simulating. But of course it doesn’t work: the re-enactments tend more towards the status of simulacra, what Plato defines as ‘a copy without an original’. But then, paradoxically, the most jarring and obviously inconsistent things, the ‘extra’ bits, the ones with no originals of any type at all, are what catapult him into ultra-authenticity — which, not coincidentally, is also pure violence. It’s the little chink on the carpet of his re-enacted bank heist that flips the whole re-enactment over into all-too-real-ness, when the re-enactor trips on it, or rather on its absence, and his gun goes off…
[Stewart Home and Tom McCarthy at 3:AM Magazine's Xmas Bash, London 2005]
THE CRACK IN THE WALL
3:AM: Barthes writes that “…the ‘realistic’ artist never places reality at the origin of his discourse, but only and always, as far back as can be traced, an already written real, a prospective code, along which we discern, as far as the eye can see, only a succession of copies” (quoted on p. 55): this is also, unwittingly, what the protagonist of Remainder does, right?
TMcC: Remainder has been read by some critics as an allegory of realism and of the realist mode of art, and this isn’t an entirely wrong reading — although if the hero had actually been an artist rather than an Everyman, some bloke, it would have been an entirely different, and inferior, book. But yes, it definitely turns around his copying, and even (as he sets about getting his re-enactors to re-enact the moments when they prepared for the previous re-enactment) his copying his moments of copying, endlessly regressive. We can try to work it out together, but ultimately I can’t give the definitive schematic meta-reading of the book any more than you — perhaps less. It was intuitive: I was looking at a crack in a wall and had a moment of dejà-vu and wished I had loads of money to re-enact this moment and there was the novel.
EVERYTHING LITERATURE SHOULD BE
3:AM: When discussing tobacco throughout the Tintin books, you explain (following Derrida) that it “goes up in smoke” but “also leaves remains, ashes, which maintain symbolic links to memory, death and inheritance. Baudelaire’s story takes off from the change left over from the two friends’ luxury expenditure: like the coin itself, it proceeds from the remainder” (p. 135). Why are remnants so important in your work?
TMcC: It’s what’s left. After the disaster, after thought, interpretation, writing itself. It’s like when Wallace Stevens says “The plum survives its poems”. Writing has to deal with this remainder, and good writing has to deal with the fact that it can never fully deal with it. Francis Ponge knows this. He writes brilliant prose poems about, for example, oranges: the texture of their cells, the way they leave goop on your hands so that even when you’ve ‘expressed’ them there’s a residue that’s not contained. If Susan Tomaselli or anyone else really want to do themselves a favour, they should re-read neither Remainder nor the Tintin books but rather Ponge’s Le Parti pris des choses (you can get it in dual text). It’s everything writing should be.
[This interview was initially posted here.]
Céline: Great Author and ‘Absolute Bastard’
February 8th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
This appeared in Guardian Books on 31 January 2011:
Céline: Great Author and ‘Absolute Bastard’
Special case: Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Photograph: Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty Images
Every year, the French government publishes a list of cultural events and personalities to be commemorated over the next 12 months. Compiling it is a lengthy and carefully-considered process. A High Committee of National Celebrations draws up a provisional list, which is then submitted to the Culture Ministry and, once approved, published in book form. Some 10,000 copies of the Recueil des Célébrations nationales 2011 were printed last autumn ahead of last week’s launch. Frédéric Mitterrand — the culture minister lui-même — had even penned a foreword, proving beyond a shadow of doubt that the project had received his imprimatur. However, when word got out that Louis-Ferdinand Céline was to feature alongside the likes of Blaise Cendrars, Théophile Gautier, Franz Liszt and Georges Pompidou, all hell broke loose.
Serge Klarsfeld, the country’s most famous Nazi hunter and Holocaust memorialist, expressed his indignation in the name of the Association of Sons and Daughters of Jews Deported from France. The Republic, he argued, shouldn’t celebrate “the most antisemitic” Frenchman of his day — a time, lest we forget, when antisemitism was so rife that it led to state-sanctioned Jewish persecution under the Vichy regime. Mitterrand’s decision, two days later, to remove the novelist from the list was logical in light of this backlash, but also somewhat surprising since he must have known that his inclusion would prove controversial in the first place (was he protecting Sarkozy, whose favourite author happens to be Céline?)
Far more surprising, however, was the reaction of the French intelligentsia, who were almost unanimous in their defence of the author of Journey to the End of the Night. Literary heavyweight Philippe Sollers accused the Culture Ministry of “censorship”. Frédéric Vitoux, a member of the prestigious Académie française who wrote a biography of Céline, likened this decision to the airbrushing of history under Stalin. Pop philosopher Alain Finkielkraut feared that some people would draw the conclusion that a “Jewish lobby” was dictating policy to the French government. Bernard-Henri Lévy, another celebrity philosopher, claimed that the commemoration of Céline’s death should have been an opportunity to try to understand how a “truly great author” can also be an “absolute bastard”. Even more surprising, perhaps, was the fact that Serge Klarsfeld himself felt the need to declare that he rated Céline as a “great writer” before going on to describe him as a “despicable human being”.
France is a place where authors and artists are granted a special status — a kind of poetic licence or artistic immunity. In fact, the country continues to view itself, and sometimes to be regarded as, the natural second home of all artists. It is this very liberal attitude which attracted many members of the Lost and Beat generations after the second world war, and that still attracts outsider writers such as Dennis Cooper. Some of the greatest works of contemporary fiction in English — Joyce’s Ulysses, Nabokov’s Lolita or Burroughs’s Naked Lunch — were available in France when they were banned or considered unpublishable in Britain or the US. A telling culture shock occurred on live television, in 1990, when a journalist from Quebec told Gabriel Matzneff that only in Paris would he be feted for writing — however exquisitely — about his liaisons with underage partners (of both genders). Anywhere else, she stated, he would probably end up in prison. The journalist was subsequently depicted as a philistine, unable to appreciate the subtlety of Matzneff’s feelings or the beauty of his style. Baudelaire once wrote that “literature and the arts pursue an aim independent of morality” and, for better or worse, this has clearly become France’s official artistic credo.
Trying to account for this “exception française” is no mean task, but I suspect it has something to do with the elevation of art to the status of surrogate religion during the second half of the 19th century. A similar phenomenon was taking place all over Europe, of course, but it probably had more resonance against the backdrop of the ongoing struggle between Republicanism and Catholicism. Both Flaubert and Baudelaire were prosecuted for public obscenity, but when French MPs called for the banning of Jean Genet‘s The Screens in 1966 (for political reasons, this time), the culture minister (and novelist) André Malraux immediately stepped in to defend the inviolability of artistic freedom. By then, artistic creation was largely considered as a value in itself, beyond morals and politics; even beyond good and evil.
The dominant French view on literature was probably best expressed by Oscar Wilde, who ended his life in exile in Paris: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Not quite, though, in this case. No one is denying Céline’s talent as one of the greatest French writers of the 20th century — probably the greatest, with Proust. Is it possible, however, to distinguish the author of antisemitic tracts from the genius novelist; the man from the artist?
Spank for England
January 18th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Here is my interview with novelist James Hawes, published in 3:AM Magazine in April 2005:
3:AM: When you burst onto the literary scene in 96, you already seemed to be a fully-formed, fully-fledged novelist. Tell us about your writing apprenticeship.
JH: I wanted to be an actor and playwright, but I was useless at both and thus managed to end up totally lost, broke and CV-less at 27, living among smackheads, crims and slumming-it trustafarians just as the Loadsamoney late 80s were starting. I knew I couldn’t last in that world, so I went back and did a PhD, which meant I got a grant to live on (ah, lost days) and a name-tag for my life. For the next seven years I quietly close-read Kafka, Nietzsche, Mann, Musil, Hesse and suchlike. I did it seriously and straight: by 1993 I was quite a respected Young Academic, but I was also trying to write again, this time a novel. In hindsight I suppose it looks as though I half-consciously made myself a bubble where I could be paid to dissect serious writers and see how they did it. But then we all have PhDs in Hindsight.
3:AM: A White Merc with Fins was part of that whole finger-on-the-pulse-of-the-zeitgeist post-Trainspotting chemical generation/lad lit wave. Were you influenced, or at least inspired, by Irvine Welsh or any of those writers?
JH: I didn’t know anything about them. I was still working full-time as a teacher of German lit. I knew almost nothing about Eng. Lit in general (I had never read anything by Martin Amis except Money or by Ian McEwan except his first story-collection, and still haven’t.) When my younger, cooler Manchester brother heard I was trying seriously to write, he sent me Trainspotting, but by the time I read it White Merc was finished and sent off to my agent. When I read it I loved it and was jealous as hell. You could tell straight away that unlike most so-called “young gunslinger” Brit writers (see next question(s)!) Welsh was not a posh North London day-school/olde grammar-school/Eton boy slumming it.
3:AM: The consensus at the moment is that Speak for England is your first truly serious work (Alfred Hickling wrote in The Guardian that you have “filled out into a comic novelist of considerable stature”) after starting off as a hip young gunslinger in the Bret Easton Ellis/Welsh mode. I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that you’ve been sending up the zeitgeist all along à la Kingsley Amis or Evelyn Waugh (who you recently described as the “only English writer” you “read and re-read for sheer pleasure”). Is the angry young man turning into a middle-aged fogy? Are you in the process of doing a John Osborne?
JH: I don’t think my writing was ever “angry” in that way. Or “young”, come to think of it. The hero of White Merc was quite explicitly a middle-class boy knocking on 30 who really only wanted “a flat with tall windows” but had gone adrift. The book took the piss out of “alternative” IRA groupies, smackheads, hippies and suchlike. I love Waugh for the LACK of foregrounded psychology in his writing — a satirical tactic which (bizarre though it probably sounds to Anglo-Saxon ears) he shares with Kafka. As for Waugh’s snobbery, see later answers…
3:AM: As Toby Clements points out in The Telegraph, the narrator’s allegiances seem to be divided in your new book, Speak for England. To what extent were you — the author — seduced by the reactionary lost world Brian Marley encounters? I mean, even if your intent is clearly satirical, it must have been quite intoxicating — liberating, even — to write the unwriteable by envisioning the Empire literally striking back, Britain withdrawing from the EU, the public humiliation of the PM’s “Best Friend” etc.
JH: Writing satire is a way of having your cake and eating it. For example, anyone who reads Brecht can hardly miss that the supposedly Bad Guys, the wicked capitalists and chancers, get all the best lines and laughs. And the more you know about Brecht himself the more clear it is that these characters are far closer to his (concealed) heart than the Good Persons. Then again (cf Waugh, too), as Nietzsche says: “What do we care about the ORIGIN of a work? The artist is only the soil and the earth — sometimes the dung and shit — from which the WORK grows!” (fx: insane cackling).
3:AM: Your analysis of the psycho-sexual roots of power is fascinating. If we “are all forever small children”, as Carl Jung surmises in the epigraph to Chapter Three (Speak for England, 95), the past is “the only real home we shall have” (ibid 335) and, consequently, we all want to go back in order to go back home. In Speak for England, the past literally comes home. The protagonist Brian Marley — who is stranded in Papua New Guinea after taking part in a Survivor-type reality game show called Brit Pluck, Green Hell, Two Million — stumbles upon a corner of a foreign jungle that is forever England, created by the passengers of a plane crash which happened in 1958. The Colonists eventually return to Britain where they reintroduce no-nonsense Fifties values. Your academic work on Nietzsche must have had some bearing on this hankering after authority (“the ultimate perversion is repression,” 315) which drives the National Government’s counter-revolution�
JH: Yes, Nietzsche is fascinating on the psychology of power and I did a lot of work on Kafka/Nietszche in that light, so no doubt it filtered in. But even more so (and more importantly for Speak for England), he’s a master of insight about our crippling need for structures of belief and certainties — as he famously says “man would rather will nothingness than not will” — meaning that we tend to embrace (any old) system of thought that can deliver “Certainties”, at almost any price, rather than face the uncharted oceans of modernity. Today that insight is more serious than ever — it exactly explains the triumph of Muslim Fundamentalism in Iran, for example.
3:AM: You get a lot of mileage out of the past/present dichotomy. The scene in which the Prime Minister’s “Best Friend” is “seen live on TV, by about half a billion people, being caned thoroughly on his naked backside by an elderly gentleman while handsome, bronzed youths with ancient rifles and big shorts stood about and laughed at him” (254) could be innocent enough in a Boy’s Own story, but has strong S&M/homoerotic connations for us. Likewise the depiction of the PM’s Press Secretary being tossed, stark naked, in the Union Jack by sixth formers while a beautiful young lady looks on “holding her hips and shaking with laughter” (249). Could you tell us a bit about that?
JH: The bizarre thing about the 50′s was that in certain circles (i.e. ex-public school, theatrical, cinematic) people were openly gay in a way that has only become more generally possible in the last ten or fifteen years. To be honest, my conscious intentions in the above passages were simply Broad Comedy — but what do our intentions matter when it’s a question of subconcious enactments…
3:AM: If we are “all forever small children”, the childhood we long for only ever really existed in books — the kind of books which created our notion of childhood in the first place. Brian Marley (whose name advertises its own literary nature) has a Proustian moment when he rediscovers his 1965 Eagle Annual which strikes him as more real than reality itself. Speak for England often resembles one of those Disney films which mix flesh-and-blood actors with animated figures. The Colonists, for instance, seem to have stepped out of a typical Boy’s Own story: significantly, they use a toy Dan Dare radio station to make contact with the modern world. There are even two references to the Famous Five, one of which is made by a female character called George! So when people like Clemency Burton-Hill (whose name could come straight out of your book!) criticise the “dismal cliche” of the dialogue, they overlook the whole metatextual aspect, don’t they?
JH: Couldn’t out it better myself. How else would these characters talk? The whole point is that our Hero free-falls easily into that clipped, anti-emotional, impersonal, oh-so “English” mode — as a grateful escape from the pressures of Individuality.
3:AM: This childhood nostalgia can be likened to “a warm homecoming to something we have never truly known but yet missed all our lives” (28), first of all because it is fictitious, but also because the childhood depicted in most children’s books is an upper-class or at least very middle-class one. The same can be said about notions of Englishness which are also class-based. Do you think there is a link between these two notions of childhood and Englishness?
JH: Absolutely. There’s a striking difference between England and America here that goes all through cinema, especially U.S. depictions of “the golden times of youth” or whatever are always (right from Citizen Kane) small-town, close-to-the-soil, classless. Ours are Edwardian upper-middle. And in every U.S. film, the Hero has to prove his blue-collar cred (even if he’s a bigshot lawyer or the President himself) by e.g. smacking a baseball out of sight. Whereas in the UK we seem happy to accept Hugh Grant’s dithering shtick as “normal everyday Englishman”. Pinter marries into the nobility, Scruton goes hunting: to a middle-class Englishman there simply IS no other model of success than a mad sub-Austen Georgians At Home fairytale.
3:AM: Speak for England — which is partly a robinsonnade — is often reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe. Like Robinson Crusoe, the Colonists have recreated the society they came from in the middle of nowhere. Like Robinson Crusoe, Brian Marley’s problems stem from his relationship with his father (Robinson disobeys his father; fatherless Brian is in thrall to the Führer-type Headmaster, the ultimate father figure). Robinson Crusoe’s inability to accept the “middle Station of Life” is mirrored by Brian’s desire to become a “real Englishman”, ie a member of the upper-classes. The difference between the two novels is that Robinson Crusoe marks the triumph of middle-class social climbing whereas in Speak For England there is a constant distinction between becoming and being.
When Brian Marley thinks he is dying in the jungle and wishes to record a last message for his son, he cannot find his own voice. As a member of the lower middle-classes, he has no voice, no identity: being lower middle-class is a transitional state. But as you show in several of your works, the upward-mobility associated with the post-war consensus has disappeared leaving only frustration in its wake. People like Brian Marley struggle through their mediocre, ersatz lives (fake mail-order Agas!) with the nagging feeling that they are “below their imagined station” (80) and are denied “the unreflective joy of unthinking union” (222) which is shared by the working and upper classes. Tell us more about this opposition between becoming (the aspirational lower middle-classes) and being (“A caveman, that would be real”, 21)�
JH: I have honestly not seen this “being” vs “belonging” business before (as an ex-academic I think I have to almost consciously repress the awareness of intellectual substructures in order to preserve any life and freedom in my writing) but you are quite right. Hmm. Yes, the salient facts of the middle-class are its very MIDDLE-ness (i.e. its lack of any “authentic” aspects) and (as Marx pointed out) its dynamism. Its relations with the Working Classes are a mixture of disdain, fear and envy, while the Upper Classes are objects of secret outrage mixed with public fawning. To my Hero’s mother’s generation the vision of “oak trees growing out of the ruins of Buckingham Palace” still implied a sort of Good Old Uncle Joe All Them Cornfields And Ballet In the Evenings left-wing project: but that Lower-Middle Radicalism is, in the saloon-bars of today, more often part of something very different: “get rid of the Posh Wasters (the Queen herself alone excepted), dismantle social security, do-gooding and multiculturalism, smash the unions, kick out the asylum seekers…”. And never underestimate the dynamism Marx spotted: we are facing what Brecht said we should dread — interesting times.
3:AM: As befits any novel about Englishness, class plays a central part. Your characters often sleepwalk through life, forgetting that “this is not a rehearsal” (Rancid Aluminium, 29), prolonging the “long vacation of extended adolescence” (A White Merc with Fins, 19), in order to maintain “the helpful fantasy that their true lives still lay in the future” (Speak for England, 80) until they make a last-ditch attempt at saving themselves by doing “something radical” (A White Merc with Fins, 22): robbing a bank, say, or taking part in an extreme reality TV show. Before reaching the end of his tether, the protagonist of Speak for England, Brian Marley, teaches English as a foreign language and flees “to some new foreign country” whenever “things get too tough or too real” (Speak for England, 41) because “moving about lets you kid yourself you are moving on” (A White Merc with Fins, 70). Countless authors of your generation have depicted the nihilistic slackerdom of the idle rich or its lumpen variety, but nobody else has dissected the “pre-emptive strike on living” of the lower middle-classes with such deadly accuracy. Would you agree that this is your great theme, and do you see it as a particularly English phenomenon?
JH: I think it’s my great theme because I’m English. Nietzsche again: “We are all just organ-grinders with only one tune, but eternity itself turns the handle”. I went to Oxford in 1978 from a rural comp like some mad innocent with a straw in his mouth, four years behind the fashion and quite literally having never met a boarding-school boy in my life. I found that the world (Oxford was then still largely a men-only-colleges place) was full of incredibly sophisticated, shamingly cool and impossibly well-connected young chaps who were used to partying in publishers’ holiday homes, skiing every Xmas vac and using mummy’s debenture at the Royal Court. They seemed two or three years older than me, never mind infinitely richer. And they (step forward in particular a certain person whom I learned ten years ago was none other than Will Self) naturally got the Posh Birds I wanted but hadn’t the faintest notion how to approach. You may detect a chip on ye olde Hawes shoulder. A sack of spuds, more like, my dear. I shudder to remember, never mind relate, the wretched idiocies I got into. And all based on class.
3:AM: You seem to imply that the linguistic class war goes far beyond the “Garridge”/”garaaj” dichotomy (256), that it is not merely a question of pronunciation�
JH: My own theory is that this can be traced right back to the Conquest. Show me a name like Percy Beaufort in the phone-book and I will call someone posh for you. I invented an Irish archaeological book from which to supposedly lift an epigraph on this subject in order to avoid forcing my views into the mouth of some hapless “character”…
3:AM: I thought the controversial end of the book (which could be described as the ultimate cliffhanger) was really effective. Did you know how it would (or would not) end right from the start, or did you come up with this — hum — aporetic non-dénouement precisely because you had no idea?
JH: No, I really didn’t know what to do with the Hero at the end, and the last thing I wanted was to manufacture a ghastly film-syle “upbeat” ending. I wish I’d ended it like A Good Man in Africa in retrospect, but I’m glad you think it worked.
3:AM: Did the Comet IV accident really happen?
JH: No, that was made up. Delighted you even have to ask.
3:AM: Many novelists of your generation like Jonathan Coe (The Rotters’ Club) or Toby Litt (Deadkidsongs) seem to be writing about their childhood. Is this a generational thing? Were you in any way inspired by these books?
JH: I haven’t read either of these. As you get older you realise that what you thought, when you were 20, was pure freedom to create your own, new, form of living is in fact tugged at by hidden (apron-)strings that go back even beyond your birth. By 40 — or maybe with parenthood? — you see that you will never know who you really are and what you could really do until you know what you actually were, and were being formed for. If anyone under 25 is reading this, my motto to them would be: “No, you don’t believe this, of course you don’t, you’re not MEANT to. But you will”.
3:AM: So what’s next?
JH: I’m putting the final touches to my first original screenplay so a Producer can take it to Cannes. It’s a screwball rom-com called Dr Kafka’s Love-Letter. I adore it and it’s had great initial come-back. I’m thinking of a novel version, but the next one will be a black-comic story about a cheated lower-middle-class man (hey, what else?) who is digging his little South London garden while wishing he’d had the guts to completely desert his ex-wife and kids by buying a bar in Valparaiso for $15,000 instead of paying £300K for this shitheap, when he comes across a long-buried, perfectly oiled and preserved AK-47…
