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<\/p>\nBy Richard Marshall.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
David Winters, Infinite Fictions<\/a><\/em>, Zero Books, 2014.<\/p>\n \u2018A feeling of deep sadness is always a warning to be heeded’ advises Burroughs. When reviewing any book of reviews there’s a sense of a solitary meeting in the loneliest place, of being on the brink of a sentence both mortal and disowned. But the intensity of David Winters pushes towards a dimension of sentences in extremis, a theatre of endeavour, a portability of silence edging to the sadness and astonishment of language consummating its defeats. This is the narrow depth of David Winters temptations. He writes with a vast interior spirit, writing against forgettable repetition to illuminate an intimate singular brilliance without the dredge of a thesaurus:<\/p>\n \u2018Fictional space\u2026 that space is the idea that it might be infinite, that the world opened up by a book might exceed that outside it. I get glimpses of this infinity in the linguistic fractals fashioned by Lish’s brilliant student, Jason Schwartz. But I also see it in the South African author Ivan Vladislavic, who has written a Borgesian fable about an unlimited library of unwritten books.’ The mood he brings to reading is one of something immediately closing in and the atmosphere is a luminous claustrophobia. He reads towards the one space backwards which is an infinite opening out to both the read and the unreadable. Reading for Winters is a Beckettian agony, a perfect hell that is optional but nevertheless the opposite of recreational.<\/p>\n What we want from the critic is some guidance , \u2018some inexhaustible source of light and silence’ as Winters says. Reading Winters we’re thrown back into a wintereisse of hopeless existence, the low-rising darkness bringing the curtain down on writing itself. We get \u2018art as solace’ and the flirtation between \u2018theory and contemplation’ as ‘…nothing but waking men’s dreams, and sick men’s phantasies.’ When the read world is at permanent risk of fading out on prepositional phrases every three seconds then the world spooks out enormous phantoms, drawing lines, casting cursing, the present ordering the past with words that inch closer to each other or else push away.<\/p>\n Winters sidesteps the old theory wars not by closing his eyes to that rather sordid paraphrasal drama but by supplementing the matter with something welling up from recursively winding inner depths of reading, discharging a \u2018\u2026 psychic life of theory \u2013 the level at which it is less a technical instrument than a totem or talisman; a charm that we clasp to our hearts.’ Some sentences Winters writes are ones that take your evening away because they show what your own reading habits have betrayed. This creates a tension as you push on, feeling a bit resentful that days are coming when there’s going to be a reckoning.<\/p>\n Winters reads Renata Adler knowing that \u2018 some of the things that had meant the most to me, I had completely misunderstood’ . Winters shares a sense of encompassing discouragements and errors that are themselves the shared predicament of the reader. Reading is a kind of hopeless love, unrequited more often than not, often a secret. Winters’ state of the reader here is Elizabeth Hardwick’s where she finds that \u2018 \u2026 in reading, I enter a kind of hallucinatory state’, or Eve Sedgwick who \u2018\u2026evokes the \u201cspeculative, superstitious” reading practices of young children, for whom understanding ‘seeps in only from the most stretched and ragged edges of competence.’ Winters is a febrile presence, a haunted figure haunting his books, who, like all ghosts, is a summation just wanting to start over again. He paints himself into his own corner, crouching over the pages with a melancholic luminous concern. He’s sharing the fate of his heroes, taking pity on the mystery of his cast of shadow writers and their readers. Beckett imagined Belaqua in this role: Winters creates a limbo, a negative pantheon, a secret canon where there’s still a problem but one that makes involution and digression realer. And reality unreal again of course. Reading is that map that contains itself, which in turn contains the map that contains itself too, and so on. It’s Valazquez’s \u2018Las Meninas’ which includes Valezquez painting \u2018Las Meninas’, and the proper telling of the 602nd night’s story in \u2018The Thousand and One Nights’, the one where Scheherazade tells the story of the king himself, a story including its own telling, which in turn would contain the telling of that telling, and so on infinitely. You get the drift. <\/p>\n Each reading works out of the peculiar danger of these examples of infinite involutions. He reads Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s \u201cA Brief History of Yes<\/a><\/em>‘ in terms of a \u2018language as astonishment’ which involves the \u2018 risk of rendering criticism redundant’. He lets us roam in the past for our best minding. It is a book that uses \u2018a technique of telling over and over again’ that is \u2018not so much a \u2018novel’, more an attempt to render the structure of sorrowful memory.’ Reading Marcom he retrieves her retrieval of a time that once made time work, catches her catching \u2018 \u2026the love that remains after the beloved has gone.’<\/p>\n Winters reads hard to find the ideal and the real held apart by style. His deft immersions dredge up lifelike magic. He approves Derek Attridge where \u2018singularity’ works. Attridge writes stuff \u2018\u2026that surprise , that disturb, that find new modes of representation and new objects to represent’. Certain truths require new expression because \u2018\u2026 fidelity to experience necessarily deforms familiar language ‘. Attridge’s shy catacomb is \u2018so wholly centred on \u2026 style\u2026 [it] seem[s] secreted , not constructed.’ We’re at an extreme here. Words are tweaked across a risky abyss daring to be more important than life and death. Language is a bodily disjecta.<\/p>\n Sam Lipsyte’s \u2018The Fun Parts<\/a><\/em>‘ buys the hiding conclusiveness of \u2018torque’, \u2018swerve’, \u2018refactoring’ where \u2018the job is not to know what you are going to find.’ Winters recalls Walt Whitman’s \u2018filament, filament, filament, out of itself; ever unreeling them \u2013 ever tirelessly speeding them’ which is apt and doesn’t bog us down in anything. Rather it propels us into Like Sugar Dissolving<\/em>, Lydia Davis and \u2018The End of the Story<\/em>‘ which is disarmingly \u2018difficult to comprehend.’ Here be Blanchot and Leiris and Josh Cohen’s \u2018 Reflexive Incomprehension’, where a \u2018\u2026 studied casualness of tone, the very American ordinariness of its idiom, has the paradoxical effect of inducing us to listen to an anterior dismension of language\u2026 bringing to light a stubbornly untranslatable enigma at the heart of the ordinary\u2026 Davis \u2026 forcing us to hear resonances of the unknown in the most familiar.’ This works like an apocryphal passport, and we seem to be travelling across the same boundary twice each time so we understand this: \u2018Writing is a shadow that casts its own shadow.’ There’s an exemplary destiny in this, and a mystic feel that Michael Hoffman calls the \u2018 visionary negative,’ and Thad Ziolkowski the \u2018 high analytical vertigo.’ It’s prose gazing on prose but only because a) prose was only born yesterday and b) \u2018literary reflexivity undercuts received \u2018truths’ so as to express a deeper truth, at a further turn of the screw.’<\/p>\n Winters connects this to Levinas’s \u2018il y a’ and his idea of a stratum of \u2018.. undetermined, anonymous being’ that silently subtends lived experience. With Lydia Davis we get \u2018a kind of epistemological echo’ whose minimal, muted and numinous answerlessness is balancing as if above an abyss. He cites Davis saying that \u2018 \u2026 what interested me, in the end, was how the narrator’s mind worked, not the actual experience of the love affair.’ Davis final sentence \u2018 since all along there had been too many ends to the story, and since they did not end anything, but only continued something, something not formed into any story, I needed an act of ceremony to end the story’ secretes a finality of \u2018something not formed’ and Winters critical act works as its mirroring dream. This picks up Schopenhauer’s notion that dreaming and wakefulness are pages of a single book and reading them is the equivalence of living. Frederick Beiser in his recent \u2018After Hegel<\/a><\/em>‘ writes of the forgotten \u2018Pessimism Controversy’ which places Schopenauer at its dead centre. \u2018The central thesis of Shopenhauer’s pessimism is as simple as it is shocking: that life is not worth living.’ From this arose \u2018one of the most intense controversies of the late nineteenth century: the Pessimismusstreit.’ Winters’ reading seems to be an answer to that pessimism, switching the metaphor back on itself to piggyback onto Nietzsche’s own answer to pessimism i.e. life without literature is a mistake and art gives life an artful meaning.<\/p>\n Winters meditates on the possessive capacity of literature via Roland Barthes riffing on Mallarme’s distinction between ‘album’ and ‘book’. It’s done as if part of the Pessimismusstreit where pleasure, work, love, suicide, freedom and death are the rub. The ‘Book’ represents the \u2018\u2026 representation of the universe, homologous to the world,’ which becomes the object, the visibility and audibility of \u2018the totality of reality and history, from the perspective of transcendence.’ The ‘Album’, by contrast, represents the \u2018 not-one, not-ordered, scattered, \u2026 pure interweaving of contingencies, with no transcendence.’ Winters takes Valery’s \u2018It is strange how the passage of time turns every work \u2013 and so every man \u2013 into fragments’ so \u2018nothing whole survives, just as recollection is never anything more than debris, and only grows sharper through false memories’ as an answer to Silenus’ answer to Midas’s question about what’s the best life; \u2018 not to be born, not to be, to be nothing’. A ruin, even a fragment, it is better than nowt.<\/p>\n For Barthes, \u2018the future of the book is the Album’. Winters reads Davis in the light of this: \u2018The book is destined to become debris, an erratic ruin; it is like a sugar cube dissolving in water. Some parts sink; others remain upright , erect, crystalline, pure and brilliant.’ It’s enough.<\/p>\n When discussing Dawn Raffel’s \u2018 In the Year of Long Division<\/a><\/em>‘ Winters makes clear his own affliation to Gordon Lish, legendary senior editor for fiction at Alfred A. Knopf and progenitor of \u2018The School of Lish,’ which is where Raffel comes out from. In her is work that \u2018eschews information in favour of mystery.’ She picks up the Pinter ultimacy where \u2018this speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear.’ Winters cites Raffel: \u2018 there is a way that whatever you turn away from owns your heart.’ Winters brilliantly suggests something like the \u2018pratfall into the Infinite’ exemplified by Lars Iyer’s \u2018Dogma<\/a><\/em>‘ as a limiting code for today’s writers and then questions it sympathetically.<\/p>\n Admiring Iyer’s working a theatre of endeavour beneath literary heights so language comes back as hilarious \u2018smut, chimp noises and made-up german’, ending in \u2018something laughably less than literature’ Winters asks: \u2018 does \u2018Dogma<\/em>‘ succeed in making a more serious statement of the failure? That is, can it somehow slough off a \u201cfalse” literariness by pointedly falling short of it?’ Winters thinks not.<\/p>\n Winters shows us Tor Ulven’s \u2018Replacement<\/a><\/em>‘ which \u2018immerses us in a storyless world’ where \u2018nothing stands out any more than anything else.’ Patterns possess \u2018no pattern at all.’ Decay is just a \u2018lowest multiple’. On Christine Schutt’s \u2018Prosperous Friends<\/a><\/em>‘ he writes of her as \u2018a writer’s writer’ immersing us in \u2018a secret world of love and suffering’ from the legendary Gordon Lish school of \u2018loosened association, antic behaviour, autism and morbid ambivalence.’ What we spend time with here is \u2018an intricate indirectness’ which Winters connects to George Steiner’s sense of the ultimate as sounds running through silent prose . Steiner says that \u2018the sensory, emotional data of music are far more immediate than those of speech\u2026 they may reach back to the womb\u2026.’ and Winters listens attentively to this as part of Kristeva’s notion that \u2018melancholy is incommunicable.’ So this is the great wrenching despair that writing and reading is all about: \u2018 \u2026 our job is to raise it to the level of words, and of life.’ Winters hasps Drabble on jigsaws: \u2018 Books, too, attempt to impose a pattern, to make a shape. We aim, by writing them, to make order from chaos. We fail.’ A two-liner from Lish italicizes this whole farrago: \u2018Was maybe seven, when, come summer, was required to spend it killing Japanese beetles. Oh, and, remaining bent to the grass, dig out, tear out, wrench out \u2013 with all my defeated wiles \u2013 crabgrass.’<\/p>\n Next up Winters settles in for the inpenetrable everyday of Enrique Vila-Matas’s \u2018Dublinesque<\/a><\/em>‘ whose \u2018\u2026 exaggerated fanaticism for literature’ again seeks the tension of what is already there but this time goes inwards. For Winters he is like Freud : \u2018 a dreamer in broad daylight’ where sentences answer to \u2018the unfathomable dimension.’ He also detects a Joycean prosaic lurking in a \u2018\u2026 grey rhythm’ which recalls Benjamin, \u00a0where the equation reads: \u2018 the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.’ Winters reads Vila-Matas so that the act of critique draws its own limit so that \u2018the book itself becomes unaccountable, exceeding the reach of our reading.’ Winters relates each unpacked object to everything else. Sentences and words respond to others and themselves. What we receive in reading this is an ever-expanding refining of the initial composition. That starting point is eroded then by this subtle process. In lines like \u2018even the rain beneath which all the dead once fell in love will have faded away’ Winters reads \u2018secret forces’ and \u2018metaphorical associations’ whereby \u2018a code lay concealed behind every scene in his life.’ Lish is quoted as saying once: \u2018 Curve back in your stories in every possible way: thematically, structurally, acoustically’ and I think here’s the reason why Winters says of \u2018Dublinesque<\/em>‘ that \u2018The novel is not a puzzle to be solved. It has already solved itself, bringing what was buried back to life. This is a book in which things are no longer concealed; where writing and reading revivify whatever we thought was dead inside us.’<\/p>\n Writing of Jason Schwartz’s \u2018John The Posthumous<\/a><\/em>‘ Winters finds the book \u2018\u2026articulates an alien linguistic world woven together from Biblical quotes, opaque legal cases, and allusions to Winslow Homer’s paintings’ but in its final gasp \u2018all that’s left is the trauma of narrative’s aftermath.’ This is very good. Winters steers us through the aboutness of the novel, taking seriously Lish’s advice that \u2018A story must be about what it is about and must continue to be about what it is about.’ What we have here are \u2026 \u2018not stories but feelings of fragmentation and loss’ , ‘an aura of a story’ and Winters detects in this evidence of Lish’s method of \u2018walking backwards’, \u2018consecution’ to capture \u2018a totalized form of attention.’<\/p>\n Winters uses Gabriel Josipovici’s \u2018Hotel Andromeda<\/a><\/em> ‘ to directly ask: \u2018How can art address those aspects of life that elude direct expression?’ Winters is a good guide, pointing us to Peter De Bolla; \u2018 \u2026 there lies the insistent murmur of all great art; the nagging thought that the work holds something to itself, contains something that in the final analysis remains untouchable, unknowable’, Joseph Cornell the artist’s sense of the \u2018untouchable, unknowable’ lying in plain sight, Barthelme’s sense of writing as \u2018 not knowing’, of all literature \u2018writing into the silence.’ The emotional tone of Winters’ book is encapsulated here in an entire epistemology of incompleteness and doubt. He sees this as an intricate \u2018entanglement’ where all seems unfinished though ended. Winters makes palpable Adorno’s \u2018\u2026 consistent consciousness of non-identity’ as an answer to the pressing questions. In a way his essay on Josipovici’s, \u2018Infinity: The Story of a Moment’ supplements the answer, driving in from another angle to the same position. What the novel here does is glean its meaning in a voice struggling not to fall silent. In asking: \u2018why should the sequence of notes be the essence of music?’ Winters answers that \u2018a sound is not a step on the way to something else’ but is itself \u2018\u2026 a world, an infinite world.’ (Although as Malcolm Budd would remind us, from the fact that music is in essence an abstract art \u2018\u2026 in that music as an art-form is not based upon music’s capacity to represent or to refer to items in the physical world\u2026’ he says that ‘… it would be mistaken to conclude that the experience and value of music must be essentially unrelated to the non-musical world.’)<\/p>\n Marek Bienczyk’s \u2018Transparency<\/a><\/em>‘ is read by Winters as expanding the titular theme to \u2018 \u2026 truth and illusion\u2026 the hobby of existence, the graspable handrail against which we may lean our very being, something we might even try to pour a text in’ (great phrase) which he takes to the speculative philology like Vico and \u2018the connections between transparency and the expressible.’ Winters choice of Vico here seems particularly apt, the same Vico modern writers like Manzoni, Foscolo, Hamann, Herder, Goethe, Marx, Michelet, Joyce, Beckett, Ungaretti, Pavese and Carpentier, all revere, \u2018drawn by the enigmatic quality and the tantalizing obscurities of Vico’s imagination’ as Giuseppe Mazzotta has it. Mazzotta<\/a> continues: <\/p>\n \u2018The weave of literature and philosophy, of … the oracular or visionary and the rational clarity of the thinker… is too messy, too dark or daemonic for contemporary historians\/antiquarians, for post-Hegelian historians of philosophy, for sociologists of literature (who like to think in terms of percentages, demographics and what not). They like to think of culture as a question of rational strategies, institutional power, deadly erudition or antiquarianism etc.<\/p>\n This visionary aspect\u2014identifiable with Homer, Dante, Petrarch, the tragic theater, Shakespeare, Tasso, Cervantes, Calderon, Bacon, Racine, the Biblical prophets etc\u2014threatens the scholars’ sense of neatness and Cartesian clarte` . Yet, this \u201cstrangeness”, this sense of the traveler, say Ulysses, who arrives unexpectedly to the shore of Nausicaa, is the best part of Vico’s thinking. I think he would have loved Emerson and Whitman, and he would have been amused (I don’t know if this is the right word) by Nietzsche’s fantasies about the Hellenic world.’<\/p>\n Vico then stands for the visionary depth charge of transparency for Winters. He takes us through a sequence of shifting landscape, starting from Aristotle’s \u2018there is only transparency’ as an underlying reality which science makes redundant. But because \u2018 the heart of man changes more slowly than the world’ we’re given the outlaw enthusiasm of Rousseau: \u2018Rousseau believed that the heart of man could speak\u2026 he saw how language could become a transparent medium for the will of speech, for everything that wishes to be expressed\u2026 with no secrets and no depths to be fathomed or understood.’ We twist like Elvis to French and one side of an immense triangle gives us \u2018Lumiers’ and then across another line, \u2018 Aufklarung in German’ where like in the downbeat cool of Fassbinder’s film \u2018Chinese Roulette’ <\/em>we hear Winters throw down a Jungian bet: \u2018Now we’ll see.’ He cracks the insular claustrophobia of consumer capitalism, says it obliges a \u2018transparent heart’ where Transparency has become a tool of the status quo, and then does the equivalent of staring at his shoes. He knows he’s done enough. But he stays on the track, tracing \u2018the houses, palaces, domes and arcades packed into the prose of the nineteenth century’ which is a straight line to Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Adorno standing \u2018 at the crossroads between positivism and magic.’ There’s a moment in Sinclair riffing on Olson riffing on Dylan that ends: \u2018Keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business’ which is about \u2018projective verse’ of course but also becomes an oblique sidewise look to Bienczyk: \u2018If glassmakers and architects hadn’t invented transparency melancholics would have.’ What I mean is that Winters gives a kind of theoretical dogma that swims in the sea of husked out language, a kind of terminus. It’s a profound meditation in itself on the loneliness that is the heart of language itself, and writing’s desperate contract with readers who may or may not exist.<\/p>\n It’s a navigation route: the Ist way is about: \u2018divergent ways of seeing\u2026 seeing without having\u2026 a shimmering collision of sight and frustration.’ Winters feels this, how the depressive gaze reifies real experience and returns as \u2018magical’. The \u00a02nd way is thus: \u2018the upward gaze’, a \u2018broken, aborted transcendence.’ It’s a brief renewal of a world that’s fallen apart each time someone cares to mention it. It depends on someone at the very least trying that. Winters catches Bienczyk talking about \u2018 \u2026 the shared striving for pure light in their texts, their striving for emptiness, for silence\u2026 their abandoning of the real, the concrete, the perceptible, the living, in favour of the motionless, the fading, the falling silent’ and curates the ghostliness of ghosts Beckett, Barthes, Blanchot. We are feeling their absence in this, absentees on two sides of a solipsistic bind \u2013 one with the reader, the other the reader’s reader. Winters then switches over to the novels of Andrzej Stasiuk and \u2018landscapes with minimum human activity’ where \u2018life has either not gotten going, or has already been extinguished.’ There’s an unread Aristotelian transparency which flirts with the idea of\u2018 the idea organizing the cosmos’ which then \u2018flirts with silence’ in a debouche of \u2018negative idealism.’ Winters offers imperatives: Chateaubriand to Joubert, Beckett to Axel Kaun, language as \u2018a veil one has to tear apart in order to get to\u2026 the nothingness lying behind it’ as a closet drama where we are left with Bacon’s screaming man who sees it. There’s a colour over this, a cyan atmosphere worthy of \u2018Nighthawks’ where Bienczyk takes a last dram muttering hope to the waitress: \u2018if life has its own utopia, perhaps nothingness does too.’ It’s a masterpiece of readerly damnation.<\/p>\n Winters knows that Gordon Lish’s \u2018Peru<\/a><\/em>‘ is for Lish\u2018\u2026 all too grievously true.’ It’s a kind of consistency of \u2018consecution’ where \u2018there is nothing I will not tell you if I can think of it.’ There are things I could never tell but think, so Lish hardly universalizes. But what we’re dealing out here is an art imperative: we’re with Conrad who says art exists \u2018to make you see’, with Pound telling Joyce to make \u2018\u2026incarnate the abstraction’. Winters works at the extremity of our plight where for him \u2018Lish in Peru must \u2018characterise an overall experience.’ Here writing is a perceptual reflex and the novel is a labyrinthine \u2018property’, \u2018cellar’ and \u2018roof’ and rhyme ; \u2018\u2026 by which I don’t mean rhymes as we generally mean. What I mean is like with like.’ Winters connects this with flirtations of reality disappearing into dreamworlds, \u2018Esse est percipi’, Berkeley and Beckett composing dreamscapes as hard as any materialism, places where stones burn the feet. Winters broods on the ledge where composition cuts across ontology not just aesthetics, where consecution becomes a miraculating agent. He recalls Lucretius’ hallucinating composition as a clinamen where our world is born from the swerving of atoms as they fall from heaven. It is the way a system defines its horizon. Winters ends up with something Ed Dorn might have used once : \u2018I might side with an even more forceful extinction, in which work of art is newly tasked with eradicating the existing tradition.’ Dorn: \u2018 The deceased are the travelers among us,’ or something like.<\/p>\n Winters reading of Ivan Vladislavic’s \u2018The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories<\/a><\/em>‘ consummates his region of\u2018case studies in failure.’ Here Winters is watching stillborn schemes and incomplete drafts, \u2018the beginning and ending of story-telling’ and is on about \u2018The Last Walk’ about Robert Walser’s last walk which \u2018carries him onto the silence of a blank page.’ Billy Childish’s painting is a kind of eavesdropping on this, and on Mallarme to Camille Mauclair ; \u2018 I only exist on the page; preferably one that’s still blank.’ What is it we see, and what is it we feel where with Walser \u2018there is not much else besides snow and the body.’ This is sadness as urgent as our breakdown.<\/p>\n On \u2018The Loss Library<\/em>‘ Winters squares up to the responsibilities of reading, like a rehearsed suicide: \u2018 When a reader opens one of these books it has consequences in others. Things are shaken up. Matters that appeared to be settled are reopened for discussion. The extent of the disruption depends on the book. There are certain slim volumes, the reading of which would hardly cause a ripple. And then there are others with the power to change everything. Entire books melt away under the reader’s eyes, schools of imitators dwindle to nothing, towers of study guides topple over.’ Writing a book removes it from the library, collapses a wave function and there are things we have to take stock of; \u2018the icy death of the author, and the frozen life of the book.’ Winters forces our hand, hints at the colossal price we have to pay sooner or later when we get into this. Corso is the poetry he writes and Winters the prose he reads. His meat is as tough as leather.<\/p>\n Dylan Nice’s \u2018Other Kinds<\/a><\/em>‘ is \u2018about human finitude,’ Heideggerian \u2018throwness’ where we’re always \u2018Fallen’ and \u2018Homeless’ once we’ve accepting the fate of becoming a writer and reader of the writer. Here Winters is slyly trying to take seriously Badiou on Plato’s \u2018The Sophist<\/em>‘, mixing the five axioms of \u2018 being, motion, stillness, sameness, and the Other’ to establish the miles that lie between us. Winters settles us down with “Wide Skies and wildflowers, Sam Michel’s \u2018Strange Cowboy: Lincoln Dahl Turns Five<\/a><\/em>‘ and backs us up into the school of Lish again just in case we’d ever thought about leaving. Here he recalls sentences summonsing a new world, a surging synax, Proust’s temporal consciousness, Joyce’s humanist pathos, the obsessive discursiveness of Beckett and Bernhard that then takes shape in The American West! Winters seems to be saying whatever you’re searching for you can have but you’d better cross oceans, plains, forest fires if you’re to get what is within your fingertips.<\/p>\n In Miranda Mellis’s \u2018The Spokes<\/a><\/em>‘ he finds a story submerged in its situation infringing Todorov’s rule that fantasy \u2018\u2026must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons\u2026 and to hesitate between a natural and supernatural explanation of events\u2026’ . Winters finds \u2018occult typologies’ and a \u2018transcendent indeterminacy.’ Some stories can’t be told, imagine. Tell that one. Mellis works in \u2018reservoirs of silence.’ Winters recalls Frank Kermode who shrugged that the \u2018 time-order of novels [is] like a stick in a river.’ Which is just another way of Lowry asking \u2018Is this the right place to leave my ashes?’ but at an angle of which Emily Dickinson would have been proud. Writing about \u2018The Life and Work of Hob Broun<\/em>‘ Winters takes the digressiveness and destabilisation of the novel as his theme. He is again impressed by the clipped compressed sentences and a fabulism leading to free association that encapsulates the \u2018modus operandi: montage, collage, bricolage.’ Again, we’re in a recursion at the school of Lish.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Where next? Start from zero and Count backwards to Kjersti Skomsvold, \u2018The Faster I walk, the Smaller I am<\/a><\/em>‘ who is nothing but a voice, a voice whose horizons coincide with those of a mind. Winters connects this with Deleuze’s \u2018univocity of being.’ In \u2018The far Side Of Fiction’ Winters discusses Gerald Murnane’s \u2018Barley Patch<\/a><\/em>‘ which “begins before itself, before literature”. An implication here is that all books imply their authors. Murnane<\/a> writes about \u2018 \u2026 what I call for convenience my mind, wherever it may lie or whatever else it may be a part of.’ There’s a quality of the hallucinatory that Winters detects in this, and Gadamer’s \u2018fusion of horizons.’ We are given scenes for stories that forget to occur and \u2018personages’ each of whom are \u2018not so much a character as a kind of character in waiting.’ Winters explains this ; \u2018what comes before any character is the \u201cimage” that guides its construction\u2026’ From this comes the idea that each origin evades the vanishing point. Claude Lorraine’s \u2018Landscape with Samuel Anointing David’ is used as an illustration of how a pattern of light exemplifies \u2018Wittgenstein’s \u2018change of aspect’ so that the background becomes \u2018the most brightly of the visible zones’ suggesting that what lies behind that may be \u2018more richly illumined still.’ His essay on Gary Lutz’s, \u2018Divorcer<\/a><\/em>‘ begins by laying out the issue: \u2018You can’t generalize about divorce, and you can’t get too specific about it either. The subject either clouds up or loves itself too much.’ Winters sees the issue as being about how to express trauma in terms that retain faith in trauma’s distressing resistance to utterance. The issue then revolves around the notion of subtraction, understood as finding the difference between x and y. He subtly sees how \u2018the baleful preposition with’ once applied can make a person \u2018suddenly pieced, unseeable as a heinous human whole. Winters writes a moving and profound analysis of this situation which equally illuminates the Lutz performance. There’s a kind of perfection in this one. Winters connects it all to Roland Barthes \u2018A Lover’s Discourse<\/em>‘ where we are given to touching language as if \u2018words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of words’. He notes that if Lutz makes his process sound utopian it’s because he’s producing a mythology or symbol of divorce through a set of uneasy ceremonies.<\/p>\n The sweet emptiness of Andrzej Stasiuk’s \u2018Dukla<\/a><\/em>‘ menaces the critic with its own void because Winters says that \u2018[t]his book doesn’t need to be contextualized. Equally though, Dukla shouldn’t be subjected to a \u201cclose” reading. Perhaps the words on the page aren’t worth as much as we think. What matters is the way that a work presents itself itself.’ What’s the critic to do? Winters suggests the reader is to read as of looking at the lens that makes the landscape possible. Stasiuk is quoted as saying that where \u2018light can’t be described, all that can be done is to keep imagining it afresh.’ He adds; \u2018I always wanted to write a book about light. I could never find anything else more reminiscent of eternity. I was never able to imagine things that don’t exist. That always seemed a waste of time to me. Events and objects either come to an end , or perish, or collapse under their own weight; and if I observe them and describe them it’s only because they refract the brightness, shape it, and give it form that we’re capable of comprehending.’ Winters draws on Wittgenstein to help here: \u2018everything is at it is, and everything happens as it does happen.’ Winters makes the summary sharply: this is about stopping \u2018\u2026 transcendence getting in the way of immanence.’ Light in this work purges everything non-essential. \u2018There’ll be no plot’ and everything \u2018melts away in the rising light of day’ like the poetic three sisters in Macbeth. Here be \u2018nothing but events’, the Beckett landscape where \u2018nothing of importance is going to happen, nothing.’ In the end there is no novel. The second section of the book turns away from novels to theory. It’s a performance subtle, assured and running each idea only as far as it actually helps reading. He takes in the recent history of literary theory’s renewal by examining Terry Eagleton’s “The Event of Literature<\/a><\/em>‘ which he doesn’t find altogether enough. Eagleton is read as making a case for the strangeness and singularity of literature, something very distinct from culture and someone who appeals to analytic aesthetics against the looseness of \u2018continental’ theory. Eagleton questions the theoretical rhetoric \u2018 which \u2018takes it as read that common-or-garden norms and perceptions are impoverished , and that dominant conceptual systems \u2026 are bound to be restrictive\u2026 a banal sort of dogma\u2026 not every margin is healthy, nor every system diseased.’ But he’s also clear that the alternative can’t be a Peter Lamarquean belles letterism. Rather he asks that \u2018the literary work conjures up the context to which it is a reaction\u2026 throwing up problems , which it seeks to resolve, creating more problems.’ I’ll quibble about the use of \u2018continental’ here \u2013 a term which has been co-opted to cover a very narrow range of philosophical approaches \u2013 but Winters finds the Eagleton position too beige to inspire. What is captivating about Winters reading is that it resists obscurity, pseudo-technicality and hedge and he keeps his infinite fictions in his sights.<\/p>\n Winters finds more with Franco Moretti’s \u2018Distant Reading<\/a><\/em>‘ and \u2018The Bourgeois<\/a><\/em>‘ for a while before again pulling back when a theoretical precipice appears. Moretti \u2018s distant reading is a remedy to the problems associated with close reading : \u2018The trouble with close reading (in all its incarnations, from the new criticism to deconstruction) is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon. At bottom , it’s a theological exercise \u2013 very solomn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously \u2013 whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them. Distance is a condition of knowledge.’ From this position Moretti’s approach is to exploit the digital landscape of literature which gives us Google Books and Standford’s \u2018Lit Lab Corpus’ with its 3,500 19th century novels and a \u2018Big Data’ responsiveness by taking statistical snapshots of 7000 titles of British novels form 1740 to 1850 and through \u2018Network Theory, Plot Analysis’ creates diagrams of connections. This replaces the need for the close work of any literary theologian. From this perspective Moretti writes on the loss of the bourgeois: \u2018I found the bourgeois more in styles than in stories,’ and talks about \u2018the buried dimension of reading.’ Kind of like Auerbach or Raymond Williams he finds \u2018the bourgeois refracted through literature.’ He talks about \u2018how the tempo of storytelling adjusts itself to the new regularity of existence,’ of \u2018the oblique semantics of Victorian adjectives’, of \u2018the role of the gerund in \u2018Robinson Crusoe<\/em>‘ and how \u2018the past speaks to us only through the medium of form.’<\/p>\n His \u2018Robinson Crusoe<\/em>‘ finds \u2018instrumental language as a practice of language.’ Narration uses the past gerund through a past tense to its final infinitive so this tripartite structure makes each sentence \u2018the stepping stone for more action, and more beyond that.’ In this way Crusoe takes \u2018the style of the useful’ reflecting the \u2018tonality of bourgeois existence’. In Flaubert and Austen Moretti examines the use of what he calls \u2018fillers’ such as those in \u2018Pride and Prejudice’ where \u2018people talk, play cards, read a letter, drink tea\u2026 the background conquering the foreground.’ Moretti claims that in this \u2018[r]ationalisation begins in the economy but spills over into the sphere of aestehetics. Fillers rationalize the novelistic universe, turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles. They are a great bourgeois invention, not because they bring into the novel trade, or industry, or other bourgeois \u201crealities” but because through them the logic of rationalization pervades the very rhythm of the novel.’ He concludes that in this style is \u2018\u2026 in the broadest sense\u2026 a way of being in the world, not just representing it.’ But Winters remains critical and wonders whether forms of language can be fully disclosed at a distance. He doubts critics make progress but \u2018Even if science and society advance in a linear style, criticism cannot\u2026’ rather critics \u2018circle around\u2026’<\/p>\n Discussing \u2018Outside the Oulipo’ via Daniel Levin Becker’s \u2018Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature<\/a><\/em>‘ Winters confronts theorists who are likened to \u2018rats who must build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape.’ This is theory as \u2018the finest sort of needlework’ whose \u2018constraints destroy the much-cherished myth of \u201cinspiration” and its idiot brother, \u201cwriter’s block” and develop tools for unpicking life and a revolutionary potential. With Tom Eyers’ \u2018Post-Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxist in Post-War France<\/a><\/em>‘ he takes us through the Cahiers pour l’Analyse which formed the early Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller, Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida. What is French structuralism? Asks Eyers. He thinks it is a form of post-rationalism, a dialogue with previous epistemologies, especially the philosophy of science of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem who both \u2018simultaneously affirm and transcend their basis in Cartesian rationalism.’ It made possible the \u2018anti-empiricist, anti-positivist materialism of the Cartesian innovators.’ It supposedly subverts a prevailing assumption that philosophy is \u2018either a scientistic empiricism \u2026 or an irresponsible relativism\u2026’ Eyers aims to unsettle myths about philosophy, claiming;<\/p>\n \u2018I reject what has, at least in some readings been imputed to French theory prior to the emergence of deconstruction: a rigid metaphorics of structure that is impervious to the dynamic incursion of the new\u2026 one of the aims of this book is to underline the dynamization of structure that post-rationalist authors performed.’ Structuralism is presented as always torn \u2018between the permanence of structure and the necessary contingency of the subject.’ Miller writes of \u2018the ways in which the conditions for the emergence of structure are always and simultaneously the potential conditions for their dissolution’ which this overlooks the ends of structuralism which was to see social structures as a cause not an effect, a mechanism for authorizing political practice.<\/p>\n Ben Kafka’s \u2018The Demon of Writing: Powers and failure of Paperwork<\/a><\/em>‘ theorises the role of clerical work in shaping modern society via \u2018the psychic life of paperwork.’ Here Winters confronts us with Kafka’s idea that \u2018paperwork syncopates the state’s rhythms’, is \u2018refractive\u2026[where]\u2026. power and knowledge inevitably change their speed and shape when they enter it’ and links this with Bruno Latour’s work on files and dossiers. Winters moves on to Martin Hagglund’s \u2018Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov<\/a><\/em>‘ and a Derridean approach to literature which claims deconstruction \u2018is not simply an extrinsic theory\u2026 [but] derived \u2018fundamental questions of life and death, time and space, memory and forgetting.’ It is again another theory that discounts the transcendent arguing that \u2018 \u2026 epiphany still tends to be aligned with a supposed experience of timelessness\u2026continues to be read in accordance with a desire for immortality.’ Hagglund talks of what he calls \u2018chrono-libido.’ He writes: \u2018the pathos of Woolf’s moments of living stems from the fact that they are always already moments of dying\u2026 not moments of timeless plenitude , but testify to the inherent traumatism of temporal life. They may intensify one’s attachment to life\u2026 but they may equally well shatter one’s attachment to life and make survival unbearable.’<\/p>\n Nabokov’s \u2018Ada<\/em>‘ is the chosen instantiation: \u2018Far from redeeming corruptability\u2026[writing]\u2026 highlights that inscription is inseparable from the risk of erasure.’ Deconstruction here is taken to be \u2018 the impossibility of being indifferent to survival’, a way of knowing what it means for something \u2018to be precious.’ Winters draws from his readings of theory the circles they make round literature and draws conclusions where one suspects a large affinity of feeling resides. Winters is that rare theorist whose heart is the engine and navigator, who tests to the limit of genuine feelings whether the theory makes it through. <\/p>\n Winters takes Peter Soterdijk’s \u2018 The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as Practice<\/a><\/em>‘ as working on \u2018the tableau of human \u201cwork on oneself”\u2026 a region that can be referred to with such categories as education, etiquette, custom, habit formation, training and exercise.’ Here we consider how \u2018[i]f the theoretical attitude is to be a matter of practice, then the cardinal exercise would be the withdrawal exercise. It would be an exercise in not-taking-a-position, an attempt at the art of suspending participation in life in the midst of life.’ In this context Plato’s Socrates is understood as \u2018 a trance or obsessive daydream’ so that \u2018the ancient European culture of rationality\u2026[becomes]\u2026 the idea that the thinking person is a kind of dead person on holiday’ and academe a \u2018 shutting out the world\u2026’ where \u2018love of wisdom’ becomes \u2018 the first and purest form of loser romanticism, reinterpreting a defeat as a victory in another field.’ From this comes a devious suspicion that perhaps academics are just disguised bastards, evading facts and twisting defeat into victory. It’s a (crazy) take on the ascetic inheritance but never Winters’ treatment of them.<\/p>\n Winters has the confidence of swift decisiveness: Jacques Ranciere, \u2018Mute Speech and Staging the People vols 1 and 2<\/em>‘ is too abstract. His philosophical interests are directly piqued by Peter E. Gordon’s \u2018Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos<\/a><\/em>.’ For Michael Friedman and others the Davos exchange is the moment analytic and continental philosophy split. Gordon writes against this idea, wanting to rid the Davos moment of its allegorical freight. He sees \u2018two normative images of humanity.’ Heidegger saw it as \u2018throwness’, \u2018Dasein’, situated within the existential horizon. Cassirer is presented as a neo-Kantian pressing beyond Heideggerian \u2018being there’ to an objective symbolic order. What is opposed from this is Existential fatalism vs Enlightenment humanism, and metaphysical angst vs anthropological agency.’ Gordon is drawn to a distinction between philosophy and history: \u2018one might say it is a desideratum for philosophy that its arguments should be resolved by philosophical means only and without reference to the non-philosophical world. On this view, philosophy would seem to demand a kind of askesis, the principled attempt to hold thought apart from all that is mundane.’ Winters reading of Martin Woessner’s \u2018Heidegger in America’ seems to continue this interest in the mundane; in this case the matter is the mundane receptions of Heidegger in the US. His interest extends to Simon Crichley’s \u2018The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology<\/em>‘ where Winters buys Crichley’s idea that politics per se is religious because they’re both based on faith structures and work like secularized religions. I found these pieces examples of how Winters uses the theorists to make spaces for himself. On a personal note I find the philosophers and theorists he writes about obscurantist and pretentious.<\/p>\n His discussion of Mark M. Freed’s \u2018Robert Musil and the Non-Modern<\/a><\/em>‘ is, like the essay on Martin Hagglund, a tour de force of this section. He quotes Blanchot saying that Musil and his masterpiece is \u2018 \u2026 an excessive work on which he labors for almost his entire creative life, a work that is for him the equivalent of his life. This book that he does not entirely master, that resists him and that he also resists, seeking to impose on it a plan that is perhaps not suitable for it. A strange experiment that makes his existence depend on a book.’ Freed thinks the contradictions and impossible projects an \u2018 intervention in the philosophical discourse of modernity.’ This Musil is writing from both inside and outside modernism and postmodernity. He fuses scientific language with the everyday. Freed says of Musil’s \u2018essayism’ that \u2018it was more or less the way an essay itself explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it\u2026 that he believed he could rightly survey and handle the world and his own life.’ It’s something that could equally be applied to Winters. When Freed writes on the character Ulrich as being, \u2018 not a what that could possess qualities but a how in the sense of a being confronted with a range of possible ways of being\u2026 a mode of being poised to seize a wider range of possibilities of existence, not a substance to which qualities adhere’ there’s a sense in which our critic is narrowing his eyes on a mirror image. Blanchot again is a source of insight \u2018\u2026 the man without particularities is precisely the man of \u201cnot yet”, the one who considers nothing as firm, stops every system, prevents every fixation, who does not say no to life, but not yet, who, finally, acts as if the world could never begin except on the next day’ and it’s no surprise that Winters asks for caution about applying theories to Musil. What is inflected through this serious insight is nothing less than devastation and the attending emotions.<\/p>\n Malcolm Bulls’ \u2018Anti-Nietzsche<\/a><\/em>‘enables Winters to raise again the Lishean question of how style elicits the right response from readers, making the response its own rhetorical reward. Bull reads Nietzsche as a loser to make apes of ourselves and although there’s nothing serious regarding Nietzsche here Winters uses it to wind us back to his literary starting point as he does in his reading of Cathy Caruth’s \u2018Literature in the Ashes of History<\/a><\/em>‘ where trauma’s paradox is where \u2018the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an inability to know it,’ where \u2018to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed’ and of which Roger Luckhurst is cited as saying that \u2018 no narrative of trauma can be told in a linear way: it has a time signature that fractures conventional causality.’ You can see why Winters will crouch down to listen in to this stuff. He hears Caruth saying: \u2018 \u2026 not so much a symptom of the unconscious as a symptom of history\u2026 the traumatized carry an impossible history within them’, asking \u2018What does it mean for history to disappear?’ and \u2018What does it mean to speak of a disappearing history?’ You can hear Stephen Barber in this mix too when we read; \u2018The historicity of the twentieth, and now the twenty-first centuries\u2026 is not, as one might traditionally expect, constituted by events that create their own remembrance, but by events that destroy their own remembrance.’ Arendt is whispering \u2018the public realm is not only the place that creates history, but also, and centrally the place of the political lie that denies them.’ And Winters understands Caruth as \u2018\u2026 effectively testing \u2026 inner fidelity to the \u201cimpossible.” What Winters won’t buy is her idea that literature can furnish foundations for an \u2018imperative to live’ and at the end there’s a sense of him stretching his legs and moving on with a kind of endless sorrow.<\/p>\n He ends, fittingly, with an elegiac that may hold in its defeat some way of going on as he reads D.N. Rodowick’s \u2018Elegy for Theory<\/a><\/em>“. \u2018Embedded within the concept of theory is a discontinuous history of conceptual usage as long as it is incomplete. Each time we evoke or invoke theory in the humanities, we lift the weight of this history on our backs, or more likely we tread lightly upon it, as if to leave undisturbed the bones of our ancestors, unaware of how many geological layers lie beneath our feet.’ Winters welcomes excavations rather than adding to the pros or cons of debate.<\/p>\n Reading Winters you get a sense he’s neither permitting nor forbidding but is rather circling. What he circles is a site of catastrophe. The depth of feeling in what he does reveals literature in our time as a small, perhaps irrecuperable ruin, where his assortment of scrawlers are only able to produce what Beckett once wrote of as \u2018\u2026 a trickle of sad phrases\u2026 tired and coming to an end.’ This is serious and won’t go away.<\/p>\n![\"9781612190464\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/9781612190464.jpg\")
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\n\u2018I saw myself as travelling from the shadowy foreground into the brightly lit distance, past the bridge and the river and then across the grassy countryside. For a few moments, I would have seen the illustration as other than a patch of painted scenery hanging in a shabby room in the place that I called the world. I would have understood that what I had taken for distant background was brightly lit foreground. The persons around the veranda were of little account. Anyone peering in on them from the darkness behind them mattered even less. I would seem to travel to the end of the grassy countryside., while the light around me intensified, and while I strained to make out the first details of the land that began where the painted places ended.’ Winters understands that this is no metaphysical claim but is rather an attempt \u2018to call attention to the way the content of the work exceeds whatever words are read or written.’ It recalls Beckett on the beautiful potential of inexpressiveness. Winters reminds us of Paul Ricoeur writing : \u2018we don’t get to the inside core but \u2018the ensemble of references opened up by the texts’ a world that \u2018unfolds’ in front of us.’ Winters summarises this as being the dream-sense that ; \u2018literature is found within its own withdrawal.’<\/p>\n
\nAll we have is Heidegger’s ground, \u2018a space has to be cleared.’ Stasiuk writes :
\n\u2018 this must have been what the world looked like just before it was set in motion: everything was ready, objects poised on the threshold of their destinies\u2026 the landscape, unpeopled to its furthest limits, looked like a stage set on which something was going to take place only later, or else already had.’ From this imagining we are poised on the brink of a terrible abyss, like a footnote at the very limit of a page:
\n\u2018It’s exactly as if I were an extraneous addition to the world\u2026 all that comes into my mind are events, nothing more.’ Winters adds a line from Joseph Koerner on Friedrich’s ruckenfiguren \u2018 I do not stand at the threshold where the scene opens up, but at the point of exclusion, where the world stands complete without me.’ This recalls Roy Sorensen’s analysis of a person as a vanishing point. Winters intense analysis throughout is astonishing. He creates an atmosphere of despair muted by literature but not redeemed.<\/p>\n![\"9781781680858\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/9781781680858.jpg\")
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\n\u2018My key argument concerns the co-implication of chronophobia and chronophilia. The fear of time and death\u2026 is generated by the investment in a life that can be lost. It is because one is attached to a temporal being (chronophila) that one fears losing it (chronophobia)\u2026. It is because the beloved can be lost that one seeks to keep it, and it is because the experience can be forgotten that one seeks to remember it.’ Continuing, he says:<\/p>\n![\"9781441122513\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/9781441122513.jpg\")
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\nABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nRichard Marshall<\/strong><\/a> is still biding his time.<\/p>\n
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