13 Questions for Lars Iyer

Lars Iyer is a novelist and philosopher. He has published six novels and two nonfiction books about Maurice Blanchot: Blanchot’s Communism and Blanchot’s Vigilance. He has been shortlisted for the Believer Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize.

Lars, self-portrait

What are you reading now?

I’m rereading Agata Bielik-Robson’s Jewish Crypotheologies of Late Modernity (2014)—a touchstone book for me, especially its pages that discuss that most enigmatic and fascinating of thinkers: Gershom Scholem.

Scholem writes of the terrible moment of revelation in which the messianic energy of the transcendent tears open the immanent domain, comparing it to a flash of lightning. This is a moment of danger, Bielik-Robson warns: lightning can start a fire that could burn up the whole world. For ‘hot messianists’, as she calls them, the world is so fallen that it deserves to be destroyed. You can save the world only by burning it up.

Contrast Franz Rosenzweig, the hero of Bielik-Robson’s book, for whom the energy in question has to made effective, transforming it into redemptive works that transform the world—in particular, through the love of the neighbour. The lightning rod is the Jewish law, which allows human beings to mend the world rather than to destroy it.

Of course, the world is not completely perfect; but nor is it completely fallen. It’s separate from God, which is why God needs us to repair the creation. That’s why it may turn out that a Messiah is not needed; his coming can be deferred indefinitely.

The danger of which Scholem warms is that messianic energies become forgotten altogether; the immanent domain seals itself up from their anarchic breeze. For Rosenzweig, the Jewish law preserves the transcendence, giving a redemptive orientation to human action.

Destruction so close to creation! Anarchism so close to the law! Transcendence as a threat, as a liberation! Amazing thoughts, which are helping me write my current novel.

What book(s) most altered your taste in literature? 

Inner Experience by Georges Bataille (1943), which I read age 23, in 1993. Indulge me in a ‘writer’s biography’.

After finishing a degree in philosophy in Manchester, I moved back south to my parents’ house in Thames Valley, and to the world of hi-tech companies I’d thought I’d left behind forever.

Gloom. Dreary temp work, checking laptops for bugs; opening and closing umbrellas to make sure a company logo was printed correctly; sorting coupons clipped out by purchasers of tea bags; going through reams of print-outs looking for errors—that kind of dull, dull stuff. 

I no longer sought the novel as the ‘bright book of life’. I’m tempted to say that my taste darkened, but it was more complex than that. It was a matter of a kind of involution—of a writing concerned with itself, with what called it into existence, however pretentious that may sound. I wanted to see what could be done with writing.

This was not a theoretical interest. I was writing myself—I’d been writing for some years—and surprising things were happening in that writing. I wanted company as a writer. I looked, in my reading, for ‘extended techniques’, as they might be called in music. Experimentalism? That word isn’t right. It suggests tinkering, hobbies in garden sheds, whimsical eccentrics trying things out for their own sake, rather than what I sought.

And I sought out writers who made a concern of writing, not out of some tedious self-involvement, but to attend to what writing did and where it took you.

I no longer sought the novel as the ‘bright book of life’. I’m tempted to say that my taste darkened, but it was more complex than that

Beckett now made sense (The Unnameable). Kafka, in general (but especially The Castle.) Abyssal books, whose writing seemed to lead into itself.  

When I wasn’t temping, I’d cycle to Reading University Library, spending whole days looking for allies among the books I’d picked from the shelves.

I discovered Cixous’s two volumes of Readings (1991), excerpts from her seminars—literary criticism, but not as I knew it. It was intensely philosophical, for want of a better word—but this wasn’t philosophy as I knew it—taking its engagement with literary texts extremely seriously. Writing had the highest stakes!

What were the principles behind Cixous’s criticism? What permitted it? What gave it life? What was she looking for? What did she mean? I’d never heard of Theory, capital T, and knew very little of European philosophy. It was like joining a conversation midway through. But a vital conversation, a necessary conversation . . .

Anyway, I was familiar with most of the authors Cixous wrote about, but not all of them. I copied out quotations from Marina Tsvetayeva, Clarice Lispector . . . all about writing, coming to writing, the possibility of writing. Then there was the famous ‘primal scene’ from Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster—which seemed to be about writing again.

Blanchot—a name new to me. But there was Gabriel Josipovici’s edition of Blanchot’s essays on the shelves of the same library! How fortunate! A world opened!

Then there was Stephen Shaviro’s book on Blanchot and Bataille, Passion and Excess. An interesting coupling. And Nick Land’s hyper-Bataillean book on Bataille, The Thirst for Annihilation. Were academics really allowed to write like that? So what was so interesting about Bataille? Now, I knew Story of the Eye; interesting and so on, but . . .

At that time, I used to travel up to London to visit the late, lamented Compendium Books in Camden, where translations of Blanchot’s work were appearing: The Space of Literature, the enormous Infinite Conversation, and some of the baffling fiction: The One Who Standing Apart from Me . . .

Blanchot was so difficult, even as his concerns seemed so close to my own. I was looking for something more immediate, something I could follow more easily back then when I was as yet unfamiliar with European philosophy.

And there it was, the book of all books: a translation of Bataille’s Inner Experience, which I bought at once. Leafing through it as I returned home on the train, I felt as though this was the book for which I’d been waiting all my life.

How extraordinary, those pages! Paragraph-length philosophical mini-essays alternating with more personal, not simply autobiographical, reflections. These mini-essays were often in apparent dialogue with italicised passages which seem to have been written at a later date, some of them offering commentaries on the text-in-progress. Plans outlined, then abandoned. Register and tone flipping without notice. Big block quotations from Blanchot, from Proust, filling pages. A whole section of free-verse poems. Notes and fragments in appendices (the book never seemed to end; nor did it ever seem to get going.) But Inner Experience wasn’t a haphazard compendium. There was argument here—one enacted, performed, in its very form. This was a work of philosophy—or something like philosophy, even as it was also like literature.

So how to even read this text? Inner Experience is not an account of an experience, as though the experience stood outside the attempt to communicate it in language. Communication is an ineluctable part of the experience; language is necessary to the experience in question. There’s a drama to Inner Experience—a journey; an experiment in thought; an exploration of limits (‘I call experience a journey to the end of the possible of man’). Crucially, this is a drama that takes place in writing.

We can be sure that whatever else it is, inner experience is a putting into question of everything (even itself—Bataille writes of ‘the incessant putting into question of experience by itself’.) It is not simply a task, a project (‘Principle of inner experience: to get out, through a project, of the realm of the project’.) Above all, it involves a kind of thinking that is without the goal of securing knowledge.

Inner experience has an affective dimension, too: ‘experience is the questioning (testing), in fever and anguish, of what man knows of the facts of being’. It leads to certain ‘ravishment’. It is linked to madness even as it is also a work of reason. It is related to mysticism but must be distinguished from that, too.

So what is Inner Experience about? It’s an enactment, a written performance evoking those elements of life, of thought that cannot be translated into something linear or goal-orientated. The text—neither simply a work of literature, but not a work of philosophy either—does not stand outside what it would discuss; experience is not ineffably ‘other’, but is part of its articulation. Inner experience is a matter of writing.

Cixous, Blanchot and most of all back then, Bataille, drew my attention to the act of writing. Writing itself, beyond or before the word literature or philosophy, became an exalted word. The next step, for me, was to give myself the intellectual background necessary to understand the arguments of the European writers I was reading.

I had been applying for a PhD scholarship to work on the thought of Kierkegaard (for whom writing, of course, was also important.) I thought of switching my proposal to focus on Bataille, so I could follow the convolutions of Inner Experience. But that book felt too close to me, and I felt it warranted a response in a practice of writing very different from an academic dissertation. I’ve been trying to respond to Bataille’s work ever since.

Describe the last time a work of literature affected you physically?

I brought Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1971) on a book tour, my first time in New York. I lost my rucksack almost immediately—I’d been lost in a trance looking up at the skyscrapers and talking to a fellow passenger on my shuttle bus from JFK. But I still had Malina and that’s what I read when, that night, I was kept awake by jetlag, staying in a midtown hotel (called the W., amusingly enough; the books I was promoting were about the adventures of W. and I; and I’d read Georges Perec’s W. for the first time on the plane.)

Malina! A reading torment. A book of madness, which seemed to double up my insomnia, my sense of unease. It was unbearable, suffocating—and yet I read.

‘It is always war’, the narrator writes, in Bachmann’s only completed novel. The war continues even in postwar Vienna, where this novel is set. Nazism, it’s suggested, was not a historical aberration; its seeds are everywhere, showing itself in the relations between all kinds of power-brokers and their victims. The possibility of fascism is right there in our family life, in our romantic relationships.

New revelations of horror call for new modes of expression: new reasons for the abandonment of the old certainties of storytelling, of novel-writing, which seem complicit with the worst. Bachmann’s implicit question: What kind of writing can present this omni-war, where the victim /perpetrator relationship is all around us, implicating us. Her answer: a mosaic of paragraph-blocks surrounded by white space; sometimes page-long sentences; unsent letters; transcribed phonecalls which may or may not have taken place; scenes from a libretto with snatches of musical notation . . .

The novel concerns the predicaments of her central character: an intellectual, a writer, a woman in her forties, who shares her flat with the more ambiguous titular figure, Malina, who may or may not exist. He supposedly works as a military historian and encourages the protagonist to explore the horrors of her wartime experiences. Malina’s questions drive her to question her romance with her cheerful lover Ivan, who is continually urging her to write an ‘optimistic’ story. No optimism in Bachmann’s novel, though, which records the protagonist’s dreams of her father’s brutality and incestuous demands. In the end, Malina insists that the protagonist kill her lover. But it is she who is apparently murdered instead, as she seemingly disappears through a chink in the wall.

How disturbing, the book! How unsettling! It made me feel uncomfortable in my skin. I wanted to put it down, fall asleep, but couldn’t. It seemed to read me, Malina—to bore into me. There’s a kind of fascination of which Blanchot writes, which means you can’t hold what fascinate you at a distance. And so it was with Malina, which seemed to want to swallow me whole.

⌑ Check out our episode on Malina here ⌑

Please share a passage from the book nearest at hand.

There's a gap between hope and despair, if you will. Where it's both together. A gap that can't be described yet. I think it escapes description. It is what I call the void, the zero point. Perhaps the word “void” is going too far . . . the zero point. The neutral point. Where sensitivity regroups, if you will, and rediscovers itself . . . Anyway: it is said that there are more and more disturbed people. Madmen: mental institutions everywhere are full of them. This to me is profoundly reassuring. It clearly proves that the world is intolerable and that people feel it to be so. It merely proves that people's sensitivity is increasing. And intelligence . . . Do you see? I think that we must turn ourselves around. We must reason backwards now about many things. Everybody is neurotic, of course, because everybody is well aware that the world is intolerable. More and more so. And a place where we can't even breathe.

I always have a novel of Marguerite Duras close by (I am used to thinking of her as my favourite literary author) and today is no exception.

Destroy, She Said has always been especially enticing to me because of the interviews that accompany the translation of her novel, and from which the excerpt above comes. And there is also its publication date: the year after the Paris 1968 Events. The interviews, among other things, meditate on the legacy of the uprising, on Destroy as a response to the Events.

For a long time, I dreamt of the northwest passage that would open from literary writing of the kind I admired—the kind I read and wanted to write—to the streets! Literature would lead naturally into politics, into political action, as if there was no break between reading and activism. The secluded life of the would-be scholar could burst open to the world, and to a way of living in the world—an ethos. Introversion would become extraversion. Solitude would flower . . .

And for a time, Destroy sustained my dream, and in this edition. Interviews and literature; interviews where Duras shared the wisdom that arose from her writing. (True, later in her career, this wisdom could give way to a regrettable grand-dame diva-ism . . . )

And what did Duras have to say? She didn’t mind that Destroy, She Said could seem boring. Long stretches of the novel are, she admits, ‘dull. Banal, Dirty and grey’. Not much is described or explained. The characters, she grants, are weak, depersonalised, deliberately interchangeable (‘they are all the same’). Point of view drifts from character to character, seemingly without preference. Dialogue often consists of banalities. The dramatic wattage is low, low, low. The pages themselves look stark, bare, full of white space.

And yet these writerly techniques were central to Duras’s effort to create and sustain what she calls a ‘void’. By its very style, by its sparsity of action, Destroy, She Said looked to the destruction of an old civilization based on strong individuality and determined action. Just as the Events of May 1968, were marked by the divestment of first-person ambition among the protestors (See Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community and Duras’s account in Green Eyes for more), so too did her novel provide a literary figuration of de-interiorised personhood, exploring new kinds of interpersonal relations. Mastery (including self-mastery) was to be undone without aggression, without struggle, but, for all that, destructively . . .

Literature would lead naturally into politics, into political action, as if there was no break between reading and activism. The secluded life of the would-be scholar could burst open to the world, and to a way of living in the world—an ethos.

How do you treat the books you read?

Back when I was studying for a doctorate, and even when I was working as a part-time lecturer, I used to underline all my books in pen. Why? Deliberate vandalism!

I thought I’d have to leave the academic world sooner or later, and that the time in which I’d be able to read books would dwindle. I resented these mandarins’ books written with the implicit assurance that literature and philosophy would always be taken seriously. So I’d deface them, in my own way—but it was a defacement that was also an homage, an overaggressive underlining of this or that important passage. I wanted to leave a record of my last passage through these books, not unlike the signs left by the explorers in Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the World. Signs for who? One day, working once again as a contractor at some hi-tech company, having resolved to take my philosophy books to the charity shop, I’d look back at those signs with wonder . . . Who was I, back then? I’d ask. Did those books really mean something to me?

Long story short—and this is the part of the story of my novel-in-progress—I found a full-time academic job, the resentment died away, and I stopped underlining things in pen . . .

What quality do you most appreciate in a novel?

The element of performance. Where the text enacts its concerns not simply in its plot, but in its grammar, its syntax, its rhythm . . .

It’s there in Georg Büchner’s Lenz (written 1836.) A short story that seems as vast in scope as a novel.

The speed of this book. It’s urgency. ‘You seem to be in a great hurry. Where do you want to get to? Is the ground really burning under your feet?', one journalist wrote to its author. Did Büchner have foreknowledge that he would die at twenty-four?

Lenz’s topic: three weeks in the life of a real playwright, Jakob Lenz (1751-1792), based on diaries written by the Pastor-physician to whom he was sent after a suicide attempt.

Lenz’s content: accounts of the protagonist’s walks in the countryside; his attempt to resurrect a dead child, his bathing openly in the town fountain; and, possibly (the text is not clear) another suicide attempt.

Lenz’s style: a feverish prose-poem, boiling with intensity, long-paragraphed, paratactically fragmented, rhythmically syncopated, given to compulsive repetition and variation: prose fiction written from inside a gathering madness. A short story in which everything other than the divine fury of performance was burnt away . . .

Another example. Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground (1864.)

Our author explores the implications of a philosophical position from within—sensitively, sympathetically, and in such a way that the reader might recognise themselves in the convulsions of the nameless protagonist.

The novella used to be celebrated as embodying Dostoevsky’s own proto-existentialist revolt against reason—how naïve! As Joseph Frank has shown so carefully, Dostoevsky does not simply endorse the position of his bilious protagonist. The underground man’s agony, masochism and curdled emotionalism are the convulsive results of trying to live in accordance with the then-current philosophy of determinism. Notes from Underground is written from inside a philosophy to explode it. That explosion is the writing in its twistedness, its polemics, the way its protagonist thinks and writes against himself.

I think of the line from Richard III: ‘I’ll join with black despair against my soul, / And to myself become an enemy’.

(Allow me in passing to recommend George Pattinson’s philosophy-novel Conversations with Dostoevsky.)

Who is an author you feel should be more widely read?

Hélène Cixous, born in 1937, is for me, the very name of literature. Literature! That word sounds so archaic, so elitist, so snobbish! Aren’t we suspicious of all those things? Isn’t our culture less hierarchical now—not so high/low, not so dismissive of literature’s supposed opposite: genre? Who can use the word, literature, innocently?

Cixous can, with a ‘second innocence’ that she writes about in connection to Heinrich von Kleist. In her literature-obsessed poetic prose (by far the bulk of her vast oeuvre), in her creative criticism, written decades before that was even a thing, she watches over literature in what she calls, in a recent interview, our ‘age of ashes’.

Our age of ashes. Compare the ‘happy times’ of the 70s that Cixous remembers, ‘when the germs of thought of what is called French theory spread from France to the rest of the West’ [Hélène Cixous interview.] And her work with it!  

‘There were noble philosophers, dazzling linguistics, applied mathematics, psychoanalysis. After Freud, there was Lacan. A slew of luminaries and innovators: Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault’. And she was the brilliant literary luminary, although usually received too summarily under the heading of ‘French Feminist’, as the author of ‘The Medusa’s Gaze’, when she’s written so much other stuff . . .

She continues: ‘It was a happy time: those researchers were able to come together thanks to the movement of 1968. They finally met, exchanged, gathered together, and effected a worldwide change in thought’.

1968 and all that! A change in thought! When literature could be taken seriously. When it vouchsafed new ways of living, a new ethos, even a new politics. When it seemed to have philosophical stakes—and high ones! None of this seems believable in our age of ashes. Thankfully, Cixous is alive to remind us that there once was a fire.

What book are you avoiding reading?

Laurelle’s work in general. It’s so difficult! And I have other things to do! Maybe this summer, maybe next summer, maybe never . . .

What novel would you add to our current season (on Family)?

You’re missing Thomas Bernhard, I think. And as a sample novel, I would suggest the comparatively neglected Gargoyles, recently the subject of reflections by Steve Mitchelmore [This Space: A measure of forever].

Bernhard never really caught on in the Anglophone world despite his work being published for prestige by the big houses (Knopf, Faber) and despite the many [Thomas Bernhard’s fiction of the meaningless - New Statesman] enthusiastic [The Rest Is Slander by Thomas Bernhard | Book review | The TLS] reviews [The Genius of Bad News | Tim Parks | The New York Review of Books] of his work. Everywhere else, it seems, he’s famous for his unending paragraphs; his musical, fugue-like prose, which performs grammatical variations on notable phrases; and the wild hyperbole of his intellectual-protagonists engaged in obsessive artistic, philosophical or musical projects.

Why do I suggest Gargoyles? Perhaps it will act as a gateway drug for readers who are not familiar with Bernhard. Published in 1967, it’s a threshold work, the first half of which is still relatively conventional in style, with characters, dialogue—even paragraphs. A doctor follows his daily rounds in a remote and mountainous part of Austria. With him: his young, still-idealistic son who sees in his father’s patients’ terrible brutality, violence, abuse, crushed hopes, drudgery, menace, cruelty . . .

The last person they meet is an insomniac solitary, the aristocrat Prince Saurau, who engages in a hundred-page monologue, the template of all the great Bernhardian monologues to come. Frenzy, paranoia, raving, despair: it’s all there, magnificently musical, extemporising on the themes of the approach of madness, impossible family relations, impending disaster for his estate, the love of Pascal and Schopenhauer. The first magnificent truly Bernhardian flight . . .

What book would you like to be the last one you read before you shuffle off this mortal coil?

Beckett’s The Unnameable (1953), which would be a way of deferring death. It never seems to end (even if does, actually end.)

The following lines from Beckett’s dialogue with Georges Duthuit are well known: ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’. Ostensibly about painting, it is really about Beckett’s own literary practice.

An accident; a fact; fortuitousness; pure contingency; good luck or even bad luck: is that the only answer we can give?

Why write? Why do you need to say anything at all? Why, as Jeff Fort asks, in a magnificent book, The Imperative to Write, is there an imperative to write? A question that’s interested me from the beginning, and that I think it would be worth returning to at the end—and deferring the end.

The Unnameable, as much as any other text in Beckett’s oeuvre, explicitly addresses this question, letting it resound without resolving it. Its narrator claims to be in touch with a voice that comes from without, which can no longer be attributed to a character, nor indeed to the inner life of any person. So much of this novel without characters (‘figures’ instead: Mahood, Worm, anonymous ‘others’, a ‘master’), without action, concerns the relation to this imperious voice.

‘[N]o need of a mouth, the words are everywhere, inside me, outside me, well well, […] I hear them, no need to hear them, no need of a head, impossible to stop them, impossible to stop, I'm in words, made of words, others’ words, what others, the place too, the air […]’ The narrator is but the channel for these words—the bearer of a voice that it must let speak.

From where does the obligation to express come? ‘I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say but the words of others, I have to speak. No one compels me to, there is no one, it's an accident, a fact’.

An accident; a fact; fortuitousness; pure contingency; good luck or even bad luck: is that the only answer we can give?

Asked by a French newspaper why he wrote, Beckett replied, ‘Bon qu’à ça” – it’s all I’m good for. Because I’m good for nothing else.  Contrast this to Angelus Silesius’s ‘the rose is without “why”; it blooms simply because it blooms’. The origin of writing shouldn’t be regarded as a bountiful miracle, for which we should all be grateful.

Jeff Fort, commenting on Beckett’s response:

The phrase thus speaks of exclusivity (bon qu’à ça), but precisely in the mode of abjection and default, a reduction not so much to the irreducible as to a last shred of something still left over, luckily (or not), at the end of a near-total process of elimination. This reduction almost to nothing also happens to be the regular course of Beckett’s fictional world in general, a homology which suggests that the extreme stripping away carried out ‘within’ the writing is also the very form of the writing vocation itself, as it dwindles into the recesses of a life reduced to little else. In Beckett’s fiction, especially in a work like The Unnamable, this remainder is the very thing that, ravenous for silence, obstructs the dissolution of speech and keeps the torture going.

The Unnameable strips down the imperative to write to pretty much nothing but that imperative, simply letting it echo through its pages. Rereading it, I might hope that it would let me answer the question, why write? at last. But there is no ‘at last’, and there is no answer except, ‘all I’m good for’. The Unnameable never ends, even if it appears to.

If you were to design a literature course around a singular word what word would that be and what three books might appear on the reading list? 

Gnosticism: that would be my word. Or, if I was allowed a phrase, Literary Gnosticism.

We might begin with Bernhard’s work, for one. ‘I cherish what Thomas Bernhard does, but in my view it isn’t literature’, Peter Handke writes in 1986. ‘[T]he things he writes don’t tackle problems of narrative or form at all […] I found his last few books to be almost criminal in their shoddiness’.

What if Bernhard deliberately seeks to overturn conventional narrative and form? It’s true, in his mature work we find little of the usual furniture of novel-craft: well-rounded characters, involved and complex plotting, fulsome description. Bernhard’s work is full of the fire of which Bielik-Robson warns in another context: he would burn up the novel and perhaps the whole world.

Perhaps, thinking of Willem Styfhals’s study of twentieth century Gnosticism [Gnosticism in Postwar German Philosophy: An Interview with Willem Styfhals – JHI Blog], Bernhard could be called a literary Gnostic. The motivating question of literary Gnosticism is: How do you write and comport yourself as an author in a literary world you at best distrust and at worst despise?

The literary author cannot negate the literary world altogether: it’s necessary to write, to use language, to publish books and so on. Even the most extreme negation of literary writing still requires the writer to take a position within literary writing. The question, then, is how one can write meaningfully in a way that squares with the negation at issue

For Bernhard, on this account, the only meaningful comportment to the literary world is the continual inversion of current literary norms and associated moral, political, historical and religious values.

But this active literary revolt reveals itself not only in the writing itself, but also in the authorial persona, comportment in interviews, delivery of speeches, author’s photographs and so on. It’s a question of a whole literary ethos – one that is consistent with what is enacted in the writing.

For that reason, I would read works by Bernhard that bear upon this ethos: My Prizes (written 1980), Three Days (the film [bernhard three days - YouTube], 1970) and his autobiographies, Gathering Evidence (written 1975-82.)

Would literary Gnosticism be a useful way of seeing the work of other authors, too? How about Susan’s Taubes’s essays, fiction and letters? Would it provide an approach to understanding what Duras calls destruction? To the torsions of Malina? Is it already at work in Büchner and Dostoevsky? Questions I would like to consider.

In what character in literature do you most recognize yourself?

For worse, rather than better—and this is my way of formulating the question about what it means to write now: Yukio Mishima’s Tōru Yasunaga, from The Decay of the Angel, the last volume of his crowning tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility (written 1964-70.) A character who describes himself as a ‘perfect negative’—who seeks to live, whether convincingly or unconvincingly, in absolute negation.

'I refuse to believe in the future', declared Mishima in one of his last interviews, 'I prefer to think that I carry all of tradition on my shoulders, and that literature will end with me'.

Decay, which only seems half realised, a gesture at a novel rather than a novel, was to be the last book. And Mishima, who took his own life in ritual seppuku, after a notorious attack on the Japanese army headquarters with a private army on the same day that he left Decay to his publishers, was to be the last human:

I no longer have any great hopes for Japan. Each day deepens my feeling that Japan is ceasing to be Japan. Soon Japan will vanish altogether. In its place, all that will remain is an inorganic, empty, neutral, drab, wealthy, scheming, economic giant in a corner of the Far East. I will not listen any longer to people who are content with that prospect. [...] we are the last humans, and there's nothing any of us can do about it. 

The tetralogy tells the story of what appear to be successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, an ardent young aristocrat who dies at twenty following the disappointments of a tragic love-affair. It also narrates the course of Japanese history in the twentieth century.

Years after Kiyoaki’s death, his friend, Shigekuni Honda, encounters this same ardency in the fervently nationalist leader of a terrorist group, who dies by his own hand at the same age.

More years pass, and Honda finds this inner fire in what he comes to believe is second incarnation, a beautiful but sickly Thai princess, who dies once again at twenty.

Still more years pass. Honda, age seventy-six, comes to believe he’s met Kiyoaki’s third incarnation in the sixteen-year-old orphan, Tōru Yasunaga. He undertakes to alter destiny, saving his charge from an early death. The retired judge adopts the boy.

But Tōru is exceptional only in his capacity for self-reflection. He is not part of a tragic romance, not committed to any idealistic goal; nor is he a beauty. Instead, he seems cruel, cold and manipulative, setting out a vindictive plan: ‘I vow it: when I am twenty I will cast Father into hell. I must start making plans’.

Tōru is petty and wayward rather than evil. His attempt to kill himself is botched; he ends up blind, pointlessly living on . . . Tōru is at one with the age of ashes, with the empty present . . .  

Yukio Mishima’s remarks about the last novel, the last human are meant to remind us of Nietzsche’s famous remarks on the ‘last man’. A general lack of creativity, of passion; the preference of mediocrity and comfort over risk; contentedness with given societal norms and values; seeking to avoid suffering above all else—the hardship and struggle required to make something out of nothing . . .

As Mishima seemed to know, his seppuku, like his private army, was only the farcical inversion of this ‘lastness’. But farce, it would appear, was better than nothing for the Japanese author. Somewhere (I’ve lost the reference) he speaks of his admiration for that submarine captain who ran into enemy fire brandishing a sword. Both futile and glorious at the same time, according to Mishima—but that was the only integral act left to us.

Literary writing, by contrast, was but a husk. What did it matter that Decay fell so far short? Novel-writing, too, belonged to the farce.

So why do I identify with Tōru? He’s a posthumous figure – perhaps like the writer of literary prose after the prestige of Literature, capital L, has collapsed. His life is pointless—recalling the cultural marginality of the literary writer. There seems to be a perverse pleasure in surviving—just as there’s a perverse pleasure in literary writing after the age in which it would have made sense.

Why read literature?

It's tempting to decry contemporary literary fiction as the work of the equivalent of Nietzsche’s last men, exhibiting a general lack of creativity, of passion, conformism, preference of mediocrity and comfort over risk; contentedness with societal norms and values; the avoidance of the suffering and struggle.

Dismissal of this kind is good polemical fun, but obvious, even expected. The gesture is empty. It’s the old épater le bourgeoisie thing—as if there were any bourgeoise left; as if anyone expected anything of literary writing anymore! As if its mere existence—its continued survival, unlikely as it seems—could be anything more than a cause for celebration!

Literary writing works negatively, even apophatically, by suspending the inherited order of meaning: by exhausted forms, complicit in horror.

And it can lead to a nostalgia for the writer as demiurge, the masterpiece-maker, the artist-overhuman, engaged in titanic struggle to receive the fire from heaven, the lightning Scholem evokes, the anarchic breeze . . .

Perhaps there really were such authors; does that mean we should become ancestor-worshippers? Perhaps we should seek out those few of this ilk that still exist. But aren’t there problems with this model of the writer, who seems to have inherited the mantle of sovereignty from the God who supposedly died long ago? The writer is no longer a demiurge; if God is dead, so is the Author, capital A.

Other options: the various writerly strategies found in the authors I’ve mentioned. Literary writing works negatively, even apophatically, by suspending the inherited order of meaning: by exhausted forms, complicit in horror. Out goes instrumental language, traditional plot construction and strong and determined protagonists who can realise their ambitions. In comes . . . all sorts of strategies.

If literary Gnosticism is a useful expression, it is in capturing the relationship these authors have not simply to the existing literary world, but to the world as such. There is an apocalyptic tendency in these writers, a dream of destroying the world rather than mending our relationship with it—but this is only a dream. The Gnostic is condemned to go on living in the world that is despised. Apocalypticism is thwarted; failure is all; the end never comes.

But aren’t there problems with this model of the writer, who seems to have inherited the mantle of sovereignty from the God who supposedly died long ago? The writer is no longer a demiurge; if God is dead, so is the Author, capital A.

Mishima’s Tōru Yasunaga cannot die, cannot carry through his evil plans. Beckett’s Unnameable can never have done with the imperative to write. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is joined with black despair against everything—even himself. The present world is intolerable to Duras – destroy it, she says; find the void, the zero point. The equivalent for Bachmann’s narrator in Malina: the world as it stands is hopelessly complicit. This is the age of ashes, says Cixous; dreaming of another May 1968, where literature and philosophy led to the streets, is absurd—a mockery.

Literary Gnosticism. Why read this kind of literature? Because it is truest to the great deaths of the modern age: the death of God, the death of the Author, and now the death of the End. The farce continues, you have to go on—but it isn’t all doom and gloom. Look at the zest of Bernhard’s writing, for example, its hyperbolic humour—literary Gnosticism can be funny, too.