Theory of Budapest

Montano, the second novel by the Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas, was recently published in English translation. Longtime readers will remember that I read and enjoyed his first, Bartleby & Co., a couple of years ago—August 2004 in fact! my God, was it really that long?

Ahem.

Montano charts a movement towards what Blanchot called the ‘impersonal’. It posits that to write is in some way ‘to recall with a memory that is not our own’; this is allegorized in Montano’s version of literary history as a transmigration of memories. To write is to take over another’s words; to intuit the words of the future poet; to create one’s precursors. A writer must strive to disappear in his work, ‘to act namelessly and not just be an idle name’—perhaps by constructing it from fragments, from other voices.

Montano’s malady (the Spanish title of the book is, in fact, El mal de Montano) is ‘literature-sickness’, whose diagnosis is continually elaborated and redefined as the narrative progresses. Writing is curative, therapeutic, and poisonous, pathological: it is Plato’s pharmakon. Montano’s malady manifests itself as a kind of writer’s block, a paralysis, anxiety of influence; but it is also a logorrheic excess of words, or a fault of vision by which one sees everything through the lens of the literary. It is, above all, a hypochondriacal obsession with the symptoms themselves.

A person with such an obsession might well be the sort you would cross the street to avoid, in the same way you might cross the library to avoid tediously self-referential novels that are obsessed with their own literariness. Fortunately, the narrator in Montano recognizes and acknowledges the problem: that kind of playful, hyper-ironic autoficition can end up delighting too much in its own disingenuousness, to the exasperation of the reader. The narrator sets his sights instead on Truthfulness: not sincerity, necessarily, or simplicity, or heartfelt authenticity (Romantic fictions all); but truth arrived at through a fragmentary, appropriative method, which aims at meaning by means of quotation. Because the truth is also invented—and I use that word advisedly.

Borges, who ‘acted as if people were only interested in literature’, that connoisseur of ‘second-hand writing’, was an expert at this, the elaboration of an ‘ethics of subordination’. Montaigne was, too, of course, but he doesn’t get a mention in this connection (the one word you omit from the riddle is the solution). Kafka, Gombrowicz, Pessoa, Benjamin, Gide. The form of the novel again and again reconfigures itself to accommodate fragments from these writers; and shifts in perspective are attendant upon shifts into different modes of writing: the diary, the confession, the lecture, the catalogue, the list. The facts of the narrative, the raw material of the fiction, are apt to be ‘revalued’ in the course of these reconfigurations; but what else is writing but an endless reconfiguration of the material of existence? The narrator’s friend and enemy, his grotesque double Tongoy (M. Teste to his Valéry) takes on many different forms—as befits a vampire—and eventually comes to stand for something like ‘the writing self’, that impersonal voice that compels the writer to speak.

One of the most interesting aspects of the journal form is this peculiar dialectical feature: that as the writer writes himself, the present of his writing is in continual dialogue with the past of the narration, and meaning emerges from the play of the writing I and the written I. The confessional mode thus is particularly well suited to bringing out the performances of the divided self. That is why Montaigne’s form is his writing. That is why literary diaries are peopled by doppelgangers, imposters, doublings. That is why, in Montano, the interruption of the narrative is simultaneously the continuation of the narrative, and there is a constant double movement of writing and stopping writing (writing about stopping writing).

Nabokov, writes Montano’s narrator, in a section of the novel in which the narrative shifts entirely into the second person (shades of Butor’s La Modification here), once wrote that ‘the soul is but a manner of being—not a constant state—that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations’; and that ‘the hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden.’

The ability to quote Nabokov appositely might serve as a badge of cultural superiority, and Montano imagines a ‘password’ that might be exchanged by those defenders of the text who share a certain regard for literature. Such a password, gesture, or signal alludes to the existence of a shared literary experience. But reading literature, even though it may teach us the better to become ‘involved in humanity’, is essentially isolating. My reading in sum can never amount to your reading, can never shift into congruency with yours. The literary experience is essentially solitary. A shared experience would be a threat to the solitude that Rilke writes of, that must be held carefully away from the solitude of the other. The password is therefore Kafka’s message to Max Brod: ‘You mustn’t say you understand me’.

One caveat: either the translation (by Jonathan Dunne) is no good, or the thing itself is quite badly written. Not having looked myself at the Spanish source text I am no position to judge which—but I suspect the stylistic awkwardness is a feature of the original. We are presented here with a writing style that is often clumsily unidiomatic, generally heavy-handed in its manipulation of imagery and rhetorical effects, and at times ridiculously pompous. (If I tell you that a description in Kafka’s diaries of people gathering to rubberneck a traffic accident ‘foreshadow[s] Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle’, you will get a sense of how crowbarred-in the ideas often are. And you are still yet to suffer the narrator’s extremely irritating and pointless remarks on September 11.) This may well be an intended effect, and the bad writing may be attributable more to the first-person narrator that to the actual author—but that doesn’t make it any easier to get through the damn thing. Admittely, it doesn’t help that at the same time I was reading this, I started on W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn (which is, incidentally, referenced in Montano), a book that is so well written and so elegantly translated that Vila-Matas/Dunne cannot possibly come out well by comparison.

Cranes

My intellectual life is shaped by the blogs I read. When I saw Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow in Vienna last weekend, I couldn’t help but think of recent discussion and analysis (or anti-analysis) of the painting on Blog Meridian, and over at Conrad’s place. In particular I remembered something Conrad had written in the comments section of John B’s blog about the silhouetted bird in flight being what makes the painting.Walter de la Mare, in a poem which Conrad glances at here, thinks that the bird is a crow (though I suspect that identification was forced upon him by the easy rhyme with ‘snow’). But I believe it to be a crane—not for any kind of ornithological reason, you understand (indeed, I ornithiconiclastically fly in the face of all ornithological reason), but merely because I wish to constrain the artwork to my own limited and limiting reading. Consider: ‘Palamedes invented the letters of the alphabet by watching noisy cranes in flight’ (this I read in a review of Richard Powers’s latest, The Echo Maker, in the current LRB). Now, most likely Palamedes distinguished his letter shapes in the formations that flocks of cranes adopt (and perhaps the sounds to go with them from the calls of the cranes?), but I like to think that Bruegel’s crane, that dark letter X slashed across the landscape, just on the horizon, stitching together and tearing apart mountain and sky, stands at the origin of human subjectivity (a Christological reading is also possible here, I suppose); and, sayeth Wikipedia, the crane ‘is the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol for the letter “B”’—Bruegel’s way of signing himself, surely!

I never knew the old Vienna…

Some nugatory musings on Vienna, a city I visited for the first time last weekend.

Vienna is to my mind an oppressively orderly and artful city. I dislike French gardens, baroque architecture and fountains in the middle of empty squares. But even though I tell myself my tastes are not well served by this city, I cannot remain unmoved by its beauty.

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Vermeer’s Artist’s Studio (or ‘Allegory of Painting’, if you prefer) hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. A visual essay on truth and representation, it has a simpler formal composition than Velázquez's Las Meninas, but is richer in its symbolism and more pleasing in its light and textures. The curtain drawn back to reveal the scene invites us to watch a performance. The mask lying on the table gestures towards the death-bound nature of this performance. Eyes and faces are averted or downcast. Clio, the Muse of history, is blind to the attentions of the artist, even as she poses in entirely soignée fashion. The painter begins with her laurel wreath – she is nothing but a laurel, a synecdoche at one remove, a symbol standing for a symbol. The map hanging on the wall: we do not make out the territory represented, we merely register the creases and textures of the hanging, just as the eye is drawn back and involved in the folds of the subjects’ clothing. Surfaces matter. But empty space matters too, and light gives depth to the scene.

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Strolling through the Augarten in the city’s second district, a sprawling park peopled by vast hordes of joggers and dogs, one’s path is darkened by the shadows cast by two massive flak towers. Constructed during the war and apparently now unable to be demolished, the towers are stupifyingly ugly and stand as a grand monument to the inhumanity of man.



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Here’s a tip: when you pay 9 euros for tickets to the Staatsoper to see Bryn Terfel sing Verdi’s Falstaff, don’t expect to be able to see anything from your seat, which will exist in some sort of non-Euclidean topology where the above and in-front of the stage is also, somehow, simultaneously behind and underneath it.

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This looks a bit like the closing scene to The Third Man, one of my favourite films. I don’t think it is, though.

On Unseemliness

Some notes and addenda to a couple of previous posts, on literary suisimilarity and on literary lying.

One aspect of sui-similitude in literary discourse that I failed to mention is the notion that there is something called ‘individual style’, that is consubstantial with its author. I am reminded of a quotation, from Henri Michaux, which I found in Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas (the subject of my next entry, no doubt): ‘Va suffisament loin en toi pour que ton style ne puisse pas suivre’ [Go so far into yourself that your style will not be able to follow]. Not particularly good advice, admittedly, but a nice turn of phrase.

The tragedian Agathon (he of Symposium fame), when asked by friends to tone down the rhetorical excesses of his work by editing out some of the more eyebrow-raising verses, answered them: ‘Would you purge Agathon of Agathon?’ This led me back (again) to Ovid, surely a poet ‘too much like himself’. Seneca Rhetor tells the story (Cont. 2.2.1.12) of Ovid being asked by some friends to expunge from his work three lines that they considered de trop; Ovid agreed to do so, but only on condition that he could choose three lines to retain at all costs. Of course, the lines chosen by his friends, it turned out, were exactly those three that Ovid wanted to keep. One of them, Seneca tells us, was this famous verse from the Ars:

semibovemque virum semivirumque bovem

The half-bull man, the half-man bull

—a line trying pretty damn hard to be unlike itself, and one which, I think, could most appropriately be described as ‘unseemly’. But if a poet is too much like himself in a work, that might even be grounds to dismiss the work as interpolation, imposture or forgery; and textual critics over the years have often attempted to expunge from Ovid those elements that are most like Ovid, for that very reason.

In other matters, last week I had my attention drawn to More’s Utopia, and specifically to the dedicatory epistles that preface that work. More, you will remember, gets his mate Peter Giles in on the act, and the two exchange letters corroborating the truth of Raphael Hythloday’s account of the fictional island, confabulating, bandying about ‘reality effects’, pretending not to remember specific details of the account, making up true-seeming reasons for gaps in their knowledge, and generally taking the piss out of the reader who doesn’t ‘get it’.

At one point, More claims that in comparing versions he found that his servant John Clement disagreed with him on one particularly trivial point, whether the length of some bridge or other was five hundred yards or three hundred. More himself cannot remember, but decides to retain the detail, on the basis that ‘potius mendacium dicam quam mentiar, quod malim bonus esse quam prudens’ [I should rather tell a lie than lie, because I’d rather be good than clever]. What, then, is the distinction between ‘mendacium dicere’ [to tell a lie] and ‘mentiri’ [to lie]? Well, according to the marginal note (which may have been inserted by Erasmus) there is a ‘theological distinction’ between the two. Amusingly, the footnote to this note in the CUP edition informs us that ‘this distinction has not been located in the theological literature’ (love the use of the passive voice there); but it does direct the reader to Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, XI.XI. Looking at the Gellius passage, it seems obvious that it is this and not some spurious theological text that More has in mind. Aulus Gellius, citing one Publius Nigidius, offers the following information:

Qui mentitur, fallit, quantum in se est; at qui mendacium dicit, ipse
non fallit, quantum in se est.

He who lies, deceives, to the extent that he can ['quantum in se est': lit. 'as much as he is in himself']; and he who tells an untruth, does not himself deceive, to the extent that he can help it ['quantum in se est'].

So, the distinction is simple enough; indeed it is the same one Plato makes in the Hippias minor, between lying deliberately (mentiri) and lying unwittingly (mendacium dicere). Of course, this doesn’t really cut much mustard in the context of the work as a whole, since More has made up the whole thing, and on purpose too. In fact, it is the intent behind the lie, and not the absence of intention, that makes it justifiable: More stresses the point that you’d have to be pretty stupid (read: unversed in Greek) not to pick up on all the clues he planted to let you know that the whole thing’s a fiction. When it comes to literature, More might have been saying, the distinction drawn by Nigidius breaks down: the writer of a literary text is not ‘in himself’: he is writing from a point outside of himself, where like and unlike converge.