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Wilhelm Meister & Me

By Barry Sheils.

When I returned to Ireland that summer after my travels around Europe with Michael, I took a train by myself to a small town in Leitrim called Carrick-on-Shannon. This was as far north as the train went, the Ulster Transport Authority having in their wisdom many years before closed the majority of the cross-border lines. I had nearly a whole day to kill until my mother’s nursing shift ended and she could drive to collect me, a journey from Omagh that would take her over an hour. The weather was fair so I managed well enough, snoozing in the park where a circus was setting up, watching passers-by.

I assumed Carrick was a typical small town, though I hadn’t made the connection to the town mentioned in so many of John McGahern’s stories: it turns out that Carrick was not just any provincial backwater, it was paradigmatically provincial, refined by literature to represent everything suffocating and ennobling about living in a particular place. An apt location, in other words, for me to remain vaguely European, sublimely detached from my surroundings, and lie the length of that day in imaginative solidarity with my fellow travellers, the bare-chested itinerants who were just then erecting the scaffold for the big top. I didn’t know it at the time but I was playing the part of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, at the end of his travels, artistic and existential experiments behind him, inducted into the secret society of those who know what experience is. I was basking in the feeling of aesthetic bliss adjoined to economic privilege; and this, despite the fact that I didn’t have a penny to my name.

The Novel Without Qualities

An Interview with Luis Chitarroni by Andrew Gallix.

Luis Chitarroni is a prominent Argentine critic, editor, and novelist, whose staggering erudition is only matched by his warmth, humour, and kindness. Over several months—as I edited the following interview—he patiently responded to all my queries. Here is an extract from a message he sent me yesterday, which gives a good idea of the number of references he can cram, quite naturally, into a short paragraph:

The Distant Star is an allusion, almost a reference, to Roberto Bolaño’s title (Estrella distante). The man from Madrid is Javier Marías (an autor [sic] who declared ‘War’ to Jorge Herralde, his previous editor and publisher). The final sentence pretends to enhance Giordano Bruno’s observation on explosions and shakespeare title’s play [sic].

In the end, I cut some passages that remained too obscure to me. There are other instances when I chose to leave in some rather cryptic sentences, due to their hypnotic rhythm or sheer beauty. After all, as Roland Barthes declared, ‘For writing to be manifest in its truth (and not in its instrumentality) it must be illegible.’ Tidying up Chitarroni’s answers felt, at times, like translating from English into English, which is slightly disquieting, but also ironic. Indeed, Susana Medina—a London-based Spanish novelist—had kindly translated my convoluted questions into her mother tongue, as I wanted Chitarroni to be able to express himself as freely as possible. When the answers came in, however, they were in English. So the questions were in Spanish, the answers in English, and the interview is the gap between the two. Whenever Chitarroni opens his mouth or puts pen to paper, it is the entire history of Western literature that seems to speak, and yet the voice is always unmistakably his. Whatever the language.

Symptoms of the Subterranean

By Suzanne Walsh.

I’m sick again, and so my world shrinks to the boundaries of the house, sometimes to the bedroom walls or the soft edges of the bed. The living room feels remote, but when I’m a little stronger it become safe territory again. The outside world is still too brash, too bright, in its distance. Better to be laying grey and quiet on a couch instead, supine and still, awaiting the possibility of restoration. Out there, like some stronger strand of the same species, the healthy attend events, shop, talk, drive, walk. I look down at them, from my remote exiled state, like a vulture that longs to feast on their vitality.

How to Write Experimental Fiction in Five Easy Steps

By Christopher Higgs.

‘It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.’

– Alain Badiou, Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art 

Step One: never render visible.

‘Clarity,’ Trinh T. Minh-Ha tells us, in her book Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, ‘is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order.’

Order cannot be other than sickness.

Release limpid syntax. Abandon and forget all the workshop groupthink about plot unity character unity setting unity and theme unity of plot character setting theme character setting or theme or unity. Those elements are enemy combatants.

From MOTHERBABYHOME

 

 

By Kimberly Campanello.