A fundamental deprivation: Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas

Perhaps all novels seek to converge on a single point. 

The thought occurred to me as I read Vila-Matas' Montevideo, translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. A random thought, apparently, but also the kind of thought provoked by the passion of observation, anecdote and speculation in Vila-Matas' novels, each of which, however distinct, may be said to ask the question in the epigram to Montano's Malady: "What will we do to disappear?". If the single point is disappearance, from what do we disappear? 

The passion of observation, anecdote and speculation perhaps. If the writer and reader wishes to disappear from writing, to be free from the guile of games and the interval of abstraction, finally to be present to the world as it is, an answer is to give a firm "No!" to writing, as done by those featured in Bartleby & Co or, in a slight variation, to be forced into the world by writer's block. This is Montano's malady, a predicament similar to the literary publisher in Dublinesque who fears the disappearance of what has been his life's work. The alternative is to leave the world behind by disappearing into writing, which is what reading the epigram placed before the usual content of the novel promises and immediately threatens. Which kind of disappearance is it then?

It's significant that the epigram is taken from L'Entretien infini, Maurice Blanchot's essay collection translated as The Infinite Conversation. As Susan Hanson explains in the foreword to her translation, 'Entretien' has a nuance the English lacks, as it can mean "a between that is rigorously held to". We're between question and possible answer. The gift of everyday language and genre fiction is to be excused the question as words and world disappear into one another. 

Rigorously holding between is the comedy of Vila-Matas' novels and why regular readers become exasperated with what they see as "writing about writing", and especially because the comedy is not comedy as in Commedia in which one begins in Hell, passes through Purgatory and ends in Paradise. The novel is the by-product of disenchantment and as such maintains only the residue of the promise of another life. Recognition of the residue may be what defines the literary in literary fiction. The gift of genre fiction is to fulfil that promise, for a time. 

A clone of Vila-Matas narrates Montevideo because the quest for disappearance is personal. He goes in search of it in chapters each named after a city: as a young man he travels to Paris with the romantic notion of becoming a writer only to write nothing and find himself instead disappearing into "the seedy side" of the capital, going to boozy parties and dealing in drugs. Rather than the novel disappearing into a titillating account of crime and debauchery, the reader is pointed to Lucy Sante's The Other Paris before carrying on writing about writing. 

In the title chapter, the other form of disappearance is sought in a hotel room in the Uruguayan capital, the setting of The Sealed Door, a story by Julio Cortàzar that fascinates the clone. He books the same room  (no pun intended) to open the eponymous door, perhaps finally to enter the origin of literature. The Spanish book cover suggests what he finds. While it's a pity the Yale UP edition doesn't also use Hammershøi's painting, the unlovely digital adaptation reminds us of an artificiality holding disappearance at arm's length.

We might ask at this point: why do we have novels like Montevideo? Shouldn't they provide more serious investigations into life in the world? Even the anxiety expressed is done in such an insouciant manner that nothing can be taken on face value. In contrast, we have seen in recent years a remarkable surplus of very serious novels full of "heartstopping beauty...sumptuous prose [and] philosophical depth" ¹ invariably spanning several hundred pages and hailed as up there with the accepted greats of modernism, so calling books like Montevideo a novel appears to be not only a category error but an insult to the common reader. 

To answer, we need to reflect on a question Kafka asked in his diary. If writing expansively on his unhappiness appears to him as "a merciful surplus of strength" when he is in the depth of suffering, "what kind of surplus is it?".²

There's a short story by Jean Paulhan collected in the translation above called Aytré who gets out of the habit, written in 1910 but published in 1943, which can be described only incidentally as a murder mystery. It begins with an adjutant in the French colonial army in Madagascar writing a private diary discussing a French woman, Raymonde, with whom he was having an affair and who has been stabbed to death. While he deals with the aftermath, his sergeant Aytré takes over writing the official log of their journey escorting 300 Senegalese women from one side of the island to the other, and the diary is interrupted to include the log. For a time Aytré notes down the simple details demanded by the form – the distance covered each day, the condition of the women, the cost of chickens, etc. – which makes for less interesting reading than the diary but, after a couple of weeks, he begins to digress by writing up his own opinions, noting down cultural differences, including a long passage detailing the seven modes of transport he has witnessed on the island. As the title says, Aytré is getting out of the habit of military life. The story then returns to the adjutant's diary and ends with his discovery that Aytré killed Raymonde in a fit of jealousy. 

This is of course unremarkable and there's no apparent reason to disinter such an obscure story from a writer more or less unknown in English. So what is the point of all this? 

In an essay on the story published the same year, Blanchot claims that Aytré is a man who has felt an emptiness in himself: "a defect, a lack of something decisive, whose absence becomes, little by little, unbearable". Perhaps he was driven to an extreme act because for him the unbearable feeling took the form of a woman. This makes sense and leaves us with the question of toxic masculinity, thereby helping the common reader to disappear from literature into the world of socio-political considerations. For many, this is the literary in literary fiction. Blanchot takes a different path by arguing that the digressions in the log also constitute an attempt to fill the emptiness with the excess of language. This has unforeseen consequences. 

From this little story, it does not follow that literature must necessarily begin with crime or, failing that, with flight. But that it does imply a caving in, a kind of initial catastrophe, and the very emptiness that anxiety and care measure; yes, we can be tempted to believe that. But let us note that this catastrophe does not fall only on the world, the objects one handles, the things one sees; it, extends also to language[:] all the thick layering of words, the sedimentation of comfortable meanings that move off, detach themselves, become a slippery and dangerous slope. The threat spreads to anyone who allows himself to answer it. ³

After finding something decisive missing from his life, Aytré loses the habit of straightforward notation and tries to fill the absence with a thick layering of detail, only for the absence to reveal itself as part of writing too. Writing gets out of the habit of regular meaning. 

for [Aytré], recourse to the most literary or beautiful language signifies only the irreparable loss of the only language that was certain for him, that in which it was enough for him to write, "We are doing twenty kilometers a day." 

Blanchot points out that, following Mallarmé, every word consists of absence and, for this reason, questions whether Kafka is correct to think his extemporising on unhappiness with flourishes and ornamentations is in fact a surplus. The effect of being able to express unhappiness with as much eloquence as one can muster means that colloquial language, in which the words disappear into the world, is replaced by poetic language, which, as it does not allow for translation into other words, becomes paradoxically "a kind of poverty" because all other words cannot properly say the same thing. Kafka's unhappiness is, in its finest expression, entirely separate from the experience, even to the one suffering it. Yes, we understand what 'unhappiness' means in general, but what does Kafka's unhappiness mean? This paradox, in which the exultation of self-expression and the gift of literature becomes "the first stirring of a fundamental deprivation", is, for Blanchot, the beginning of literature. The surplus of maximalist novels in recent years, rather than renewing modernism, can only evade the implications of the paradox, and evasion becomes the means of its critical reception; the longer the book, the better to forget the evasion. ⁴ The beginning may be the single point on which Vila-Matas' novels seek to converge. There is never any end to the novel.

 

Notes 

¹ From a tweet by Krapp's Last Vape. 

² From 19th September 1917.

³ From The Paradox of Aytré in The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell. 

⁴ It cannot be a coincidence that in Kafka's The Judgment Georg Bendemann's revelation that his friend in Russia to whom he writes with a freedom founded on evasion is in fact his father. He has the final word.

39 Books: 2005

Four years later, browsing in Waterstones, I picked a book from a table and read "What will we do to disappear?" – the epigram to Enrique Vila-Matas's novel Montano's Malady. It's a line taken from Maurice Blanchot's Infinite Conversation, so I had to buy it. Later that year, when as part of the Warwick Prize for Writing jury I championed the novel, another member complained that it was "writing about writing". Instead of correcting this to writing about not writing, I responded rather weakly by saying that writing is as much a part of life as anything else. I should have pointed out it was also part of the title for the prize.

Placing writing in the foreground is the reason why Vila-Matas has not won a literary prize in this country while winning almost every one on the European mainland, because literary prizes in this country are routinely awarded to happy recyclers, genre jugglers, barkers for bookshops, and handed to them by prize juries invariably loaded with centrist dullards who display their literary perspicacity to the world (well, The Guardian) by pointing to an author's genitals. British literature cannot and will not open the wound of the negative.

Anyway, this year's choice is not about writing but giving up writing. The narrator, Marcelo, says he wrote one book and then stopped writing until he began keeping a notebook of writers who stopped writing; "writers of the No", those who who, like Bartleby the Scrivener, develop "the negative impulse or attraction towards nothingness".

The incongruity of Enrique Vila-Matas writing about not writing is, of course, that he himself has never stopped writing. He has followed Marguerite Duras' advice given to him as a young man: "You must write, don’t do anything but write", advice she received from Raymond Queneau. However, the incongruity may be deceptive. In following the advice, Vila-Matas becomes a Bartleby himself, a copyist, but he is unusual in that he seeks a way out by witnessing himself acting within the history of the novel. He is aware that each generation has to find for itself the possibility of literature, hence the complaints from budding prize jury members, such as this reviewer who thinks the book should not be called a novel and "more like literary criticism". By writing about the condition of the copyist, he opens onto that empty space, that silence on the other side of writing into which Bartlebys disappear. One becomes a real writer by not writing, by not being "like" in Alice Oswald's sense. 

"It is well known that God keeps quiet, is a master of silence, hears all the pianos in the world, is a consummate writer of the No, and for that reason He is transcendent."

Vila-Matas' unofficial trilogy of Bartleby & Co, Montano's Malady, and Dublinesque may constitute a negative theology of literature, something of which I knew nothing in 2005 and only a little more now, though of course knowledge in this field is of questionable value.

Death by Saudade by Enrique Vila-Matas

The first collection of Vila-Matas' short stories in English translation is named after the fifteenth story in the table of contents, but might better have been named after the seventh, Death by Saudade because it compresses Vila-Matas' work into a black hole. Just as Harvill Secker’s abbreviation of Montano’s Malady, his second novel in English, excludes any mention of illness, the choice of this title disguises the nature of his fiction with a predictable play on genre.


This is entirely understandable, as publishers must assume potential consumers read for what is misnamed 'entertainment' rather than to assuage saudade, a Portuguese term with no equivalent in English but defined by Wikipedia as "a profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves". Indeed, to misquote Kafka, we might wonder how can one take delight in stories unless one flees to them for refuge. There's the extra worry for the publisher in that potential readers are notoriously resistant to short stories, as they minimise the pleasures of following a character as they traverse deep time. To mitigate this, short stories are narrated more often than not in the first person, with Vampire in Love no exception.  

Death by Saudade in particular is narrated by the owner of a dry-cleaning shop telling of his childhood fascination with the plenitude that lay beyond home and school, inspired by a friend's stories of his seafaring grandfather. Watching the activity on a busy street replaced reading great novels, he says. He becomes intrigued by a female vagrant who approaches women and appears to whisper something in their ear. To hear it himself he dresses up in his mother's clothes but, rather than hear any exciting secret, he is seized by her "wild, magnetic, mirror-like eyes" and feels a gust of wind on his face:

"I fled in terror because I had suddenly understood that what I had just seen, with utter clarity, was the face of the evil ravaging the streets of the city and which my parents, in low, cautious voices, called the wind from the bay, the wind that drove so many mad." [Translated by Margaret Jull Costa]

From then on and into adulthood he feels like a vagrant himself, travelling to evade anxiety and melancholy all the while "filled with the temptation to leap into the void". He walks through the city of Bernardo Soares full of beautiful places to make the leap. Back home he tries to paint what he saw on the street but never finishes anything. The plenitude that promised so much in childhood is revealed as something else: "I say to myself that life is not achievable while one is alive".

Saudade (1899) by Almeida Júnior
(note that she is reading)

You might think all this means Vila-Matas' fiction is negative, not life affirming, depressing even; everything 'entertainment' seeks to repress. This is because Vila-Matas is attuned to the enigma of fiction, of this strange need to read and write – projected here into travel and painting. His fiction shadows its logic. Why, after all, has the dry cleaner spoken at all? And why are we listening in this way? The issue of the story before us is neither whether the narrator is convincing, reliable or anything else, nor whether the form of his narration is traditional, experimental, modernist or postmodernist, but the paradox of saudade: a word whose meaning requires translation even in its language of origin, a condition that is magnetic and mirror-like, pinning the sufferer to mortality and reflecting their denial, and yet that which gives life purpose and meaning, which returns us to the child wanting to discover what is beyond and so to fictionalise himself as a woman to do so, then to duplicate the breeze in paint, and so to accommodate it, to make life and death indistinguishable. Life by saudade.

His friend finally reveals that his seafaring grandfather had in fact killed himself, and later the narrator discovers that numerous other members of the same family had also killed themselves. They had succumbed to saudade and "experienced the only possible plenitude, the plenitude of suicide". Vila-Matas' comedy is never far away.

The paradox of saudade is then the paradox of reading and writing. At the end, the narrator says he will not leap into the void, while the story demonstrates otherwise.

A Provisional Miracle: Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas

This is the sad tale of poor Samuel Riba:

He belongs to an increasingly rare breed of sophisticated, literary publishers. And every day, since the beginning of this century, he has watched in despair the spectacle of the noble branch of his trade – publishers who still read and who have always been drawn to literature – gradually, surreptitiously dying out.

There are fewer and fewer “genuine writers and talented readers” to make it worthwhile, a decline Riba ascribes to “the golden calf of the gothic novel”, which created “the stupid myth of the passive reader”. Riba dreams of the return of readers with a capacity for “intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other and to approach a language distinct to the one of our daily tyrannies”, but he knows it is unlikely to be realised. The younger publishers are keen instead to exploit the “the ‘new language of the digital revolution’, so useful for covering up a lack of imagination and talent”. Yes, it's time for Riba to retire.




Actually, he finds it liberating to be free of the “vampire tales and other nonsense now in fashion” and “no longer to waste hours reading so much rubbish: manuscripts with conventional plots, stories that need a conflict in order to be anything”. Only he regrets not having resolved his lifelong obsession, to uncover an authentic literary genius. He believes the writer is still out there: “in the shadows: in solitude, in doubt, in question”.

There is a dream he can realise however, and that is one he had while seriously ill, caused by years of alcohol abuse. He dreamed of Dublin, “a city he had never been to, but which in the dream he knew perfectly well, as if he'd lived there in another life”. That other life is, of course, reading. He has absorbed James Joyce’s Ulysses as a vampire absorbs another's lifeblood, just as Joyce absorbed Homer. As is only natural for someone who has a “remarkable tendency to read his life as a literary text”, Riba decides to hold a funeral for the Gutenberg age of print in the very same chapel that in episode six of Ulysses saw the funeral of Paddy Dignam. If literature is dying, then a funeral must follow. Literary interconnections fabricate his story: Gutenberg’s funeral aligns itself to Dignam's as it was itself aligned to Odysseus’ descent into the underworld.

Riba is fascinated by the stranger wearing a macintosh encountered by Bloom at the funeral, perhaps because he too often sees mysterious strangers: a man wearing a Nehru jacket staring at him from the street outside his parents’ home, who Riba then spies again on his taxi ride home. What does he signify? Is there a connection? Perhaps his fascination with Ulysses agitates excessive awareness. He wonders if Nabokov is right that the man in the macintosh is Joyce himself, a portrait of the author as friend to the dead. To distract himself, Riba reads a newspaper and happens upon an article featuring comments by Claudio Magris, an author he has published, who argues that Odysseus’ circular journey home was replaced halfway through the twentieth century “by a rectilinear journey: a sort of pilgrimage, a journey always moving forward, towards an impossible point in infinity, like a straight line advancing hesitantly into nothingness”. The correspondence is clear as Riba is himself on his way home in the taxi, reiterating Joyce's achievement in applying Homeric reach to the absolutely mundane, this time taking it further towards that nothingness; his own.

Not that Riba is entirely happy with this literary web spinning, aware perhaps that it is the intellectual equivalent of alcohol ingestion; an induced reverie with damaging consequences. But then it follows that if the everyday of the reader proffers literary correspondences, adding a certain portentous grandeur to ordinary life, the end of literature will mean life disrobed and destitute, leaving him to endure what we might call enchantment hunger (which someone ought to use for a title). When Riba sees a strange suitcase in his Dublin hotel room, he recognises it is an appropriate incident for a novel, but he doesn’t want to be written by novelist of some cheap, conventional fiction. At the funeral, he sees a young man nearby who looks remarkably like a young Samuel Beckett, the “direct and essential heir” of Joyce. Riba now becomes obsessed with him. Could this stranger be the authentic genius to bring Riba and the Gutenberg age back to life?

Of course, following Nabokov, the Beckett figure could be Vila-Matas himself, this millionaire of books and stories (to adapt Borges’ description of Joyce), and thereby Riba’s undiscovered genius. This would certainly deliver a redemptive twist to his sad tale and give his apocalyptic sensibility not only a splendid fictional veneer but necessity. Dublinesque – which is translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Ann McLean – is so lightly ironic in this way that it may be dismissed as the densely woven floss of literary candy; it shares not only the title of Philip Larkin’s poem describing a funeral procession but also its sentimental grace. Yet such fairy-tale simplicity and lightness veils the precise patterning of a novel in which every gossamery sentence describing every ghostly event is thread OuLiPo-like through the eyes of a thousand literary needles. Sometimes I wonder if deployment of such dazzling skill is merely that, with too much knowing producing only a warm, colourful rug over the frozen sea rather than a glistening axe. But this is Joyce land, not Kafka.

When Borges introduced the great writer to an Argentine audience in 1925, he characterised himself as a traveller and Ulysses as a new land, confessing to not having cleared a path through all of its pages. In the meantime, he said “let us admire the provisional miracle”. In solitude, in doubt, in question, I suggest we do the same with Dublinesque.

A life that has some meaning: Vila-Matas & Modernism

English readers may view Vila-Matas as too self-absorbed, too self-referential in his choice of the pursuit of literature as the exclusive subject of his fiction. Modernism in fiction may be acceptable, but such postmodern games still seem too much of a Continental fashion. Yet Vila-Matas's obsession shows that the quest to create literature is a metonym for the ability to live a life that has some meaning, rather than being entirely absurd. His creations suffer because of their obsessions, and all risk ending up like Herman Melville's scrivener, locked away for their refusal to compromise with "normality".

Nick Caistor reviews Enrique Vila-Matas' Dublinesca, his new novel in Spanish.

Vila-Matas insists that there is a "moral contract" between writer and reader, and that the reader should be active, showing a "capacity for intelligent emotion, a wish to understand the other person, and to get closer to a language that is different from that of our daily tyrannies". He goes further, declaring that: "the same skills needed to write are also needed to read. Writers can fail readers, but the reverse is also true, and readers fail writers when all they look for in them is a confirmation that the world is exactly how they see it". In spite of all the playfulness therefore, the game of literature is the most serious and urgent there is.

The review is behind the TLS' subscriber paywall yet, for such diligence, sensitivity and happy seriousness, it is worth the outlay. Elsewhere in the paper, Gabriel Josipovici provides the background to his unhappy attempt to speak about such issues to a few of our daily tyrannies and concludes:

[T]hough critics and reviewers in the English language today pay lip service to T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and even Beckett and Borges, they seem not to have grasped what it was these writers were up to, the radical nature of their critique of the arts in our time. That is what [What Ever Happened to Modernism?] is about, though it seems that in England today journalists are only interested in raking mud.