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The twentieth century literature of northern Ireland was substantially and understandably dominated by one subject matter, namely the formal invention in 1922 of ‘Northern Ireland’, and the various forceful consequences of same. For that reason it has perhaps been too easy to hold a writer such as Forrest Reid (1875-1947) in a marginal regard. And yet this is a character to whom E.M. Forster once referred as ‘the most important man in Belfast.’

Reid’s published writing life straddled the partition of Ireland, and so to some extent he may have been rather overlooked in a melee; but more importantly he was a man out of time. Though in a sense he never left Belfast (other than for his studies at Cambridge) and made home for most his life at 13 Ormiston Crescent, his inner universe was intensely fired by the spirit and aesthetics of ancient Greece, and through his mind’s eye he transformed the landscape of Ulster into a sort of Arcadia.

In the 1970s, it was the turn of Losey, who in a similar way had to drop his plans for the whole thing when funds dried up. But his À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (1972) is a great lost film, or ghost film, or imaginary film, because in 1978 Harold Pinter published the screenplay Losey commissioned from him, and it is fascinating to read this while attempting to “play” the movie in your head. The running time was estimated at just under four hours, which is about the reading time. Perhaps all directors should create an unproduced project like the Losey/Pinter Proust, a DIY film that viewers must conjure up for themselves.

Pinter’s Proust screenplay is a bold, radical compression or distillation: all the textual richness and amplitude is boiled away, and we are left with an audacious repatterning, a series of stark, fragmentary glimpses. It is a brilliant and very Pinteresque reading of Proust, with a real passion for the work. David Caute’s biography of Losey amusingly quotes one derisive non-backer: “This is the age of Gene Hackman and Barbra Streisand. There are no roles for them here.” Actually, given John Malkovich’s great success in Ruiz’s Time Regained as the cantankerous sensualist and snob Baron de Charlus, I’m not so sure; Hackman might have made a good, fussy Dr Cottard.

I wonder how many people share the experience described by David Shields in Reality Hunger, of tackling some large novel, a work essentially conventional in its structure and brand of realism, that weaves together the lives of its characters over a number of years, and simply feeling that the whole exercise has become largely irrelevant. Shields doesn’t present his remarks as a criticism of writers — the name he mentions is Jonathan Franzen — pursuing the tradition of the long realistic novel. Rather, he suggests it is a change in himself, something he believes has been brought about by the utterly changed nature of contemporary life. He considers the variety of electronic media — the proliferation and abbreviation of all forms of messages, the circumstances created by the ever more rapid transit and greater abundance of information, the emergence of a powerful virtual world that becomes more real to us all the time — and he concludes that given this way of life it is hard for the traditional kind of novel to hold our attention. He then looks at a variety of texts that, unlike the traditional novel, weld together chunks of “reality,” pieces of documentary taken from elsewhere, quotations, fragments, provocations, moments of lyricism, and melodrama, perhaps from film or television, newspapers or websites, to create an entirely different reading experience.

Originally, feathers evolved to retain heat; later, they were repurposed for a means of flight. No one ever accuses the descendants of ancient birds of plagiarism for taking heat-retaining feathers and modifying them into wings for flight. In our current system, the original feathers would be copyrighted, and upstart birds would get sued for stealing the feathers for a different use. Almost all famous discoveries (by Darwin, Edison, Einstein, et al.) were not lightning-bolt epiphanies but were built slowly over time and heavily dependent on the intellectual superstructure of what had come before them. E.g., the commonplace book was popular among English intellectuals in the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries. These notebooks were a depository for thoughts and quotes and were usually categorised by topic. Enquire Within Upon Everything, a commercially successful parody of the commonplace book, was published in London in 1890. There’s no such thing as originality. Invention and innovation grow out of networks of people and ideas. All life on earth (and by extension, technology) is built upon appropriation and reuse of the pre-existing.

A few months before 36 year old outlaw writer Daniil Kharms starves to death in a psychiatric prison in 1942, a German bomb hits a block of flats during the siege of Leningrad. One side of the block is destroyed. On the other side, windows implode. Inside one of those shattered apartments. Kharms’ second wife, Marina Malich and philosopher Yakuc Drukin frantically gather up his papers and notebooks. These fragments floating through the bomb blasted air are his collected works. They’re what’s left of him.