of Resonance

May 10

“How does it happen that, as persons, we are given to writing?
As it turns out, this question seems to be one way of identifying the human concern generally referred to as “religion,” at least in the sense that we speak of “religions of the Book,” religions that trace their history back to Abraham, “the father of faith.”1 Still the faith of Abraham is only a beginning, only one possible beginning, in a long history of religious scripture, of history as the memory of religion in writing and as writing, of writing as the trace of what passes, passes over and passes on, the memory of life and death written in and as the memory of persons. Perhaps we are given to religion as writing because we ourselves, our lives and deaths, are written in flesh and blood, like paper and ink. For our memory too is bodily.” from the introduction to Dante and Derrida.

May 9

May 3

“

Was there any exotic travel or exciting people you met and discussed Walter Benjamin with?

Alas, no – I went to Watford and was bored, but you have to be: ‘People who are not bored cannot tell stories,’ said Walter Benjamin. Moreover, ‘we penetrate mystery,’ he says, ‘only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world.’

” from In Conversation with John Schad: Walter Benjamin Revealed

“Josipovici worries that contemporary literary fiction impoverishes life. I agree with him. But I make another claim in my Manifesto: that life itself, under the conditions of neoliberalism, is becoming impoverished – and that existing forms of literary fiction have difficulties responding to and registering this impoverishment. This leads me to conclude that contemporary literary fiction risks disengagement from the literary traditions, of which literary modernism is a crucial part, due to British parochialism, but also that literary modernism itself will have to be remade in the face of contemporary conditions, due to the disastrous effects of neoliberalism. There is a further twist: the marginality of literary fiction, the fact that it is but one strand in our multi-braided culture, means that it may no longer have a role that is central enough to respond to its own crisis. That is, its marginality, which means the impossibility of taking itself seriously as literature, means that it cannot rise to its greatest challenge. Contemporary literary fiction, for me, has been displaced from the traditions that feed into it, and from the conditions of these traditions, to the extent that we can say it is premised on the death of literature. Whether we acknowledge it or not, as readers, as writers, we are posthumous with respect to literature. We’ve come too late. We can no longer believe in literature. But there is a ray of hope: once you accept this non-belief, once you affirm it in a particular way, then something may be possible.” From an interview with Lars Iyer by Lee Rourke.

Apr 18

Apr 2

“The novel had no … need of deep distance and difference from the world of its readers: it would, with Kafka and Beckett, become a new kind of animal – a non-novel from which the novel goes on trying to recover – once it made distance its matrix.” TJ Clark in False Moderacy.

Apr 1

“I think it is possible that talent has moved to other things … and that real writing is occurring elsewhere, rather than in novels. You have to be very clear about the material that possesses you, and you’ve got to find the correct form for it. You can’t borrow somebody else’s form, otherwise you can easily end up with absurdities like, shall we say, the story of a New Guinea chieftain cast in the form of a George Eliot narrative. One narrative goes with a particular kind of life, a particular moment in history; another narrative comes at another time, and you have to find the correct one. The one that feels true to you. Not the one that they teach you about. The minute that you can be taught about something, you know it’s not real. All writing has to be new.” VS Naipaul in a Sunday Times interview, 8th May 1994.

Mar 13

“

Does a writer speak for other people? What is the correct configuration or responsibility as you see it?

I’m not sure I understand the question. One tries to catch an elusive something that will not let one rest until one has had a stab at turning it into a narrative of sorts. That something can be a rhythm, a character, an incident or a combination of all these. One’s responsibility is to the elusive thing and to that alone. Of course by the time I have finished I usually feel I have not only failed to do what I had set out to do, but that I have also lost the stab of excitement which set me going in the first place. Very occasionally I feel I have captured something – and that makes everything worthwhile.

” Interview

Feb 25

“For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had gotten nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything had to submit to form. If any of literatures’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called “writing”. Writing is more about destroying than creating.” from My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

of Resonance

A sub-continuation of This Space. This space of resonance.