Category Archives: Phantom books

Nudisme

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Jacques Cégeste, in Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus (1949), is a young writer who has published his first poems in a journal called Nudisme, which is made up of blank pages.

Orphée (extract from film)

Un ancien poète est attablé à un bar, en compagnie de jeunes poètes.

ancien poète, s’adressant à Orphée
Asseyez-vous une minute.

les jeunes poètes, à l’ancien poète
Vous êtes fou !
Ils se lèvent et s’en vont

orphée
Je fais le vide…

ancien poète
Vous êtes venu vous mettre dans la gueule du loup.

orphée
Je tenais à me rendre compte…

ancien poète
Qu’est-ce que vous boirez ?

orphée
Rien merci. J’ai bu. C’était plutôt amer…
Vous avez du courage de m’adresser la parole.

ancien poète
Oh moi ! Je ne suis plus dans la lutte ! J’ai arrêté d’écrire à vingt ans : je n’apportais rien de neuf ! On respecte mon silence…

orphée
Ils estiment sans doute que je n’apporte rien de neuf, et qu’un poète, ne doit pas être trop célèbre…

ancien poète
Ils ne vous aiment pas beaucoup.

orphée
Dîtes plutôt qu’ils me haïssent.
Quel est ce jeune ivrogne qui vient de me traiter si aimablement et qui n’a pas l’air de mépriser le luxe ?

ancien poète
C’est Jacques Cégeste. Un poète ! Il a dix-huit ans et on l’adore. La princesse qui l’accompagne commandite la revue où il vient de publier ses premiers poèmes.

orphée
Cette princesse est fort belle, et fort élégante.

ancien poète
Elle est étrangère et elle ne peut pas se passer de notre milieu. Voilà sa revue.
Il tend à Orphée un album de pages blanches

orphée
Je ne vois que des pages blanches !

ancien poète
Celà s’appelle «NUDISME».

orphée
Mais c’est ridicule !

ancien poète
Moins ridicule que si ces pages étaient couvertes de textes ridicules ! Aucun excès n’est ridicule !
Orphée, votre plus grave défaut est de savoir jusqu’où on peut aller trop loin.

To Write the Thing That is to be Written

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An extract from Astri von Arbin Ahlander‘s interview with Tom McCarthy in The Days Of Yore 2011:

…So after college, in Prague, there was always the project: To write the thing that is to be written. …There was a project. I couldn’t name it, I didn’t know what it was, but it was to write. So, all of this was somehow part of the project. Even partying was somehow part of the project. …It was a very good place for being a painter, writer or filmmaker without painting, writing or making films, necessarily. It was conducive to taking the scenic route. But, I mean, look at Baudelaire. He sits in his bed in Paris smoking hashish for weeks on end and then that becomes “the thing.”

…Read. Read, read, read. That would be the thing. Because, ultimately, it’s not about having something to say. It’s what Kafka said, “I write in order to affirm and re-affirm that I have nothing to say.” Writing is not about having something to say. It’s about an intense relationship with the symbolic. Which means being completely immersed in literature, which means in other literature, but also in the world and all its mediations. So, maybe that would be the advice: Go and get immersed.

…People who proclaim the end of the book just haven’t read their literary history. I mean, the first novel, Don Quixote, is about the end of the book. That is the premise of literature.

I think this is a unique thing about literature: It’s a medium that only works because it doesn’t work. Right? It’s always about the experience of failure. The people who have best theorized about what literature essentially is — like Blanchot, Derrida — they keep coming back to this: It’s a system failure, like a computer crash, like Macs used to be before Steve Jobs came back. They would crash every few minutes — that is what literature is. And so it has always been living out its own death.

The problem would not be if literature was doomed, the problem would be if it wasn’t. Then we would have something to worry about. That is the state the middlebrow novel is in; it is genuinely doomed.

…I think any writing that confronts its own impossibility, its embedding within media, mediation, the interruptedness and so on that this involves, is, because of its very impossibility, actually destined to paradoxically survive the same way that fish grow lungs when the seas dry up, or something. It’ll find its biological form.

The Influence of Unread Books

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An extract from Umberto Eco‘s This is Not the End of the Book published in The Guardian on 22 May 2011:

There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven’t read, that we haven’t had the time to read. Who has actually read Finnegans Wake — I mean from beginning to end? Who has read the Bible properly, from Genesis to the Apocalypse?

And yet I’ve a fairly accurate notion of what I haven’t read. I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then. The Mahabharata — I’ve never read that, despite owning three editions in different languages. Who has actually read the Kama Sutra? And yet everyone talks about it, and some practise it too. So we can see that the world is full of books that we haven’t read, but that we know pretty well.

And yet when we eventually pick them up, we find they are already familiar. How is that? First, there’s the esoteric explanation — there are these waves that somehow travel from the book to you — to which I don’t subscribe. Second, perhaps it’s not true that you’ve never opened the book; over the years you’re bound to have moved it from place to place, and may have flicked through it and forgotten that you’ve done so. Third, over the years you’ve read lots of books that have mentioned this one and so made it seem familiar.

We Are All Bartlebys

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An extract from Tom McCarthy‘s “David Foster Wallace: The Last Audit,” The New York Times Sunday 14 May 2011:

…Which brings me to the second way of understanding the whole document: as a much rawer and more fragmented reflection on the act of writing itself, the excruciating difficulty of carrying the practice forward — properly and rigorously forward — in an age of data saturation. The Jesuit presents “the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world’s constituent info generated . . . now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling and organizing that torrential flow of info.” He could just as well be describing the task of the novelist, who, of course, is also “called to account.” It’s hard not to see in the poor pencil-pushers huddled at their desks an image of the writer — nor, given Wallace’s untimely end, to shudder when they contemplate suicide.

Lost childhood pools, by this reading, would constitute a kind of pastoral mode cached (or trashed) within the postmodern “systems” novel — which, in turn, is what the systems-within-systems I.R.S. really stands for. The issues of emotion and agency remain central, but are incorporated into a larger argument about the possibility or otherwise of these things within contemporary fiction. The data-psychic character Sylvanshine can glean trivia about anyone simply by looking at him, but is “weak or defective in the area of will.” Nor, due to endless digressions, can he complete anything. No one can; in “The Pale King,” nothing ever fully happens. That this is to a large extent a metaphor (for the novel in general, or this novel in particular) becomes glaringly obvious when we hear one unnamed character describe the play he’s writing, in which a character sits at a desk, doing nothing; after the audience has left, he will do something — what that “something” is, though, the play’s author hasn’t worked out yet. […]

…Wallace’s writing is haunted by modernism’s (very plural) legacy. One of the nicknames for the David Wallace character in “The Pale King” is “the young man carbuncular,” a moniker straight from Eliot’s “Waste Land.” Kafka’s “Castle” is explicitly invoked; and so, implicitly by the unfinished clerk-at-desk play, is the entirety of Beckett’s drama.

But there’s an older ghost haunting “The Pale King” even more, I think, one whose spectral presence combines both the political and metafictional ways of reading the book: Melville’s Bartleby, the meek and lowly copyist who cannot will himself to complete the act of copying — or, to put it another way, the writer who cannot will himself to complete the act of writing. In effect, all the I.R.S.’s clerical serfs are Bartlebys; through them, and through this book, he emerges as the melancholy impasse out of which the American novel has yet to work its way. America’s greatest writer, the author of “Moby-Dick,” spent his final 19 years as a customs officer — that is, a tax inspector. To research “The Pale King,” Wallace trained in accounting. We’re moving beyond haunting to possession here. Bartleby, of course, ends up dead, leaving a stack of undeliverable papers. This is the inheritance that Wallace earnestly, and perhaps fatally, grappled with. The outcome was as brilliant as it was sad — and the battle is the right one to engage in.

Abandoned Novels

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A short extract from Dan Kois‘ “Why Do Writers Abandon Novels?” The New York Times 4 March 2011

“A book itself threatens to kill its author repeatedly during its composition,” Michael Chabon writes in the margins of his unfinished novel “Fountain City” — a novel, he adds, that he could feel “erasing me, breaking me down, burying me alive, drowning me, kicking me down the stairs.” And so Chabon fought back: he killed “Fountain City” in 1992. What was to be the follow-up to his first novel, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” instead was a black mark on his hard drive, five and a half years of work wasted.

That’s why you’ve never read “Fountain City,” just as you’ve never read John Updike’s “Willow,” Junot Díaz’s “Dark America” or Jennifer Egan’s “Inland Souls” — all abandoned by their authors after years of toil and piles of pages. Chabon, though, has recently published the first four chapters of “Fountain City” in the literary magazine McSweeney’s, complete with annotations that in turn bemoan and belittle the book that stole so much of his life before he put his misery out of its misery.

Why would a novel be, in Chabon’s parlance, “wrecked”? Authors, always sensitive creatures, might abandon a book in a fit of despair, as Stephenie Meyer initially did in 2008 with her “Twilight” spinoff “Midnight Sun,” which she declared herself “too sad” to finish after 12 chapters leaked to the Internet. More dramatically, in 1925 Evelyn Waugh burned his unpublished first novel, “The Temple at Thatch,” and attempted to drown himself in the sea after a friend gave it a bad review. (Stung by jellyfish, Waugh soon returned to shore.) More dramatically still, Nikolai Gogol died a mere 10 days after burning the manuscript of “Dead Souls II,” for the second time.

Sometimes success intrudes on a writer’s plans, transforming what once came easily into an impossible slog — as happened to two old friends, Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Lee had written more than 100 pages of her second novel, “The Long Goodbye,” before “To Kill a Mockingbird” was even published in 1960. But the attention accompanying the wild success of “Mockingbird” slowed her output to a trickle. After years of fitful work, she seems to have given up, telling her cousin, “When you’re at the top there’s only one way to go.”

Capote, meanwhile, published chapters from his long-gestating “Answered Prayers” in Esquire, and the resulting fallout — longtime friends, recognizing themselves in the barely veiled portraits of desperation and decadence, cut Capote off — infuriated and hurt him. “What did they expect?” he asked his editor. “I’m a writer, I use everything.” Some think that Capote wrote more, but that the chapters were destroyed or lost; many, including his longtime partner, Jack Dunphy, believe he never wrote another word.

Then there are novels abandoned for the dullest of reasons, one as familiar to M.F.A. students and National Novel Writing Month participants as it is to the pros: The novel just isn’t working. …

Barthes’s Fantasy-of-the-Novel

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Mairéad Hanrahan, “The Amazing About-Face of Roland Barthes,” Times Literary Supplement 19 January 2011

Kate Briggs’s wonderful translation finally makes available in English a most unusual book by one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century. The Preparation of the Novel comprises the notes of the third and last lecture course Roland Barthes delivered at the Collège de France, cut short in 1980 by his untimely death. …

The uncertainty begins with the title. Is The Preparation of the Novel merely a course/class/series of lecture notes about the preparation of the novel, or is it also part of that preparation? From the outset, both interpretations are carefully invited: although Barthes denies, contrary to rumours circulating at the time, that he is writing a novel (and states that, if he were, he would not propose a course on its preparation), at the same time he acknowledges the deeply personal nature of the course’s origin and stresses that the “fantasy” it mobilizes is his own “Fantasy-of-the-Novel”. The ambiguity this creates about the book’s genre never disappears, reinforced by the contradictory positions adopted at different moments. For example, at the beginning of Part II (the 1979–80 classes), Barthes invites us to think of the Course as a “film or book”, whereas elsewhere he distinguishes it explicitly from “real writing, that of the book”. One of the text’s most enjoyable features is that the reader can never determine whether or not Barthes himself is practising what he teaches. This uncertainty is echoed in the strong parallels suggested between Barthes’s own situation and that of the writers he considers. This is particularly the case with his discussion of the decisive moment when Proust’s masterpiece, À la Recherche du temps perdu, suddenly “took” or fell into place. Proust’s passing from essay to novel in 1909, a few years after the death of his mother, corresponds closely to the turning point in Barthes’s own life evoked at the opening of The Preparation of the Novel: he recalls an afternoon not long after his own mother’s death when he found himself gripped by the necessity of a dramatic change, a vita nova. But for “someone who writes”, this new life could only involve a new writing practice. The choice of “The Preparation of the Novel” as the topic of Barthes’s course thus reflects a shift analogous to the one which resulted in Proust’s novel.

In a significant editorial departure from the French original, this translation appends a transcription of an eight-page sketch of a novel found in Barthes’s papers after his death. The translator’s nuanced discussion in her preface of the decision to include the pages wards against the danger that the relation would be read only in teleological terms, and justifies the decision simply but persuasively on the grounds that the project, although available in French, had not hitherto been available in English. …

The Not-Oyster Bit

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Tom McCarthy interviewed about Tristram Shandy in Henry Hitchings‘ Birth of the British Novel broadcast on BBC Four, 7 February 2011:

HH: What is a novel?

(Tom McCarthy laughs.)

TMC: A novel is something that contains its own negation, right? So a novel is not a novel without an anti-novel lodged in it. It’s like an oyster: it isn’t interesting unless it has got a bit of grit in it as well — that not-oyster bit that kind of produces the pearl. In Tristram Shandy, this is precisely what produces the drama: the central drama of that book is its own undermining. And I think, in a way, this is what every book should be, in one way or another.

A Cathedral Full of Fire

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Emma Brockes, “Michael Cunningham: A Life in Writing,” The Guardian 5 February 2011 (Guardian Review p.12)

…It is Cunningham’s project too, the pressure of which he feels, particularly after finishing a novel, when the terrible gap between what he hoped he’d produce and what he wound up with becomes apparent. Because, he says, one tends to value the things one isn’t good at, he has a fantasy that one day he’ll find he has written “some kind of vast epic novel that would include the Crimean war and interstellar space travel” rather than his usual slim volume of the interior lives of ordinary people.

“Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I’m finishing, even if it’s turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don’t admit it, they’re not being honest. You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire — that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it’s just this book. And it has its strengths, it has its virtues, but there’s nothing about the Crimean war, there’s nothing about interstellar travel. It says what it says and that’s it. And it joins all the other books in the world.” …

Things Not Said, Actions Not Done

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Gabriel Josipovici, “Learning From the Master,” The Irish Times 18 December 2010 [a review of Colm Tóibín’s All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James]:

“…I do, however, have to take issue with Tóibín and with James himself on one important point. In an essay on the meaning for the novelist of Lamb House, his Sussex retreat in his later years, Tóibín quotes a letter James wrote to his friend Grace Norton about the heroine of A Portrait of a Lady and her relationship to the real-life Minnie Temple: ‘I had her in mind and there is in the heroine a considerable infusion of my impression of her remarkable nature. But the thing is not a portrait. Poor Minny was essentially incomplete and I have attempted to make my young woman more rounded, more finished. In truth everyone, in life, is incomplete, and it is [in] the work of art that in reproducing them one feels the desire to fill them out, to justify them, as it were.’

Tóibín is so taken with this formulation that he repeats it verbatim in one later essay and paraphrases it in another. But what artists say about their work, even artists as self-aware as James, is, as Tóibín knows all too well, not necessarily the truth. It seems to me that both James and Tóibín in The Master are using their art not to round out and fill out a portrait left incomplete by life, which sounds more like the sort of aim Oscar Wilde might have expressed, but to bring home (to themselves, to the reader) the mystery of that life. That is why each of the great last novels ends not with resolution, not with final understanding, but with the sense that something which could be said in no other way has, remarkably, been said by the accumulation of things not said, of actions not done. That is why James’s greatest short story, The Turn of the Screw, ends so magnificently and so mysteriously: ‘I caught him, yes, I held him — it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it was truly that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped”. …”

The Impossibility of Narrating the Event

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Tom McCarthy interviewed by Richard Wolinsky, Bookwaves (KPFA) 1 November 2010:

“This idea of reconstruction, of how to narrate the event: this is the kind of conceptual impossibility at the core of Remainder, which involves this guy elaborately spending millions of pounds to hire people to reconstruct events that he vaguely remembers — and they never get it right because you can’t. And, I suppose, this is almost a metaphor for all of narrative: the impossibility of actually narrating the event.”