When John Updike read À la recherche du temps perdu after having read Scott-Moncrieff's translation, he was surprised to find Proust less Proustian, the epithet we associate with flowery prose blossoming over prodigious sentences proliferating clause within clause. While I cannot read French, this was also my experience of reading the new translations, first The Swann Way by Brian Nelson and now In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom by Charlotte Mandell. In the glow of remembering the experience of reading Within a Budding Grove, the prose of the new translation is less ornate, one might say more colloquial, at least no longer at arm's length from the decadence of fin de siècle France, an impression created perhaps by Scott-Moncrieff's grandiloquence. This worried me, as I've often described Proust to those who haven't read the novel as mind-expanding; one begins to follow thoughts into their depths of variation and reversal, suggesting that the recognition and interpretation of the signs of the world offers more to life than a novel's notable events, and I wondered if the overripe vocabulary and unusually generous size of the original typeface had something to do with this. With the new translations, one is sobered up enough from Scott-Moncrieff-intoxication to draw alongside Marcel the man himself, realising only too painfully one has failed to heed the lessons in love he presents with such eloquence and precision. With some shame, the reader comes to identify with Swann and Marcel. In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom is a novel written in shade and sunlight. In the first part, Marcel's frustrated love for Swann's daughter Gilberte is given a long post-mortem, much as The Swann Way is a post-mortem for Swann's jealous love for Gilberte's mother Odette, while in the second Marcel has moved on from Gilberte and is spending Summer in a high-end hotel in Balbec on the Normandy coast. There he becomes infatuated with a "little band" of teenage girls he sees cycling around the resort, getting up to minor mischief. He describes their clothes and features lit by sunlight brightened by the sea, trying to discern their secrets, longing to get closer. Each day is charged by the thrill of catching a glimpse. The evocation of teenage kicks is hard to beat, provoking memories and melancholy shared by the reader. It comes so quickly, the time when you have nothing left to look forward to, when your body is fixed in a state of immobility that promises no more surprises, when you lose all hope at the sight of faces that are still young framed by hair that's falling out or growing grey, like a tree in full summer with leaves that are already dead; it is so short, this radiant morning, that one comes to love only very young girls, the ones in whom the flesh, like a precious dough, is still rising. They are nothing but a pliable flow of matter, constantly moulded by whatever passing impression dominates them at the time.  Back at the hotel, the family becomes acquainted with the painter Elstir who, impressed by Marcel, invites him to his studio, but Marcel keeps putting it off because he cannot bear to miss an opportunity to spot the little band. This proves to be an error. It is decades since my reading of Terence Kilmartin's revision of Scott-Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past and then Penguin's retitled re-translation, and I was alarmed by how much detail was unfamiliar; I had forgotten entirely Madame Swann's little salon and images of train journeys, visits to Elstir's studio and sightings of the little band were only vague. What I do remember very clearly is fresh air and brilliant light, as if the novel itself is a holiday in the sun. While this exposes dilettantish tendencies, it may be fairer to compare the condition to the narrator's experience of enchantment with the group of girls. Likewise, we are enchanted by certain books and, like Marcel, we can be "profoundly surprised" each time we are in their presence, which in his case he puts down to "the multiplicity of each individual" compared to when "we are left alone with the arbitrary simplicity of our memory". Our relationship to a book can also follow the via dolorosa of disenchantment and Marcel's post-mortem commentary bulks out that path, accessorising what is otherwise an unremarkable story, so perhaps I had become jaded over the decades. Except, commentary does not constitute forgotten detail, as the winding sentences unconsciously nourish the growth of the reader's quality of perception, acting at a crude level like a prose exposition of a poem or to the summary of a dream minus the purity of its experience. Purity shines like the Balbec sun.  Seeking to recover the dream, to give the purity of the experience a presence we might hold and share, we turn to plot summaries, biographies, scholarly monographs, documentaries, film adaptations, even blog posts, leaving us in a state of literary insomnia comparable to a night in the hotel in which an exhausted Marcel tosses and turns in bed, kept awake by the dread of sleeplessness. All of a sudden I did fall asleep; I fell into that deep sleep that opens up for us a return to childhood, the rediscovery of years past and emotions once felt, disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the recollection of the dead, the illusions of madness, regression to the most primitive forms of nature (for it's said we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that, almost always when we dream, we ourselves are animals deprived of the rationality that projects the light of certainty onto things; on the contrary, all we can direct at the spectacle of life is an uncertain gaze constantly being obliterated by forgetfulness, each reality vanishing before the next takes its place like the ever-shifting projection of a magic lantern as the slides are changed) all these mysteries we think we don't know but into which we are actually initiated almost every night, just as we're introduced to the other great mystery of annihilation and resurrection.  The places to which we are taken in this passage and the music in Charlotte Mandell's beautifully invisible translation is reminiscent of the unrelenting procession of the dreams of which it speaks, and in this we might recognise that literature is, like dream, in excess of the world. We cannot access its mysteries by day.   Blanchot notes that modern literature has "a preoccupation with a profoundly continuous speech" giving rise "with Lautréamont, with Proust, then with surrealism, then with Joyce...to works that were manifestly scandalous". Scandalous not because of the content but because an "excess of continuity unsettles the reader, and unsettles the reader's habits of regular comprehension". Again, like dreaming. The excess of continuity draws us close to what is discontinuous of habitual life, to what remains stubbornly unfamiliar and yet into which we are initiated in certain books, the axe-books Kafka said we needed. This may in turn explain why novelists like Beckett and Bernhard, as different from Proust as one can imagine, are nevertheless closer companions than those who write regular novels of time and memory. If we compare this to Heidegger's claim that the measure of a great poet is to the extent they are able to commit to "one single poetic statement", a statement that is not explicit, we can appreciate that such continuousness is the outpouring of what cannot be stated and that our attachment to a particular book is not something we can properly articulate without becoming novelists ourselves. Marcel recognises this once he is initiated into friendship with the little band: It was on them that my thoughts contentedly dwelled when I thought I was thinking of something else, or of nothing. But when, even without realizing it, I thought of them, at an even deeper level of unconsciousness they were the hilly blue undulations of the sea, a procession silhouetted against the sea. It was the sea I was hoping to find again, if I went to some town where they might be. The most exclusive love for a person is always love for something else.   To discover something else, our true love, we might ask: how can we sleep? This may be the question for the literature of our time. Note In Proust Regained, I wrote about Brian Nelson's translation The Swann Way and included links to other posts of mine on Proust and In Search of Lost Time.

In an in-between time in which nothing begins or ends, in which blank patience takes the place of activity, I picked two books from my shelves stubbornly remote from utility, lacking the intimacy of possession, and a third in which I had never read a key section. The first was Peter Handke's Crossing the Sierra del Gredos, a 472-page novel narrated by a writer employed by financial operative to write something about her and which I abandoned eighteen years ago retaining no memory of its content. This time, I read page after page in a reverie of detachment. 1 Then there was Geoffrey Hill's collected poems Broken Hierarchies, a book whose word choice and subject matter is fiercely English and Christian or, perhaps more accurately, Protestant and Anglo-Saxon, which despite being English and culturally Christian, remains alien to me. Why did I think a huge edition like this presented and read in chronological order would enable something previously declined? No doubt I assumed from immersion some sort of knowledge or at least familiarity was to be gained. Perhaps I might draw closer to the distinction of my ancestral lands. Reading from where I left off provoked the same cool reverie and with it the assumption of gain fell away. Thirdly, there were the pages prefacing Maurice Blanchot's Infinite Conversation: italicised dialogue and commentary I have always skipped, or read without memory of having read, in a book otherwise opened so often it is held together by masking tape; skipped not only because of the tightly-bound typeface – why do italicised paragraphs repel our eyes? – but because they are abstract and anonymous; there is no listing in the table of contents and no names or titles cited to orientate us within a recognisable discourse, only mundane and hyperbolic expressions of weariness and what weariness means in context. If I were to insert an example quotation here it would only to betray what I began writing this to say, and indeed to name these books let alone summarise them obscures what I experienced.  In this empty time such reading, hardly reading at all actually, closer to passive looking, attentive only to the space opening before my eyes in the steady progress of lines and sentences, I chanced upon what felt like the pure mode of literature, an experience apart, an effortless drift from rational comprehension into the enchantment of a pale expanse, with no wish continue and no wish to stop.   Note  The original title is Der Bildverlust, oder, Durch die Sierra del Gredos. Why FSG chose to exclude the first part of the title, coined it appears by this novel and which translates as The Loss of Images, is unknown, but predictable (later we saw it with Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady reduced by Jonathan Cape to Montano). Imagine a German edition of Melville's novel abridged to Der Wal.↩

Two intellectual memoirs dominated my reading over Spring, three if WG Sebald's Silent Catastrophes can be included given that its analysis of the careers of various Austrian writers illuminates Sebald's own literary trajectory.1 Peter Brown's Journeys of a Mind: A Life in History is over 700 pages but remains fascinating upto and including the final page, and while Giorgio Agamben's Self-Portrait in the Studio is over 500 pages shorter, reading it again only multiplies the pleasure. All three writers display a commitment to their research not limited to a 9-to-5 academic career. It is embedded in their lives;2 the two surviving authors are still working in their 80s. But why did they dominate my reading? I wondered if it was a vicarious living of an alternative life, the one in which I was able to dedicate my time to reading and writing, perhaps to enable a more satisfying production. I daydream of the garden offices I see advertised in my Instagram feed in which I might escape distraction and finally concentrate after decades of superficiality. The archive of this blog reveals a movement from naive enthusiasms and bitter agitations to more ambitious content that doesn't quite escape the original form and may in fact diminish its strengths. At its best, blog writing glances at subjects, whether that is a new book or literary current affair, acting as the corner of an eye catching sight of something regular coverage blanks out, while, at its worst, it merely imitates.3 Ultimately, however, it remains a dilettantism. It doesn't nourish. At least, that is what I have felt. Then I reread the passage in Self-Portrait in the Studio in which Agamben writes of a postcard on his studio desk of a 17th century painting depicting a woman feeding from her own breast.4 After acknowledging its 'cloying lineage', he argues for it as an allegory of the soul nourishing itself. He asks what it means to nourish oneself: "What is a light that feeds itself? A flame that no longer needs fuel?" In the process of nourishing—in any kind of nourishing, spiritual or bodily—there is a threshold at which the process reverses direction and turns back towards itself. Food can nourish only if at a certain point it is no longer something other than us, only if we have—as they say—assimilated it; but this means—to the exactly the same degree—that we are assimilated to it. The same thing happens with the light of knowledge: it always arises from outside, but there arrives a moment when inside and outside meet and we can no longer tell them apart. At this point, the fire ceases to consume us, 'it now consumes itself'.5 This, I realised, was why these books had dominated. Each in its way marks multiple crossings of thresholds, the meetings of inside and outside, and I was drawn to these books because I was aware that I had been impatient for such a threshold to make itself known and want to know how others had climbed above the shameful lowlands of secondary writing. Like so many others, I had sought assimilation in the consumption of ideas, washing down the keywords and catchphrases of philosophy, literary criticism and critical theory like so many pills, downloaded using the convenient shortcuts technology offers, but which map only the landscape of the outside. No meeting ever arrives. Ten years ago when I read Nathaniel Davis' translation of 'Across the Border', Sebald's beautiful essay on Peter Handke's Repetition, a novel that had dazzled me in the late 1980s alongside Slow Homecoming, Across, and The Afternoon of a Writer, I was also dazzled. I had read the novel several times was frustrated each time that I couldn't find words to express why it and the three other novels had stood out above almost everything else I had read,6 and Sebald's essay only deepened the frustration as it focuses on the novel's metaphysical ideas, its mythological scheme, and its relation to the theme of 'Heimat' in Austrian literature and Filip Kobal's quest for redemption from the inheritance of fascist violence; that is, nothing much to do with me, but did help me to understand "the particular light which filters through" the novel, the words Sebald uses to describe Handke's prose in Repetition. The light made "the text itself a place of refuge among the arid zones" and "by the power of words alone" made visible "a world more beautiful than this one". Reading Jo Catling's translation of the essay in a book we have waited for two decades and on which I hope to write more, I realised the larger issues had over those years become embedded in me, so familiar that I could set them aside to concentrate on what really nourishes, perhaps refuge, beauty and redemption. This is another reason why the books dominated: they emphasised the value of finding what such nourishment rather than trying to assimilate the food that passes right through. Assimilation may take a lifetime to arrive, but, as Blanchot says: "The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way that ought to lead there."  Notes Terry Pitts' two-part review of the collection is especially good on this.↩ This becomes clear in the remarkable final section of Agamben's What I saw, heard, learned in which he remembers a note he wrote as a child that "seemed to be the secret core of my philosophy"↩ All these years later I still cringe at the memory of when the Litblog Co-Op, set up to promote formally adventurous fiction and challenge the conservative coverage of print newspapers, announced its first 'Read This!' promotion as Kate Atkinson's best-selling novel Case Histories with the co-op member referring to the author as "a juicy pro", as if novelists were gymnasts and the novel a pommel horse.↩ The painting by Giovanni Serodine is given the title as Allegory of Science by the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but most other sources refer to it as Allegorical Female Figure.↩ Agamben is quoting Plato's Seventh Letter on which he bases the claim.↩ I wrote a blogpost on three of the four and another on Handke's book-length poem To Duration also written in the mid-1980s but didn't appear in English translation for another 25 years.↩

The premise of this multi-volume novel is simple: a modern-day French woman called Tara finds herself stuck inside the eighteenth day of a November. The nineteenth never appears. On the 121st iteration of the same day she begins to write by describing the sounds made by her husband Thomas as he moves around upstairs. The same moves, the same noises every day. A simple premise and very promising, but very difficult to turn into a compelling narrative. If everything she sees and hears is going to be the same from one day to the next, variation or resolution can only undermine the conceit, making the novel the diary of an anecdote, essentially a ghost story,1 but if there is no variation or resolution, boredom and impatience are inevitable. And the novel is indeed fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, as the premise gives the reader an existential thrill imagining what such a condition might entail while also wondering how the constraint on the story will develop, and perhaps even resolve, but frustrating because there are only so many meditations on a regular day one can read. The novel is filled out with Tara's precise observations of her surroundings and descriptions of the events leading up to the "rift in time", a level-headed attention suggested by the title, all of which may be interesting in context, but not otherwise. However, any longueurs are mitigated when, longing for a world in which time passes, she tries to reach the nineteenth. She interrupts Thomas' routine and explains the situation in the hope that he will be able to lead her into the next day, but by morning he has to be told all over again. However, this does have its unique joys: We woke in the morning, we went for walks, we sat down and had coffee somewhere on the eighteenth of November. For most of the day as intimately aware of one another as couples in the first flush of love or nearsighted creatures. We made the horizon vanish. We sought this giddy feeling. The distance between us was dispelled in the fog. We made the giddiness a part of our day. Created a bright space out of dazed, gray confusion. The reader nevertheless is impatient for a resolution and spins the hands of the clock forward enabled by the smooth translation of Balle's uncluttered prose, only to discover on closing the book that there is a serenity in the stability of Tara's infinite crisis, and now that serenity is gone. This may be why there are several more volumes ahead, just as there is always another book to read. Translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland Part one of On the Calculation of Volume has been reviewed widely and made the International Booker Prize shortlist and came top of the Shadow Panel's vote.2 While many of the reviews place the novel within a generic tradition and cite one of the most famous novels about time as a literary predecessor, not one review that I've found recognises the significance of the apparently random date chosen for Tara to explore. Had they wondered why a Danish author chose to write a multi-volume novel about time from the perspective of a French woman, they may have discovered that the eighteenth of November is the day in 1922 on which the author of À la recherche du temps perdu died.3 There are other parallels: Tara's experience at the beginning of the rift is a neat inversion of Proust's narrator at the beginning of that novel: each morning he wakes in uncertainty to reconstruct reality from forgetful sleep, while she wakes to a sense of peace as the normality of another morning appears, only for its normality to dissolve. And when she tells Thomas everything and they stay awake all night hoping the nineteenth will appear in an entirely new dawn, a sudden imperceptible loss of concentration leads to him losing the memory of the day, a moment that reverses Proust's famous instants. Perhaps then this is a novel written from the end of time, from the blank space of death or, less morbidly, from eternity. For Nietzsche, eternity is precisely the revelation of time. In the face of relentless change, the serene stability of the novel is the ideal form to enable an experience of time in relation to eternity. This may explain why the rise of the novel coincided with the decline of faith and the disenchantment of the world: if poetry is the gift of eternity, the novel is the gift of time, and the novels of Proust and Solvej Balle seek to merge both in the flux of imagination and reality.4     David Lowery's movie A Ghost Story springs to mind here. A dead husband haunts the house he shared with his wife and watches from afar.↩ See the Booker Prize website and the Shadow Panel's Substack report. The latter tends to more reliable in purely literary terms as it's not driven by corporate demands.↩ A letter to the TLS mentions it in response to a review, but much is behind the paywall.↩ There is another connection, not film or book related. In the thinking of the experience of the same day and the fog obscuring the movement of the days, I remembered seeing J Mascis and the Fog perform the song Sameday live in Brighton many years ago. The Fog that night featured Mike Watt of Minutemen (and later the underrated Firehose) and Ron Asheton of The Stooges. ↩

On submission and resistance to AI-generated literature   To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in conclusions, feeling themselves thereby given back to life. For the genius each caesura, and the heavy blows of fate, fall like gentle sleep itself into his workshop labour. About it he draws a charmed circle of fragments.                                               – Walter Benjamin 1                      Many years ago I used this paragraph as the epigram to something of identical length – perhaps a short story or prose poem – as an alibi for its brevity and as a dig at the use of epigrams, a device as I saw it for co-opting the incontrovertibility of the one to win credence for the other. It was weightless until it dropped into memory when I read a similar point made by one of Benjamin's keenest readers in an intellectual memoir prompted by the objects in his workplace: The studio is the image of potentiality–of the writer's potentiality to write, of the painter's or sculptor's potentiality to paint or sculpt. Attempting to describe one's own studio thus means attempting to describe the modes of and forms of one's own potentiality–a task that is, at least on first glance, impossible. How can one have a potentiality? One cannot have a potentiality, one can only inhabit it.2 One can sense the weight of potential in the open notebooks on show, a place the reader inhabits examining the details. Potentiality is a subject embedded in Agamben's thinking and extends beyond practicalities, but what struck me in the photograph is that there is no computer in sight, not even a typewriter. Agamben makes no explicit mention of his working methold, but it's there to see. The clutter is a neat copy of the working mind as it seeks a completed work. The working method is also something I noticed on the cover of a very different but equally absorbing intellectual memoir whose cover has a cropped version of this photograph accompanying an interview. Peter Brown says his books are written by hand. And recently I heard that Peter Handke is the only author Suhrkamp allows to submit work handwritten in pencil. He wants to move slowly, allowing sentences to come from a great distance. His collection of notebooks pictured below provokes an overwhelming sense of potential.  The pleasure of writing by hand in notebooks is not in what one writes but in its opening onto possibility, the potential to become something complete. I write one sentence and a world opens. This is not possible on a computer because everything one types can be deleted in a moment (and usually is), whereas one is driven forward by the pen and potential is maintained despite striking out a typed or handwritten sentence; even an eraser leaves the ghost of a pencilled word. On completion, however, the world closes. As readers we know of Agamben, Brown and Handke only because of completion, and yet the presence of books like the self-portrait and Handke's The Weight of the World suggests Benjamin is right about the unique experience of potential, especially in light of these authors' prolific output, as if so many books are attempts not to add to the pile but to move in the opposite direction, towards potential. Writing longhand may be a resistance to completion and conclusions, very much against the grain of cultural demand. Image from The Goalie's Anxiety   Technology now at hand enables completion without the need to work through potential. Much anxiety has been expressed about the threat of the new generation of large language models (LLMs) to destroy livelihoods in the short term and to erase the social role of literature in the long. One professional writer says "We're screwed. Writing is over. That's it. It's time to pack away your quill, your biro, and your shiny iPad: the computers will soon be here to do it better." Meanwhile, the Society of Authors has staged a protest about copyright infringement and the Guardian has run a discussion of an AI-generated story by various professional authors in which worries about the lack of a human connection are expressed.  On a more philosophical level, it raises questions about the role of the writer in the writing process. The learning-theory guru Donald Clark reckons these are due only because we are "trapped in the late 18th [Century] Romantic view of authorship, the unique, divinely-inspired, creative spark of the individual". This has led to the Society of Authors appropriating the mystique of authorship to make it a respectable profession like carpet weaving or quantity surveying, while their public statements read like a corporate drone has written them.3 LLMs are really only the logical terminus of genre fiction that dominates book culture, the last thing the Society would march against.4 The scholar of digital literature Hannes Bajohr confirms AI is the genre author's secret sharer because it is designed to produce "normalization": Their output is convincing precisely when they are supposed to spit out what is expected, what is ordinary, what is statistically probable...And just as there are assistive marketing AIs for expectable marketing prose, there are now also assistive literature AIs for more or less expectable literature....Genre literature is virtually defined by the recurrence of certain elements, making it particularly suitable for AI generation. Like AI, genre writing minimises the creative workload for the author – each sentence an epigram – and allows easy digestion by the reader. This is has always been the ideal for the "feeble and distracted" to give themselves back to life without ever leaving it. Bajohr tells of the popular German writer Daniel Kehlmann's attempt to generated a story using a language model AI, which failed according to Kehlmann because it did not "seem good enough to be published as an artistic work rather than merely as the product of an experiment on an artistic level". "But" Bajohr asks "what does 'good enough' mean? Measured against what aesthetics?" When Kehlmann speaks of 'experiment', he seems not to have experimental literature in mind, but rather the scientific meaning of the word: a controlled observation whose outcome supports, weakens, or refines a hypothesis. But it does so...only within the framework of an existing paradigm – new paradigms are precisely not what scientific experiments establish. Experimental literature, on the other hand – at least according to its avant-garde self-image – does not want mere refinement, but ideally questions the paradigm of literature itself. Clark focuses on a "robot artist" that is at the forefront of challenging the paradigm of "the human-centric view of creativity as a uniquely human trait" in which: vast pools of media representing the sum total of all history, all cultural output from our species, has been captured and used to train huge multimodal models that allow our species to create a new future. With new forms of AI, we are borrowing to create the new. It is a new beginning, a fresh start using technology that we have never seen before in the history of our species, something that seems strange but oddly familiar, thrilling but terrifying. Examples are provided of "historical dawns that hinted at this future" such as the Library of Alexandria, "open to all containing the known world's knowledge" and latterly Wikipedia. The difference, he says is that AI is "much more profoundly communal". The examples remind us that AI is only the latest form of technology without which cultural production communal or otherwise would not be possible. Similar concerns were not expressed when a quill on papyrus became a fountain pen on mass-produced paper, or when a pen became a typewriter. Everything was positive moving forward. But of course there was concern following the invention of printing press and the subsequent availability of translations of the Bible into the vernacular, and this example immediately exposes the deeper issue lurking in the concern for AI-generated art. It is the ghost haunting Clark's assumption that art equals encyclopaedic knowledge, containing creativity within the boundaries of humanism. This is continued in his claim that we have entered a new era of artistic production defined by Nicolas Bourriaud as postproduction in which "art and cultural activity now interprets, reproduces, re-exhibits or utilises works made by others or from already available cultural products". If this seems familiar it's because it is the standard practice of postmodernism, with all the insoucient optimism that goes with it, and Clark does acknowledge that postmodernism shares with postproduction "themes of challenging originality and embracing plurality". The difference here is that this "moves us beyond simple curation, collages and mashups into genuinely new forms of production and expression". It cannot be pinned down to one word and we should "let the idea [of AI's 'outputs'] flutter and fly free from the prison of language".  Such optimism about new technology and the arts is nothing new: In the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. This part of Paul Valéry's essay The Conquest of Ubiquity from 1928 was used by Walter Benjamin as the epigram to his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in which he sees such technological innovations as enabling a change in human perception, in this case the inexhaustible repetition of previously immutable works of art presented in limited arenas are injected with time and change, removing the aura surrounding them and brushing aside "outmoded concepts, such as ... eternal value and mystery", thereby empowering a perceptual and political revolution. What may be less familiar is the continuity of all three thinkers with the art production of a much earlier era. "The artistic representation of sacred subjects was a science governed by fixed laws which could not be broken at the dictates of individual imagination" writes Êmile Mâle in the book subtitled Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century. Every artist had to learn the rules of representation. He must know that the circular nimbus placed vertically behind the head serves to express sanctity, while the nimbus impressed with a cross is the sign of divinity which he will always use in portraying any of the three Persons of the Trinity. He will learn that the aureole (i.e. light which emanates from the whole figure and surrounds the body as a nimbus) expresses eternal bliss, and belongs to the three Persons of the Trinity, to the Virgin, and to the souls of the Blessed. He must know that representations of God the Father, God the Son, the angels and the apostles should have the feet bare, while there would be real impropriety in representing the Virgin and the saints with bare feet. In such matters a mistake would have ranked almost as heresy. Other accepted symbols enabled the mediaeval artist to express the invisible, to represent that which would otherwise be beyond the domain of art.5  If this programme reads like the precise opposite of secular freedom and the unpredictable products of AI, that's because it is, but it is also determined by tradition and normalisation (in which anything goes becomes a programming command). Both bring forth the old and proclaim the new, appropriating an aura even in the act of discharging it; "nothing was left solely to inspiration", as Mâle says of Dante's Commedia. AI's rampant productivity also mimics capitalism's hothouse demand for new markets, 'growth' and human submission. From expressing the invisible via religious art to escaping the prison of language via AI, there is continuity in utopian claims, for the promise of deliverance whether heavenly or humanist. The continuity is consolidated in Meyer Schapiro's revisionary account of church art in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when he says began "a new sphere of artistic creation without religious content" anticipating modern art because it was "imbued with values of spontaneity, individual fantasy, delight in color and movement, and the expression of feeling". We can't help but regard medieval art as entirely symbolic and devotional, and Schapiro cites commentators who have sought to attach religious symbolism to the most mundane features. He explains this with Hegel's comment that "in an age of piety one does not have to be religious in order to create a truly religious work of art, whereas today the most deeply pious artist is incapable of producing it."  This suggest that the basis of artistic production and what we are drawn toward is the "truly religious", however sublimated.6 This may be confirmed by the vast archives of scholarly material on the arts and popular culture communities devoted to billion-dollar movie franchises. Anxiety about the meaning and worth of art in the here and now is embodied in modern review culture. The reception of Daniel Kehlmann's bestselling novel Die Vermessung der Welt when published in translation as Measuring the World is a good example. One reviewer sought the incontrovertibility of paradigm-shifting European modernism to win credence for the crowd-pleasing entertainment by announcing without evidence that Kehlmann was "already being compared to Nabokov and Proust"; a claim that became its own evidence. Unable to recognise what it seeks, the visual arts has developed an aura as an investment commodity for the super-rich,7 and as sentimental ornamentation for the rest, while novels are evaluated by entirely extra-literary criteria: the public profile of an author, the number of sales, whether they have won a literary prize, and sometimes even by the number of pages. AI, however, may provoke a turn away from such inanities. ***   For a long time I thought writing was a job of work. I'm now convinced that it's an inner event, a 'non-work' that you accomplish, above all, by emptying yourself out, and allowing what's already self-evident to percolate through.                Marguerite Duras 8 When Benjamin predicted the overcoming of auratic art, he defined the aura as "the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be", and if distance has now become taboo in contemporary literature, it is with the advent of LLMs literature that the unique phenomenon is drawn back into the foreground. Invariably, distance is presented as the "inaccessible" and experienced entirely on the reader's side and is used as a critical barb directed at the "self-indulgent" author but, as Duras' remark suggests, it is also experienced by the author (at least by those who disavow the agency of the name).  It's a curious thing, this intimate experience of distance and our need for the guarantee of a human presence in the background. Like road signs and adverts, genre fiction provides an a priori guarantee and must be why supernatural horror and stories of gruesome crime provides comfort to so many, much as the story of Christ's torture and death on the cross brings comfort to Christians. In 2004, I was drawn to write about the promotional phrases on two posters on a bus shelter, not to seek the identity of copywriters but because of their automated effacement, the empty space onto which the words open and how difficult it is to speak about. There is someone speaking and yet nobody is speaking; assuredly, this is speech, but speech that does not think about what it is saying, always says the same thing, and is incapable of choosing its audience or responding to their questions.  This is not one of the Guardian's guests responding to the soulless anonymity of an AI-generated story but Socrates talking about the phenomenon of writing, paraphrased here by Maurice Blanchot.9 Socrates proposes that language of this sort should be avoided in favour of a living speaker one can interrogate. He recognises its similarity to "the pure speech that gives expression to the sacred", such as at the oracle of Delphi. In this regard, somewhat mysteriously...writing, as an object, appears to have an essential proximity with sacred language, whose strangeness it imparts to the literary work, while also inheriting from it its boundlessness, risk, and incalculable force beyond all guarantee. Like sacred language, what is written comes from no recognizable source, is without author or origin, and thereby always refers back to something more original than itself. What is strange about literature? What risks does it take? In what way is it close to the sacred? These are the questions dilating the void beneath contemporary art and literature. They cannot receive answers because we have no means to formulate a response. To ask them invites weary contempt. For Heidegger, this is because literature has gone peak-Socrates to become a functional technology reducing the world and its inhabitants to a resource to be exploited. Strangeness, risk and the sacred have become marketing phrases. He traces the retreat of the sacred in the poetry of Hölderlin. In his time the "default of God" was distance – "the age [was] determined by God's keeping himself afar" – whereas now the default is absence and the "radiance of divinity is extinguished in world-history". The ground upon which humanity stood is no longer ground but an abyss: "The age is desolate not only because God is dead but also because mortals scarcely know or are capable even of their own mortality." Poetry offers a mode of truth-revelation more originary to commonsense correspondence between word and thing. Heidegger separates the hammer from the hand. For him, poetry is a means of building new ground, but in order to so "it is necessary that there are those who reach into the abyss", who seek to be capable of their own mortality, and in doing so enable others to experience and endure the loss and absence of the sacred, to recognise the disenchantment of the world: "How could there ever be for God a residence fit for God unless the radiance of divinity had already begun to appear in all that is?" 10 Heidegger was not alone in recognising symptoms in poetry. A few decades earlier Mallarmé claimed that literature was "undergoing an exquisite and fundamental crisis" as free verse flooded over classical forms following the instability of runaway industrial growth, and soon after Benjamin showed how even the everyday wisdom passed on in storytelling had succumbed to the novel in which "no event comes to us without already being shot through with explanations".11 Nowadays poetry is difficult to identify as anything other than prose in an affectation of format, a prejudicial identification for sure but one made possible because of the dominance of functional prose. This would explain why it has a minor presence in literary culture, not refuted by the growth of boilerplate expressionism on social media. Readability has become unreadable. If the novel then functions only as information by other means – events shot through with explanation – and has in the process neutralised the potential for the unveiling of poetic language in Heidegger's sense, thereby creating conditions for literature identical to those summarised by Hegel for religious art, we might wonder if literature is even possible in our time. Duras' conviction that writing a novel is non-work is not far from LLMs that can produce a complete work without indeed any work. Both disrupt our notion of creativity and both open onto distance. The similarity may help us to understand why in all its richness and variety of contemporary art and literature, and in its excited amplification in criticism, it nevertheless appears very much after the Lord Mayor's Show, forced and straining for glory; "pyrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness", as EM Cioran put it.12    Duras was not alone in the manner of her discovery. As Holly Langstaff recounts in her outstanding book how Blanchot at first agreed with Heidegger that poetic language was a vehicle of truth grounding human existence, but through his own experience as a literary critic in the day and as a novelist at night, his mind was changed. If the critic's task is to evaluate a literary work and to communicate this to the reading public it "requires there to be something particular about the work that sets it apart from the everyday". A paradox arises in the demand to bring to light that which is bound to the dark, but it is inevitable that the critic and the everyday reader will seek to utilise the experience of the night and to communicate it in some way, to itself if not also to others, and indeed Blanchot argued that this is also necessary to the work. Yet what sets the reading experience apart and why it maintains almost mystical prestige in an otherwise non-literary culture is that the essence of literature is perpetually removed from such utility. Critics invariably point to specific details to shine a light on a novel's dark, such as its ingenious plotting, its psychological insights, its geographical and chronological span, the knowledge we absorb of other people and cultures, its relation to similar books or an account of the author's career thus far, or simply how good, bad or indifferent it makes them feel. But the light merely illuminates itself. In reading, and for the writer too, as Duras says, something escapes rational translation. This should not be news to any keen reader because it is the fundamental experience of reading a novel, the longue durée of curling up with a good book. Blanchot calls it La Part de feu, the fire's share, as in the swathe of a forest sacrificed by a firebreak so the rest can survive. This is the determinate sentence of literature. However, there is what Langstaff calls slippage between the two modes of language that Heidegger saw as a great danger as it "results in the forgetting of Being which is characteristic of modernity" leading to everything, including literature, becoming a resource to be exploited. This is related to Blanchot's criticism of word-by-word and line-by-line paraphrasing of poetry but praise for the critic who respects the fire "while maintaining his reader in a state of pure ignorance".13 How familiar this is to the reader of the broadsheet book reviews! Literature haunts us because it is a confrontation with the "unsayable emptiness" of the fire, what Blanchot refers to elsewhere as "the outside", "the neuter" or, from Heidegger's es gibt, "the there is". He sees literary writing as a suspension of the empirical world, its negation, an inhuman interruption of human control and understanding. While this may be seen as nihilistic, and certainly not humanist, Blanchot sees it instead as an affirmation of the unknowable, which can be creative as well as destructive, "a radical nihilism which", Langstaff says, "is no longer nihilism in the sense of nostalgia for values, but an embrace of the impossible".14 In the final part below, I'll turn to the writing of the impossible.   ***   How many efforts are required in order not to write—in order that, writing, I not write, in spite of everything.                   – Blanchot 15   In the first part of this inadvertent series, I responded to Alice Oswald's "manifesto of likeness" in which the Oxford Professor of Poetry calls for rhapsodic poetry to stitch the profusion of the empirical world together against lyric poetry, exemplified by a poem generated by chatGPT, because it not does not emerge from a "situated self" and "is not about things which are". In doing so, she says, it exposes us to "a mighty contagious absence". While Oswald's criticism presents a powerful case and appears to be humanism's definitive resistance to the advent of AI-generated poetry and prose, it does so by addressing a technology whose essence is and always has been precisely this absence; the absence of things which are, or the presence of that which is situated elsewhere, or indeed nowhere. Absence draws us to to books; an absence we sense in the world and turn to books in the hope to fathom and resolve, an absence, however, we meet again in the infinity of prose, at once mocking and soothing our finitude, an absence we go on to explore and reinscribe in writing. Absence is contagious. Happy talk of novels opening "another world" is a symptom of this meeting; another world in which nothing dies, in which nothing can die.16  A confounding dualism is inherent to literature: it is nothing and is nothing without it. So behind our literary evaluations and debates is our relation to this nothing, this space of absence.  In an exceptional essay,17 Lars Iyer traces the origins of the relation back to ancient Palestine and the messianic hope offered by an apocalypse in which the coming messiah will end the dualism between God and the world. Despite the horrors associated with apocalypse – whose etymology can be traced to "an unveiling or revelation" – the faithful "can look forward to the coming vindication of the persecuted, to the divine redemption that brings an end to suffering and death". Hope lies in apocalypse. We can see the residue of this in the aura given to the book, the decapitalised version is its modest disguise of the divine Word, and the hope we invest in its promise of a revelation, however vulgar or diminished. "But what happens", Iyer asks, "when the putative messiah actually arrives and fails?" What happens when Christ dies upon the cross leaving the world order unchanged? And so we might ask, what happens when the book fails not only to resolve absence but augments it? Iyer cites Jacob Taubes' argument that St. Paul dealt with the crisis of a failed apocalypse by turning it inward. From now on it would take place in the individual soul, which for Taubes meant opening: an inward messianic realm of freedom, of faith, which not only suspends the Mosaic law, the legal framework of the Roman Empire but also the Hellenistic metaphysics of law, which is to say, [the] general sense of worldly order and structure. Paul rejects all earthly, lawful, orderly authority in the name of faith.18  The freedom offered in the literary, reliant on our suspension of disbelief, has its DNA in Paul's rejection of worldly authority. The supposedly opposed genres of Realism and Fantasy can be seen as the culmination of our bad faith in what opens for us. What opens in Paul's theology is "very close to what [Taubes] calls called Gnosticism". For Paul, like the Gnostics, the cosmos is ruled by demonic powers; Satan is the prince of this world. For Paul, like the Gnostics, the aim is to achieve a kind of gnosis, or knowledge, that allows you to hold yourself back from full participation in the world, which remains ruled by the wicked 'powers and principalities'. For Paul, like the Gnostics, very little can be said about God. As Taubes writes: The negative statements about God—unrecognizable, unnameable, unrepeatable, incomprehensible, without form, without bounds, and even nonexistent—all orchestrate the . .. Gnostic proposition that God is essentially contrary to the world. This suggests that Paul's faith is a relation to an empty transcendence, lacking determinate content and contesting at every turn the works that support the order of the world. God is what Hans Jonas called the 'nothing of the world', understood as the antithesis of worldly power.19 We go to books to understand and cope with the world, and of course to escape its demons for a while, and in doing experience a cover version of messianic promise which is, however, only ever an empty transcendence. Literature becomes the nothing of the world. No wonder modern readers have an almost identical relationship with religious faith as they do with books; a short walk from gush to disgust. 20   Novels generated by LLMs, however bad judged as works of art, reveal the essence of literature. This is the fear: every book is revealed as an excess of nothing.21  This would explain why fragments haunt great writers, as they maintain a relationship with that which is in excess of the world without falling into generic form and as such disrupts the use of literature as an everyday resource. They cannot make use of them. The writer in the centre of a charmed circle is only ever a writer in potential, the book only ever a book in potential. While this presents a roadblock, it may be key to resisting AI-generated and genre literature, which are, it has to be restated, identical; they cannot be told apart. Literature may be possible only by maintaining its potential within the work. But what does this mean in practice? Giorgio Agamben's essay On Potentiality discusses the aporia raised by Aristotle of why the senses cannot themselves be sensed in the absence of external objects. Aristotle's answer is that sensibility is not actual but only potential, which raises the question of what it means to have a faculty like sight. We tend to see our faculties as modes of power, and Agamben links this to "that part of humanity that has grown and developed its potency to the point of imposing its power over the whole planet". But Agamben interprets having a faculty as having a privation and potentiality is "the mode of existence of this privation". We would not be able to see light were it not for darkness, and darkness "is in some way the color of potentiality". To be potential means: to be one's own lack, to be in relation to one's own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own nonBeing. In potentiality, sensation is in relation to anesthesia, knowledge to ignorance, vision to darkness.22 Presence is in relation to absence. Applied to literature, and Agamben says Aristotle draws his examples from "the domain of arts and knowledge", we are returned to Blanchot's writing set apart from the day and Heidegger's poets reaching into the abyss for a relation of finitude to the infinite. Our faculty to write is considered much like the power of that has imposed itself over the planet. So if we are to resist AI-generated prose and its threat to human creativity, we must first recognise that its apparent inhumanity is and always has been part of us and part of writing. This is why it is indistinguishable from genre fiction. Agamben ends by asking how we might consider the actuality of the potentiality to not-be. "The actuality of the potentiality to play the piano is the performance of a piece for the piano; but what is the actuality of the potentiality to not-play?". Aristotle answers: if a potentiality to not-be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such. This does not mean that it disappears in actuality; on the contrary, it preserves itself as such in actuality. What is truly potential is thus what has exhausted all its impotentiality in bringing it wholly into the act as such. This may be how to question the paradigm of literature, to move in the opposite direction, towards potential.     Notes 1 From One-Way Street (not sure of translator). Click on the back button to return.  2 Translated by Kevin Attell.  3 The author Matthew Teller resigned from the SOA following its "outlandishly opaque statement" on an Israeli raid on a bookshop in Jerusalem.    4 According to the Verso Books blog, "Romance novels are said to account for nearly 40% of all book sales in the last decade".  5 Translated by Dora Nussey.  6 In the Talk Gnosis podcast, Jonathan Stewart claims "we have this deep yearning for the divine":  "Even if you're not a spiritual person…consciousness is almost structured in a way where we want to have the divine. Doesn't mean that there is a god, but to be a happy, adjusted society and an adjusted individual, you have to acknowledge this and work with it in a healthy way.  You don't have to be religious, you can get it through good art. Because people aren't aware of this religious drive within us...we assume we live in the most secular society in human history [but] we live in the most religious society that has ever existed in human history. We act in religious ways without really knowing it, with no way to funnel it, no way to integrate it into our lives. The rationalist is missing all this." 7 We see this in action on the BBC's Fake or Fortune series, and Clark claims value for the robot artist's products because they sell for six-figure sums. 8 From Suspended Passion translated by Chris Turner. 9 In the Oxford Literary Review, Volume 22, Number 1, translated by Leslie Hill. 10 From 'Why poets?' in Off the Beaten Track translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes.  11 I used Benjamin's essay The Storyteller in The last novel, a discussion of JM Coetzee's The Death of Jesus. 12 In A Short History of Decay, translated by Richard Howard.  13 From 'The Myth of Mallarmé' in The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell. 14 Blanchot's atheism is discussed by Stefanos Geroulanos in An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought.  15 From The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock. 16 The Morning Star in Knausgaard's novel of the same name is a symbol of the book and an allegory of this meeting, at least as I argue in my review.  17 The Opposite Direction: Taubes, Bernhard and the Gnostic Imaginary was a paper given to the European Graduate School in 2023. 18 I wrote about a biography of Taubes in A modern heretic.  19 Iyer's paper cites my blogpost The withdrawal of the novel in which I write about Willem Styfhals' book on Gnosticism and postwar German philosophy. 20 Larkin's poem A Study in Reading Habits is a prime example of the latter. 21 In my post A measure of forever, I wrote about how a combination of plainness and excess renewed my interest in novels. 22 In Potentialities, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen.