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Wilde and Morris – Saving Socialism’s Soul

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Ben Granger) — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:31:16 GMT

Is this Utopian? A map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

Oscar Wilde

It is the province of art to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable life….a life to which the perception and creation of beauty, the enjoyment of real pleasure that is, shall be felt to be as necessary to man as his daily bread…

William Morris

We are living through capitalism’s greatest crisis, witnessing what should be the death-throes of a discredited system, as bankrupt in credibility as it is financially. And yet Rightist political parties benefit from the chaos.A dead system has risen up and mugged us in such a crafty and audacious a way that we have been left dazed, staggering in a hazy psychosis. We are now showing all the symptoms of a kind of global Stockholm Syndrome. The parties of the Left are left floundering and flapping, wrong-footed by their earlier surrender to the disastrous deregulation of the neo-liberal project. There was a reason however, for this initial retreat, the cowardice that made this collapse possible. The popular conception of socialism had already been blasted and blackened, trod to the mud. An understatement: socialism has something of an image problem. If something is deemed to be even worse than the mess we currently find the world in, then it really must be in trouble.

The experience of the soi-disant Communist countries, the ‘actually existing socialism’ of the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc, China, and assorted lower-league tyrannical basket cases is of course the greatest argument capitalism has for socialism ‘not working’. The Marxist replies that these regimes were perversions, distortions and contortions, that Marx should no more be blamed for Stalin and Mao than Jesus for Torquemada and Franco. True enough, though the fact nearly every Communist country came to fester a similar way suggests that the source text has, at least, a case to answer.

Most thinking people however seem to understand that these economic backwaters were the worst possible areas in which try out any socialist experiment, press the point and even most fair-minded Rightists will concede this point. No, the allergic reaction to socialism goes deeper than revulsion at the horrors of the Great Leap Forward or the Gulag. There is a nameless fear of uniformity, of regimentation of the human mind, a cold grey labyrinthine bureaucracy of the soul, a monochrome maze where individuality loses itself, shrivels and dies. Over the years a sturdy connecting corridor has been built in the world’s collective consciousness between ‘socialism’ and this netherworld, and the link cannot easily be severed. It’s a structure frightening and ruinous enough to convince millions of people to vote against their own economic interests. It isn’t just Stalinist Red Tape to blame for this. Amongst the social reforming Fabians of Britain, amongst the continental Social Democrats too, a species of socialism formed, which, when given a vague taste of power, seemed more about regulation, order and uniformity than freedom. A creed of liberation seems to have curdled into officialdom, Spartacus re-clothed as a jobsworth traffic warden.

Of course, if we do live in such a colour-drained petty tyranny of ticket-stampers, it is not socialists of any stripe who have installed it. Bureaucracy festers in a market economy just as much as a planned one, moreso once the legal classes get their mucky thumbs in the pie. The irony of surburban Daily Mail letter-writers complaining that “under socialism we’d all be the same” has not been lost on many. But just because they are duped and duplicitous, we still don’t somehow believe them to be entirely wrong. The lingering idea of coldness, of sterile desiccation, is still there. How to cleanse it? Where might we find the answer?

To the casual reader, Oscar Wilde would seem an unlikely response. Wilde has the reputation of an airy aesthete, a genius of frivolity, master of the mannerism and bon mot, but neither rabble-rouser nor theoretician. With a superficial glance at apparently superficial statements, an argument could be made to bear this out. The only banner Wilde seemed to wave was “Art for art’s sake” “all art is quite useless”. Where his reputation does touch on “political issues”, it is as his unwanted role as the great Liberal Martyr, persecuted by Victorian conservatism for his homosexuality (a fate and reputation which would surely have bored him for its drab worthiness. )

Yet this masks an essential truth: Wilde was a socialist, avowedly and dedicatedly so. The many audiences of his plays who see only the wit and wicked humour make a fundamental error. As Lord Darlington says to Lady Windemere “Life is too important thing to take it seriously.” Wilde may have been vehemently opposed to didactic art, art with a controlling and improving “message”. Nevertheless, razor sharp dissections of bourgeois society criss-cross his work, plays such as Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance swipe savagely at the grubby hypocrisies which stick the system together. They are all the more deadly for being subtle, yet the subtlety is such that many audiences do not even notice them. Only once was Wilde uncharacteristically direct in his politics, in a brief essay entitled The Soul of Man Under Socialism written in 1891. It remains his clearest and most candid vision of how he wished the world to be, what he thought it could be. It is also one of the most inspiring – and overlooked – arguments for socialism ever written.

Wilde’s most deadly weapon was always the paradox, which he wields in this text as soon as we start. The first line:- “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is undoubtedly the fact that Socialism would relieve us from the sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.” The chief argument of the anti-socialist down the ages has always been individualism, that living for others is an unnatural state. And here is Wilde, agreeing whole-heartedly.

On the same page, Wilde wrong-foots the reactionary even further, continuing the onslaught against unnatural altruism by laying into the whole pantheon of social reformers, philanthropists, and ‘do-gooders’ of the late-Victorian day. On one level this is the familiar argument of the revolutionary against the reformist – putting sticking plasters on society doesn’t solve the real problems, and instead makes revolution less likely. “Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of England, the people who do most harm are those who try to do good.” But Wilde is against this altruism for a more fundamental reason – he sees it as a distraction for people being true to themselves, in particular, for the few men living who are able to realise their greatness.

Indeed, Wilde is every bit as much a believer in the Great Man – the intellectual and spiritual Titan who stands above and beyond the herd – as that other great aphorist Nietzsche. Wilde mentions Keats and Flaubert earlier in the piece, and Byron, Shelley, Victor Hugo and Baudellaire later as among the few who have managed to ‘keep out of the reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand ‘under the shelter of the wall’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world.’ The difference between the two is that Wilde thought it desirable, and thought it possible, that everyone should be able to follow in this perfection, that all could became ‘real men, the men who have realised themselves’. He believed we all had the capacity to be ubermensch, supermen.

The present state of class relations, the rank injustice of the division between masters and men is shown to have an enslaving effect on the owners almost as much as the owned. “Property is really a nuisance... Property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore.” He goes on to note even the greatest men such as Caesar and Marcus Aurelius were made less great by the ‘waste’ of having to exert their authority on others. Note however, that Wilde is still making the claim that the few who have managed to realise themselves are among the wealthy and moneyed. Here Wilde goes against the Leftist grain again with an apparently disdainful view of the working classes as they are. “There is only one class that thinks about money more than the rich – the poor.” Wilde says that the poor have no wit or cultivation “no grace of manner or charm of speech”, but his real scorn and contempt is saved and savoured for the ‘decent, hard working poor’, those who are contented with their lot. “They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for a very pad potage. They must be extraordinarily stupid.” On the other hand, Wilde has much time for those poor who are “ungrateful, discontented, disobedient and rebellious. They are quite right to be so.”

It is safe to assume he would have quite approved of our recent riots, however indiscriminate the targets. Violent, arbitrary, aimless : at least they were rebelling in some way. Rather rambunctious rebellion than craven compromise. There is a great schism within the broad church of socialism on the role of those that Marx termed the “lumpenproletariat” can play in a revolution. One tradition states that only the organised working-class, the unionised workers, united and resolved can achieve anything either within, or against capitalism. The lumpens, the long term unemployed, the criminals, confidence tricksters, prostitutes, beggars and other assorted outlaws are an objectively conservative force which will always be bought off by the rich, “a tool of reactionary intrigue.” Such was Marx’s view, and phrase. The wider labour movement has been in broad agreement. Bakunin took the opposite stance. He thought that organisation in itself always corrupted, always led to hierarchy. Given this, the unionised were more likely to be co-opted by the state, and that the more lawless the workers, the more independent: and therefore the more revolutionary. A century later, Huey Newton and the American Black Panthers thought so too, despite being ideologically closer to Maoism than anarchism.

Wilde, it seems, was in agreement. On his lecture tours of the USA he found his favourite audience in the town of Leadville, Colorado, an utterly lawless Wild West crew of prospecting miners, hustlers and prostitutes – “the best dressed men in America” as he termed them (they loved him back, admiring his ability to drink them under the table, and naming a sliver mine after him). His exploration of the underworld of the rent boys of London brought him further contact with the criminal classes. He came to admire the transgressive in general – larceny in person and lawlessness in the abstract (“genius steals”), as a bulwark against bourgeois morality. We will return later as to whether this necessarily makes Wilde an “anarchist”, but suffice to say this is part of Wilde’s view that “man’s original virtue is disobedience”. And as such he has no time for a state modelled on obedience, however “progressive”, whether Stalinist or Fabian.

Wilde is strikingly prophetic in his denunciations of what he describes here as “authoritarian socialism”. He says again that in the present state of affairs, at least some men with the advantages of privilege manage to find themselves, to realise their potential “If the Socialism is authoritarian; if there are governments to be armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have industrial tyrannies, than the last state of man will be worse than the first.” At least some can have freedom now, in this state, no-one would at all. Wilde sees no virtue at all in the equitable distribution of misery. The collectivism of compunction which existed in Soviet Russia or Mao’s China was precisely the nightmare scenario he was warning against. It seems clear though that Wilde actually thought the sheer unattractiveness of this made it unlikely. “I hardly think any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours”. He may have ‘hardly thought’ it, but at the same time Wilde wrote this there were plenty of socialists who had just such a vision in mind – and sadly their type were to proliferate, and in some areas to predominate. No wonder that The Soul of Man was an inspiration to many revolutionaries rebelling against the Tsars of Russia, but was later suppressed and banned by Stalin himself.

Wilde’s antipathy for this vision stemmed from a hatred not just of tyranny, but for utilitarianism, for grey functional necessity in all its forms. For this ultimate aesthete anything which smelt of soul-shrivelling drudgery of utility was poison to his nostrils. When Wilde said earlier that “all art is quite useless”, he meant it as the highest form of compliment to art. In this essay he states “the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied it self not with such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely”. The ‘dignity of labour’ seems to have little appeal for Wilde (recalling his earlier witticism “a man who calls a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.”)

Wilde had a life-long aversion to the regimentation of the old Latin Roman world, preferring instead the free intelligence of the Greeks (and Athens rather than Sparta.) Here he says that the Greeks were right to say that civilisation needs slaves – but that machines are now the new slaves. The machine is key to Wilde’s vision of liberation, saving people from soulless drudgery, from living to work rather than working to live, allowing them to spend time exploring their own true potential. Wilde’s actual criticism of capitalism’s depredations is generally non specific and allusive, he is at his most exact in decrying the fact that at the moment machines only exacerbate the problem, they put people out of work but do not give them leisure in return. After the revolution this “surplus value” will be given back to the people, machines will serve man rather than the other way around.

A familiar criticism of socialism is that it engenders conformity, the hive mind and “tyranny of the majority.” In fact, this is a criticism levelled not just at socialism, but at democracy itself, and has been directed by the libertarian down the years at the conformity of societies from Atlee’s UK to Eisenhower’s USA. De Tocqueville’s criticisms of American democracy were an early warning of the tyrannising dangers inherent to a mass society. Again, the avowedly libertarian Wilde is in full agreement. “Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people." Perhaps the majority of the second half of the essay is given to a defence of the individual, not against oppressive government, but against the tyranny of public opinion, the drab ochlochracy of the press pack. “In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But it is still very bad, and wrong, and demoralising.”

The press is the grand villain of the piece, not for its defence of the powers-that-be, but for its low, utilitarian pandering to public opinion and prejudice. With signature deftness of paradox, the public are credited with an insatiable habit for curiosity for everything except that which is worth knowing, “and the journalist, with his tradesman-like habits, supplies their demand.” This is a denunciation of the tabloid mentality, the double-faced prurience and puritan morality which has persisted down the years and which was to devour Wilde himself in the end. These journalists are in the gutter, but their eyes follow the sewers, not the stars. His point here though, is rather more profound than a critique of Paul Dacre, Kelvin Mackenzie and their spiritual forbears. The press is merely the clearest and most obvious example of pandering to the public rather than challenging them, of playing to the gallery, feeding on the underbelly of the lowest common denominator. Art and politics are just as guilty, and the enervating effect of the herd who must be heard is even greater. Poetry, declares Wilde, is only of quality in Britain because the public don’t care about it and so leave it alone, novels and drama are soiled with the influence of public opinion. This may appear to be snobbery. On one level, it is. But Wilde is keen to stress that the collective opinion of the “educated” is even more harmful than that of the wider masses. His true point is this: a piece of art should be true to the artist, it should be made to for the artist, not his audience. Hence “Thackeray’s ‘Esmond’ is a beautiful work because he wrote it to please himself. In his other novels... he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his work by appealing directly to the sympathies of the public...”

The implication of this message in art is that true genius is unique. The implication in politics is that the individual must not be stifled in any way. This does not mean that people should be free to trample on others, as in the infantile, one-eyed, self-interested and self-contradictory arguments of modern day so-called libertarians (those who conveniently forget that finance capital is only given meaning by the reviled state itself. ) It does mean as complete a freedom from restraint by the state as is possible. Just as crucially, it also means freedom of the constraints of physical want and need, from the talons of finance.

Perhaps a more controversial view from the socialist perspective, is that, if the crowd is usually wrong, then it takes an exceptional individual or group to make change. Wilde is adamant about this – slaves never freed themselves, it was outsiders with unpopular ideas which achieved emancipation. He makes such a demon of popular opinion that popular morality itself takes on a devilish form, to the extent that Wilde claims that to be accused of ‘immorality’ is the highest compliment that can be paid, whether to art or individual (to be respectable is to be repellent, as Lady Bracknell cattily remarks of Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest.)

Again Wilde seems to be with Nietzsche here, both in his desire to escape the slave morality of the masses (a continual theme in his plays), and also his defence of history being shaped by powerful personalities, Carlyle’s “great men.” Nietzsche had said that madness was rare in individuals but in “groups, parties, nations and epochs, is the rule.” Much earlier than in this essay, Wilde had said that “To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.” We needn’t go into the obvious ways in which such a message is prone to perversion, except to say Wilde’s defence of absolute freedom in every area of human life is something of an inoculation against any usurpation by dictators, that his elitism of individuality should not equate to a political elitism. His absolute individualism is an inoculation against oppression, whether that tyranny is brought about by government or money power.

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinion, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation” said Wilde later in De Profundis, text more tormentedly personal of course, but the message was essentially the same. Society as it stands does not allow people to be what they want to be, and that is its greatest crime. In The Soul Of Man, Wilde holds that being absolutely true to yourself was the most essential message to be found in the teachings of Jesus Christ and the greatest goal of any society. The pain which Jesus’ endured is no longer necessary, and the self which we reach will be a new state, beyond the necessity of sacrifice. It is hard to deny that such a vision is utterly removed from any bureaucratic statistopia. It is equally hard to deny that it is quite as equally far removed from a capitalism where the poor are shackled to the rich, and all are shackled to commerce. “It will be a marvellous thing, the true personality of a man” when it finally appears.

In fairness to Marx, he too could offer the odd glimpse into the liberated society which he envisaged socialism would lead to, and in his vision too it was one in which the true potential of the individual was unleashed. In the German Ideology, he wrote that in a society un-encumbered by the division of labour and bolstered by plentiful and bountiful resources, that a man could would be able to "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner... without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic." Sadly this was an all too rare insight into the end goal of the purest liberty which Marx had in mind. Can this absence really be unrelated to the abysmal tyrannies committed blindly in the man's name? In The Soul Of Man, Wilde gives full untrammelled voice to the liberation dreams hidden largely in Marx's head, as the German spent his devoted his energies to what we might call with wry understatement "the details" of society as it is, how and why revolution was to occur. Marx inspired action where Wilde only dreamt. But dreams are necessary too. As with much of Wilde’s writing, one feels the presence of a large and loving wisdom, a generous genius, all the more profound for being informal and approachable. To hear this voice speak out for the cause of equality and liberation is a truly a liberation in itself, and a release.

If Wilde's essay is dreamlike in its idealism, and in its unique beauty, it is amorphous like a dream too. When it comes to what communism will “look like”, Wilde gives more of the specifics in aesthetics and principle lacking in Marx, but he is as vague as the man himself in concrete examples of the how the society is to function. Still, no-one ever came to Wilde to seek the steely rigours of practical instruction. Yet to another great Victorian polymath, quite a few people often did.

William Morris loomed as large over the intellectual world of late 19th century Britain as did Wilde, though his shadow fell on different areas. Both were writers, both were poets, and both had a very particular aesthetic vision which was to prove as inspirational as it was divisive. Morris’ pastoral view of England, a bucolic arcadia with a rustic, rural and Nordic spirit, was every bit as influential as Wilde’s iconoclastic and urbane art for art’s sake. But the more practically minded Morris was a craftsman and draughtsman as much as a dreamer and thinker, a man whose textile designs are more well-known to the wider public today than his writings. Morris was the high overseer of the arts and crafts movement, a print-maker and editor or the highest distinction, and a founder member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Morris was more a joiner than Wilde in more ways than one.

Wilde neither joined nor applied for membership of any political parties or societies. Like a later, wise-cracking left-winger, he probably wouldn’t belong to any that would have him. Morris by contrast was a leading figure in both the Social Democratic Federation and the later Socialist League, the earliest organisations in Britain to have fought for a fully realised socialism in both name and form. His temperament tended more to the aesthetic than the ascetic, and he was happier conversing on art with his friends the pre-Raphaelites than reviewing policy documents. Nevertheless he was not averse to the organisational side of the political world, and proved an effective leader. He helped build organisations with the same methodical care in which he produced beautifully bound editions of Chaucer, and, with his inspirational lectures, did as much as any other one man to promote the popularity of the socialist cause in the century’s later years. Perhaps it should not be surprising then that Morris should seek to combine his literary and artistic sensibilities to his proselytising for a freer and more equal world. To him there was no contradiction between the two. The result of this marriage of aesthete art and political purpose was his 1890 novella News from Nowhere.

The inspiration for News From Nowhere was a negative one. The American lawyer, writer and socialist Edward Bellamy had written his own utopian fantasy novel Looking Backward, which sought to imagine the perfected future society which a socialist revolution would bring about. In Looking Backward, America is transformed into a machine-led society of plenty-for-all, a rationalised utopia organised from the centre. Unemployment and poverty are banished, great rationalised and nationalised chain stores provide citizens with all they need. Morris reviewed the novel in the Socialist League magazine the Commonweal, and his reaction, while polite, was unmistakably hostile. It was not just the impersonality of Bellamy’s vision which unnerved him, nor the centralisation, with all the propensity for dictatorial abuse which that entailed. It was the fact that Bellamy saw work itself as an evil to be vanquished, a primitive throwback to be banished in his labour-saving, leisure oriented utopia. This was deeply unsatisfying to Morris, and was determined to offer an alternative view as to the promised land where socialism might lead. News From Nowhere was the response.

Its plot was a response too. Just as in Looking Backward, News from Nowhere features a narrator who is spirited away from the dingy present to a fantastically improved future. But unlike the earlier book gleaming mechanised world of Bellamy, that very futuristic future, Morris’ hero at first seems to be stepping not into the future at all, but further into the past.

Awakening one day following an evening discussing what a future society might look like with his friends at the Socialist League, middle-aged, middle class Londoner William Guest takes a walk along the Thames to find it oddly cleaner than usual. Taking a boat ride with a curiously dressed, handsome oarsman, Guest travels up the river to find the rickety habitations thrown up by industrialisation remarkably absent, “the soap-works with their smoke-vomiting chimneys had gone; the lead works gone, and no sound of riveting and hammering came down the west wind from Thorneycroft’s.” In their place are verdant greenery interspersed with beautifully designed medievalesque houses. Guest is as unnerved by this as he is by the fact that his oarsman (also dressed in a style closer to the 1400s than the 1800s) seems mightily amused when Guest suggests payment for the ride.

"I think I know what you mean. You think that I have done you a service; so you feel yourself bound to give me something which I am not to give to a neighbour, unless he has done something special for me. I have heard of this kind of thing; but pardon me for saying, that it seems to us a troublesome and roundabout custom; and we don't know how to manage it.”

The ruggedly handsome oarsman, whose name it transpires is Dick, takes warm pity on the on the confusion of the relatively haggard Guest, and takes him on a quick tour of the hamlet style commune in which he and his fellow healthy, youthful and cheerful citizens live. Guest sees citizens displaying arts, crafts and furniture they have made themselves at stalls, giving or exchanging wares but expecting no payment in return. He sees craftsmen working on benches and then relaxing in the woods afterwards, and finding equal satisfaction in each activity. It becomes clear than many people he meets are a good few years older than they look, such is the succouring and flourishing environment in which they dwell. Seeing that Guest’s confusion is still intense given the alien world from which he has arrived, Dick and his girlfriend Clara, another vivacious and hearty character give him over to the more detailed instruction of an older man; the wry and avuncular Hammond. Seeing that Guest is truly an outsider, from what is in effect another world, he explains as patiently as he can.

Hammond explains that in today’s world money is meaningless, and that small, autonomous interdependent communities produce what they need and trade with one another. Cities have in effect have dissolved, there is no distinction between town and country, habitations are distributed precisely where people want and need them, enmeshed within surrounding nature.

Central authority does not exist, decisions are based entirely at a local level. “I must now shock you by telling you that we have no longer anything which you, a native of another planet, would call a government.” Marriage and divorce are no more, free and equal relationships are forged between men and women at will, based on mutual affection alone. This may seem the least radical of Morris’ ideas to us today, upon its earlier readings it was probably the most. Morris tells Guest how Dick and Clara have been lovers for many years but for a while they grew apart and each had other partners between them, before realising that they were in the end happier together. Entrapped as the earlier reader would have been in the draconian bonds of Victorian marriage, Guest can hardly fathom the sexual freedom on display. “Socialist” though he is, he finds it as hard to accept this as to accept that people can work without payment. How can you get people to work when there is no reward for labour? Hammond explains the reward is “the reward of creation. The wages that God gets, as people might have said in time agone. If you are going to ask to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is what excellence in work means, the next thing we shall hear of will be a bill sent in for the begetting of children.”

Morris’s society is a world revolving heavily around “work”, but work is no longer seen in any way as something divorced from enjoyment, as something that has to be done to ward off starvation or to accumulate abstract wealth. Work is no longer a chore. From an early age children are taught to create things which they love, and which make them happy. If their surroundings do not suit them, they are taught to make their own. Some may find it more amenable to fashion pottery, some to write poetry, some to assemble brickwork, some to cook, some to perform athletic feats. But to all, a sense of art is integral, not additional to life.

Everyone is encouraged to try their hand at everything, so they are not limited to one path of expression, and to have a large degree of self sufficiency. And yet, equally importantly, people are allowed to pursue their own desires and enthusiasms so that the activities which they spend most time on are the ones they enjoy the most, and which in turn they can excel at to the best of their abilities. The boy who enjoys welding with brass will turn his love into an essential service for the community, in just the same way that the girl who enjoys poetry the most will create this into a commodity for those who enjoy it. Crucially though, she is not writing the poems to please others, but to please herself. Division of labour is gone, all work is now a “hobby”, or rather more than that - a thing of enjoyment and fulfilment. Yet in being harnessed for the community becomes so much more than that. The same principle is applied to physical work and mental work, to music and exercise, to the serious and the jocular, so that people are able to achieve the very zenith of what they are capable, hence the beautiful bodies and minds on display. This society would contain “Neither brain-slack brain workers, nor heart-sick hand workers” to quote a phrase Morris uses elsewhere.

One of the great innovations of Marx’s writings was the theory of alienation, the fact that workers, toiling for wages on work completely divorced from their own needs, become separated from their essence, their very being. While this alienation has been fascinatingly explored by many, from Lukacs to Debord and the Situationists, it is much rarer to see an explanation of what humanity would look like with the alienation removed. Morris sought to achieve this through the bucolic natives of News from Nowhere. These were not just men and women working how, where and why they wanted, these were self-contained artists, producing their own aesthetic surroundings producing their own reality, rather than living in another’s.

As the book’s plot unwinds in its charming way, just as even the most hard-headed capitalist may find it hard to refute some of its arguments, so even the most idealistic utopian may find it unlikely that such a society could ever genuinely be created. Guest himself shares this incredulity with his host. It is at this point, when Hammond begins to explain the history of how the commonwealth came about, that the tale takes on a sterner tone. He explains at some length how the capitalists did not give up their wealth through education, through persuasion, or any sudden spasm battalions of philanthropy on their part. On the contrary, Hammond recounts how capitalist Britain was wracked through heroic strikes from the working classes which lead to increasingly violent and vicious repression from the rulers. This bloody impasse eventually leads to all out civil war, leaving carnage in its wake. In a fairly brief aside he mentions thuggish pro-government leagues bought off by the bosses to put down the masses, which go by the name of the “Friends of Order”, an eerie augur of Fascism. This struggle eventually comes to an end after several years, when the workers begin to generate their own self governing communities which win over more and more converts. Eventually the capitalists simply cannot afford to buy off the loyalties of sections of the proletariat any more. As their capital supplies dwindle, and communities become increasingly more self sufficient, they lose their potential to either bribe or blackmail the wider populace.

Whatever one makes of this scenario, it certainly takes News from Nowhere out of the realms of the abstract utopia, or for that matter prissy pacifist idealism. On the contrary, it places the plot in a specifically Marxist framework of class war, fleshing out for the first time what such a violent struggle might look like in practice. Morris did indeed consider himself a follower of Marx, but found equal inspiration in the teachings of John Ruskin. The great genius art critic (a teacher of Wilde at Oxford) was as influential to Morris for his theory of man being degraded by an urban environment as he was in his arguments that all work should be pleasing as well as productive, “labour without joy is base, joy without labour is base.” He wanted to expunge the arid abstraction from Marx, and the lingering desire for social hierarchy in Ruskin. News from Nowhere is Morris’s audacious synthesis of the father of scientific socialism and the self-professed “violent Tory of the old school”.

As William Guest wakes after his blissfully inspiring sojourn with Hammond, Dick and Clara, he finds himself back in dingy industrial London, sad to leave them, but hopeful for the future. And so this seminal tract ends with the very conventional plot device of the ‘ambiguous dream’, at the end of what is in some ways a quite traditional story. Quite apart from its ideological controversies, it has been quite as divisive as a piece of art. Its vision of a hopeful future served as a great beacon of idealism inspiring many thousands to take up a lifelong struggle of a freer and more equal future . At its best its arcadian idyll can give the socialist reader the feeling that the ghosts of old England are on their side, that the cause of a just future has found its greatest ally in the ancient past. Its pastoral prose style has found admirers who are not socialists themselves.

On the other hand it has had its detractors as well. George Orwell for one was unimpressed with what he termed its “watery melancholy”, meaning the very satisfaction and self-containment of its characters made them insipid. Orwell made this observation in an essay which maintained that describing a perfect, or even a particularly happy society in inspirational terms was so hard as to be nearly impossible. There is perhaps a certain lack of spark in the prose, but perhaps this is, as Orwell says, the sheer impossibility of capturing utopia in print. Dystopias are far more vivid, as he and others proved. When challenged with imagining an ideal world, even Swift, the greatest of imaginative writers, could only create those very wise, very dignified, very dreary horses, the Houyhnhnms. Morris managed better than most.

What would Wilde himself have made of it? As far as I know there is no record of this. Wilde was certainly an admirer of Morris himself, of much of his work and his aesthetic vision. One biographer speculated whether the playwright visited the engraver on his deathbed, it transpires this was probably not true, though the pair were certainly on warm correspondence terms in earlier years. It does seem likely though that a man whose work is rife with waspish worldly-wise aphorists like Lord Henry Wooton, Jack Worthing and Mrs Erlynne, may have found Dick, Clara and the whole rustic crew a little too clean living for his tastes.

There were other fundamental differences. Wilde’s attitude to nature is ambivalent; witheringly contemptuous of “wearisome, uncomfortable nature” which he finds hopelessly inferior to art in The Decay Of Lying, and yet later finding sublime wonder in natural simplicity near the end of De Profundis. Wilde seems to swing both ways here, but taken as a whole his essentially sophisticate worldview seems as urban as it is urbane, elementally distanced in sensibility from Morris’ communism of carpentry. For Morris, nature was supreme, an organic ideal to which humanity should aspire. A different palette of thought was being drawn from in both men. Wilde’s well of cultural inspiration was essentially cosmopolitan; pagan Greece and the Catholic Europe of Italy and France. The Europe which inspired Morris was that of the North, he espoused an organic, medieval rural idea of the British isles which he saw as interwoven with the ancient sagas of Scandinavia. Wilde was Classical, Morris was Gothic. Visions of the future inspired by these two quite separate and unique imaginations were bound to have their differences.

The line about a man calling a spade a spade being compelled to use one does not indicate in Wilde a man who sees any intrinsic value to manual work, however fresh and free the environment where the digging takes place. The Soul of Man claims that the Greeks were correct on the need for slaves, and that we now have machines to play such a role. Morris, by contrast, sees machinery itself as an anonymising tool of the market, which would, to coin a phrase, “wither away” once socialism had arrived. Morris found fulfilment in labour, Wilde sought to escape it altogether. This is a major schism to put it mildly, and in that area at least, it seems likely Wilde may have preferred Edward Bellamy’s labour –saving utopia closer to his Hellenic ideal than Morris’s pastoral paradise.

The similarities however, are more striking than the differences. Classical and Gothic aside, both were Romantic. These were visions of socialism which both showed a profound understanding of how inequality and the market economy poisons human relationships, distorting life into a warped mirror of its own debased priorities and limiting possibilities. While abhorring capitalism, they both warned against a vision of an alternative which would set against the power of capital an equally oppressive power of the state, the “industrial tyranny” of augur. Most importantly, both were visions in which the autonomy of the individual was sacrosanct, in which the absolute freedom of the individual to be what they wanted to be was inviolable. Marx may have wanted this too, but the ambiguities surrounding his wishes have led to the darkest of consequences.

While Morris was the more practical man, he was every bit as committed as Wilde to the aesthetics of human happiness, and to the principle that art and culture were central to society, not just a by-product. Both were passionate in their belief in the sanctity of the independent human spirit. The sheer stupefying dullness and uniformity which characterised the societies of post-war Poland, of Honnecker’s East Germany, of Czechoslovakia following brave Dubcek’s defeat, would have been as alien to them as muck to marble, with less similarity in form and spirit than the bile of Pat Robertson has with the Sermon on the Mount.

It is not suggested here that either The Soul of Man or News From Nowhere are a stand-in or replacement for the great works of the socialist canon, that Marx and Tawney can be thrown from the window, or that lyrical dreams are a substitute for the lived experience of struggle. Nor is either work without important flaws. Wilde’s vision is beautiful, but its reliance on the Great Man, on outside agitators as the only agent of change, is frankly elitist. News from Nowhere on the other hand is so tied into Morris’s particular ruralist outlook as to put anyone who actually quite likes living in a city (not an insignificant number of people) off the idea of socialism altogether. What they are however, apart from being brilliantly inspiring revelations in themselves, are magnificent correctives to the high-handed excesses of other thinkers, so heavy is the air of freedom about them.

Some would claim it is not correct to classify the pair as socialists at all, but rather as anarchists. Certainly those within the modern Left Anarchist tradition passionately claim them for their own. In their denunciation of state tyranny and advocacy of decentralised community power allied to their egalitarianism, it is very clear there is at the very least much common ground. Wilde and Morris, while clear on the way their ideal society would look, were not prescriptive as to their method of travel. Wilde gave no indication at all. Morris clearly believed a violent revolution would be necessary to uproot and overturn the capitalist system, but issued no prescription against accessing the levers of power to move society towards this direction. Anarchists denounce any function of the state, or participation in Parliamentary process. The heroic achievements won by social democracy: full employment, free healthcare, support for the weak and disabled (now being systematically destroyed) were great steps towards the empowerment of both working people as a group, and towards unleashing the potential of individuals to lead the lives they want to lead, emancipated from the slavery of poverty. Of course Wilde and Morris would have thought these measures didn’t go nearly far enough, but I still believe they would have treasured these achievements, not scorned them.

Take a look at the index of any dictionary of witty quotations, and Wilde is likely to be one with the most entries, or in the top five at any rate. Jostling with him for position is likely to be that other great Anglo-Irish wit; George Bernard Shaw. The pair were contemporaries and friends – on one occasion when Shaw launched a petition to free the Haymarket Martyrs (anarchists jailed in America), Wilde was the only one to sign it. Shaw went on to outlive Wilde for half a century, and his vision and version of socialism was the one which came to predominate. For Wilde, this was a tragedy, for Shaw, a dubious vindication by default. For socialism, it was a disaster.

If the driving force behind Wilde’s socialism was liberty, the controlling passion for Shaw was order. Of course he could write the most brilliant denunciations of the horrors inflicted by poverty on the workers, or on the absurdities of sexual inequality. But it was the chaos of capitalist society which he opposed more than its injustice. It was the wanton inefficiency of unemployment which irked him more than the human misery it caused.

In Wilde’s wit there is always a warmth, no matter how sharp the surface. Shaw’s barbs have an icier quality to them, the air of a sarcastic schoolmaster chiding his children for disappointing him -yet again. Shaw didn’t see himself as a poet, but as grand designer, the great engineer of the human soul (as Stalin himself said a writer should be), re-sculpting it in his own image. He had no faith in the working-class as an agent of its own liberation, and his attitude to individual proletarians in his plays was one of ill-concealed contempt. No, the only way that workers, and society as a whole could be saved was by the benign tutorship of the enlightened, rationalised middle-class, by individuals, in short, such as his good self. It was this corrosive spirit which formed the kernel of the Fabianism which has so sullied the soul of socialism in this country.

I simplify perhaps, but not too much. When one moves beyond the UK and into the realms of international politics, it is hard to overstate how detrimental and deleterious Shaw’s attitude was. He was, of course, one of the main cheerleaders for the Stalin regime, apologist-in-chief for the crimes of Communism, the myopic scar which was to disfigure sections of the Left, and bring the rest into disrepute by association. His was a rather worse betrayal however, than those many Communists of the 20s and 30s who had misguidedly come to see the Soviet Union as carrying out the Marxist mission. Shaw did not even believe in revolution - never had - far too messy, too combustible. He had little time for Marx - but he did have time for Stalin. He admired the tyrant, without even endorsing the thinker who gave the tyrant spurious justification. Here after all was another great engineer of humanity, a “great man” who “got things done”. A man of destiny who didn’t allow such trifles as the value of liberty or the sanctity of human life to get in his way.

Shaw would take this ruthlessness and power-worship even further however, into sympathy not just for Stalin, but even for Mussolini, and, to a lesser extent, Hitler. In this rather rarer perversion, we see in even purer relief the moral and intellectual monstrosities which can be justified when socialism becomes nothing more the desire for a planned economy and opposition to the free market, divorced from the humanistic vision which should inspire it. The modern Right, particularly in America, is full of pseudo-libertarian quarter-wits yelping “Hitler was a socialist too! You’re all the same!”, while trying to prise Barack Obama into their demented and nonsensical Venn diagram. It is Shaw’s intellectual outrages with give this drivel currency. George Orwell observed that most Englishmen either considered Communism and Fascism as opposites, and so sympathised with one over the other, or else they saw them as the same, and opposed them both. Only Shaw, he ruefully remarked, saw them as the same and so supported them both for that very reason (“though Shaw is not an Englishman”.) This is where you can end up when the means engulfs the end, where your enemy’s enemy is always your friend.

Though they did not live long enough to give us hard proof, it is literally unthinkable to imagine either Wilde or Morris displaying the slightest sympathy for Stalin (let alone the Fascists.) Turning the tables, it is equally impossible to imagine Stalin, Mao, Hoxha or Gaddafi reading their works with anything other then seething contempt. Such effete decadence , such rebellious individualism, such unworkable idealism…The very fibre of their writing pulse with a humanity, a sheer will to freedom which these arid tyrants entirely lacked. But it is not just the Stalinists who lacked this basic vitamin of respect for individuality and autonomy. Many Fabians, Shaw among their number were very nearly as corrupted. The same corruption led to the enthusiasm which many of them had for eugenics, “re-scalpelling” society in the most sinister way possible. Take Shaw’s chilling phrase “the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialism of the selective breeding of man.” The same inhumanity and inflexibility would lead others into anti-Semitism. Here is Shaw again: "This is the real enemy, the invader from the East, the Druze, the ruffian, the oriental parasite; in a word: the Jew.” It would be hard to dream up a clearer example of how a creed of liberation had been wrenched from its origins.

Stalinist and Fabian, revolutionary and reformer alike were to end up betraying the very basic tenets of socialism because they ended up the free autonomy of the individual human being. Arch-Fabian Beatrice Webb dismissed the 1926 General Strike, the nearest this country has ever came to revolution in the twentieth century, as “a monstrous irrelevance in the sphere of social reform”.The working man was not to be trusted, he was too brutalised by capitalism. He would be led to salvation either by a revolutionary vanguard political party run by intellectuals and warriors, or a reforming state run by intellectuals and bureaucrats. In rejecting individuality, they ended up jettisoning the fundamental freedom of the worker to live the life that he or she wishes to lead: the whole reason why the creed evolved in the first place.

The biggest defence of the true spirit of socialism is not in the example of any one leader, writer or thinker, but in the lived experience and struggle of the working people down the decades who have fought for fairer wages, more spare time to live their lives, freedom from being ravaged by want: what E.P. Thompson termed the “moral economy” of the masses. Nonetheless, the brave and bold example of a few magnificent, unique individuals did much to not only inspire a movement, but also made it truer to itself. Wilde and Morris are not alone here.

There are other inoculations against the viruses of Stalin and Shaw, other heroes. E.P. Thompson himself, the historian who did more than most to rescue the voice of ordinary people from “the enormous condescension of posterity.” Orwell of course, famous enemy of Stalinism, but an equal foe of Fascism, British imperialism and the brutalities of the free market. William Cobbett, the great agrarian writer, farmer and eternal rebel whose dogged and rugged individualism has been claimed by Tories, but whose unassailable fight for the underdog places him as a the champion of the common man against the powers-that-be, ( a man whose anti-intellectual outlook, taken in small doses, is a valuable corrective to the systemising excesses of the urban middle-class left.) Above all, the heroic stand of all those on the Labour Left, from Bevan to Foot, from Tony Benn to Dennis Skinner who have kept alive the strongest support for egalitarianism, and workers’ rights without ever falling under the Soviet spell.

All the same, the examples of Wilde and Morris offer a unique counterbalance of idealism and clarity, of insight and inspiration, warriors with words, grand sentinels of soul and mind. It is time to take heed. Movements for freedom, fighting the stagnant tyranny of the plutocracy are flaring the world over, armed insurrections, occupations, protests, strikes. The Occupy movements may be scorned for their blank-slate idealism, but at least they are finally free from the deadening sectarianism which has ultimately strangled every previous insurrection. They are not in thrall to dead Russians, and this is a good thing. Time for some dead English and Irishmen to be heard instead. Not Shaw though: his time is over, his day is done. Let’s let Wilde and Morris have their say.

My Struggle: Book One

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Danny Byrne) — Tue, 15 May 2012 08:40:09 GMT

Towards the end of the shattering first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s memoir My Struggle (published in the UK, by Harvill, as A Death in the Family), he cuts from a scene of particularly sepulchral intensity to a flashback describing his days interviewing writers for a student newspaper. On one such occasion, while interviewing the author Kjartan Fløgstad, he forgets his notepad and is forced to try to recreate the interview from memory. But it’s impossible. Even with the questions to hand his memories of the conversation are “too vague, too imprecise”. Having called up Fløgstad for some ‘follow-up questions’ he manages to cobble together a version that seems faithful enough, and submits it to the author for review. The response reads as an ironically prescient in-joke:

“I opened it. Held the printout of the interview. It was covered with red marks and red comments in the margin. “I never said this”, I saw, “Imprecise”, I saw, “No, no, no”, I saw, “???”, I saw. “Where did you get that from?” I saw.”

Knausgaard’s six-volume tell-all has become a literary sensation in Norway, partly due to the lavish acclaim it has drawn from more bookish quarters, but mainly due to the juicy controversy stemming from its warts-and-all portrayal of Knausgaard’s family. This, the first volume to be translated into English, centres on his enigmatic father, who walked out on the family and later barricaded himself in his mother’s house and systematically drank himself to death. Knausgaard pulls no punches in laying bare the desperate squalor in which his father spent his final days, and the very public fallout with surviving members of the family over Knausgaard’s version of events has made the book an unlikely bestseller.

Prescience aside, the anecdote demonstrates the fundamental impossibility of Knausgaard’s project. If he cannot recount a single conversation without scandalizing his interlocutor with flagrant distortions and misrepresentations, what can his memoir ever be but the most arrant of fictions? Even the passage itself is a double negative, a self-cancelling invalidation. As a remembered anecdote that Knausgaard uses to demonstrate the impossibility of really remembering anything, it negates its own purported premises, even as it undermines those of the entire undertaking. This awareness of his alienation from the past underpins Knausgaard’s approach to his subject matter. He may be able to dredge up disparate fragments, images, even the odd madeleine-prompted moment of uncanny convergence, but as Thomas Bernhard’s narrator puts it in Extinction, for the most part the past – even yesterday, even the last second - is nothing but a gaping void. Memory is to a greater or lesser degree fictional, and that is before one even confronts the problematics of writing, of subjugating experience to the outrages of narrative form and the corrupting medium of language. Knausgaard reflects:

“You know too little and it doesn’t exist. You know too much and it doesn’t exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. But how to get there?” (p. 190)

Even self-knowledge becomes unreliable once it is detached from intuition, and has been assimilated into a personal narrative. Truth isn’t a question of content but of sense and feeling; an event; a verb not a noun. For Knausgaard, writing is a lie deployed in the service of exhuming and recapturing this fugitive truth. But writing muddies the water with its own manipulations and falsehoods, from the weight of usage and association to the gestures of ritual and convention, the charade of literary voice. Knausgaard thus chooses a way of ‘taking us there’ through his writing that is risky, oblique and at times disconcerting. Distrusting the tyranny of the adjective, he bases his style around flatness and matter-of-fact detail. For the most part he lets significations arise out of form and structure, the internally generated resonances and associations carried by objects themselves, rather than laying them on a plate for us through the line-by-line expressiveness of literary prose. Rather than channeling experience, Knausgaard’s dispassionate delivery more often than not serves to accentuate our distance from it:

“On the way downstairs a huge surge of tears overcame me. This time there was no question of trying to hide it. My whole chest trembled and shook, I couldn’t draw breath, deep sobs rolled through me, and my face contorted, I was completely out of control.
“Ooooooooh,” I said. “Ooooooooh.”

The subject matter sits uncomfortably with the anti-emotive, matter-of-fact style. The symptoms are simply presented in a non-hierarchical list (‘My whole chest…’), free of any of the inflective legwork we expect prose to do in order to enhance the sense of that to which it refers. Part of the uncanny effect of Knausgaard’s approach to his subject manner is this resistance to almost any kind of literary voice, rejecting its heightened sensibility on a line-by-line level and instead opting for a cumulative effect based on form rather than style. His prose rejects one of the central mechanisms of traditional literary aesthetics: enhancing and evoking subject matter through imitation. Like when Keats imitates the sticky sibilance of an overripe apple, or Dickens or Joyce modulate their sentences to evoke fog or snow. Knausgaard simply doesn’t bother with any of this, which becomes a kind of oppositional statement in itself. His stubbornly deadpan delivery accentuates the rupture between now and then, the void that separates the historical self from the self that tries to recapture experience and recreate it through prose. Yet this is not the mannered, deliberately enigmatic Dirty Realist minimalism of Hemingway and Carver, or even the offhand garrulousness of Kerouac. It lies somewhere much closer to the tone of Imre Kertesz’s remarkable novel Fateless, in which the narrator revisits Auschwitz and rather than emoting just ingenuously describes what he sees.

In Knausgaard the resistance to emotiveness is not merely a way of confronting the ineffability of trauma without reducing it to the forms and codes of habit, though this is undoubtedly partly where he is coming from. It is also down to a more general, pervasive sense of the impossibility of writing, of which the recollection of trauma is merely an extreme example. It is much more obviously impossible to convey the actual sense of Auschwitz than it is to convey the actual sense of the dinner-table atmosphere of one’s childhood, or the feeling of playing in a rubbish band, or making a pot of coffee or lighting a cigarette; there is much more at stake in its being subsumed into the normalizing network of shared association. But it is ultimately an amplification of the same incongruity. The sense of a moment passes through words like so many grains of sand through despairing fingers. If Knausgaard is to overcome this problem he must do so obliquely.

What does it mean to say that Knausgaard’s artistic effects arise from form and structure rather than style? Take, for example, the line that begins the passage that deals with his father’s death and its aftermath, the real subject matter of the book: “I was almost thirty years old when I saw a dead body for the first time”. This comes on page 222, but it is really the book’s beginning. The events that the narrative concerns – Knausgaard’s confrontation with the squalid house in which his father died, and his attempts to make sense of the events that drove him to what was in effect a prolonged suicide - are all to come. Yet Knausgaard prefaces this all with 222 pages, consisting of a mixture of saturnine overtures, philosophical asides, quotidian detail and fractured anecdotes from his youth, that can at times seem slightly directionless. However, in retrospect it becomes clear that by doing so he creates the conditions under which the objects and events that the main narrative concerns can become meaningful, independent of the stylistic shortcuts of a more conventionally literary treatment. We can well imagine a lyrical memoir in which the above sentence serves as a killer opening. It might continue with evocative prose that transports us inside the mind of the observer, creating resonance and an illusion of empathy. Yet this is not how Knausgaard continues. He merely dispassionately describes what happens:

“It was the summer of 1998, a July afternoon, in a chapel in Kristiansand. My father had died. He was laid out on a table in the middle of the room, the sky was overcast, the light in the room dull, outside the window a lawn mower was slowly circling around a lawn.”

The significance of the scene arises from the painfully accumulated sensibility we have derived from the previous 222 pages, insidiously, accretively drawing us into the author’s way of looking at the world, his many-sided relationship with his father, the ineffable web of significations contained within the corpse laid out on the table before us and its relationship to the observer. Knausgaard could try and communicate something of this through evocative prose, perhaps using free indirect discourse to try to recreate his mental reaction to what he observes. Yet he knows that this would be a fraudulent way of recreating the ‘there’ of the moment. Instead, through its structure and painfully assembled detail, the novel cultivates a sensibility whereby the signification is able to arise, to some extent, out of the objects themselves. Hence, when Karl Ove and Yngwe pull up outside of the house in which his father drank himself to death, all he needs to do is flatly describe what they see:

“The garden was completely overgrown. The grass was knee-high, like a meadow, grayish-yellow in color, flattened in some places by the rain. It had spread everywhere, covering all the beds, I wouldn’t have been able to see the flowers had I not known where they were…”

Knausgaard doesn’t tell us what he is thinking, because he knows the structure of the novel does that for us. We immediately cast our minds back to our first encounter with his father digging his immaculately maintained garden twenty years previously, a cold, rigidly disciplinarian figure. The contrast with the dissolute slob who drank himself to death does not need to be articulated through high-flung phrases or hand-wringing lamentation; Knausgaard subtly creates a textual structure in which it arises out of the detail itself.

The fault line separating autobiography and fiction was explored by some of the great writers of the 20th century, from Nabokov and Cendrars to Bernhard and Coetzee, though the obvious source text for Knausgaard’s epic is Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu. Knausgaard’s memoir is a Proustian undertaking not just in the most obvious sense of it being a gargantuan six-volume novelistic examination of the author’s memories, but also in the sense that it tells the story of how it came to be written. It remains to be seen exactly where the remaining five volumes will take us, but even as a standalone Knausgaard’s narrative is circular in the sense that it creates the conditions for its own coming into being in the reader. It engenders the requisite sensibility in the reader who has finished the novel whereby he is able to comprehend something of the full meaning of the author who began writing it. In this sense it is a book that reinforces the Nabokovian diktat that we cannot read, only re-read. And one of the great gifts of this devastating, urgent and original masterpiece is that its resonant last line invites you to do just that: turn back to the first page and start over, all the better equipped to make sense of the journey.

Also published, in the UK, by Harvill, as A Death in the Family.

My Mother and Edith

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Leora Skolkin-Smith) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:43:18 GMT

Edith Wharton and my mother, Rachel Silberstein, could not have been further apart. Edith Wharton was from one of old New York City’s wealthiest families, polished, bred and educated in the polite though confining drawing rooms manners and society of America’s 19th century. My mother had immigrated in 1948 from the other side of the globe, from a country Edith Wharton’s own work had never reached or considered as part of its scope and concerns – Palestine.

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in 1862 to a wealthy New York family. At the other extreme, my mother was born in 1922, and raised in a five room limestone house with no bathrooms except for the outhouses in a wilderness of pine trees, the daughter of a Jewish clerk, in a place where there were only nameless streets, and who, later, at 14 joined the Jewish underground in the war-torn streets of early Palestine. I have often envisioned my mother from her early photos: a voluptuous young woman in a cotton dress with white lace neckline and sandals, smiling widely inside a limestone arch against shadows of barren and cratered hills. My mother left her native Jerusalem to marry my American father in 1947. Like many of the young woman fiercely trying to escape the confines of a war society, my mother leapt into her marriage with my father impulsively, and though, perhaps, the first years with him were romantically thrilling to her, I am sure, later, their marriage was not a happy one. I do not think my mother ever read Edith Wharton’s novels, English was always hard for her, and I am sure she did not feel she would be welcome in a prose about early, privileged Americans, a Christian society that did not include many immigrant or Jewish families.

The Mount was the house Edith Wharton designed during a time of great unhappiness in her marriage. Built in the Berkshires, standing amid the vast New England green lands, hills and quarries, it seemed an architecture embodying a woman’s self and struggles. The outside acreage with its walled gardens and views of the Berkshire hills could not have been further from the vista of Palestine ‘s sun-scorched fields and rocks.

“I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms,” Edith Wharton once wrote...

There is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.

Edith Wharton also wrote in The Writing of Fiction that a writer shouldn’t write for their audience or for themselves but instead write for the “other self.” The “other self” is the inner artist for whom the writer is always in “correspondence”.

My mother took a trip to the revived Mount on my insistence, when I visited her one day in the Berkshires. Standing as she was in 1980 on Edith Wharton’s famous estate, five feet two, round, with the deep worried eyes of woman recently widowed, my mother’s face beamed with a warmth only brought on by the privilege of an intimacy with a kindred soul.

Had they both met in a subconscious spatial world defined by rooms and gardens?

Looking up at an ornamental plaster ceiling, my mother excitedly began her travels through Edith Wharton’s world. Following an interior hallway, which was as much an emotional interior hallway as a real one, my mother walked the ground floor with its drawing room, library, and den, up a flight to Edith Wharton’s boudoir and bedroom. A terrace façade wrapped around to the north side, leading to a Palladian staircase and the formal gardens.

Edith Wharton had her formal "coming out" in 1885 and soon after she married Edward Wharton, an older man from a wealthy Boston family. She built The Mount during the time of her husband’s nervous breakdowns. His emotional illness drove her into debts and sorrow, along with his sexual indiscretions with other lovers.

My mother bought a house in the Berkshire, an old a “Gibson girl” house, after my father died. My father had suffered a stroke causing irreversible brain damage in 1969. As my mother struggled to cope with the tragedy, she grew progressively estranged from the affluent Westchester society my father had introduced her to as a younger woman. After he died, she moved away from the sprawling colonial house we had lived in for years when my father was well.

Both Edith and my mother felt alone in a society where an unhappy marriage isolated them cruelly, and, later, as single women, that alienation widened.

As my mother had reformed herself and her destiny through the creative furnishings and interior decoration of her new Gibson home, breathing in the fresh Berkshire winds and salve from the hills and quarries, she had mirrored Edith Wharton’s work to create the spatial details, harmony, of her own vessel for independence and self-reinvention, The Mount. And perhaps, too, their invisible but ageless communion and alliance was an answer to one of the questions I have always had about art, about the internal emotions that go into the architecture of creating a novel. As I followed my mother who, like an eager child who had finally found home again after a long exile and sojourn, watching her in the long corridors under the arched ceiling, the terrace steps to the gardens, Wharton’s theory grew more profound. My mother died last year. I like to think The Mount had heard my mother’s footsteps in the “innermost room”. I like to think my mother’s soul found a correspondence with a great writer and was, at last, not alone.

An Introduction to Oppressive Light: Poems by Robert Walser

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Carolyn Forché) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:35:50 GMT

To paraphrase Musil’s famous aphorism regarding Reason, the path of Robert Walser’s poetry “is the path of a cloud” in the rarified air of a solitary life, adrift in an evil century, moving with the lightness of an accomplished soul. One enters his language to be enveloped in gentle agonies, dark praise, rays of bright pleasure and the tumult of recognitions regarding selfhood and the fog of self, an ich ohne ich. This lyric cloud forms at the beginning of his writing life, with the earliest poem Im Bureau, wherein the poet, as a “miserable clerk,” is “made humble,” his language floating across the moon, a “wound of night.”

As a young man, Walser left his birthplace of Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, for Stuttgart, Germany, where, having failed his first audition as an actor, he resolved to become a poet, earning his living as a clerk moving from job to job before returning to Switzerland, on foot, to continue in clerical positions. After fulfilling his military obligations, he entered the employ of a failed inventor, and then trained as a servant, working as a butler in a castle in Upper Silesia. In 1905, he moved to Berlin to join his brother, a painter of theater sets, and here, living frugally in rooming houses, he wrote his first three masterful novels, as well as short stories, sketches, ‘dramolets’ and feuilletons popular in magazines and newspapers of the day. He was accepted in literary circles and admired by Franz Kafka, Robert Musil and also Walter Benjamin, who wrote that in Walser’s sentences, “the idea that stumbles around... is a thief, a vagabond and a genius.” In these years, prose flowed fluently from his pen, in a script that was nearly calligraphic in its execution. The flâneur, the servant, the poet and salaried clerk moved as characters through his dreamscapes, anonymous and evanescent. His sentences seemed to cascade and vanish like veils of falling water upon rock. The late W.G. Sebald thought that Walser shared Gogol’s secret of “utter superfluity... the awful provisionality of their respective existences, the prismatic mood swings, the sense of panic, the wonderfully capricious humour steeped at the same time in blackest heartache, the endless scraps of paper and, of course, the invention of a whole populace of lost souls, a ceaseless masquerade for the purpose of autobiographical mystification.”

Walser’s life swerves here, through a return to Switzerland, military service, the loss of his father, a brother’s suicide, periods of prodigious writing and self-disparagement, poverty and isolation, and finally the closing of his “little prose-piece workshop.” A crippling cramp in his writing hand forced him then to invent what he called “the pencil method,” – writing in pencil on paper scraps, in a miniscule and, for years, indecipherable hand of “tiny, antlike markings” that his friend, Carl Seelig, assumed was a secret code.

The sequence is unclear to me, but it seems that after periods of drinking and depression, his sister urged him to enter a mental sanatorium in Waldau, and although doctors couldn’t agree on a diagnosis, finally settling on schizophrenia, he would live incarcerated in mental hospitals in Waldau and later Herisau for a quarter of a century, until his death. He spent his days at menial tasks such as sorting beans and making paper bags; he read magazines and took long walks, especially at night. He declined a room of his own, choosing to sleep in the asylum barracks. Although he showed no outward signs of mental illness, he refused to live in the world again, and when asked by a visitor about his writing, he famously answered: “I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad.”

The later poems are dated from 1924 to 1933, spanning the years of his confinement. The last of them had to have been written “from the pencil area,” a provisional brouillon of light drafts that freed his hand and didn’t at all resemble his past experience of sitting “for hours bent over a single word that has to take the long slow route from brain to paper.” The penciled script allowed him, according to J.M. Coetzee, “the purposeful, uninterrupted, yet dreamy hand movement that had become indispensable to his creative mood.” In the asylum, he never felt himself to be in a hurry. The asylum walls and also his long walks on the grounds and beyond afforded him solitude, and in the barracks and wards, he found companionship of the sort he could bear. “I would wish it on no one to be me,” he wrote, “Only I am capable of bearing myself. To know so much, to have seen so much, and / To say nothing, just about nothing.”

The late poems include To Georg Trakl, the Austrian poet who would have been Walser’s contemporary, and with whom he shared affinities, lyric and experiential, having to do with literary gifts and mental fragility, who shared a sense of apartness on earth, and who was also hospitalized (in Krakow) for a mental breakdown in the aftermath of attending to ninety wounded soldiers in Galicia whose lives he could not save. Trakl’s friend, Ludwig von Ficker, attempted to intercede on his behalf and also preserved his work, just as Walser’s friend Carl Seelig would later do. They shared a radiant awareness of nature, the brevity of conscious life, and the instability of selfhood. Of reading Trakl’s work, Walser wrote to the poet: “I found myself in the chasm of reading,/ in the pursuit of your being’s beauty,” and later, “I dedicate this speech, playfully, dreamlike/ to your genius.” And in conclusion, “When I read your poems/ I feel as if/ I’m being driven away by a magnificent chaise.”

Throughout the poems, early and late, we find the vocation announced, to which Walser would devote his life: the spiritual and later corporeal work of vanishing from the world. This is everywhere available in the lyrics: “They abandoned me, so I learned to forget myself/ which allowed me to bathe in my inspired soul.” And later in the same poem: “Because they didn’t want to know me, I became self-aware.” In another he is “enchanted/ by the idea that I’ve been forgotten.” Of the place in which he has vanished, he writes “I only know that it’s quiet here,/ stripped of all needs and doings,/ here it feels good, here I can rest,/ for no time measures my time.” With untold suffering behind him perhaps, in the interstices of his recorded life, he seems to write his way toward a liminal state of non-attachment and hovering, weightless acceptance: “The world is inside an hour,/ unaware, not needing anything,/ and, oh, I don’t always know/ where it rests and sleeps, my world.” His world is other-where, and he without it, and we emerge from reading his lyric art as a cloud would disperse in raw light, with unexpected clarity, having followed the poet’s footsteps to where he was found on Christmas Day in 1956, lying in the snow, his eyes open, his heart still, with snow on his shoulders and his soul loosed.

Rhetoric: a modest reading list

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Sam Leith) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:50:37 GMT

One of the greatest pleasures in writing my introduction to rhetoric, You Talkin' To Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama, was the research. For many centuries rhetoric – alongside grammar and logic in the trivium – was one third of an education. Here's a vast, neglected field of knowledge that goes to the centre of how civilisation works, has attracted some of the great minds of the last couple of millennia, and yet also contains some bizarre and fascinating byways. A day in the British Library reading up on it was bliss.

Ever since Aristotle identified rhetoric as a techne – that is to say, a practical skill that can be taught and analysed – a vast body of work has grown up around the subject: books of theory and practical manuals, or “handbooks”, alike.

My book gives an overview – but for anyone interested in reading further here’s a selection of ten of the more important and/or interesting works in the field.

1. Rhetoric, by Aristotle, 4th century BC

Aristotle was the Newton of rhetoric, and here is his Principia. It’s an eccentrically arranged book, and some of the in-jokes will strike the modern reader as bizarre (look out for the one about the sparrow shitting on an orator’s head). It put in place the enduring triads of rhetoric: identifying the three appeals, ethos, pathos and logos; and the distinction between deliberative, judicial and epideictic oratory. This is where it all began – and Aristotle’s tone of wan pragmatism makes clear that the study of persuasion is, in effect, the study of human nature itself.

2. Ad Herennium, 90s BC

Long believed to be by Cicero (it was thought to be his “second rhetoric”), Ad Herennium was the most influential rhetoric handbook in the West through the middle ages and beyond. It’s very likely Shakespeare would have studied it. As well as being full of commonsense advice across the board, and setting out the standard structure of an argument, it contains the first thoroughgoing treatment of the ancient loci method of memory-training. If you want to build your own memory palace – a method endorsed by Sherlock Holmes, Tony Judt and Hannibal Lecter – this is the place to start.

3. The Catiline Orations, by Cicero, 63 BC

Cicero was not only the outstanding Roman theorist of oratory, he was without peer as a practitioner. His works about oratory, De Inventione and De Oratore, are landmarks. But to break up the run of handbooks here I think it would be nice to include, as it were, a shot of him in action. His invective against Catiline, the leader of a conspiracy whom Cicero successfully drove into exile, find the great man bringing his A-game. “How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience? And for how long will that madness of yours mock us?” That’s epiplexis as it was meant to be used. That sharp tongue eventually got Cicero in trouble. Mark Antony had him killed – and, legend has it, Antony’s wife Fulvia took his severed head and stuck her hairpins through his tongue.

4. Institutes of Oratory, by Quintilian, c 95 AD

An extensive, very clear, and sometimes crisply amusing work, Quintilian looks back to Cicero and, before him, Aristotle. His book’s a splendid summation of Roman ideas about rhetoric, culled from long experience as a teacher (he was tutor to the grand-nephews of the Emperor Domitian, among other claims to fame). Like Cicero before him, Quintilian sees education in oratory as being intimately bound up with civic virtue. There’s a very nifty hypertext version of at rhetoric.eserver.org/quintilian

5. The Arte of English Poesie, by George Puttenham, 1589

“Utterance also and language is given by nature to man for perswasion of others, and aide of them selues [...] the Poets were also from the beginning the best perswaders and their eloquence the first Rethoricke of the world.” Puttenham’s treatise – long held to be the yardstick for Elizabethan courtly verse – makes clear the overlap between rhetoric and poetics. Its real payload for rhetoric scholars is Book Three, where he discusses the figures and gives them all eccentric English names, redubbing zeugma “the Single Supply”, epizeuxis “Cuckowspell”, synecdoche “Quicke Conceit” and mycterismus, wonderfully, “the Fleering Frumpe”. That Puttenham, far from having been an urbane courtier, was recently exposed as a serial sex pest, beater-up of vicars and dodger of alimony somehow makes it all the jollier.

6. Chirologia/Chironomia, by John Bulwer, 1644

Of the five canons of rhetoric – Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, Delivery – many of the classic handbooks skim over the last one. This deals with more or less nothing but, offering a systematic consideration of hand-gestures – from the shaken fist or the blown kiss to higa, or what we now call “flipping the bird” – and the question of how they are most effectively and decorously used in oratory. You may find a copy hard to track down, but it’s fascinating. Best of all are the extensive woodcut illustrations. It’s a standing tragedy that Bulwer died before he was to complete the follow-up Cephalelogia/Cephalenomia, which was to have been an exhaustive consideration of head gestures.

7. A Rhetoric of Motives, by Kenneth Burke, 1950

Perhaps the outstanding twentieth century scholar of rhetoric, Burke picks up the torch from Aristotle by embedding his account of the workings of rhetoric in social relations. Here, again, is rhetoric as the study of human behaviour. He talks about the way that persuasion develops through a process of identification, and so provides not just a formal but a social account of the orator’s art. In so doing he made a place for the ancient rhetorical tradition amid the new social and linguistic disciplines that threatened to displace it.

8. What I Saw at the Revolution, by Peggy Noonan, 1990

A former speechwriter to President Reagan, Peggy Noonan lets you know what it’s like to be the person in charge of what political apparatchiks dismissively call “the rah rah”. Noonan’s account of how a modern political speech is put together – it’s a “fondue pot”, she says, where everyone gets a fork – is invaluable, and her winningly nutty personality is a treat too. Her first glimpse of President Reagan, she reports, was a foot in a cordovan loafer, seen through an open door: “But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe even a little... frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads.”

9. Winning Arguments, by Jay Heinrichs, 2007

If you want to get a sense of what a rhetorical handbook would look like in the 21st century, Jay Heinrichs’s is a fine recent example. Heinrichs is an American rhetoric scholar and journalist who maintains a lively rhetoric blog at figarospeech.com. Winning arguments wears its classicism lightly, and is full of slangy examples, imperative chapter headings (“Control the Mood”; “Make Them Identify With Your Choice”) and perky sidebars called things like “Persuasion Alert”. It explains and also – in the age of self-help and business communications – exemplifies the rhetorical quality of decorum.

10. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (second edition), by Richard A Lanham, 1991

This is the invaluable reference – the book no student of rhetoric should be without. As well as being as close to encyclopaedic a guide to the figures as exists in one volume, it’s a work of extraordinary wit and brio and good sense. Plus, funny jokes. I doubt it will ever be bettered, and nor will any other work of reference – with the arguable exception of William Donaldson’s Brewer’s Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics – be read with such enjoyment.

Antwerp

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Shiona Tregaskis) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 23:49:34 GMT

“I know of one Greek labyrinth which is but one straight line. Along that line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so too.” Borges, Death and the Compass

“Murder is a religious subject,” wrote Graham Greene. “The interest of a detective story is the pursuit of exact truth.” Indeed, the crime genre affirms values of teleology and reason as its narratives move from the discovery of the victim through the amassing of clues until the murderer is revealed. From disclosure to closure, few things could be more comforting than this way of taming the world: the pursuit of exact truth is an affirmation of meaningfulness. But Antwerp, by Roberto Bolaño, enters the crime genre and takes meaning hostage. I can't say for sure what he does with it. Perhaps that is the mystery of the novel.

It doesn't tell a story. Rather, we get glimpses of stories, as events pile up in fragments and frames, each unleashing a chorus of disembodied voices, while a fictionalised version of the author feeds us with images and snips of conversations, broken stories and dreams. The book's 56 short chapters – or vignettes, or prose poems, or whatever you want to call them – do not comprise the traditional narrative arc of the crime genre. Instead, Antwerp reads like the gathering of forensic evidence – loosely pertaining (or perhaps not at all) to a murder in the Costa Brava, and a string of other “sad stories” and “last gasps”. The hunchback in the woods... Cops who fuck nameless girls... Death throes and an asshole from South America, on the road. We are left to decide whether we will attempt to solve the mystery by drawing connections between these pieces of evidence.

But the first job for the reader-detective, before they can examine the evidence, is to consider the nature of Antwerp's mystery. Any attempt to read the novel how we have been trained to read, to assemble the recurring narrative elements – “a campsite”, “a red-haired girl”, “Roberto Bolaño” – into a nice, clean, causal plot would be maddening. It requires another approach.

Antwerp snaps moments into focus, then blurs them, refuses to distinguish important sequences from what may just be noise, and operates according to a contradictory scheme. Chapters unravel, they stop short, they disintegrate. This, of course, makes specific demands on the reader – if the stories don't do what you think they are going to do, how are you going to read them?

One way of understanding Antwerp – insofar as we can see how it departs from the traditional detective story – would be to begin at the end. After all, starting at the end and working backwards is one way that detective writers may build the neat teleology of their stories – begin with ultimate clarity, and then muddy the water so the reader can see the solving of the story unfold.

So what happens if we start at the end of Antwerp? Does the final chapter (entitled Postscript) conclude a steady movement away from entropy as Bolaño goes through chaotic elements and towards order? No such luck. What we find instead is a statement explicitly against that:

Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength. (Significant, said the foreigner.) Odes to the human and the divine. Let my writing be like the verses by Leopardi that Daniel Biga recited on a Nordic bridge to gird himself with courage.

If we are to attempt to take this at face value, the passage begins with a yearning for quiddity – the idea that you might be able to recover what it was like to be alive at a certain time, at a certain place. It goes on to further invite us to look away from "fiction" and turn towards a possible moment located in history – the poet Daniel Biga on a bridge. It is one of several invocations of the biographical “real” in the novel (for example, the death of the poet Sophie Podolski, 27 years old).

As a conclusion, this yearning and genre-blurring doesn't draw a neat line under anything. Its gentleness even seems out of place in a novel which has described some very dark, seedy and violent events. As carefully as we may have managed to pull together fragments of Antwerp's fractured plot, this does not appear to be part of it. But what it does have in common with the rest of the novel is a description of a powerful experience, happening at a certain place, given weight by a particular mood – in this case, one of nostalgia or loss.

But what makes it important – why is this particular experience so significant? It is a careful description of a particular type of moment which draws from notions of youthful strength, an invocation of literary authority, the place it might have happened – all of which combine to create the sense of a significance, even if we don't understand exactly of what.

We may not have plot conclusion. We may not even have continuation of mood. But what we do have is a fitting conclusion to the conceptual undertone of the book. The postscript takes pains for you to realise, if you didn't already, that this is a description of a moment of salience. Salience refers in psychology to the phenomenon of experiencing events as linked and meaningful “(Significant, said the foreigner)”. It is the impulse behind the disembodied voices throughout the novel who comment on events. It doesn't matter that there may not be something inherently significant about the Postscript – it is the simply the experience of significance which underlies its importance.

The novel is set up to examine salience right from the beginning. Not in the author's introduction (which, incidentally, is so self-mythologising it should be read as part of the fiction: “I worked at night. During the day I wrote and read. I never slept. To keep awake, I drank coffee and smoked”) – but in the epigraphs, one directly after another. The first contains the wonder and terror of a religious moment, the second, a secular chill.

The first quotation, from Pascal, considers the sheer terror of “the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me”. It continues: “I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there.” The quote is from Pensées, in which the theologian seeks to justify faith by wagering the consequences of belief and disbelief in a world where there is a God, and one in which there is not. But in Antwerp, Bolaño has invited us to bet on meaningfulness – stakes equally high, perhaps.

What immediately follows this is a quotation from David O Selznick, producer of Gone With the Wind. It reads:

Once photographed, life here is ended. It is almost symbolic of Hollywood. Tara has no rooms inside. It was just a facade.

The house, a set, was a facade, there were no inhabitable spaces behind the windows. This is not necessarily a regretful sentiment - just as there is no real house in Gone With the Wind, there is no limit to the scope of belief: the novel, the whole world, is a series of movable facades. If the world is a series of facades, then thought is a door to infinite possibility. Anything can be simulated.

By placing these two epigraphs together, Bolaño sets up an interesting premise for a detective novel. On the one hand, we have a world of facades in which anything can be possible. On the other hand, are the experiences they provide authentically meaningful? In the chaos of the novel, it feels there could be hidden a series of meaningful events, if only we could just puzzle it out. But the reader quickly realises that there is so much background noise that, really, any one thing could be as important as anything else. Stories carry us off and we begin to feel hopeful – only for them to stop short, merge with another, take a U-turn. There is a process of stripping away in each chapter in which hierarchies unfold – typical of Bolaño. For example, the story about a man who was killed in a collision with a truck full of pigs is concluded: “I wanted to be alone too. In Antwerp or Barcelona. The moon. Animals fleeing. Highway accident. Fear.” Everything keeps falling away. Barcelona, Antwerp, the moon, fear. Equally it might be Leopardi, Daniel Biga, Nordic bridge, courage... Bolaño's power in Antwerp is the ability to commemorate meaningfulness by marking its loss, much in same way a war memorial or gravestone does. Antwerp is crammed full of these monuments.

But what are we meant to make of these monuments of quiddity? We have been handed a difficult task. So difficult, in fact, it's as if by presuming or betting on meaning we have been set up to lose. The question is, what is it to lose meaningfulness? The knowledge of that experience is beyond us. “The infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing”. The opposite of salience is dysphoria, which is crucially not the experience of meaninglessness or indeed absurdity – but a flat, featureless absence of experience. Antwerp lures us to grasp for the experience of what it is to lose salience. As the novel gathers pace, every sentence seems to usher us towards this unknowable portent. There is nothing like reading Bolaño to bring a person face to face with this kind of fear, while simultaneously keeping it thrillingly just out of reach.

The Melancholy of Resistance

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Danny Byrne) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 23:21:10 GMT

Fans of Bela Tarr’s wonderful film adaptation Werckmeister Harmonies will be familiar with the basic outline of this dense metaphysical parable: a circus turns up to a remote Hungarian town boasting the world’s largest whale, and provokes a mysterious outpouring of carnivalesque violence. However, what Tarr viewers may be unprepared for is its thematic and philosophical richness. In many ways The Melancholy of Resistance is an old-school European ‘novel of ideas’ in the dialogic tradition of Dostoevsky through Conrad and Mann, yet it is also back-lit with a Kafkaesque disquiet. Tarr’s film is still probably better known than its source text among an English-speaking audience, and Werckmeister Harmonies is characteristically austere and inscrutable; it relies on surface and silence, and makes a virtue of its own cryptic lack of explanation. While these elements are present to some degree in Krasznahorkai’s novel, it is considerably more discursive, more tonally varied in its surrealism and dark humour, and more stylistically baroque than one might expect given the rigorous minimalism of Tarr’s treatment.

Whatever avant-gardeist reputation Krasznahorkai may have amassed thanks to his long sentences and Bernhardian distaste for paragraph breaks, his material is some of the oldest in literature: in fact, the symbolic devices read at times like a post-Nietzschean take on Elizabethan tragedy. There are two major interconnected metaphorical codes running through the novel. On one hand, the giant dead whale is a symbolically loaded literary signifier, somewhere between leviathan, Moby-Dick, a mysterious memento mori and a Trojan horse that smuggles into the town the seeds of its destruction; yet on the other it maintains the stubborn silence of materiality and non-being, a monument to the indifference of the phenomenal world. Meanwhile the thematic opposition of order and disorder – a throwback to the central mechanism of Shakespearian tragedy - is animated through the prism of the philosophical worldviews of four main characters: Mrs Plauf, Mrs Eszter, Valushka, and Mr Eszter.

The book highlights the schism between their various belief systems and its violent events. We begin the novel through the eyes of Mrs Plauf, an uptight petit bourgeois, as she journeys back by train across the frozen plains of central Hungary in an unseasonably Baltic November. Written in free indirect style, the journey is unsettling: a disheveled drunk apparently misinterprets her innocent adjustment of her bra, and attempts to follow her into a toilet. On her return to the town she witnesses a rabble of strange men, a random outbreak of violence, a power cut – the stuff of pathetic fallacy. Though her insular frame of reference is gently mocked, it nonetheless foreshadows in its own naive vocabulary the eventual outbreak of violence. The latter is unleashed on the town in unreasoning ferocity by a strange mob led by the Prince, a mysterious Zarathustran prophet of doom recalling Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden.

The violence is juxtaposed with various illusions of order. Mr Eszter provides the book’s main philosophical metaphor in the form of the despair to which he has been driven by his research into musical tonality. Eszter’s pessimism recalls that of a Bernhardian narrator, right down to his study of musicology, hermeticism, obsessive negativity and tragic-comic literal-mindedness. Bernhard’s most pessimistic novel Correction concerns the logico-philosophical death-spiral of a character, loosely based on early Wittgenstein, who effectively manages to reason himself into non-existence. Driven to despair by the impossibility of aligning thought and experience, he obsessively ‘corrects’ the imperfections of an autobiographical text until he is driven to destroy both it and himself in the ultimate act of self-correction. This deadly rupture between representation and fact - the remainder that leaks through the illusions of order we cognitively impose on the flux of the phenomenal world - is represented through Eszter’s studies in musical tonality.

In a lengthy interior monologue Eszter outlines his erstwhile conception of music as the representation of cosmological harmony that redeems the Schopenhauerean misery of the world:

Ever since he was young he had lived with the unshakeable conviction that music, which for him consisted of the omnipotent magic of harmony and echo, provided humanity’s only sure stay against the filth and squalor of the surrounding world, music being as close an approximation to perfection as could be imagined...

Yet Ezster’s obsessive, tonal-mathematical studies into the inner workings of harmonics have led him to a devastating discovery: the seven-tone European scale operates at a departure from absolute purity of pitch. The works of Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart do not adumbrate some transcendent cosmological harmony, but are in fact, mathematically speaking, aberrations. In ‘natural’ (ie tonally equidistant) tuning the works of Bach are nothing but a horrible clamour; harmony is in fact an illusion concealing, in Bruchner’s famous words “that screaming that men call silence”. The masterworks that Eszter had regarded as evidence of the redeeming possibility of the unity of object and idea are in fact merely “evidences of human failings”, and this for Eszter has the profoundest of philosophical implications:

... music was not the articulation of some better part of ourselves, or a reference to some notion of a better world, but a disguising of the fact of our irredeemable selves and the sorry state of the world, but no, not merely a disguising but a complete, twisted denial of such facts: it was a cure that did not work, a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate...

Whereas Ezsther’s despair is purely conceptual (he has retreated from the world, we are told, “to recline on his bed and banish boredom by composing, day and night, sentences like variations ‘on the same bitter theme’”), his unlettered companion Valushka undergoes before our eyes his own Weberian ‘disenchantment of the world’, played out in the pre-conceptual domain of the aesthetic.

Whereas Eszter attempts to rationalize the world through the metaphor of harmonic correspondences, the unlettered Valushka aestheticizes it through a rhapsodic intuition of totality. Regarded as a village idiot, Valushka delivers letters, entertains the punters at pub closing time with his rapt demonstrations of the movements of the planets, and performs nightly circuits of the city, watching over it like a guardian angel. Valushka is enchanted by a dimly comprehended image of ‘the regal calm of the universe’, a platonic realm to which the phenomenal world is a mere shadow dance. His initial reaction to the appearance of the great whale is “to cry aloud that people should forget the whale and gaze, each and every one of them, at the sky”; yet even its dumb mass is soon subsumed into his belief system as a sign that points to ‘the apparently lost unity of things’.

Whereas Eszter reasons himself into his fallen state, Valushka’s disenchantment is a consequence of the senseless violence that the strange circus unleashes on the town, brutally exposing the illusory nature of his idealism: “he no longer believed the world was ‘an enchanted place’ for the only power that really existed was ‘that declared by force of arms’”. In Krasznahorkai’s world of will and representation, the latter is doomed to failure; the ascendancy of predation is personified in the eventual rise to power of Mrs Eszter, a corpulent macchiavel. She takes advantage of the violence to seize control of the town council, monopolizing the use of legitimate violence through her affairs first with the chief of police, then with the army colonel brought in to quell the rioting.

It is not merely systems of belief that crumble in the face of the brute facts of appetite, predation and decay, but even the normalizing network of everyday language. As one captured rioter rants at his moralistic interrogator:

Because you don’t talk, you “whisper” or “expostulate”; you don’t walk down the street but “proceed feverishly”; you don’t enter a place but “cross its threshold”, you don’t feel cold or hot, but `’find yourselves shivering”, or “feel the sweat pouring down you”! I haven’t heard a straight word for hours, you can only mew and caterwaul; if a hooligan throws a brick through your window you invoke the last judgment, and because your brains are addled and filled up with steam, because if someone sticks your nose in shit all you do is sniff, stare and cry “sorcery!”

The Prince’s followers seem to be in some sense attempting to purify the town by correcting it into rubble, pure matter cleansed of the aberrance of form. Yet if the quaint language of the townspeople is absurd, groundless and irrelevant – codifying the sustaining illusions of their insularity – so too are the enchanted metaphysical ravings of Valushka, and Eszter’s mannered expressions of despair. Ultimately, for any metaphorical foreshadowing contained in Eszter’s learned analysis of the tonal system, or the townspeople’s quaint intimations of the apocalypse, neither has any effect on the outcome. The destruction that is wrought on the town is ultimately impervious to metaphor, a manifestation of the sheer indifference of the material world. In the Nietzschean terms of the Prince the destruction of the town is a kind of fatalistic correction, an Etch-a-Sketch end of the world:

A town based on lies will continue to be a town based on lies... What they do and what they will do are both based on lies and false pride. What they think and what they will think are equally ridiculous. They think because they are frightened. Fear is ignorance. He says he likes it when things fall to pieces. Ruin comprises every form of making: lies and false pride are like oxygen in the ice. Making is half: ruin is everything.

As if to vindicate its own anti-metaphysics the novel ends with a scientifically detailed five-page account of Mrs Plauf’s bodily decomposition, as Mrs Eszter - a personification of the will to power - looks on at her graveside. In a cruel twist of structural inevitability, she has been raped and murdered – an ironic vindication of her slightly laughable paranoia at the start of the book. In a novel that evokes the utter, crushing indifference of the phenomenal objects that we invest with meaning and significance, it is fitting that the very eyes through which the narrative begins are ultimately ground down into dust, in the rigorously dispassionate language of biological description. The man who sinisterly tries to follow Mrs Plauf into the toilet on the train may indeed have had the last word, a perversely ironic fate that screams utter indifference even as it apes the nightmare visions of her own petit-bourgeois paranoia. Either way, her beliefs have no effect on her fate.

Nor is the novel itself exempt from this bleak vision. It too will succumb to the indifferent corrective force of material fate. Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, that hopeless idealist, ends his confession with an elegant appeal to the “the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita”. But for Krasznahorkai, even ink has its shelf life:

It ground the empire into carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur, it took its delicate fibers and unstitched them till they dispersed and had ceased to exist, because they had been consumed by the force of some incomprehensible distant edict, which must also consume this book, here, now, at the full stop, after the last word.

Isle of the Dead

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Cassandra Moss) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 23:09:01 GMT

Gerhard Meier's Isle of the Dead reads as a moment when you acutely feel time within. You feel it pushing and pulling you as you simultaneously go back and forth and off to the side of yourself. Such moments can overwhelm with their plurality, their opening and closing possibilities, and their glimpses of the gulf between what is and what was. For the two old friends in the novel, Bauer and Bindschädler, the potency of this sensation is heightened by the distance of their advancing years from their former selves. As they talk and meander through the Swiss city of Olten, Bauer says, 'Why, Bindschädler, when one is old, does one have this crazy need – to look backward or to live with our yesterdays?'. That need is then evinced in the patterns, repetitions, and abstractions of the digressive and meditative prose.

As if constructing a person/action graph, Bauer's memories plot specific points and draw a line between them. His recollections, it seems, hinge on these markers. When talking about his family, the fact that his dead brother-in-law, Ferdinand, did not let his cherry trees grow too tall is a recurrent phrase throughout. Rather than being a reductive byline in place of the person, though, it is instead a pathway to him. The impression of Ferdinand and his cherry trees offers such rich sensual knowledge for Bauer because it is, as Proust puts it, a 'particular and spontaneous' memory that accesses a truth a deliberate or voluntary memory could not. From this source comes the revelation of the whole person. As one point leads on to another, Bauer goes from memory to memory; the past, whilst immutable as a remote, completed whole, offers, in fine detail, movement and malleability.

In contrast to Bauer's talking, Bindschädler mainly listens and internally reflects. Nature is ever-present in his narration. The weather and seasons permeate the mood and he returns throughout to a pondering of how crickets make sounds. Man-made constructions in the city are also noted and commented upon. Everything is in process. In Bindschädler's and Bauer's perspectives past and present coincide, as the act of remembering occurs within time, which is never stationary.

Multi-directionality is integral to the above notion that the past 'must somewhere have dissolved and yet is present'. The narrative rewinds, circles, zigzags and alternates between inner and outer voices, but, ultimately, goes forward. In Deleuzian terms, time is always 'splitting into two dissymmetrical jets, one making the present pass on and the other preserving all the past.' Within the preserved past memory may cut its own trajectory and seek certain curios, but time's arrow is inexorably moving in one direction, and it's the irreconcilability of this opposition that underscores the reverie with regret. When Bauer says 'if I should ever get around to writing, I want to do it Picasso's way' his unconsummated desire remains outside of what was and what is. It exists only as a future form reliant upon a conditional clause. The more the past expands, the more it confines because what lies inside it provides no reassurance of actualising an intention.

As the book draws to a close, Bindschädler notes that they are approaching the centre of town again. Nothing much has happened. Yet, time has passed and things are not exactly as they were. The gradual, gentle manner of the novel suggests that whilst there are big events in life, change is mostly incremental and unnoticeable. When you look back, you make the connections you need to in order to understand how it relates, if indeed it does at all, to anything of now. Isle of the Dead is infused with a wondrous appreciation of, rather than bitterness for, that process and although it does not shy away from death and sadness, it infers that emotional experience would be incomplete without them. Despite the apparent lightness, however, there is some terror in the act of remembering, in that it illuminates the incomprehension of the moment of occurrence. Perhaps because people sleep through their lives. Bauer references Picasso's wish to wake people up from their slumber and make them see that the world is 'not the way they thought it was'. Even if Bauer still has not got around to writing, the book itself prods at any complacency the reader might have about time's passage. Reading is not exempt from process and the constant movement within the prose does not let you forget the moment you have finished will, however subtly, be different from the moment you started.

A bibliography for The Faith of the Faithless

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Simon Critchley) — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:17:37 GMT

The Faith of the Faithless is a series of experiments in political theology that tries to think through the dangerous intrication between politics, religion and violence that defines our so-called secular age and - without embracing any theism - find a meaning to the idea of faith, a belief for unbelievers like me. It’s a laugh a minute, I promise you.

Mark Thwaite bemoaned the absence of a bibliography in the book. This was intentional as I didn’t want to expose my chronic lack of reading. However, in an effort provide some clues for those curious to follow the book’s byways, there follows a Faith of the Faithless top ten. The book consists of four long essays, framed by two parables: the first on Oscar Wilde, the second on Kierkegaard.

1. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

This is Wilde’s sole text written in captivity in Reading Gaol. It is a stunning text for many reasons, but what took my breath away, and provided the idea for my book was the following quotation:

When I think of religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith.

It is the phrase, ‘Everything to be true must become a religion’ that is most striking. What might ‘true’ mean? Wilde is clearly not alluding to the logical truth of propositions or the empirical truths of natural science. I think that he is using ‘true’ in a manner close to its root meaning of ‘being true to’, namely an act of fidelity that is kept alive in the German treu: loyal or faithful. This is perhaps in Jesus’ phrase when he said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’.(John 14:6) Religious truth is like troth, the experience of fidelity where one is affianced and then betrothed. What is true, then, is an experience of faith, and this is as true for agnostics and atheists as it is for theists. Those who cannot believe still require religious truth and a framework of ritual in which they can believe. At the core of Wilde’s remark is the seemingly contradictory idea of the faith of the faithless and the belief of unbelievers, a faith which does not give up on the idea of truth, but transfigures its meaning.

2. Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

On my reading, what is being called for by Kierkegaard is a rigorous and activist conception of faith that proclaims itself into being at each instant without guarantee or security, and which abides with the infinite demand of love, the rigor of love. Faith is the enactment of the self in relation to a demand that exceeds my power, both in relation to what Heidegger would call my factical thrownness in the world and the projective movement of freedom achieved as responsibility. Faith is not a like-for-like relationship of equals, but the asymmetry of the like-to-unlike. This is what I try to describe in The Faith of the Faithless as a subjective strength that only finds its power to act through an admission of weakness: the powerless power of conscience. Conscience is the inward ear that listens for the repetition of the infinite demand. Its call is not heard in passive resignation from the world, but in the urgency of active engagement. It has been my contention in this book that such an experience of faith is not only shared by those who are faithless from a creedal or denominational perspective, but can be experienced by them in an exemplary manner. Like the Roman centurion of whom Kierkegaard writes, it is perhaps the faithless who can best sustain the rigor of faith without requiring security, guarantees and rewards: ‘Be it done for you, as you believed’.

3. Rousseau, The Social Contract

I must be briefer in this top ten countdown. The first 100 pages of The Faith of the Faithless are devoted to Rousseau. There is just too much to say here, but my aim is to free Jean-Jacques from the prison of both liberal and totalitarian misunderstandings of his work. For me, Rousseau is the most important leftist thinker in the modern period and a much more consequent political thinker than Marx. His formula for egalitarian politics is very simple: association without representation.

4. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium

God, this 1957 book is a real page-turner. I was turned on to it by John Gray years back. As perverse thanks, I give Gray a hard time in the book, though I have learned much from his work. Cohn plots Millenarian political theology in Northern Europe in the middle ages, but the book is really a critique of various forms of political apocalypticism, which still show no signs of dying away. It was through Cohn that I discovered the so-called Heresy of the Free Spirit and the next book.

5. Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple and Annihilated Souls

Porete was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1310. The heresy is simple: she argued that human beings could overcome the condition of original sin and unify with God. This led to forms of itinerant communist insurgency across Europe that was violently suppressed by the Catholic Church.

6. Reiner Schürmann, Meister Eckhart

My reading of Porete, with the help of amazing scholars like Amy Hollywood, renewed my old interest in mysticism, particularly Eckhart, who I read as an undergraduate at Essex and fell in love with. Eckhart’s most brilliant and heretical writings are his German sermons and Schürmann’s presentation of them is unsurpassed. When I turned up in New York in 2004, I was given Reiner’s old office, which still had his name on the door. I found this very intimidating.

7. Adolph Harnack, History of Dogma

True story: with the help of Lars Iyer’s ‘W’, I liberated seven volumes of Harnack definitive account of the history of Christian dogma from the University of Essex library in 1983. I read them all. Nearly 30 years later, I found a great use for it in my account of Pauline theology in The Faith of the Faithless.

8. Adolph Harnack, Marcion: Gospel of the Alien God

Yes, the king of liberal, protestant, Wilhelmite political theology has two items in my top ten. Harnack spent his entire life working on this book and only published it in 1925, I think. Along with Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion, it is the major source on how the Gnostic heresy took shape after Paul in Marcion, who saw himself as Paul’s true apostle. Basically, although I can’t go into it here, the solution to the Christian problem of reconciling the orders of creation and redemption is the postulation of two divine sources: a true God, revealed through Christ, and a false God of this world. Ontological dualism. In other words, this world is Krapp and salvation lies with an alien God, which is an intuition I am now using to read Philip K. Dick in a long piece that will come out in a month or so in The New York Times.

9. Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life

Everything that valuable in the existential analytic of Dasein in Being and Time is contained in Heidegger’s lectures on Paul and Augustine from the early 1920s. We are spared the transcendentalizing agonies of Kantianism and the oddities of Heidegger’s Aristotelian reading of Husserl and go to the beating heart of Heidegger’s project: the existential enactment of life in relation to a calling over against a facticity in and for a community of waiting, a Messianic community.

10. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

Although I have run out of space, let me say that the last part of The Faith of the Faithless is concerned with the relation between an ethics of nonviolence and a politics of violence. Bonhoeffer is exemplary of the argument I try to make. I am thinking in particular of the way he was eventually driven to drop the pacifism he adopted in the 1930s and participate in the attempted tyrannicide of Hitler and failed coup d’état against the National Socialist regime that led to his brutal execution shortly before the end of the Second World War in 1945. Bonhoeffer’s ethics does not rest on absolute, law-like principles, but on a freely assumed responsibility that, in extreme situations and as a last resort, is willing to act violently. The extreme necessities of a critical situation, Bonhoeffer writes, ‘appeal directly to the free responsibility of the one who acts, a responsibility not bound by any law’. But such a conception of ethical action would not lead to the sort of celebration of violence endemic to fascism, National Socialism, but an infinite responsibility for violence that, in exceptional circumstances, might lead us to break the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Responsible action involves what Bonhoeffer calls a ‘willingness to become guilty’ (‘Bereitschaft zur Schuldübernahme’): this is the price one pays for freedom. Would such a strategy of resistance have been successful? In Bonhoeffer’s case, we know that the attempted tyrannicide failed. But the point here is that I am not preaching nonviolence in all political cases, and no more am I arguing for some easy ‘clean hands’ retreat from the state, as Zizek contends. On the contrary.

The White Review

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 09:59:08 GMT

The White Review is a quarterly arts, culture and politics journal published in print and online, and established on a non-profit economic model. The current print issue is available to buy in bookshops and via the website, or by subscription. The website is updated with new, usually web-only content in the first week of each month.

The review was conceived as a platform to promote contemporary writing and art, and to bring new work to a wider audience. It takes its name and a degree of inspiration from La Revue Blanche, a Parisian magazine which ran from 1899 to 1903.

The review is edited by Benjamin Eastham and Jacques Testard who kindly submitted to my email questions whilst in the middle of preparing Issue 4...

Mark Thwaite: With the rise and rise of all things e-, web- and cloud-based, is it really a good time to be starting an old-fashioned paper-based journal?

TWR: The fact that there are new means of communicating, of reading and being read, is a good thing for anyone dissatisfied, as we were, with mainstream publishing as an industry. We consider ourselves a part of the rise you mentioned, because we think that that growth is symptomatic of a move towards greater pluralism and adventurousness in our reading and publishing habits.

Our website is a cornerstone of the project – we publish dedicated online issues every month, which content is available to everyone, and we’re looking to include material appropriate to that format. We recently published a short video shot in Tahrir Square during the final days of President Mubarak’s regime. We’ll also be looking to publish short art videos. So we try to play to the strengths of each format. For example, speaking generally, we carry shorter pieces on the website and longer pieces in the print issue. This is I suppose a reflection of our own experiences of reading on screen and reading a physical book.

Beyond that, we believe in the value of the book as a physical object. Neither do we consider this to be an old-fashioned attitude. Publishing will go down two different routes: there’s no point knocking out a cheap, poorly bound paperback on crap paper any more because you’re as well to read the content on an electronic reader. The book as a medium has to justify itself now, it’s no longer the default option, and this is to its benefit. We’ve witnessed an upsurge in beautifully produced books, with enormous amounts of time and creativity invested in them – check out Visual Editions, for just one example, and the work of artists and independent galleries exploring the possibilities offered by the book form. The design of The White Review is important to us – the quality of the images we reproduce, the balance of the colours, the alignment and legibility of the text. We value the content, so we value the medium in which it is reproduced.

Mark Thwaite: Regardless, then, of the format – is it a good time to be starting an arts, culture and politics journal at all? Aren't such things outmoded, even elitist?

TWR: No. We feel very strongly about this. The arts, culture and politics aren’t outmoded: they’re absolutely pertinent to the way we live today, and so by extension is any source that can provide people with greater access to their practice and discussion. To dismiss the discussion of complicated subjects as elitist is to deny people a stake in them. It’s to fall victim to the fallacy that people aren’t willing to tackle difficult subjects, or to engage with things that aren’t blindingly obvious. As editors we might make poor decisions of which readers disapprove, but we have no intention of patronising them.

Mark Thwaite: Isn't The *White* Review a rather ill-advised name?

TWR: We considered this. Ultimately we decided it wasn’t. We liked the name, and we liked its (non-cutaneous) connotations – the link to La Revue Blanche among them – and we decided that to reject a title we felt comfortable with on the basis of what is ultimately a pathological over-sensitivity about being wilfully misconstrued would be ridiculous, and fly in the face of our own stated principles. Last but not least, we are massive Tranmere Rovers fans (Google will help you work that one out...)

Mark Thwaite: You obviously think TWR fills a 'gap in the market', so why do you think that gap was there in the first place and how then does it fill it?

TWR: We identified what we hoped was a gap in the UK market for a periodical that catered for a broader interest in the arts than the largely specialist publications that are well-established here. I don’t know why that gap was there – perhaps because the British tend to delineate the visual arts from literature from fashion from politics in a way that the Americans or the French don’t (and much of our inspiration came from publications based abroad, like n+1, the Paris Review or Cabinet). We were also eager to publish something that was aesthetically attractive and therefore collectible – we don’t believe enough attention is paid by British publishers to design, which is a shame given that there are so many great British designers.

There is also the striking dearth of options for young writers, and to a lesser extent, artists emerging today in Britain. Who do you go to, in the UK, to publish a long-form essay, a piece of reportage or a short story, if you are just starting out? Part of this endeavour was to open up what is ultimately a rather staid industry, with few breakthroughs, few opportunities for younger generations. That’s why our commitment to new and emerging writers and artists is so pronounced – we’re trying to kick-start careers, and with that comes a willingness for experimentation that we don’t see much elsewhere in British publications. By 2015, we’ll hopefully have published the Joyce of the twenty-first century. Failing that, we’ll publish the real Joyce (see below).

Mark Thwaite: Anybody reading the review can see that presentation is key to your ethos – why is it so important to you that TWR looks the way it does?

TWR: We just think the way everything is presented is important. You don’t take a great painting and stick it in the cupboard. It’s an expression of our respect for the content that we spend so much time and energy housing it in something that we believe presents it to its best advantage, and which the reader can enjoy. When we say ‘we’, we really mean our designer Ray O’Meara, for whom (and we’re putting words into his mouth here) every edition must be a coherently produced, satisfying work. Speaking personally (Ben), it’s like really great architecture – it can be considered independently of the objects it holds or in concert with them. We hope that either way the design adds to the appeal of the journal, gives it a ‘collectible’ dimension. And, by the way, back issues are on sale on our website...

Mark Thwaite: How did you get such a handsome – dare I say 'expensive' - looking magazine off the ground in the first place?

TWR: To get the money together for a first issue we set up a crowd-funding appeal. The idea was that sponsors gained access to certain perks by pledging to us in advance of the launch. We took pre-orders on copies of the first issue before we even had it together, and we sold subscriptions too. We relied upon donations small and large to get going, and we still rely upon donations to help us along. As regards the expense, we’re lucky to have a great relationship with the brilliant printing house PUSH, in Bermondsey, whose patience, understanding and willingness to be involved in the project has allowed us to experiment. Unfortunately, we’re still unable to pay contributors but we’re hoping this will change some time soon. In the meantime, and we’re quoting ourselves here from the second issue editorial, ‘We hope that the context in which [artists’ and writers’ work] is reproduced justifies, for now, the time devoted to their art.’

Mark Thwaite: What do you hope the journal achieves?

TWR: We hope really that maybe a few people read it and come across something they might not otherwise have read, and that the experience is in some small way a stimulus, or that it makes them angry, or anything that involves a reaction, really. On a personal level, if we can shake things up a bit, help new writers and artists on their way to success, and prove that there is space for this kind of venture over time, we’ll be delighted.

Mark Thwaite: How do you choose your contributors?

TWR: They very often choose us. We accept unsolicited submissions – a point of principle when it’s so hard for writers without agents to get anywhere. Beyond that, we do a bit of headhunting – approaching people whose work we have seen elsewhere and admire, and people are often recommended to us. As for interviewees, we have a dream list, but suggestions are welcome.

Mark Thwaite: What is your favourite/most important or exciting contribution so far?

Ben: The most exciting contribution is actually hearing back from people – receiving emails disputing or praising pieces that we’ve published. Which brings rise to discussion, which is exciting. The discussions post-publication are the most interesting really. By the time we actually publish anything we’ve both read it so many times, and moved so many commas about, that we’re pretty much sick to death of it.

Jacques: In terms of importance, getting a hold of some unpublished Primo Levi letters for the first issue was a big deal. It gave us (a bit of) legitimacy when getting in touch with writers and artists like Paula Rego, Tom McCarthy and Des Hogan – all of whom eventually agreed to be a part of it.

Mark Thwaite: Who would you really like to publish?

TWR:The copyright on James Joyce’s work has just expired so we’re considering putting out Ulysses for next Christmas, with a few editorial interventions where we think he goes on a bit.

Mark Thwaite: What are your future plans for TWR (and associated enterprises)?

TWR: Survival (thewhitereview.org/donate). Each issue very nearly pays for the next, and the shortfall has, thus far, been covered by donations. Beyond that: paying contributors, maybe ourselves a bit later on, and if we’re still alive, we’ll try to publish some books.

Mark Thwaite: What are you both currently reading?

Ben: The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass and Fluxus Experience by Hannah Higgins.

Jacques: I’ve just finished Cairo: My City, Our Revolution by Ahdaf Soueif, whom I just interviewed for issue 4. I’m now going back to Infinite Jest, which I’ve been reading on and (mainly) off for the last four months.