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Farewell to The Story of the Stone and a valuable browse in Chinese literature. I’ll do it again someday. FICTION The Peony Pavilion (1598), Tang Xianzu – written up back here. The Story of the Stone, Vol. 5: The Dreamer Wakes (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin & Gao E – some notes here. The quotation in my title is from p. 94. Naomi (1924) & Quicksand (1930), Junichiro Tanizaki – and these are over here. Calamity Town (1942), Ellery Queen – A very lightly metafictional mystery. Not only does the detective share his name with the book’s actual “author,” itself a fiction, but he is a mystery writer who at times seems to be generating the crime within the novel so that he will have something interesting to write about. But not quite doing that, unfortunately. That novel would have been more interesting. The actual novel was fine. This is one of those mysteries where every instance of clumsy plotting is in fact a clue. A Question of Upbringing (1951), Anthony Powell – I think I will write something about this book once I have read another volume of the series. Damned If I Do (2004), Percival Everett – short stories. A perfect Everett title. It is all his characters need since it doesn’t matter what will happen if they don’t. They always do. On the Calculation of Volume I (2020), Solvej Balle – a Groundhog Day story told with more philosophy and less humor. A good fantasy on its own terms, but the puzzle is that the series has six more volumes, two of which have not been written yet. The whole thing will be at least 1,200 pages long, for all I know more. This first volume is reasonably complete, so I have no idea where the series might be going. POETRY NOT IN FRENCH OR PORTUGUESE Selected Poems (1968), Zbigniew Herbert TRAVEL, MUSIC HISTORY Tschiffelly's Ride (1933), Aimé Tschifelly – a Swiss English teacher rides a pair of Pampas horses from Buenos Aires to Washington, D. C., just for fun, and writes an equestrian classic. Lots of emphasis on the horses and horse-riding. My geographical knowledge of South and Central America has greatly improved. I have only been to one of the countries Tschifelly passes through. Peru gets the largest number of pages; Mexico second. Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (2023), Jeremy Eichler – Before I finished The Emigrants in 1996 I knew that Sebald was going to be an important writer. I knew that people were going to want to do what he was doing. That was the only time I have been right about that, really, and I did not predict how much Sebaldian visual and musical art would follow, nor that there could be Sebaldian music history, which is what classical music critic Jeremy Eichler has written. Lightly Sebaldian – he includes uncaptioned photos, yes, but always says, somewhere in the text, what they are. The book is about World War II memorial pieces, built around Schoenberg’s A Survivor in Warsaw (1947), Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945), Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and several Shostakovich works. Highly recommended to anyone who likes this sort of thing. IN FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE Odes et Ballades (1828), Victor Hugo – young, young Hugo. I had read the first half several years ago; now I finished it up. He sounded like himself from the beginning, but he would not become the greatest French poet until, well, almost immediately after this book. Les songes en equilibre (1942) & Le tombeau des rois (1953) & Mystère de la parole (1960), Anne Hébert – Lovely dream and childhood poems from a Quebecois poet. I have not read Hébert in English, but I will bet there are some good translations. Her Catholic poems did not do much for me. If you have opinions about her fiction, please share them. Éthiopiques (1956), Léopold Sédar Senghor – One would not – I would not – guess that he would be President of Senegal four years later. I have visited his childhood home. Post-Scriptum (1960), Jorge de Sena Flores ao Telefone (1968) & Os Idólatras (1969), Maria Judite de Carvalho – I do not remember exactly how this book was recommended to me by a soon-to-be distinguished Portuguese author. “If you like sad stories about depressed people, these are good.” Carvalho has a place in Portuguese literature and feminism perhaps a little like Edna O’Brien in Ireland or Grace Paley in the United States, sharply ironic domestic stories, although without O’Brien’s sexual explicitness or Paley’s humor. Culture hero Margaret Jull Costa is bringing Carvalho into English and is presumably working right now on these books, recently published in Portuguese in Volume 3 of Carvalho’s collected works. Of course with that recommendation I had to buy a copy.
Two Junichiro Tanizaki novels from the 1920s for Japanese Literature Month over at Dolce Bellezza. Always interesting to see what people are reading. Thanks as usual. 18th edition! The two novels I read, Naomi (1924) and Quicksand (1928-30), are closely related. Both are about dominant and submissive sexual relations, an obsession of Tanizaki. Both were serialized in newspapers. How I wish the books had explanations of how the serialization worked. Both novels are written in, or at least translated as, plain, sometimes even dull prose, perhaps a consequence of tight serial deadlines. Both have narrators who may well be playing tricks on me, although if so I did not see the signals, and believe me I am alert to the signals, well-trained by Pale Fire and The Tin Drum and Villette and so on. Maybe Tanizaki’s tricks are different. Naomi is narrated by a creep of an engineer who picks up – grooms – a 15 year-old waitress who he finds especially “Western.” … most of her value to me lay in the fact that I’d brought her up myself, that I myself had made her into the woman she was, and that only I knew every part of her body. For me Naomi was the same as a fruit that I’d cultivated myself. I’d labored hard and spared no pains to bring that piece of fruit to its present, magnificent ripeness, and it was only proper that I, the cultivator, should be the one to taste it. No one else had that right. (Ch. 18, 161) Pure poison. By this point in the novel Naomi has taken power, well on her way to complete control, crushing her groomer, who is likely, it turns out, happier crushed. Much of the novel is set in the modern, Westernized Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo, before the terrible earthquake that obliterated the dancehalls and movie theaters. I found all of that detail quite interesting, as it was in Yasunari Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929-30). One more piece of bad luck and Naomi might have become one of the homeless teen prostitutes in The Scarlet Gang. Too bad Naomi does not have the innovative linguistic interest of Kawabata’s crackling novel. The Japanese title of Quicksand is a single character, the Buddhist swastika, a perfect representation of the content of the novel, which is a four-way struggle for dominance among the narrator, her girlfriend, her husband, and the girlfriend’s boyfriend. Some of the weapons in the struggle are pretty crazy, like a scene where the narrator and the girlfriend’s lunatic boyfriend swear a blood oath. Eh, they’re all crazy. The narrator is the eventual winner, obviously, I guess. Maybe she is making it all up. Quicksand has a lot in common with Ford Madox Ford’s devious The Good Soldier, another four-way struggle, but as I said if Tanizaki’s narrator is a tenth as tricky as Ford’s I sure couldn’t see it. She seems more unreliable in theory than practice. One technique that is interesting and may hold clues: Tanizaki and the narrator return to key scenes, describing what happened from different perspectives, yes, like in Akutagawa’s “In a Bamboo Grove” (1922), except everything is filtered through the narrator, which does have the appearance of what I am calling a trick, a technique of emphasizing and controlling unreliability. How newspaper readers followed this over two full years baffles me, but my understanding is that the lesbian aspect got the attention. I have trouble imaging the literary world where these were newspaper novels. Naomi was in fact too shocking and was booted from the newspaper, with Tanizaki completing it in a magazine. Should I give an example of what I mean by dull prose? Is it worth the tedium of the typing? I mean that there is a lot of this: “Were you still asleep, Mitsu?” “Your phone call wakened me!” “I can leave anytime now. Won’t you come right away too?” “Then I’ll hurry up and get ready. Can you be at the Umeda station by half-past nine?” “You’re sure you can?” “Of course I am!” (Quicksand, Ch. 15, 98) And this is nominally supposed to be the narrator telling her story to Tanizaki. Serialization filler? Maybe you can see why I am not in a hurry to solve the puzzle of Quicksand. The appeal of both novels, for me, was exploring the psychology of the believably awful characters and seeing how their less believable awful schemes work out. Anthony Chambers translated Naomi; Howard Hibbett did Quicksand.
The teens living in the garden in the YA romantasy The Story of the Stone spend a lot of time reading forbidden books, much older YA romantasys. These books are all famous classical Chinese plays. Cao Xueqin gives a couple of chapters early on to their reading, including a list of titles. I figured I’d better try one of them. How about The Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu, written in 1598, an exciting time in English and Spanish drama, too. The play is really an opera, partly sung and partly spoken, a monster, eighteen hours long in a complete performance, a wild mix of stories and tones. An attempt at the story: beautiful young Bridal Du begins her education with a tutor. The explication of four lines of 2,500 year-old Chinese poetry, the limit of her education, are enough to make her curious about the outside world. She goes for a walk in an artificial garden where, in the title’s Peony Pavilion, she falls into a dream where she meets and has sex with a stranger, an experience so powerful that after waking she soon dies. This is one-third of the way in. Luckily the lover is real and stumbles across the garden. After an idyllic period of ghost sex, he figures out how to resurrect Bridal Du, launching the final third of the play which is full of bandits, severed heads, mistaken identities, and heroic test-taking. There is a scene I have never encountered in dramatic form before, Scene 41, where the test examiners grades essays: Every kind of error: what a bunch of blockheads grinding their ink for nothing, not one brush “bursts into flower.” (230) What could be more dramatic than watching a teacher grade papers? The Peony Pavilion also has comic scenes in Hell, songs about manure, comics scenes with a couple of slapstick servants, and a comic scene with a pompous government inspector. I thought this scene must be one of the most cut – the entire opera has been performed rarely, or perhaps never before 1999 (!) – but no, it is one of the most performed, historically, often performed on its own at village festivals. The text is full of quotations and lines and entire poems from two thousand years of Chinese poetry, all identified, as above, by quotation marks and occasionally by footnote identification, but there is so much quotation that the editor gives up on identifying the authors by page 5. The quotations are sometimes turned into dirty jokes or elaborate poetry games much like the kids play in The Story of the Stone. It is all the most amazing thing, is what I am saying, one piece of craziness after another. Someday I will have to read more of these things, and maybe a book or two about how to read them. Cao Xueqin clearly learned more about writing his novel from these plays than from earlier Chinese novels. “It’s very pretty in the garden” but “[t]hat garden is a vast and lonely place” (Sc. 11, 54). Oh, why are classical plays forbidden to the 18th century youth? One, kids are not supposed to be wasting their time with romantasys but instead reading the Five Classics and practicing calligraphy; second, the plays will give young ladies corrupting ideas about falling in love and marrying who they want rather than the dud or monster chosen by their parents. Cyril Birch is the translator. Page references are to the Indiana University Press 2nd edition. The image is from the 1998 Peter Sellars production of The Peony Pavilion. How I wish I had seen it. Tan Dun’s music for that production (the album is titled Bitter Love) is worth hearing.
How I wish all long novels were published in sensible multi-volume editions. I have finished The Story of the Stone, 2,500 pages in five volumes, the last two translated by John Minford. Cao Xueqin and his posthumous editor Gao E again share credit for authorship. Chapters have become shorter and a few episodes seem abbreviated, but otherwise I have no sense of who did what. Perhaps Minford smooths everything out for me. In the last 22 chapters and 380 pages the novel necessarily narrows. Necessarily if it is going to have an ending, which in this case it does. A series of catastrophes strike the family began hitting the family at the end of the last volume, and they only accelerate. Disgrace, crime, debt, deaths, so many deaths, some of them expected for a long time, some real surprises. One shocked even jaded ol’ me. There is some resemblance to the occasional contemporary event of the Chinese billionaire who suddenly falls from party favor and is arrested for corruption. The garden, scene of so many teenage poetry games, is abandoned, a haunted ruin: The Garden’s caretakers saw nothing to be gained by staying. They all wanted to leave the place, and invented a whole series of incidents to substantiate the presence of diabolical tree-imps and flower sprites. (Ch. 102, 72) In the next paragraph a minor character dies suddenly, perhaps as the result of sexual assault by one of those flower sprites, more monstrous than their name suggests. Subplots resolve amidst the disasters and funerals. Story elements abandoned for 2,000 pages return. The architecture of this novel has some long, long arcs. Eventually, the story narrows back to Bao-yu, the boy born with the jade stone in his mouth, who had “degenerated into a complete idiot” (109, 79) to the point where I was beginning to wonder how he could continue to function as a protagonist. But the magical monk, seen rarely but at key moments previously, returns to take our away from the earthly plane into the Daoist fairy realm. More or less. “I know I’ve been somewhere like this before. I remember it now. It was in a dream. What a blessing this is, to return to the scene of my childhood dream!” (116, 286) Bao-yu is here in a complex dream chapter paralleling one that was well over 2,000 pages earlier, pulling together all of the major teenage female characters, dead and alive, like a last farewell to them before Bao-yu himself exits the novel just slightly ahead of the reader. But not before he – I am giving away an important part of the story – so skip ahead if this bothers you – but seriously you probably want to know this one, it is so good – not before saving his family from disgrace by getting a high score on a test. The Chief Examiner presented the successful candidates’ compositions to the throne, and His Majesty read them through one by one and found them to be well-balanced and cogent, displaying both breadth of learning and soundness of judgment… His Majesty, as a consequence of this information, being a monarch of exceptional enlightenment and compassion, instructed his minister, in consideration of the family’s distinguished record of service, to submit a full report on their case. (119, 351) So most of the characters, if they made it this far, get a happy ending of one kind or another. It is not so much that The Story of the Stone is the greatest Chinese novel but rather that it is the greatest Chinese novel. “What is truth, and what fiction? You must understand that truth id fiction, and fiction truth.” (103, 94) This from another (or perhaps the same) magical monk. The words “truth” and “fiction” are puns on the names of the two branches of the novel’s family. Bao-yu is on the fiction side, and to the extent that Cao Xueqin is his double so is the author. The great paradox of the novel, from beginning to end, is the contrast between the materialistic, dangerous “realistic” world of the adults with its budgets and corruption and the idyllic, fantastic world of the kite-flying, poetry-reciting teenagers in the garden, both ephemeral compared to Daoist eternity. What then, was Cao Xueqin doing, who does not become a monk but rather writes a monumental realistic (and ant-realistic, and unrealistic) novel based on his early adolescent moment of happiness? He finds an alternative immortality. “So it was really all utter nonsense! Author, copyist, and reader were alike in the dark! Just so much ink splashed for fun, a diversion!” (120, 375, almost the last words of the novel)
What did I read in 2024? The best book I read last year was Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE). Best books, really, in translations by Arthur Golding and Charles Martin. My “best book of the year” answer will never be interesting. America’s librarian Nancy Pearl asked, somewhere on Twitter, if people thought they had already read the best book they would ever encounter. The answers were, by far, that they had not, which is even possible, for them, but I have read The Odyssey and King Lear and Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and so on, a lot of books, a lot of great, great books. The odds are low. Maybe the best book of 2025 will be The Odyssey. It has been a while. My favorite book, maybe. I kept up on my French, and learned a lot of Portuguese. A week of intensive French in a classroom in Porto helped a lot. I could use some more of those. I read some long books: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (1110), Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), the first 2,200 pages or so of Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (c. 1760) and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1931), barely over six hundred pages but in such difficult French that I am counting it, am I ever. I built little projects around several books, piling more Persian books around Shanameh and Chinese literature around The Story of the Stone. I did the same thing during the summer with Arabic literature while reading The Arabian Nights (13th c.) in Husain Haddawy’s great, not especially long, translation, adding modern poetry by Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish and a novel and book of stories by Naguib Mahfouz. My kind of fun. Let’s see. I read nine Percival Everett books, including James (2024) just a bit before everyone else read it. How odd it felt to have read anew book that so many other people were reading. The best contemporary book I read, though, was easily Judi Dench’s Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent. It is “Dench and her interviewer friend working through every Shakespeare role she ever did, all of which she still has memorized,” enormously pleasurable for those of us who enjoy such things. What will I read in 2025? Some more long books, I hope. I have barely over a hundred pages of The Story of the Stone left. I enjoyed John Cowper Powys’s eccentric Wolf Solent (1929) last summer and will try The Glastonbury Romance (1932), preposterously long, any day now. Then what – The Tale of Genji? Another of the big Chinese monsters? Maybe Vassily Grossman’s Stalingrad? Someday, anyway, with luck. If Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75) counts as one novel, which it does not, that will be one of my long ones. Brad “Neglected Books” Bigelow is hosting a year-long readalong, one short novel per month. I just finished the first book, A Question of Upbringing (1951) and will tag along for a while. Unfortunately discussions will be on Zoom but what are ya gonna do, who wants to write anything anymore. Speaking of which, in the spirit of reading the Greek plays, I would like to begin a Not Shakespeare project, let’s say next fall, where I read and write about not all but many of the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, The Spanish Tragedy, those folks, not that one could not also read some Shakespeare along the way. A play every two weeks maybe? If anyone is interested in joining in, please let me know. The WPA poster can be found at the Library of Congress site. I have put it up before. It is full of truth.
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Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Writing in the Dark” by Denise Levertov appeared first on The American Scholar.
Often, I think of the late Adam Zagajewski urging young poets – and by extension, the rest of us -- to “read everything.” The suggestion is not dictatorial. The Pole even admits he is a “chaotic reader,” as most of us are. I’ve never been systematic about much of anything and inevitably there are embarrassing holes in my education. Call it the Autodidact Syndrome. When it comes to books, we never know in advance what will come in handy, which volume will help solve a problem we didn’t know we were asking. Here is Zagajewski the literary cheerleader: “Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry, sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss, or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies and your friends, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can’t yet understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.” Zagajewski’s enthusiasm is almost embarrassing but the juggernaut of aliteracy and the threat it poses to Western Civilization may already be irreversible. My friend Cynthia Haven published an interview with Zagajewski not long after his death in 2021 in which she reminds him of his “read everything” essay. He replies: “What can I say? I’m in favor of reading and taking into consideration past writers. But you know, I don’t know ancient Greek, my Latin almost doesn’t exist; I’m not one of those lofty professors who know everything and terrorize others with their perfect erudition. What’s important is to think, to read, to meditate, to react, to be imaginative. Sometimes a reduced reading list, if given strong attention, can be better than a classical education when pursued somewhat mechanically. Of course I want the past writers to persist but first of all I want thinking and being moved by intelligent texts to persist.” Good advice. Don’t be intimidated by the vastness of the reading list. Choose a volume someone once mentioned he enjoyed or that had a strong emotional or intellectual impact on him. Say, the Life of Johnson, Richard Wilbur’s poems, Gershom Scholem’s Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, a novel by P.G. Wodehouse or Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life. Read it and see where it carries you.
Where we go when we go to sleep and why we go there is one of the great mysteries of the mind. Why the mind at times refuses to go there, despite the pleading and bargaining of its conscious owner, is a greater mystery still. We know that ever since REM evolved in the bird brain, the third of our lives we spend sleeping and dreaming has been a crucible of our capacity for learning, emotional regulation, and creativity. But the price we have paid for these crowning curios of consciousness has been savage self-consciousness, thought turned in on itself,… read article
For me, fiction is a space of plainness and excess. Amina Cain When TS Eliot read Dante for the first time, he noted a discrepancy between his enjoyment and his understanding, leading to the famous claim that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood". He warns potential readers against two extremes: believing one has to master the theology, structure and historical context of the Commedia to appreciate its poetry or that knowledge is irrelevant to further enjoyment, which is why he thinks many readers' enjoyment is limited to the local thrills of Inferno. The warning holds today as we remain uncertain about the role literature plays in our lives: is it a repository of instrumental knowledge, cod liver oil for the soul, or pure escapism? "All three" is the public answer, except the distinctions are never clear and never overtly discussed despite fueling an entire literary culture, manifesting in, for example, the Guardian's Where to start with series in which pellets of one are slipped inside morsels of another. (Dante started with a dark wood lacking a branch of Waterstone's.) In the months before I read the sentence in Amina Cain's A Horse at Night, I had stopped enjoying novels. I picked up several hailed as modern-day masterpieces and, despite their mutually incompatible variety, there was no spark. I bought and borrowed more seeking to break the cycle. Nothing worked. It would be easy to deceive myself into a rhetorical enjoyment, such as one reads every day in reviews, and I have often done that myself only later to reflect and regret, but I couldn't deny something was missing. Be assured this isn't a prelude to announcing the death of the novel and a call toward the tethered blimp of non-fiction, as I maintain faith in the indefinable potential of formal adventure. So if my loss of enjoyment was not the dulling of age, I wondered if there was a common absence. A answer came in that sentence. Eliot defined his enjoyment. He called it "poetic emotion". The quotation marks are his own as the phrase refers to his earlier essay on Hamlet and its definition of the Objective Correlative in which "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events" elicit a particular emotion. This suggests literature must stick to generic templates through which a skilled writer can provoke a response immanent to the work, and Eliot more or less confirms it by reckoning Hamlet an "artistic failure" because Shakespeare did not find an objective correlative for Hamlet's behaviour that he superimposed onto the "cruder material" of earlier plays: "Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear." He dismisses the emotion as adolescent. However, if we go back to the essay on Dante, Eliot mitigates the mixture of autobiography, lyric poetry and allegory comprising the Vita Nuova because it is a recipe "not available to the modern mind", the one that assumes biographical detail is an exposé of a personality. Instead, in Dante's case it is a report of personal experiences that were important not because they happened to Dante but because they had "philosophical and impersonal value". We might ask in response: when did a change occur that makes such a recipe unavailable to us? Perhaps it was changing in Shakespeare's time and that is precisely what makes Hamlet an excessive play. For Dante, the inexpressible and excess of facts took the form of Beatrice, a childhood love who becomes a personification of the divine and leads to a religious commitment. For Hamlet (the man), the opposite is the case. What presents itself to him is not an undoubted human presence and its gift of beatitude but a ghost he may have hallucinated and yet whose demands press upon him. Can he trust the experience? If it is false, how can he trust himself? If it is genuine, how can he trust the world? If Eliot thinks Hamlet's angst is adolescent, it may be because such introversion is now firmly embedded in the modern mind (as embodied by a certain J. Alfred Prufrock) and so easily dismissed, whereas in Shakespeare's time it was only just emerging and out of joint with what was firmly embedded then and responsible for the plays Eliot judged as "assured" artistic successes. Vita Nuova and Hamlet are anomalies in literary history (anomalies define literary history), and what they both exhibit and what they both emerge from is excess and deprivation. The combination plays out differently in each: for Dante, the excess of emotion caused by Beatrice's presence and the deprivation experienced when she withheld her greeting and then when she died is transfigured into a mystical apocalypse and a key to salvation. His new life will be one of praise. For Hamlet the excess of ambiguity and subsequent deprivation of trust leads to behaviour that nowadays might be considered signs of a breakdown. What they also have in common is a meeting of the personal and the other-worldly. William Franke says the Vita Nuova is modelled on the New Testament gospels in which the experience of the apparent son of God remains central to the life of the writer. Beatrice was Dante's path to God and lyric poetry was his witness, the only proper means of communicating the revelation, with the prose commentary grounding the divine in everyday experience. The phenomenon of transcendence that Beatrice was for Dante became possible "only by the instrumentality of the lyric, specifically by virtue of its powers to express registers of personal experience in which subjective response and feeling are constitutive parts or aspects of objective events, not secondary and less real". Franke compares this to Christ's beatitudes that "lend themselves...to liturgical recitation and serve as kernels inviting supplemental elaboration in the form of illustrative narratives or parables and edifying doctrinal discourses". Hamlet does not have this resource and the very different form the play takes from Dante's little book indicates stages in a long process in which lyric poetry and literary prose finally become divorced, as described by Robert Alter, cited by Franke. The progressive narrativization of verse specifically in the refashioning and transmutation of biblical poetry into epic narration...describes a natural evolution starting from poetry, as the original form of literary expression, and moving to prose as its extension and elaboration. The process follows the incremental secularisation of Western society and the decline of the effects of revelation. It may explain why certain phrases in Hamlet have become embedded in everyday life in the same way as lines of poetry have (and so the apocryphal story of someone complaining that the play is full of quotations), while passages of novels, the exemplary form of disenchantment, have not (and indeed why poetry and plays have become minor forms in literary culture). Of course, novels are often common reference points, but nobody has lines running through their heads or recites passages off the cuff. They neither lend themselves to recitation nor to the rituals of performance. By becoming wholly extension and elaboration, prose has freed itself from its roots in lyric poetry and in the process that which exceeds the everyday, divine or otherwise. The lyrical state is a state beyond forms and systems. EM Cioran So it was when I read Amina Cain's sentence that I recognised the problem. Plainness and excess has become prosaic. Plainness has become unimpeachable by making the everyday consequential in itself, though this has constantly to be renewed with critical hype – Dirty Realism was all the rage when I got into reading – and yet the residue of lyric and its promise of something other than the everyday remains: revelation has become a ghost in popular features such the 'twist in the tale' and the resolution of a plot, while in more refined circles, the possibility of revelation is present in the value afforded to 'experimental' writing which seems to promise that "under the myopic scrutiny of a good close reading" as Catherine Liu puts it "an obdurate, clam-like text [would] give up its iridescent pearl of gorgeous meaning". Meanwhile, excess is converted into maximalist world-building breezeblocks telling stories spanning continents and centuries, packed with history, adventure, romance, horror and fantasy. Each, however, remains undisturbed by the excess of its own presence, the incomprehensible revelation that with one sentence, however plain, however excessive, something has been added to the world, in the world as a product of a culture, yet not completely of the world. The surprise of distance. This has an effect comparable to that which Beatrice had on Dante and the ghost had on Hamlet; comparable but distinct, as it goes unnoticed. You can see the return of the repressed in "lyrical humanism", the form Lee Rourke diagnosed as the default mode of 'literary fiction', poised uneasily between popular and elite culture. With 'poetic' prose, it seeks to enchant a world without transcendence, standing in for that transcendence, and while it is ultimately empty, drawing the contempt of popular authors, it comforts the reader as much as the cushions on their conservatory armchair. (Dirty Realism is lyrical humanism in black and white.) We overlook its origins because the reception of contemporary novels follows Eliot by using contemporary mutations of the objective correlative to contain the terms of evaluation. The sparkless cycle was broken when in a desultory search I picked out Thomas Bernhard's 1967 novel Verstörung, unfortunately translated as Gargoyles (it means Disturbance or Derangement) and began to read it for the first time in 25 years. I had regarded it as an also-ran among his novels, perhaps because the first of its two chapters is a plain story. A doctor's son home from college is listening to his father describing his rounds in a handful of small Austrian towns. There was a schoolteacher in Salla who he found dying and then a child in Hüllberg who fell into a tub of boiling water. The visits wear him down and the death of his wife and his daughter's suicide attempt hang over him. Despite this, the son's presence gives him cheer and he speaks of the restorative effects of nature. They prepare for a walk along the local river but are immediately interrupted by an urgent call to attend an innkeeper's wife in Gradenberg who has been bludgeoned by a drunken miner. The son accompanies the father to the inn and then the hospital, where she dies. Crime, sickness, psychological distress and death pervade the region with son and father like Dante and Virgil on a travelogue through Hell, only without Dante's contrapasso placing the suffering in God's design. Purgatory of sorts is suggested when they reach the father's friend Bloch, an estate agent. The father finds some equilibrium by discussing political and philosophical issues with him and borrowing the big books of European thought from his library: Pascal, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche. He says Bloch resists despair by "seeing his life as an easily understood mechanism" he can adjust as necessary to practical ends. The son, a student of mining, agrees: "It was worth making the maximum effort to shake off a tendency to despair". Next they visit a wealthy industrialist who also seeks to make the maximum effort, in his case by shutting himself up in a hunting lodge to write on a literary work on a "purely philosophical subject". Father and son enter the lodge and walk on wooden floorboards through dark and barely furnished rooms. The son wishes to scream and throw open the shutters, but makes the effort to check himself. Throughout the first half then the tension between mind and body, between self and world, is held in place by the firebreak between the observer and observed. The son is part of the world, partly outside. The plain act of description maintains literary sanity, with its correlative in the story being the father's commentary on the cases in the sanctuary of the car as they drive towards the summit of the purgatorial mountain. It is here that they meet Prince Saurau on the outer wall of Hochgobernitz Castle perched high above the surrounding countryside, a paradise of sorts. It is also where the second chapter begins and is what led Italo Calvino to call Gargoyles one of the great novels of the 20th century. The Prince greets the visitors and immediately begins talking about the three applicants for the job he had advertised that morning, commenting on their dress, their demeanour, their background, their family, the towns they come from and, leaping from one subject to another, doesn't stop talking for the next 140 pages. He is enraged by the "idiotic bureaucratic rabble" that runs the Austrian state who have "expropriated" everything. He repeats variations of "expropriated" several times, and then "empty" several times. "Everything is empty!". In his analysis he comes across as intensely sensitive, lucid perhaps, and in the repetitions on the edge of madness. As is familiar in Bernhard's novels, the conditions cannot be separated. If the Prince hasn't descended entirely it is because the repetitions of words and phrases coalesce to maintain him in an oscillation above his abyss, even if it is an oscillation in which anger, loneliness, alienation, distress and despair comprise its dynamo. The Prince's compulsive repetitions form a lyricism in the absence of meaning, a revelation of sorts. Gershom Scholem called it the nothingness of revelation: "a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance. A state in which the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the process of appearing...still does not disappear." It is a state we recognise in the process of reading Gargoyles. A more straightforward reader may interpret the condition as purely medical and the novel merely a case study, while admiring Bernhard's skill in capturing the symptoms. Lyricism has its place in these conditions, as Cioran observed: It is significant that the beginnings of all mental psychoses are marked by a lyrical phase during which all the usual barriers and limits disappear, giving way to an inner drunkenness of the most fertile, creative kind. This explains the poetic productivity characteristic of the first phases of psychoses. Consequently, madness could be seen as a sort of paroxysm of lyricism. [Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston] Except the condition enabling such a diagnosis is not an uncontaminated onlooker: rationalism could be seen as a paroxysm of psychic catalepsy, the checked scream in recognition of the eternal silence of infinite space beyond the shutters of science, unwilling to confront the utter mystery of conscious existence. Pascal's famous line is the appropriate epigram to Gargoyles. With this in mind, we may turn to German Idealism and the intellectual history of the deus absconditus to recognise that the Prince is in a "delirium of loss" whose theological ground is set out by Alina Feld in Melancholy and the Otherness of God. The unhappy consciousness is "torn between finitude and the infinite, between the fallen and the ideal, between the human self and transcendent God". And while this condition appears to be conclusive, the form it takes remains part of the possible paroxysm, with catalepsy its cure. The lack of satisfaction in rational codefication is why we turn to novels, to its excess of the world, to writing that has an openness to an apparent outside, made apparent by writing, however deceptive. What is revealed in reading Gargoyles, and by extension in all novels, is a relation to what does and at the same time does not exist. The Prince's disturbance of this novel in particular is a disturbance of the novel in its generic safety and its readers seeking knowledge, cod liver oil for the soul and escapism. It is the revelation of the novel as an other-worldly presence in our lives, a measure of forever, an enjoyment beyond our understanding.
