by
James Wood
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[...] But a life without stumbling is also unimaginable: perhaps to be in between two places, to be at home in neither, is the inevitable fallen state, almost as natural as being at home in the first place.
Almost. But not quite. When I left England eighteen years go, I didn't know then how strangely departure would obliterate return: how could I have known? It's one of time's lessons, and can only be learned temporally. What is peculiar, perhaps even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth is the slow revelation that I made a large choice many years ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life--indeed how life is lived. [...]
the endless and impossible journey, etc
There are two absolutely lancing sentences in this story: “In that minute he had told it all and was quite amazed to find that the story had taken such a short time. He had thought he could go on talking about the kiss all night.”
What a serious noticer a writer must be to write those lines. Chekhov appears to notice everything. He sees that the story we tell in our heads is the most important one, because we are internal expansionists, comic fantasists. For Ryabovich, his story has grown bigger and bigger, and has joined, in real time, the rhythm of life. Chekhov sees that Ryabovich, painfully, does and doesn’t need an audience for his story. Perhaps Chekhov is also jokily suggesting that, unlike Chekhov, the captain wasn’t much of a storyteller. For there is the inescapable irony that Chekhov’s own story, while taking a bit longer than a minute to tell, does not take all evening to read: like many of his tales, it is brisk and brief. Had Chekhov told it, people would have listened. Yet Chekhov also suggests that even the story we have just read—Chekhov’s brief story—is not the whole account of Ryabovich’s experience; that just as Ryabovich failed to tell it all, so perhaps Chekhov has failed to tell it all. There is still the enigma of what Ryabovich wanted to say.
loooove this
But just as Ryabovich’s one-minute story is not really worth telling, is not really a story, so the shapeless story that would take all evening is too shapeless, is not enough of a story. Ryabovich, one suspects, needs a Chekhovian eye for detail, the ability to notice well and seriously, the genius for selection. Do you think that Ryabovich mentioned, when he told his tale to his fellow-soldiers, that the darkened room smelt of lilacs, poplar, and roses? Do you think that Ryabovich mentioned that when the woman kissed him, his cheek glowed, as if brushed with peppermint? For details represent those moments in a story where form is outlived, cancelled, evaded. I think of details as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them. Details are not, of course, just bits of life: they represent that magical fusion, wherein the maximum amount of literary artifice (the writer's genius for selection and imaginative creation) produces a simulacrum of the maximum amount of non-literary or actual life, a process whereby artifice is then indeed converted into (fictional, which is to say, new) life. Details are not lifelike but irreducible: things-in-themselves, what I would call lifeness itself. The detail about the peppermint, like the tingle felt by Ryabovich on his cheek, lingers for us: all we have to do is rub the spot.
For some weird reason, the lithub preview replaces a few sentences near the end with "But if the life of a story is in its excess, in its surplus, in the riot of things beyond order and form, then it can also be said that the life-surplus of a story lies in its details." which i kinda like better
In ordinary life, we don’t spend very long looking at things or at the natural world or at people, but writers do. It is what literature has in common with painting, drawing, photography. You could say, following John Berger, that civilians merely see, while artists look. In an essay on drawing, Berger writes that, “To draw is to look, examining the structure of experiences. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree being looked at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree being looked at) not only takes minutes of hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking.” Berger is saying two things, at least. First, that just as the artist takes pains—and many hours—to examine that tree, so the person who looks hard at the drawing, or reads a description of a tree on the page, learns how to take pains, too; learns how to change seeing into looking. Second, Berger seems to argue that every great drawing of a tree has a relation to every previous great drawing of a tree, since artists learn by both looking at the world and by looking at what other artists have done with the world. Our looking is always mediated by other representations of looking.
Literature, like art, pushes against time's fancy - makes us insomniacs in the halls of habit, offers to rescue the life of things from the dead. A story is told about the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who was leading a live drawing class. The students were bored and doing dull work, so Kokoschka whispered to the model and told him to collapse to the ground. Kokoschka went over to the prone body, listened to his heart, pronounced him dead. The class was deeply shocked. Then the model stood up, and Kokoschka said: 'Now draw him as though you were aware he was alive and not dead!' What might that painting, in fiction, of a live body look like? It would paint a body that was truly alive, but in such a way that we might be able to see that a body is always really dying; it would understand that life is shadowed by mortality, and thus make a death-seeing metaphysics of Kokoschka's life-giving aesthetics. (Isn't this what makes serious noticing truly serious?) It might read like this passage from a late story by Saul Bellow, 'Something to Remember Me By'. It is a paragraph about a drunken Irishman, McKern, who has passed out on a couch: 'I looked in at McKern, who had thrown down the coat and taken off his drawers. The parboiled face, the short nose pointed sharply, the life signs in the throat, the broken look of his neck, the black hair of his belly, the short cylinder between his legs ending in a spiral of loose skin, the white shine of the shins, the tragic expression of his feet.' This is perhaps what Kokoschka had in mind: Bellow is painting, in words, a model, who might or might not be alive: a painting that threatens at any moment to become a still life. [...]
Gramsci argued that, though the economic must never be forgotten, conjunctural crises are never solely economic, or economically-determined ‘in the last instance’. They arise when a number of contradictions at work in different key practices and sites come together - or ‘con-join’ - in the same moment and political space and, as Althusser said, ‘fuse in a ruptural unity’. Analysis here focuses on crises and breaks, and the distinctive character of the ‘historic settlements’ which follow. The condensation of forces during a period of crisis, and the new social configurations which result, mark a new ‘conjuncture’.
[...] However anachronistic it may seem, neoliberalism is grounded in the ‘free, possessive individual’, with the state cast as tyrannical and oppressive. The welfare state, in particular, is the arch enemy of freedom. The state must never govern society, dictate to free individuals how to dispose of their private property, regulate a free-market economy or interfere with the God-given right to make profits and amass personal wealth. State-led ‘social engineering’ must never prevail over corporate and private interests. It must not intervene in the ‘natural’ mechanisms of the free market, or take as its objective the amelioration of free-market capitalism’s propensity to create inequality [...]
According to the neoliberal narrative, the welfare state (propelled by workingclass reaction to the Depression of the 1930s and the popular mobilisation of World War Two) mistakenly saw its task as intervening in the economy, redistributing wealth, universalising life-chances, attacking unemployment, protecting the socially vulnerable, ameliorating the condition of oppressed or marginalised groups and addressing social injustice. It tried to break the ‘natural’ (sic) link between social needs and the individual’s capacity to pay. But its dogooding, utopian sentimentality enervated the nation’s moral fibre, and eroded personal responsibility and the over-riding duty of the poor to work. It imposed social purposes on an economy rooted in individual greed and self interest. State intervention must never compromise the right of private capital to ‘grow the business’, improve share value, pay dividends and reward its agents with enormous salaries, benefits and bonuses. The function of the liberal state should be limited to safeguarding the conditions in which profitable competition can be pursued without engendering Hobbes’s ‘war of all against all’.
It should be noted, of course, that neoliberalism has many variants. There are critical differences, for example, between American, British and European ‘social market’ versions; South East Asian state-supported growth and Chinese ‘state capitalism’; Russia’s oligarchic/kleptomanic state and the monetarist ‘experiments’ in Latin America. Neoliberalism is not one thing. It evolves and diversifies. Nevertheless, geopolitically, neoliberal ideas, policies and strategies are incrementally gaining ground, re-defining the political, social and economic model, governing the strategies and setting the pace.
Still, the old had to be destroyed before the new could take its place. Margaret Thatcher conspired in a ruthless war against the cabinet ‘wets’ and simultaneously plotted to break trade union power - ‘the enemy within’. She impelled people towards new, individualised, competitive solutions: ‘get on your bike’, become self-employed or a share-holder, buy your council house, invest in the property-owning democracy. She coined a homespun equivalent for the key neoliberal ideas behind the sea-change she was imposing on society: value for money, managing your own budget, fiscal restraint, the money supply and the virtues of competition. There was anger, protest, resistance - but also a surge of populist support for the ruthless exercise of strong leadership.
Thatcherism mobilised widespread but unfocused anxiety about social change,
engineering populist calls from ‘below’ to the state ‘above’ to save the country by
imposing social order. [...]
Ideology is always contradictory. There is no single, integrated ‘ruling ideology’ - a mistake we repeat again now in failing to distinguish between conservative and neoliberal repertoires. Ideology works best by suturing together contradictory lines of argument and emotional investments - finding what Laclau called ‘systems of equivalence’ between them. Contradiction is its metier. Andrew Gamble characterised Thatcherism as combining ‘free market’/‘strong state’. Many believed this contradiction would be Thatcherism’s undoing. But, though not logical, few strategies are so successful at winning consent as those which root themselves in the contradictory elements of common sense, popular life and consciousness. Even today, the market/free enterprise/private property discourse persists cheek by jowl with older conservative attachments to nation, racial homogeneity, Empire, tradition. ‘Market forces’ is good for restoring the power of capital and destroying the redistributivist illusion. But in moments of difficulty one can trust ‘the Empire’ to strike back. [...]