Relocating the Argument

It is no good where we are.  Not at all.   The argument needs relocating.  Just a few blades of grass survive, if that.  Sticking out of the cracks between the broken paving. 

dreams in plastic bags

ontology taxonomy phylum genus species type kind sort class pigeon hole peg label Boom Boom Boom Tap Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Tap Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Tap Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Tap Boom Boom pipe smoke in rooms cigarettes cigar butts men seating ladies on their seats in Lyons cafés drumming on desks dads doodling in pencil rain light through a hall fanlight brass door bells

Stone upon Stone

The significant buildings of a city, its churches, its cathedrals, that work as the icons of place, that make it recognisable, that are landmarks, constructed from beautiful local stone; that tend to be beautiful in themselves - there is a still further consideration in this, for there is no avoiding how they are also in their various ways unique monuments to greed.  Houses of wealth, acquisition, goods, gold and silver.  And politics.  Transliterate the motives that built these buildings, these churches, into the present.  What are their equals?  The office block. The supermarket.  Placeless things that stand in their stead like litter.  Looking out at the City of London, visible from the Horniman Park away in the South, on an early soft summer evening, it is quite stunning, it is not recognisable but as a threat.  Not ‘local stone’.  No one is seeing the black interplanetary towers of a race in elsewhere’s sigil.  Monumental shards of the mineral.

Happy Days

A few months ago I saw Beckett’s Happy Days.  It is a work of the poetic imagination.  For all meaningful purposes it renders the impossible real.  Unending daylight.  The apocalypse.  Fossilised narrative sense.  The ‘story’ has stopped.  Or almost stopped.  Nothing happens.  Or: almost nothing happens.  Only a toothbrush and a handbag occur as events along with Willie’s reading a ‘stopped’ newspaper, his body pinned to the rubble-scape. 

Reason’s Idiots

Milan Kundera’s The Curtain: “Our feeling for continuity is so strong that it enters into the perception of any work of art.”  (But after all, what if it were weaker – if that is possible too?)  What ‘enters into’ what?  Kundera is like someone saying, “Why did I trip over the curb today?  There must be a reason!”  But why not just say “You did it because you were foolish” - ?  Foolishness can be rational too as well as reason’s failure.

Tin China

Kafka’s story: the innocent seeming phrases always yielding to contradiction; endlessly, dismayingly; the effect that this has is clear: it puts his material beyond the scope of reason. For example, the beginning of the Great Wall of China; something like: “The Great Wall of China was completed …” (ah so, it was finished!) “…in its North Eastern Section.” (Ah, so it wasn’t finished.) One could call this technique ’erasing the beginning/ending’.  The origin of an event or object is put beyond the reader’s reach, like a rabbit out of a hat.  Thus, for example, K.s trial; it begins “one morning”. But immediately this “one morning” loses its origin. No, no - it never began.  K. was always on trial. His trial is without beginning.  Just as our present is too. 

Puerility as a Voice

A surprising number of contemporary British novelists have no ‘voice’. Not to name any names. But compare the Americans. McCarthy; DeLillo; Ford; Salter, who write prose with a distinctive human stamp: books suited to being read aloud. I am about halfway through a sequel to The Graduateby a writer whose best instincts take him toward pure dialogue. If life is becoming increasingly ‘contextless’ -– then it is in the human voice that something of a counterbalance to that loss can be found, a resource finely exploited by all these writers. In the recognition that one is hearing someone speak, there is also the recognition that here at least is someone who exists! The ‘loss of story’ or the so-called ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ that is said to characterise much of modern cultural life illustrates the theme that this engages with generally.  For this process excludes the very possibility of culture - so to speak. Caulfield demonstrates this rather abstract idea very well: he hates everything: religion, culture, tv, life, society, school, mum, dad, etc. The kind of Catcher in the Rye style novel of disaffection that shows the hero cut off from life, cut out from it, ‘contextless’, needs the counterbalance of Caulfield’s distinctive narrative voice to make it live; he has to be real - knowable. The irredeemably disaffected Caulfield, expelled from Pency, has gone on a wilful self-destructive binge, wandering from place to place, talking, drinking, whoring, running away, and generally living in a world in which the key is homelessness, in which nothing is likeable, without amenity: even though, or because, he is moneyed and privileged.  The problem is context and the lack of real meaning, that there is no real story for him (that David Copperfield crap); being phoney, it makes him feel nauseated — and yet the counterbalance, as it were, is the very ’sound’ of this - this vocal noise, this image of what it is for the individual to be alive now. We need to be able to hear him because thus he exists; since he exists in spite of himself; against everything. I find certain similarities in Charles Webb’s Home School. ‘Nature’s register’ is the human voice. In other words, for there is nothing real besides - nothing that means anything beyond this, the voice’s mere material fact. Voicelessness here means mannerlessness, puerility.  The inability to conceive of a believable social reality.  Caulfield lives for us, as Benjamin also lives for us, because a form of mannerliness seduces him: if in nothing else then in the sound of this voice complaining at its voicelessness; crying for the scruple of human taste.  Unable to evolve any sort of conduct beyond that which demonstrates a new kind of now world chic the only thing left to him in these is its rejection and the evolution of a voice that works through this rejection. He complains, volubly and at length, and so finally is successful: yes, yes, he exists.  So, voice and place. Haunted by the Spectre of Vulgarity, doomed to fade into the gigantism of an Advert, complaint in mourning its absence of manners establishes a new order of one. 

Dust

A naive argument.  Ordinary or mainstream novels walk with an unavoidable limp; ordinary or mainstream novels are hobbled by their associations with dullness. – Is that fair?  Ordinary fiction merely confirms what experience teaches.  For that is where its sense begins.  A mainstream novel succeeds by finding novel ways of teaching us what we already know.   It does not tell us anything new it merely dresses in new clothes the already familiar, the familiar beyond recall – the familiar to the point of oblivion.  But so does this hobbling acquire a power; we originate in the ‘ordinary world’ for example but this revisiting of it, this act of looking again at it, at the past or the present, can be de-familiarising. Our ordinary lives are revisited in a light quite different to anything ‘ordinary’; facts that usage and habit have all but made invisible suddenly appear visible again.  Through its presentation of what works as immediate experience, through verisimilitude, the ’ordinary’ novel is able to convey the non-ordinariness of the ordinary.  What happens when this engagement is abandoned?  So that the concept of reality is presented hyperbolically?  Just as for example with an advert.  It does not give us the story of reality but an hyperbolised purified revision of it, instrumentally designed – seemingly akin to reality and yet not so but reduced down: an above body temperature truth.  Thus a science fiction novel does not give us reality but a sort of high temperature simulacrum.  Everything is bland, draft-free, room shaped, smiley, even fire and ice.  Death and destruction.  Or is that true?