Category Archives: About

Fighting Fiction with Fiction

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Bethanie Blanchard, “This Week in Books,” Guardian Australia Culture Blog Sunday 17 November 2013

Lars Iyer, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize — an award celebrating innovation in the form of the novel — has argued that the time for literary novels is over. In an interesting response, Andrew Gallix considers the death of realist literary fiction and the uncertainty of its future. “Literature only coincides with itself when it claims to be what it is not. As soon as it acknowledges its made-up nature, the novel looks back at itself in anger; becomes its own worst enemy,” he writes. Gallix highlights the historical development of the form of the novel, the limitations of mimetic storytelling, and the uncertain way forward for “fighting fiction with fiction”.

The Offbeats

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Ben Ashwell, “An Interview with Tony O’Neill,” Bookslut 138 (November 2013)

… O’Neill built a strong reputation for his needles-and-all accounts of addiction by publishing his stories online, on sites like 3:AM Magazine. This led him to be grouped with a range of other writers — such as Ben Myers, Lee Rourke, Adelle Stripe, and Andrew Gallix — who were collectively branded “The Offbeat Generation” by The Guardian.

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[Me and Tony O’Neill, Paris, June 2009]

A Report From the Front

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Here’s Douglas Glover’s great introduction to “Of Literary Bondage” from the August 2013 issue of Numéro Cinq:

We live in a culture at war with itself, and I don’t mean the War on Drugs. I mean the thousand-year war between the rhetoricians and the dialecticians (as McLuhan had it), between the Ciceronian, elaborated style and the plain style of Peter Ramus, between writers who believe in the aesthetic joy of linguistic play over those who think words are just for communication (how dull and, well, Soviet that word can sound). Andrew Gallix offers here a dazzling and provocative note, a report from the front, on literary Modernism and Paul Valéry’s famous sentence “The marquise went out at five” conceived as a critique of the traditional, conventional, realistic, well-made (pick your own epithet) novel, or, really, anything that smacks of the prosiness of prose, of mere communication. Valéry’s line cleaved to the centre of the debate: Would you write a novel or a story or an essay containing a sentence as mundane as “The marquise went out at five” or not? As Gallix points out, the marquise has become a shibboleth in France for a certain kind of traditional (dull) writing. Not so much over here where prose dominates the market place. Something to think about. Andrew Gallix is the brilliant founder of 3:AM Magazine, he teaches at the Sorbonne, he writes for the UK Guardian. It’s a great pleasure to present his work here.

The Ghost of the Death of Literature

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Elisa Giuliana, “Dark Times,” Nude Review 1 15 February 2012

…Nevertheless, I reject the assumption that this literary poverty is the symptom of an irreversible condition. After all, the ghost of the death of literature tends to appear in times of cultural uncertainty: an article by Andrew Gallix has recently appeared in The Guardian, which gives an account of those writers, critics and scholars who have decreed its death throughout the centuries.

[This issue was entitled Is Literature Dead?]

Never Taken As Read

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Richard Marshall, “No Thing,” 3:AM Magazine 29 March 2013

. . . Dworkin hopes that through erasure writing can be recovered by attending to its essential detritus, its material media and its event. He suggests this retrieval comes by a palimpsest enacting a “double play of concealment and revelation”, a way of obstructing to make something visible. Andrew Gallix writes that “Words become visible; the bloody things keep getting in the way. From this perspective, the literary is what can never be taken as read”. . . .

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As Tight As Wire

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Richard Marshall, “Modernist Ghosts,” 3:AM Magazine 18 June 2013

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. . . Reality is inevitably, and tragically, the boss, relentless and remorselessly impervious to the dreams of its inhabitants. We hope for autonomy, agency, but fear it’s just the drink talking post hoc most of time. ‘When you say my name, you retain nothing of me but my absence. And nobody is present behind these words I speak’ says Emilie in the Andrew Gallix short story “Fifty Shades of Grey Matter“. The story presents a doomed lover contemplating his lost love. The materiality, the bodily anxiety presses in against the frenetic, desperate and seething mind of the protagonist and throughout there’s a need to try and combine the two — the mind and the body — to understand the relationship in some way. The story is implacable and granite strong in this. The violence of physical action, the dangerous crime that bodies seem to presuppose in the narrative, carries ‘the mute reminder of the possibility of impossibility’ symbolized by an insane aside about anal rape. What kind of dark matter is being imagined in this? The subject is Occasionalism, the question of powers and causality.

. . . Gallix’s odd fiction seems also to hold lyricism in a merciless fixed embrace. The facts are stone, as dry as archaism, stratified, absorbed and the utter indifference to the sensual passion of its protagonist is expressed in a language chisselled and polished like marble. Everything is imagined with prodigal allusiveness. It’s as tight as wire, extremes of tragedy, pathos and irony are cut like contours ploughed into copper with a burin. If the effect is a dismembered cruelty, it is a cruelty of the universe, of a cause from somewhere else altogether, somewhere or some agency that knows enough to cause it.

Gallix’s approach is not alone in the Fiddleblack collection. Nor is this conceit I’m pressing — arbitrarily at times, but then making a run of it to see where we might go, for there are others that might be mysteriously pressed into action. The impossibility of causality without knowledge of how to create or annhiliate, well, that has some edge, even if we think it exactly false. But Gallix, to continue using him as a catalyst here, has that line about the ‘possibility of impossibility,’ and who cannot unforgive a paradox when we’re telling each other stories about how it isn’t?

. . . But the orgiastic demonstration of writing’s imaginative physique is best in the antiquity of Gallix’s Roman fairy tale of Valentin Vermot, a ghost haunted by ghosts that, abbreviated to an essentialist verbatim, goes: ‘Once upon a time there was a man called Valentin. Valentin Vermot. Just like you. He thought he was haunted by a ghost, but his ex-wife assured him that there was no such thing. “There are no ghosts,” she said. “There are no ghosts.” Valentin opened his eyes. He was all alone, but Emilie’s voice was still ringing in his ears. There are no ghosts, there are no ghosts, there are no ghosts, there are no ghosts…’ . . .

Droll, Mischievous and Wonderfully Intelligent

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Douglas Glover, “Fifty Shades of Grey Matter: Fiction,” Numéro Cinq 8 June 2013

Droll, mischievous and wonderfully intelligent confection, a Modernist riposte to the vacancy (absence) of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, in which Gabriel Josipovici has a walk-on role and the protagonist images himself as Caspar Friedrich’s Wanderer AND Roy Scheider in Jaws in the same instant and someone wears a Clarice Lispector frock. It all begins with a mother telling a bedtime story, yes, yes, a scene of sadistic psychic violence like none other. Brilliantly witty. Deploys many of the Modern erotic positions: sex and text, love as desire for absence, and self as ghost (we all have that sense of the self being something that haunts itself). The teaser below accurately describes love and art, or maybe not. By Andrew Gallix who edits 3AM Magazine.

Your heart still skips like a trip of jackrabbits in the Arizona desert, where we carved our names on a bench close to the abyss. But when I look at you, well, I just feel dead inside. It has to be like this and no other way; otherwise it wouldn’t be art, would it? I’m in love with Jay now: I feed him mini Milano cookies and give him snug harbor. Anyway, I was never quite all there, was I? Long before we met, I was a character in one of your stories — ‘Sweet Fanny Adams.’ Young man goes looking for girl of his dreams in order to break up straight away. ‘At last,’ he says upon meeting her, ‘I have found my sense of loss.’ See? I haven’t forgotten. I started off as fiction, and to fiction I have returned. Our relationship was only a movement towards my disappearance. I am your sense of loss: the self-effacing subject of your work…”

“Emilie…” said Valentin.

“When you say my name, you retain nothing of me but my absence. And nobody is present behind these words I speak.”

Read the rest.

Asterixesque

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From “Guardian Weekly Letters,” Guardian Weekly 14 June 2O13:

French language is in decline

Andrew Gallix pretty well sums up the debates that we have been reading in the French press about a possible revision of the Toubon law to allow a few university classes to be taught in English (31 May). I agree: the French language has been under threat lately, but not from the borrowing of any foreign word. Any language will shine by and dazzle with what it produces, but sadly, we have made nihilistic literature our speciality, to cite only literature.

I still cannot figure out why our critics bask in such books as the ones by Michel Houellebecq or Christine Angot, to name but two authors. Reading the last by Angot, the depiction in minute detail of an incest, one realises that Marcel Pagnol and the nostalgia of his childhood are definitively over, as is the wit of Astérix. The enthusiasts of the French language, like Claude Hagège, mainly regret that French is not in the dominant position — our lost American future. Hagège states that English implies economic liberalism, and hence the capitalism bias. But this thesis forgets that English also was the language of Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson.

Now, with the possible new law, I would rather be concerned about the poor English that French university professors might soon impose on their students: oh no…
Marc Jachym
Paris, France

The historical irony of the French tongue is that, were it not for imperialistic Latin, it would have turned out something like Breton or Gaelic (or even possibly German, judging from appropriated nouns). Romance French began as a Latin superimposed on the subjugated (and preliterate) Celts. And, were it not for Julius Caesar’s scribe’s ear, we would have no first record of Celtic culture: no Lutetia (Paris), no plucky chieftains like Vercingetorix and Dumnorix, nor any British Boudicca, druids and naked warriors in woad. And alas, no Astérix and Obelix, sprung from Goscinny’s head.

Andrew Gallix (delightfully Astérixesque name, that) formidably defends besieged French as a medium of instruction against the steamroller of American English, but quixotically. Even former African colonies are beginning to relinquish French pedagogy for English. Like Latin, French is fated to become an antiquarian, literary language, a historical cul-de-sac, its vestiges living on through English (as Latin lives on through French).

Marianne Faithfull saw it coming on in the 80s: “Don’t say it in Russian, don’t say it in German, say it in — broken English.”
R M Fransson
Denver, Colorado, US

Paris in American Literatures

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I am mentioned in Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Vamsi K. Koneru, eds, Paris in American Literatures: On Distance as a Literary Resource, Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickson University Press, 2013

Page 152: “As Andrew Gallix observes; ‘It seems now that the stories shape the city as much as the coty once shaped the stories’ (Gallix 2010, 1).”

Page 153: “The Paris of the tourist and student imagination drives the repetition and commodification of the pilgrimage; Gallix’s assertion here about the development of Paris in the collective imagination is somewhat misleading — the stories, like the screenplays and the somewhat limited study-abroad impressions, shape the impression of the city for the foreigner.”

What is also somewhat misleading is the fact that both the quote and the article in which it appears are by Anthony Cuthbertson!