by
James Wood
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[...] Has anyone described the way light changes during the morning better than Hardy does, in his poem 'The Going': 'while I / Saw morning harden upon the wall'? One can see, with the help of these lines, the light becoming more solid, more densely itself; and of course our mornings harden in a different way, too: our days tend to begin loose with possibility, and then harden around us as the lost hours progress and we feel their unfreedom accrete.
pretty
[...] the abysses in Krasznahorkai are bottomless and not logical. Krasznahorkai often deliberately obscures the referent, so that we have no idea what is motivating the fictions: reading him is a little like seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square, apparently warming their hands at a fire, only to discover, as one gets closer, that there is no fire, and that they are gathered around nothing at all.
just a cool analogy
[...] "Which do you love more, your family or Albania?" Albania, of course, I told him. A family you can make overnight. You walk out of a coffee house, run into a woman on the corner, take her to a hotel, and boom--wife and children. But you can't make Albania overnight after a quick drink in a coffee house, can you? No, not in one night, and not in a thousand and one nights, either'. . .
I like this a lot for some reason
Again, this is funny and wily, but beneath it runs dread, the dread of nullity. For the book's persistent question is: If Adam Gordon were able to summon himself into authenticity, would there be anything to see? Are we in fact constituted by our inauthenticities? When Adam appears on a panel to discuss literature and politics, he has nothing to say, and trots out platitudes that he learns by heart, along with a quotation from Ortega y Gasset ('who I had at one time thought was two people, like Deleuze and Guattari, Calvin and Hobbes'). [...]
Responding to an enquiry about his cultural perspectives in the years immediately after the Second World War, Williams comments:
I thought that the Labour government had a choice: either for reconstruction of the cultural field in capitalist terms, or for funding institutions of popular education and popular culture that could have withstood the political campaigns in the bourgeois press that were already gathering momentum. In fact, there was a rapid option for conventional capitalist priorities; the refusal to finance the documentary film movement was an example. I still believe that the failure to fund the working-class movement culturally when the channels of popular education and popular culture were there in the forties became a key factor in the
very quick disintegration of Labour's position in the fifties. [...]
[...] I think this is because the stuff that's truly interesting about religion is inarticulable.** Plus the truth is that there's nothing about I really know, and nothing about it that anybody, I don't think, really knows; and so when I hear some person try to articulate or persuade me of some specific point about religious stuff I find myself looking at my watch or shifting my feet, immediately and deeply bored. But--each time--this boredom always lasts exactly as long as it takes me to realize that what this person who's trying to talk about religion is really talking about is herself. This happens each time. I'm glazed and scanning for the exit until I get the real gist: though these heartfelt utterances present themselves as assuasive or argumentative, what they really are are--truly, deeply--expressive--expressive of a self's heart's special tangle, of a knowing and verbal self's particular tortured relation to what is unknow- and -sayable. Then it gets interesting again.
**(Which of course paradoxically is a big part of what makes it so interesting, so it all gets really tangled.)
I would argue, then, that the contemporary novelist who is not in any way addressing the changed reality of the present may yet be serving an important function. For the reader, that is--not necessarily for the genre itself. A crucial distinction. Through his deployment of the language, through giving expression to his vision, the writer may be creating a self-contained alternate order--a place where the ambitious reader can go to counter the centrifuge of late modernity, where he can, at least for a time, possess the aesthetic illusion of focus and sustain a single-minded immersion in circumstance no longer so generally available. that this is vicarious does not undermine its validity: it is a mode of surrogate living which most closely approximates what living felt like before technologies began to divide us from ourselves.
I like the centrifuge metaphor
Now, if you think Art is fundamentally important to human beings--not as a notion but as a practical reality--the present anti-artistic (i.e., anti-humanist) thrust of the present party-political climate has to be worrying. Art is not decoration, or something pretty by someone dead. It's not escapism or entertainment. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with any of these things but they're not Art. Art is more even than ideas. Art is the exploration of ideas: an attempt, I think, to make sense of the experience of being human through a process of creative skepticism. This in turn means Art is best at work when it's being prickly, querulous, and hostile to complacency of thought. It is obvious how Art itself is a problem for the new right: too may questions do not sit well with the smug face of an apparently immovable government. [...]
[...] Whosoever has let in one genuine sentence, one paragraph, has felt that seduction like a golden thread being pulled slowly through one. . . .
The future will be gorgeous and reckless, and words, those luminous charms, will set us free again. If only for a moment.