Lars Iyer's Blog

Typepad will soon be closed permanently, which means this blog - and the other blogs that I run from Typepad, one for each of my recent novels - will also end. I will move all the content somewhere else, if I can. Details to come.

More and more, the essential feature in Kafka seems to me is humour. He himself was not a humourist, of course. Rather, he was a man whose fate it was to keep stumbling upon people who made humour their profession: clowns. Amerika in particular is one large clown act. And concerning the friendship with Brod, I think I am on the track of the truth when I say: Kafka as Laurel felt the onerous obligation to seek out his Hardy - and that was Brod. However that may be, I think the key to Kafka's work is likely to fall into the hands of the person who is able to extract the comic aspects from Jewish theology. Has there been such a man? Or would you be man enough to be that man?

Walter Benjamin to Gerhard Scholem, February 4th, 1939

'Stupidity and Messianism': Ubaldo Le��n Barreto reviews Spurious (in Spanish) in Rialta. Most insightful review of them all? A candidate, and not just because it's flattering. Here's a machine translation:

Walter Benjamin, in a letter to Gershom Scholem, writes: "Be that as it may, I imagine that whoever succeeds in discovering the comic aspects of Jewish theology would have in his possession the key to Kafka. Has this man ever existed? Would you dare to be skilled enough to be that man?" The strange, profoundly enigmatic intuition[1] of the great German literary critic, thinker and crypto-Kabbalist has obsessed countless first-rate intellects for decades: What exactly does it mean?: Kafka as a humorist?; Is the existence of comic elements in the almost infinite theological corpus of rabbinic Judaism even conceivable? Such perplexity is understandable: they are not exactly (at least at first glance) ideas that we can associate with the Czech narrator's grim parables, let alone with the great Talmudic tradition of dour, painstaking, insanely complex commentaries on the Torah. However, the difficulty of the fragment has not managed to dissuade (on the contrary, quite the opposite) dozens ��� perhaps hundreds ��� of accomplished exegetes who continue their hermeneutical work with admirable stubbornness... and derisory results: no philosopher or theorist has succeeded, I believe, in offering a more or less satisfactory explanation of Benjamin's apophthegm. Is it so abstruse that it defies any gloss? I do not think so: I suspect rather that the approach deployed by literary theory, philosophy, and even theology is probably not the most appropriate in this instance: only literature itself can, perhaps, respond effectively to such a challenge, provided that the author recalls the capital distinction established by Henry James[2] between saying and showing. [3] No one has done it better than Lars Iyer in his eccentric, masterful narrative  Espurious .

It is a comic novel ��� or, if you prefer, satirical ��� inscribed in the great tradition of Thomas Bernhard, the last C��line (From One Castle to Another, North, Rigodon) and, above all, Samuel Beckett:[4] that is, not the superficial humour of a certain English narrative[5] but the joyless, corrosive, nihilistic and absolutely desperate laughter that informs almost all the texts of those illustrious misanthropes. Indeed, Iyer's book is dominated by two of the most original, pessimistic and hilarious characters in contemporary European literature: at one extreme is W, a tormented university professor obsessed with Kafka, the Jewish messianic tradition,[6] failure, Kierkegaard and the cinema of B��la Tarr; in the other is Lars:[7] narrator of the novel, Hindu, aspiring philosopher, chronically unemployed, fat, affable, and author of a book that his friend incessantly criticizes: both poor, alcoholics, scholars, anguished, and eccentric: two intellectuals entrenched in their dark, damp, barely habitable apartments[8] in the north of England with a single thought that they have developed to their last, Unbreathable conclusions: Europe ��� and perhaps the whole of so-called Western civilization ��� is about to sink into the deepest of abysses: they have no idea what exactly that means and they recognize it, but, of course, a small detail like that is not going to prevent them from speculating endlessly on the matter. Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that almost the entire novel is composed exclusively of the dense, hilarious dialogues between the two great failures... with special emphasis on Jewish messianism[9], the life of Kafka and the incessant derision that W ��� incomparable master of the art of insulting ��� deploys against his best (read: only) friend: "When did you know that you would not amount to anything Lars?; When did you realize that you would never be more than an idiot, an ape that pretends to think?... And at first you seemed so smart, but then we read your work: how can anyone be so stupid? Kafka was incapable of writing a sentence that was not perfect. Wittgenstein suffered for thought. But you, Lars, you are the anti-Kafka, the anti-Wittgenstein, the greatest philosophical fraud in English history, a fat stutterer who annihilates thought!, says W: my obesity impresses him, so does my gluttony... but above all my stupidity." [10]

Well, I suspect that was not what Cicero[11] had in mind when he composed his On Friendship: What's Going On Here? Is W a sadist who torments his friend for entertainment? Not at all, for he admires many of Lars's traits and reserves his greatest contempt for himself:[12] he is a quintessential misfortune (in the sense Bernhard gave to the term) and, without the slightest doubt, Kafka was his Glenn Gould. [13] It is clear that, along with Jewish messianism, the other great theme is stupidity..., but not the kind that can be found anywhere, but a very special variety: the B��tisse[14] that obsessed Flaubert in his correspondence to the paradoxical extreme of acquiring an unexpected metaphysical dimension: in this sense, it would not be inaccurate to consider  Espurious  (among other things) as a rewriting of Bouvard and P��cuchet for the twenty-first century: in the Frenchman's text, two championship imbeciles who do not know they are so, aspire to master all existing knowledge and, overwhelmed by the vastness of the enterprise, end up ��� what a surprise! ��� reduced to copyists of all the printed material they can find; [15] In Iyer's novel, by contrast, W and Lars have the keenest imaginable awareness of their limits and incessantly proclaim: "Our idiocy possesses a very uncommon purity, on that we agree. We are idiots, so idiotic that we cannot even conceive the depth of our stupidity. We are mystics of idiocy, there is something cosmic and almost majestic in our ignorance." Now, it is precisely at this point that the strange link between the two great themes of the novel is articulated:[16]: stupidity and Jewish messianism: in fact, for the protagonists it is not enough to recognize their own idiocy but also that of the whole of the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and even the Universe itself[17] (why should they limit themselves, after all, to the third planet in the solar system?).
And, as so often happens when one wants to see a meaning against all evidence, theology emerges triumphantly to justify the unbridled tenor of his thought: "And you still ask why I read Rosenzweig: the guy understood everything, Lars... look at those nauseating Germans gorging themselves on beer and sausages!, look at the apes passing for academics in England!, Look in a mirror, Lars!: the world has been molded in your image and likeness: England and Europe, Europe and England: fat idiots choking on beer and sausages, publishing nonsense they call philosophy You yourself are a sign of the end times, Lars!: the Messiah is coming, only he can save us. But you're an atheist, W, I tell him. That does not invalidate my thinking!, exclaims W. It does not matter what I believe or do not believe: moreover, that I do not believe in God can be a magnificent argument in favor of his existence." A remarkable phrase that recalls the abyssal paradoxes of Flannery O'Connor[18] and marks the beginning of the most delirious monologues pronounced by W, supreme and virtuous garrulore of failure: until that moment his interests were relatively broad (that is to say); now his obsession with eschatological signs and the arrival of the Messiah proliferates and reaches a manic intensity that is very reminiscent of the absolute prose of L��szl�� Krasznahorkai: W gets drunk in Germany, predicts the arrival of the Messiah "when no one needs him anymore" and vomits copiously while continuing to utter insults against all the German philosophers who have ever existed, exist and will exist; W reads dozens of books in German about God and advanced mathematics without understanding ninety percent of what he scrutinizes (his German is poor, his mathematical knowledge non-existent) and proclaims, despite everything, that he has made great discoveries; W mocks Lars for the umpteenth time and suspects that perhaps his friend is responsible for the Messiah's delay. [19] It is useless to continue this enumeration: the essential thing is how, through the meticulous deployment of certain procedures,[20] Jewish theology becomes absolutely derisory in this extraordinary story, perhaps the best imaginable continuation of the grandiose comic-philosophical program initiated by the Austrian atrabiliary who wrote Old Masters.
[1] Just one of the many surprising observations that flood his splendid correspondence with Scholem.

[2] "The great master of research on the formal possibilities of narrative fiction" (Frank Kermode).

[3] Which refers, of course, to the use of narrative procedures and has nothing to do with certain considerations of Wittgenstein in the final pages of the Tractatus.

[4] Plays, of course, but also stories such as Watt or Mercier and Camier.

[5] The much-celebrated���and vastly overrated���wit of Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, the insufferable, abysmally banal P. G. Woodhouse, and so many others.

[6] In particular the highly influential, almost mythical, theological-philosophical treatise The Star of Redemption, written by the ill-fated ��� he died at the age of 43 ��� elusive and fascinating Franz Rosenzweig: a kind of Jewish Max Stirner who deeply impressed Gershom Scholem.

[7] Yes, it's named after the author of the novel, but that doesn't mean anything: at most it's just another instance of the so-called British self-deprecating humour: the guy makes fun of himself.

[8] Lars' is infested with rats and is not without leaks.

[9] W hardly thinks about anything else and tries ��� with predictable results ��� to learn advanced mathematics to determine when the Messiah will arrive: "It has nothing to do with mysticism!

[10] These are merely some of the more "charitable insults" devised by W.

[11] Otherwise, W does not take the Roman philosophers seriously: "All impostors, imitators without talent, Lars: You must read the Greeks! Read them in the original!, says W. But you don't really know classical Greek, I reply. It's not true!, W exalts: I can read Plato with a good dictionary!"

[12] When you read what he thinks about his own stupidity and lack of talent, everything said about Lars seems almost harmless: in the difficult art of self-destruction (verbal, although physically he doesn't fare much better) W has reached real heights.

[13] "Kafka ruined me, Lars: when I was young and still thought I would become something I was unlucky enough to read The Castle: how can someone write like that? For a long time I wanted to be Kafka, but now I understand that I have only become Max Brod."

[14] An essentially untranslatable French term: in one of his letters the great novelist goes so far as to maintain that "masterpieces are stupid; they have a calm aspect, like the very productions of nature, like large animals and mountains": words whose meaning eludes me but which certainly confer on the concept ��� at least in Flaubert's poetics ��� a complexity far superior to translations such as "idiocy" or "imbecility".

[15] "What shall we do with all this? There's nothing to think about! Let's copy!"

[16] That W claims to have discovered: "That's the key to everything, Lars... and only a failure like me could understand it!: it is the only original thought I have ever had in my life".

[17] Only a few writers, philosophers and artists escape: Kafka ���naturally���, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Blanchot, L��vinas, B��la Tarr.

[18] I am thinking, first of all, of the great story The Lame Shall Enter First.

[19] "Your stupidity prevents his coming... You are the antimesias, Lars, a fat stupid and drunkard, a proud failure!"

[20] Obsessive repetition of phrases, witty insults, endless invectives and, above all, the grotesque splendor of the monologue delivered by an idiot, "full of sound and fury, which means nothing".

Walter Benjamin, in a letter to Gershom Scholem, writes: "Be that as it may, I imagine that whoever succeeds in discovering the comic aspects of Jewish theology would have in his possession the key to Kafka. Has this man ever existed? Would you dare to be skilled enough to be that man?"

'Stupidity and Messianism': Ubaldo Le��n Barreto reviews Spurious (in Spanish) in Rialta.

I have a slight problem with Beckett. I think some of it is fantastic. I always remember there was a French magazine that asked writers, why do you write? And Anthony Burgess wrote three pages. Beckett said, Good only for that. And I thought that was very funny and very true and quite essentially Beckett. It���s even better in French: Bon qu���a ��a. But sometimes I feel, however much he tries to get rid of the rhetoric because he associates it with ���Irishness��� and so on, nevertheless, he can���t avoid it. And it remains a performance. I think in the late plays, which I love, and the late fiction, that sort of disappears really. I think in a lot of the earlier things, there���s this wonderful, enjoyable sense of performance, but in the end, that keeps me at bay. So I have a slightly more ambivalent attitude to it. But his letters are wonderful and always so interesting, and what I treasure in all art, I think, is a complete genuineness. He���s not going to be beholden to anyone.

Maybe I���m either more optimistic or more sentimental than him, I don���t know. But when looking at late Stevens and late Beckett, who have a lot in common ��� I explore that a bit in that book Forgetting ��� in the end, Stevens is willing to recognize a sense of joy at moments in his life. Whereas Beckett feels any sign of that is false, and wants to crush it as soon as he becomes aware of it. And I suppose I feel more at ease with Proust and Stevens on that. I feel, in my life, that is something I want to leave a space for. Beckett, for whatever reason, I think was always suspicious of it. He can���t take it. He doesn���t want it. And even in some of those late pieces of fiction where he goes back to his childhood, he then has to knock it down. As he did in Krapp���s Last Tape. So it���s always been a thing with him. Can���t allow it. Can���t allow it. That���s false.

Gabriel Josipovici, interviewed

New interview with me at Books of Some Substance.

Thus, Canetti���s hatred of injustice is intrinsically braided with his hatred of death. For death is the ultimate injustice; it violates the right to life, which is the right not to die. Mortality, Canetti reminds us, was the first punishment, doled out by God (���the founder and guardian of death���) in the garden, a punishment whose term can never be served, imposed by a power that can never be disestablished. If one cannot overcome death, then one can at least rebuke it, despise it. ���For me it is not about abolishing [death], which is not possible,��� Canetti writes in an entry from 1980, ���It���s about condemning it.��� In The Book Against Death, the author assumes the role of a Roman orator, marshalling words against death the way one would a tyrant, as if one could banish it with speech, ridicule it out of existence.

Canetti approaches his subjects of attack as if they will eventually yield by virtue of sheer insistence (as Sontag points out, for Canetti, ���to think is to insist���). He is always thinking against the grain of his subject, butting up against its unjust actualities. ���One should not think away the wall that we smash our head against,��� he wrote in 1972. He is always in defiance against seemingly eternal forces: power, society, religion, God, death. And it is not enough simply to think about something������all thoughts are enlisted in the conquest of their subject. Canetti���s pens��e amounts to an act of protest, a great refutation, culminating in the ultimate refutation of death.

Source unknown

A few years later, in what seems to be his last appearance on the record in print, again in Fangoria, St. John says of his process: You can���t think about that while you���re writing it; you must remain true to what���s in front of you. You have to build a world and inhabit it with the people that you need to do it with, and you must keep it true to itself���. We take characters to their emotional and logical extremes. We push them to the edge, and that���s what you need to do. That���s what I think our films do ��� we really get out there with them, put them in a situation and turn the screws on them��� I don���t want to talk for Abel, but I firmly believe that the films we���ve done together take place in a moral universe, and I think he does too��� I don���t think fashionable amorality is going to get us anywhere. It���s a disaster, and I hope we can catch ourselves before it does real damage.

To this day Nicholas St. John gives no interviews on his career, one of the most consistent and distinguished of genre screenwriters. There is no comment on what made him run away from such promise, which encounters with dishonesty motivated him to flee even the fringes of the industry. In this light, that Dangerous Game is his last script written specifically for Abel ��� both The Addiction and The Funeral, filmed later, were from scripts completed around the same time as King of New York ��� speaks volumes above any such personal insights. 

On Nicholas St John, Abel Ferrara's screenwriter, source unknown

In a rejoinder to the Hegelian notion that philosophy only has the task of painting the gray of the world in gray, Adorno once explained: ���Consciousness could not even despair over what is grey if we did not possess the concept of a different color, whose scattered trace is not absent in the negative whole.���

For Adorno, this learning process commits him to a secularizing gesture that can learn from theology even while it leaves no sacred concepts immune. He summarized this view in a remark in a radio discussion (later published as ���Revelation or Autonomous Reason���) from the late 1950s: ���Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating into the secular, the profane.���

Adorno was far too skeptical about the technological optimism that seems to be built into orthodox Marxism, and like many of his generation, he had also lost his confidence in the proletariat as the singular and unified collective agent of history. Nor did he accept the strong element of economism that lurks in some versions of historical materialism. He worried that economism reflects an ideology of unfreedom: Rather than restoring to humanity our self-conception as agents who have the capacity to shape our own destiny, it eternalizes the experience of ourselves as mere objects who are locked in a deterministic mechanism. Vulgar Marxism, you might say, is not a solution to our unfreedom; it is merely its symptom.

What he admires in an artwork is not its illusory transcendence but its capacity to transcribe in its very form the suffering and imperfection of the surrounding world. This is why he was especially drawn to the later works by Beethoven, in which the breaks and fissures seem to express the subject���s limitations and the promises of non-identity. 

Invoking a famous idea from Stendhal and Baudelaire, he said that all genuine art also serves as a ���promise of happiness.��� Incidentally, this is where I found the title of my book. Adorno once said of modern music that it contains as much ���precarious happiness��� as it does despair. To me, this line conveys his broader understanding of art as an unresolved dialectic.

Source unknown

What is comical, as we saw, is a personality who makes his own actions contradictory and so brings them to nothing, while remaining tranquil and self assured in the process. Therefore comedy has for its starting-point what tragedy may end with, namely an absolutely reconciled and cheerful heart. . . . The comical therefore plays its part more often in people with lower views, tied to the real world and the present, i.e. among men who are what they are once and for all, who cannot be or will anything different, and, though incapable of any genuine ���pathos,��� have not the least doubt about what they are or what they are doing. But at the same time they reveal themselves as having something higher in them because they are not seriously tied to the finite world with which they are engaged but are raised above it and remain firm in themselves and secure in the face of failure and loss. It is to this absolute freedom of spirit which is utterly consoled in advance in every human undertaking, to this world of private serenity that Aristophanes conducts us. If you have not read him, you can scarcely realize how men can take things so easily.

Hegel, Lectures on the Fine Arts