the far side of fiction

Posted on February 14, 2012 by David Winters

reflections on gerald murnane’s barley patch

This ontology, in which the ‘origin’ of the work evades any vanishing point, is figured within Barley Patch by means of a memorised image. The image in question is Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Samuel Anointing David, the ‘painted backdrop’ to the stage at the Capitol Theatre, where a young Murnane and his schoolmates once took part in a concert. As when Murnane says of his early reading habits that he ‘moved among the characters,’ so, as a child, he dreamt of inhabiting the place that this painting depicted. But Lorrain’s landscape doesn’t merely manifest a set of fictional entities. Instead the painting’s pattern of light implies what Wittgenstein would call a ‘change of aspect.’ As Murnane makes out, it isn’t the scene’s foreground but its background that has somehow become ‘the most brightly lit of the visible zones,’ suggesting that what lies beyond may be ‘more richly illumined still’ (…)

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.’

read the rest of the essay at ReadySteadyBook

modernism then and now

Posted on February 3, 2012 by David Winters

a conversation about literary history with anthony of time’s flow stemmed

How then might writing return to the problems that modernism presents? Or rather, how will writing refuse to delude itself that it’s rid of those problems? And can it still do so while ‘making it new,’ that is, without lapsing into pastiche, or fetishising a ‘period’ that’s part of the past?

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.

read the rest at 3:AM Magazine

unreal realism

Posted on January 20, 2012 by David Winters

a review of ben marcus’ new novel, the flame alphabet

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.

read the rest at The Millions

sweet emptiness

Posted on December 4, 2011 by David Winters

an essay on dukla, andrzej stasiuk’s ‘book about light’

Dukla is not, after Flaubert, a ‘book about nothing.’ Such modernist moves belonged to the last days of literature, whereas Dukla reunites literature with its prehistory. It is not that nothing happens in the world, but that the novel must eradicate itself if it is to capture what happens. Fiction threads itself over the real ‘the way cotton candy is wound around a wooden stick,’ but once it’s finished ‘there’s only a sweet emptiness.’ What is a novel worth, anyway? Next to a film, a photograph? Precious little, unless it’s no longer a novel, more a ‘magic lantern, a camera obscura, a crystal ball in which snow gently falls.’ In the same movement that Dukla destroys the novel, it comes close to uncovering its condition. What is erased is retrieved as unwritten.

read the rest at 3:AM Magazine

literary melancholy

Posted on November 15, 2011 by David Winters

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.’