Tuesday 12 August 2008

I wouldn't do it, but they make it so easy...

Yes, it's my ongoing war with the Guardian literary section and its hilarious inability to decide whether it should be laughably mediocre (the weirdly Fukuyama-like Zadie Smith telling us that there's no point in writing experimental novels because George Eliot achieved formal perfection) and the vapidly pretentious. Here, frequent blogger Lee Rourke opts for the latter alternative.

Dear Lee:

Question 1: You seem to be obsessed with flouting your (specifically modernist) experimental credentials. Ne'er a blog goes by where you don't pull out some oddly gnomic eulogisation of Blanchot, Bataille or Cendrars. Why, then, does the magazine you edit seem to be dominated largely by 'drugs and indie' hipster-lit?

Question 2: Your concept of 'Heideggerian' boredom, allegedly the kind that fascinates you the most, seems pretty woolly to me. In fact, it sounds suspiciously like the kind of existential caveat a 12 year old attempting to get out of going to a christening would employ. 'Like, Mum, nothing means anything anyway, you know.' If this was seriously the paraphrasable sum total of Heidegger's thought, do you really think we'd have spent the last half a century reading Being and Time for its contribution to (as opposed to negation of) metaphysics? Why do you sound so unconvincing when you say things like - and this is a paraphrase, but a fair one - 'boredom clouds even boredom itself'?

Question 3: Did your MA thesis contain more than ten iterations of the phrase 'that is not to say'?

Question 4: Do you stop reading Derrida on about the fourth page of 'Structure, Sign and Play'?

Question 5: Is there any chance that, like a number of humanities-educated people, you've used the critiques of subjectivity made by post-structuralism (and I'm guessing that Levinas, Blanchot and Deleuze are on your shelf) as the means with which to bolster a version of personal identity which those same critiques would undermine? Have you found your center in philosophical decenterings?

To be honest, though, I'm mostly pissed off because you didn't bother including Henry Green's Party Going on this list. It is a substantially better novel than Houllebecq's Whatever. I'll let you have Hunger, though, as it's pretty genre defining, though I was pretty shocked neither Thomas the Obscure or Death Sentence made it. Also: no Nausea? Or any novels by women (surely Charlotte Bronte's Villette and Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel are almost perfect articulations of boredom and, yes, I'm willing to contend that this argument works on a formal-linguistic as well as thematic level)? The Magic Mountain?

3 comments:

scarecrow said...

Dear Lee:

Question 1: You seem to be obsessed with flouting your (specifically modernist) experimental credentials. Ne'er a blog goes by where you don't pull out some oddly gnomic eulogisation of Blanchot, Bataille or Cendrars. Why, then, does the magazine you edit seem to be dominated largely by 'drugs and indie' hipster-lit?

Because ‘drugs and indie' hipster-lit’ has its place too. Life would be rotten if all that existed was a post-structuralist mish-mash of anti-narrative and repetition.

Question 2: Your concept of 'Heideggerian' boredom, allegedly the kind that fascinates you the most, seems pretty woolly to me. In fact, it sounds suspiciously like the kind of existential caveat a 12 year old attempting to get out of going to a christening would employ. 'Like, Mum, nothing means anything anyway, you know.' If this was seriously the paraphrasable sum total of Heidegger's thought, do you really think we'd have spent the last half a century reading Being and Time for its contribution to (as opposed to negation of) metaphysics? Why do you sound so unconvincing when you say things like - and this is a paraphrase, but a fair one - 'boredom clouds even boredom itself'?

Heidegger is too huge an influence to tackle here in a riposte to your entertaining and intelligent post. ‘The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics’ has all the answers you or I could wish for contained in it. We demand language! That’s why you and I blog. We demand language. We are the same.

I would also say that – even if many parted company with (I’m guessing you know who) – ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ and ‘The Turning’ are essential too in understanding the flashing glance that modernity is offering us.

“Why do you sound so unconvincing when you say things like - and this is a paraphrase, but a fair one - 'boredom clouds even boredom itself'?” Well, possibly because I was paraphrasing Heidegger! He says it much better in his lecture “What is Metaphysics?” . . .

“existential caveat a 12 year old”

I’m impressed; you must know some very intelligent and interesting 12 year olds. I was probably learning to masturbate properly at that age or reading books about the ‘Battle of Britain’ (I preferred Hurricanes to Spitfires).


Question 3: Did your MA thesis contain more than ten iterations of the phrase 'that is not to say'?

No.

Question 4: Do you stop reading Derrida on about the fourth page of 'Structure, Sign and Play'?

I wish I had.

Question 5: Is there any chance that, like a number of humanities-educated people, you've used the critiques of subjectivity made by post-structuralism (and I'm guessing that Levinas, Blanchot and Deleuze are on your shelf) as the means with which to bolster a version of personal identity which those same critiques would undermine? Have you found your center in philosophical decenterings?

Ah, hypocrisy, the great luxury. Well, it all depends on the ‘centre’ of whoever disagrees with me, surely?

For me, Blanchot is the blind-spot of literature. He exists there. Night. I take from Blanchot whatever I can understand. I am the centre of nothing. I’m pointless.

Blanchot gave my fiction (read my book ‘Everyday’) its centre. Didn’t he say that all books, no matter how fragmented, have their own centre?

To be honest, though, I'm mostly pissed off because you didn't bother including Henry Green's Party Going on this list. It is a substantially better novel than Houllebecq's Whatever. I'll let you have Hunger, though, as it's pretty genre defining, though I was pretty shocked neither Thomas the Obscure or Death Sentence made it. Also: no Nausea? Or any novels by women (surely Charlotte Bronte's Villette and Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel are almost perfect articulations of boredom and, yes, I'm willing to contend that this argument works on a formal-linguistic as well as thematic level)? The Magic Mountain?

Ha! I wanted to do a top 25 but they wouldn’t let me.

Toodle-pip

Lee x

Joe said...

Fair play for replying, Lee - or Scarecrow - and I think it's fair to say that my post has mostly been motivated by my antipathy towards the extremely mixed messages the old Guardian puts out about modernist aesthetics. Too often, it has seemed like they'll devote reams and reams of coverage to defending a liberal humanist, realist literature (an issue they cloud by appealing to 'thematic experimentation', cf. lots of novels by trust fund ravers featuring irritatingly naturalised surrealism.) I completely agree that viscerality has a place - a pretty big place - in literature, and when it's done well (David Peace, for example, and the better Irvine Welsh) it seems to constitute its own supplement to modernist anti-narratives. I couldn't read Sollers and Blanchot all the time: in fact, I'd rather not read them most of the time.

I guess I've heard lots and lots of testaments to the aesthetic power of boredom, but they all seem to come dressed up in a leather jacket and puffing a Gauloise. The thing with existentialism is that it gets sexed-up to the point at which the finer points of its account of boredom gets lost in a sea of berets. Furthermore, and this is me wearing my Yorkshire hat, how applicable is the 'boredom' Knut Hamsun writes about to a fifteen year-old kid growing up in some quasi-feudal outpost in the Dales? Is it me, or does boredom frequently get aestheticised precisely by the people who don't really suffer from it in any practical sense?

If my initial post was written in an overly-aggressive way (and my Derrida comment was, I admit, the work of a needling wanker) it's because I've heard boredom-based account of modernism so often, and modernism was exactly the (broad) aesthetic field which promised interest and excitement when I was growing up in a place which wasn't exactly full of Baudelaire quoting literary mavericks. However intellectually bereft such a position may be, I've always been more attracted to that 'infinite' experience modernism promises in that sense of Joycean verbal excess and Poundian possibility. I'm not sure that existential meaninglessness, in that Jean Paul Belmondo way, really squares with my (perhaps parochial) fascination with modernist indeterminacy.

Anyway, thanks for responding to this in a thoughtful and not-too-aggrieved way. You're clearly a better sportsman than I'll ever be...and I'll go back to my copy of The Space of Literature to try and square my problems with the weird double-bind of some literary poststructuralists (which has caused quite enough pub arguments for me in the past.)

Cheers,

Joe

PS - C'mon, I know we've all heard a 12 year old claim that 'nothing means anything'!

Ernesto said...

I'm glad to see that a Guardian Blogger (they pay you to do that, I suppose) replied to one of us, mere mortal bloggers who pay to do it instead of getting paid to do it.

In my experience they tend to be so detached from the blogsphere (except when they email their Word document to be posted by some young, good-looking intern) that they seldom ever come down to play with the likes of us.

So I celebrate this exchange.