Nietzsche plays on our narcissism. His writing wants us, as Bull puts it, to “read for victory”. Nietzsche always admired the Homeric hero, set on a circular journey of self-discovery. Yet the reader is the real hero of Nietzsche’s narratives, enticed into seeing him or herself as uniquely receptive to their radical arguments. We want to be just like Nietzsche, and Nietzsche knows this, which is why he encourages us to join him in enjoying fictional forms of strength, superiority, and self-expression. Faced with a choice between man and Superman, we naturally want to relate to the latter, even if Nietzsche’s Übermensch is as unreal as any literary character. But if that’s the case, how can readers resist the temptation to take Nietzsche’s bait?

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Wherever art appears to end it begins again; every horizon it reaches reveals a new one. On this level, then, Lorrain’s landscape discloses a diagram of an open, ongoing origin. In the same way, Murnane claims, even when literature seems to lead back to ‘life,’ it can’t help but lead to a literature beyond literature. Indeed, every text written or read implies another that lies in the distance, and whatever setting a writer describes suggests to the reader ‘a further region never yet written about.’ Behind the book, a place made of blank pages: ‘a country on the far side of fiction.’

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For the record, one literary form I do think is ‘dead’ is the novel of ideas. I’m a cultural pessimist insofar as I can’t see our future producing another Mann, a Goethe, a Sartre. But nor would I want it to. I’d say the days of the great, stately ‘philosophical’ novel are gone, and they’re gone for a reason. Put bluntly, I think it’s no longer enough for writing to thematise its conjuncture. Today, treating modernity as a theme has become one more way of turning away from it.

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Likening language to a virus is an old Burroughsian trope, of course, but in Burroughs it’s basically just a routine; a clever abstraction. Marcus makes it more forcefully, hurtfully concrete. Indeed, his creation of a fully immersive fictional world (as opposed to a formal experiment) allows him to take a real emotional toll on his readers. After all, a life without language would be one of harrowing sadness. Deep down, then, The Flame Alphabet is less about linguistics than the decay of relationships, the fracturing of familial loyalties, and the everyday heartbreak of human estrangement.

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Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities has taken a while to achieve recognition as a modernist masterpiece. This could be because it doesn’t quite fit with our orderly models of what ‘the modern’ might mean. The trouble is, Musil wasn’t Joyce, nor Proust, and to weigh up his book as some Germanic answer to Ulysses or A la Recherché du Temps Perdu is to miss its point. Or rather, its lack of one. Because, however many times you read this famously unfinished novel, one thing’s for sure: you’ll never fully take the measure of its pointlessness. It’d be a stretch to say that the text makes sense of itself, let alone of ‘modernity.’ Rather, its freewheeling narrative propels it somewhere beyond the familiar aims of modernist art. For unlike those others, this book doesn’t want to build systems, to give order to memory or history, or to shore up anything much against its ruins. Instead, it lets those ruins remain as they are: incomplete, enigmatic, never entirely intelligible.

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It’s as if divorce has seeped into the structure of these stories, like a rot in the grain of their language; something sweetly corrupt that can’t be cut out of them. It’s buried deep in their syntax, motivating the phrasing that estranges the opening of any errant sentence from its end. In each of the book’s seven entries, words are put to work on pulling something apart – a family, a body, a memory of bodies together – in ways that render how life’s breaking points really feel when reached. Shards of language are arranged into snapshots of how things are, as Lutz puts it, painfully ‘halved’.

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To consider the concept of nihilism, Simon Critchley once remarked, is to take up the trail of ‘Ariadne’s thread’, a theoretical route through the labyrinth of history. For Critchley, the story of nihilism is the story of what it means to be modern, and to read the philology of nihilism, of the nihil, is to look through a lens at modernity’s underside. Shane Weller’s survey of the web of relations between Modernism and Nihilism proceeds from the same supposition. His book unpicks the thread where it’s at its most knotted, in the high modernist literatures of the early twentieth century. For Weller, what’s at work in the works of the modernists – from Tzara to Kafka to Cioran – is a discursive puzzle for which ‘nihilism’ would seem to be the key, the master term that could unlock and make sense of the modern. Yet the thrust of his thesis is the fact that it fails to do so; the way that whatever it touches is rendered resistant to interpretation. So, on the one hand, thought and talk about ‘nihilism’ is ubiquitous across modern culture: wherever the modernist moment is, nihilism sits alongside it. On the other, modernism proves unable to reduce nihilism to its propaedeutic, its explanatory toolkit. Rather, nihilism is what haunts modernism, as its ghost or double, a tense co-presence forever unsettling its meanings.

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read the rest at The Marx and Philosophy Review of Books