a long talk with lars iyer on literature after literature

‘I want to read books that are commensurable with this world, in content and form, books that have abandoned a whole repertoire of literary gestures but which still, in some way, respond to what literature once was. I want to read books that make a problem of their inheritance, a problem of coming somehow after literature. I want to read books that register a sense of their own belatedness (…) Sometimes, I wonder whether my making claims of this kind is a result of my literary melancholy. Shouldn’t it be possible, if one only tried hard enough, to dream of a fabulously new novel to come, of a nouveau roman newer than the nouveau romans of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, which would always belong to the future? Mightn’t there be some fiery rebirth of the Modern in some faraway place, among writers who write new manifestos in the dream of restoring a revolutionary purity to their endeavours? I can only say that it seems to me that literature has, in some fundamental way, run its course.’

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