Part way through Zadie’s NYRB article, Two Paths for the Novel, looking at Netherland (next up) and Remainder.
Ambitious and serious, even pretentious.
I may be wrong, but I think I saw ZS in Bloomsbury: walking a small pooch.
More discussion on RSB.
Has bad philosophy killed the Booker prize? | Books | guardian.co.uk
Recently, the British philosopher Simon Critchley gave a lecture at the inaugural Speakers’ Corner held at the Paradise Row gallery in East London. There’s something a little out of the ordinary right there. It’s that juxtaposition of the words “British” and “philosopher”.
It sits uncomfortably with me. Why is that? Is it because British philosophers have, for so long, been inching down the blind alley of analytical philosophy, the foundation for our current avoidance of anything that might seem esoteric, or – dare I say it – continental? Or is it because we are force-fed something else in its place: a slick, concise, quick-fix philosophising that’s grounded in fact and not too time-consuming to read? Whatever it is, I’m positive such inert scepticism governs our philosophical and literary judgment in this country. It’s the reason that the recent Booker prize shortlist, which reflects our deeply conservative, philosophy-lite tastes, is such an embarrassing failure.
I first read the work of Simon Critchley when the novelist Tom McCarthy gave me a sneak-preview transcript of their joint New York Declaration: INS Statement on Inauthenticity (it was announced by the International Necronautical Society [INS] in the Drawing Center, Manhattan on September 25th, 2007). I was immediately hooked when they declared: “For us, art is the consequence and experience of failed transcendence … art’s dirty secret is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments that attempt to cover over the traumatic event of materiality.”
Critchley’s entire oeuvre to date, similarly to the novels of McCarthy, is a call against the stuffy, reductive thinking that has haunted a British establishment that sides with form at all costs. When the Booker prize prize judge and novelist Louise Doughty writes: “The ability to come up with a good plot and create a good structure are great literary qualities – it is not just about how to make a finely turned sentence. The ability to move a story on in an engaging way, and the creation of character – these are great literary skills,” I begin to understand the kind of Idealism the INS is rallying against.
Critchley’s thinking explores the “circularity of ethical experience” and the motivational forces behind political action – predominantly disappointment, both religious and political, as he argues in Infinitely Demanding. In Things Merely Are he examines the “the situation of the relation of philosophy and poetry” through the work of Wallace Stevens, ultimately arriving at an acceptance of materialism in literature. For Critchley, material reality is a “trauma” that literature must “navigate”, allowing “things to be in their irreducible materiality” – something he has explored himself in a series of experimental writings with McCarthy and the INS.
It is somewhere within the navigation of materiality that I feel the future of the British novel lies. If literature is to evolve in this country it should put aside its traditional empiricism and strive towards radical contemporary philosophies and the esoteric, as far removed from us as they may seem. Sadly, the Booker prize is a reflection of a massive wrong-turn in our literary and philosophical culture. We have ventured no further than a conservative, establishment cul-de-sac of un-acceptance: we simply do not do philosophy that veers away from the tried and tested. We’ve got to get out of the anti-philosophical avenue our wrong-headed literary culture is pursuing.
Critchley is right when he says that all philosophy “begins in disappointment”. It is this same sense of disappointment that should encourage us to explore his work further.
LRB · Benjamin Kunkel: Men in White
…there is, after all, just the one world or, for the individual, the one life. We also know that originality, in realist fiction, comes not only from capturing what’s historically new but also from correlating novelty with persistent inherited ways of acting, thinking and feeling. But the challenge posed to fictional representation by even the most ordinary contemporary life in New York City (or anywhere similar) may not yet have been met.
Anywhere similar… the London in David Szalay’s LONDON AND THE SOUTH EAST (see more @ amazon)? A small life unconnected to what Kunkel calls ‘finanicalisation’, MBA cosmopolitanism and technology, but certainly contemporary.
More?
Review by Scarlett Thomas in The Independent:
Nothing in this haunting novel is there by accident, just as no human behaviour, according to Freud, is truly “accidental” either. There is a reference to Freud’s notion of parapraxis (errors and slips created by the unconscious) on the very first page, and then the narrative unfolds like a shape emerging in a kaleidoscope.
The protagonist Lawrence Miller teaches Gender Studies and serves on his university’s Sexual Harassment committee. The novel begins as he loses his place in a book and, as a result, begins to notice odd changes occurring in his office. He then starts to suspect that he isn’t the only person using the room – that an insane sexual predator and misogynist, Bogomil Trumilcik, may be sleeping there at night. A lot of the mysterious goings- on in this novel occur at night, as though they were parts of a dream. And the novel is – in the truest, psychoanalytic sense of the term – dreamlike. We can learn from psychoanalysis that dreams are manifestations of unconscious thought and have their own poetic language of metaphor, metonymy and juxtaposition. This is a novel written in that language, almost geometrically so.
At one point in the novel Miller throws away a glass eye. His attempted disposal of this object (the eye/I) is a failure: “I took Mr Kurwen’s eye from my pocket and hurled it into the half-frozen lake. Instead of landing in the water, it embedded itself in a floating island of ice, staring skyward.” It is not enough to read this as a metaphor for attempted repression; the reader will also want to ask (but perhaps not want to know) what exactly the narrator is trying to repress.
This novel is so creepy because it is so clever. Only in the last few pages do you realise, or begin to realise, what you’ve read, and even then you’re not sure. Images from the book flicker in your mind like images from a forgotten, disturbing dream. And this isn’t even your own dream but someone else’s. You suddenly feel that you – and he – have been engaged in an act of vast, mutual misreading. It would take another book to explain the symbolism, coincidences and symmetries within this narrative. A brilliant novel that must be reread at least once, this is easy to follow, with clear, spare prose but the ultimate effect is a vast enigma, a puzzle with a troubling, instinctive conclusion.
