Life after Derrida

Ramona Fotiade reviews a recently translated work by the French philosopher

In an article published in the TLS in 2005, Ramona Fotiade reviews Jacques Derrida's Apprendre a vivre enfi (now published as Learning to Live Finally) and reflects on the thinker's philosophical perspectives and ruminations on mortality:

I am waging war against myself", declared Jacques Derrida in an interview with Le Monde last year, published less than two months before he succumbed to the after-effects of pancreatic cancer in a Paris hospital. A philosopher's private life has rarely been so closely scrutinized by the media, and, to a certain extent, so persistently interwoven with conflicting accounts of his thought, in recent times. Two documentary films have further contributed to blurring the boundary between the private and the public personae, through an invasive, if enlightening, incursion into Derrida's everyday existence. The only other salient example in post-war French culture that comes to mind is Jean-Paul Sartre, whose militant left-wing convictions and media-friendly presence in the political arena went hand in hand with his philosophical account of engagement.

However, deconstruction certainly had more affinities with post-structuralism than Sartrean existentialism, given its initial concern with epistemological rather than ontological issues. Derrida's sustained attacks on the classical metaphysical tradition and the combined presuppositions of theological and ontological discourses further reinforced the impression that the aims of deconstruction were obviously at odds with the scope of the early or derived "philosophies of existence". Yet Derrida's increasing concern with the aporias of personal experience and philosophical reflection, or what could be said to constitute, beyond abstract ethical considerations, a fundamental interrogation over the meaning of life, perhaps points to the contrary. Having waged war against metaphysics, deconstruction has (for longer than one may think -almost three decades now) turned to the "residual" issue of the philosopher's own temporal presence in the world, and the aporias of an autobiographical discourse which, having survived the demise of the traditional notion of "the subject", returns to haunt the self-sufficient proclamations of rational analysis. [Read the article]

Ramona Fotiade, 'Life after Derrida'

Times Literary Supplement, 2 December 2005

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Deconstructing Derrida: Mikics' Intellectual Biography
• Why read Derrida?
• On the difficulty of reading Derrida
• Jacques Derrida and the Fear of Writing
• Open Yale Courses: Theories of Literature

Don DeLillo's White Noise: Annotated

Andrew Hearst shares a rare glimpse from the Harry Ransom Center archives

Andrew Hearst reveals previously unseen annotations of the first page of White Noise, with the aid of its author, Don DeLillo:

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Don DeLillo gave a reading at the University of Texas on February 10 to mark the sale of his papers to the university’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The next day, the Austin American-Statesman reported that DeLillo read from Libra and Underworld, answered a few questions, and then left. Uneventful, but DeLillo isn’t exactly a flamboyant guy.

A few days before the reading, the American-Statesman published something excellent: an annotation of the opening page of White Noise, with details drawn from various drafts of that page found in the author’s papers. The reporter, Jeff Salamon, also interviewed DeLillo for the piece. Some of the information in Salamon’s annotation has long been known to DeLillo observers—e.g., the fact that DeLillo wanted to call the book Panasonic but couldn’t get permission from the Matsushita corporation—but the piece contains a number of specific new details about DeLillo’s writing process.

The American-Statesman’s site has a totally annoying registration process (and the login and password posted on Bug Me Not don’t work anymore). So I will just post the entire thing here, after the jump.

Twelve years after I first read it, White Noise is still my favorite novel. I don’t have a favorite movie or a favorite TV show or a favorite album or a favorite band; I don’t tend to narrow things down quite that much. But I have a favorite novel, and it’s White Noise. [Read the article]

Andrew Hearst, 'An Annotation of the First Page of White Noise, With Help From Don DeLillo'

Panopticist, 22 February 2005

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Writers: Don DeLillo

Thomas Pynchon on Objective Reality

An excerpt from Thomas Pynchon's 1963 novel, V

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing the world in only three. Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the near obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub him Soft-show Sydney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in front of a chorus line.

But it was a neat theory, and he was in love with it. The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it.

Thomas Pynchon, V

Patricia Highsmith's Greenwich Village

Highsmith's biographer takes a look around the American author's old neighbourhood

Patricia Highsmith's biographer, Joan Schenkar, offers the New York Times a tour of the author's Greenwich Village neighbourhood:

Patricia Highsmith wrote 22 novels, many of them set in Greenwich Village, where she lived. But the landscape of Highsmith Country consists not only of the physical Village neighborhood, but also the dark and desperate territory of Highsmith’s psyche.

“She is our most Freudian novelist,” said Joan Schenkar, whose biography of Highsmith was released this week by St. Martin’s Press. Having spent nearly eight years on the book, “The Talented Miss Highsmith,” Ms. Schenkar is the perfect tour guide for this novelist’s world. Standing in front of the red-brick building at 35 Morton Street where the 19-year-old Highsmith took a summer sublet in 1940 to escape her mother and stepfather, Ms. Schenkar continued: “To her, love and death are closely related. She tends to murder people in her novels where she made love in real life.” [Read the article]

Patricia Cohen, 'The Haunts of Miss Highsmith'

New York Times, 10 December 2009

Ballard: 'Freud was a born storyteller'

J. G. Ballard on psychoanalysis and the creative imagination

Despite its long application to a legion of neurotic victims, especially in America, psychoanalysis has had only a modest therapeutic success, and some psychiatrists see it as a complete failure. Yet the power of Sigmund Freud's presence and imagination endures. Perhaps he should be seen primarily as a novelist, with a great imaginative writer's ability to explore the human heart through the unfolding drama of a strong confrontational narrative. Freud was a born storyteller, not only in the hundreds of case histories he deployed, but in the master narratives that he devsed to underpin all human behaviour—the Oedipus complex, the struggle against the tyrannical father and the quest for the lost union with the mother. It may be that Freud is the great novelist of the 20th Century.

J. G. Ballard: Quotes

RE/Search

Edited by V. Vale and Mike Ryan

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Moorcock remembers J. G. Ballard
• Bea Ballard on her father, J. G. Ballard
• Will Self, 'My hero: J. G. Ballard'
• Freud and Love

Edward Hopper's Sketchbook

A glimpse at earlier versions of the American painter's work

Edward Hopper's sketch for 'Office in a Small City' (1953)

Edward Hopper, 'Office in a Small City' (1953)

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is hosting an online selection of Edward Hopper's work from an exhibition in 2007. The website includes a slideshow of some of Hopper's best-known paintings, and an interactive sketchbook where readers can see original sketches for signature works. As one of the quintessential twentieth-century painters of American life, the site appeals to experts and newcomers alike.

• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Edward Hopper

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Seeing the Light
• The Transparent City
• Solitude and Light: The Paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi

Paul Auster on Autobiographical Fiction

Stop Smiling interviews the American writer

Stop Smiling presents an unabridged interview with postmodern writer Paul Auster, including a variety of topics, from American politics to traces of autobiography in his work:

While books like The Invention of Solitude and Hand to Mouth function as explicit memoir, characters with whom you share many distinctive traits or who seem like overt stand-ins pop up frequently in your work.

Paul Auster: I tend not to think of this as true. Because I have written autobiographical work, I don’t feel much of a desire to sneak biographical material into my novels. Though it does happen, as it did with the Newark riots. In the case of Leviathan, it’s a wink, but that wink is really to Siri and her first novel. I made a trans-fictional marriage between my character Peter Aaron and Iris, the protagonist of The Blindfold. And, of course, Siri actually appears in City of Glass — as do I, for that matter. And then there are things that I’ve used now and again for reasons that always had to do with the story I was writing, and not because I particularly wanted to tell that autobiographical incident. In The Locked Room, for example, the story about the census-taking job was something I really did. And Fanshawe’s experiences on the ship are similar to mine. And, of course, the story about the old Russian composer in The Locked Room was taken directly from real life. So, yes, I have done these sorts of things, but not as often as you’d think.

I can’t help but wonder if you see the varied levels of autobiographical content as being a way of trying to get closer to some sort of self-knowledge.

Paul Auster: I know that I do learn more about myself in the act of writing, of digging. There are times when it’s very painful, writing about things that make you depressed or angry, that make you scared. But you have to keep going down there. It can be exhausting, emotionally, but I think that’s why you do it. My only justification for doing what I do in this world of many books is that writing is a job that demands everything from you — something not true of most jobs. And every day after I’ve finished work, even if I’ve accomplished nothing, even if I’ve crossed out every sentence I’ve written, I can stand up from my desk and say that I gave everything I had today, poured my whole self into trying to unearth the truth about whatever it is I’m trying to talk about. [Read the interview]

'Parallel Worlds: Paul Auster (Unabridged)

Stop Smiling, 23 March 2009

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Paul Auster in New York Magazine
• Paul Auster on meeting Samuel Beckett
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Paul Auster at Google

Representation and Reality in Don DeLillo

Uncovering the way DeLillo's work explores boundaries of perception

In Don DeLillo's latest novel, Point Omega, Archie Bland observes a questioning of everyday reality that spans back to his earlier masterpiece, White Noise:

Twenty-six years ago, in White Noise, Don DeLillo wrote about the Most Photographed Barn in America, a tourist attraction that was an attraction simply because it was an attraction, and thus bestowed with a significance entirely unjustified by its architectural or historical standing. Read now, the vignette feels like an uncanny prophecy of celeb reality. "No one sees the barn," says Murray, an academic on a day trip. "What was the barn like before it was photographed? What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura." [Read the article]

Archie Bland, 'Point Omega, By Don DeLillo'

Independent on Sunday, 7 March 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Don DeLillo

Paul Auster on Identity and Urban Spaces

An excerpt from Paul Auster's New York Trilogy

Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within... By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.

Paul Auster, City of Glass

The New York Trilogy

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Auster
• Paul Auster in New York Magazine
• Paul Auster on meeting Samuel Beckett
• Paul Auster at Google

A Companion to Samuel Beckett

A new collection of academic essays on the European writer's work

I'm very excited to announce a new collection of essays on Samuel Beckett, edited by S. E. Gontarski. A Companion to Samuel Beckett is published by Wiley-Blackwell in the UK and the United States, and includes a rich and diverse selection of scholarly and theoretical approaches. The first part of the collection, 'A Life in Letters', follows the recent publication of Beckett's personal correspondence; among the essays are accounts from official biographer James Knowlson, and Beckett's Grove publisher, Barney Rosset.

The second part broadly addresses new theoretical and philosophical approaches to Beckett's writing, and includes work by distinguished scholar Jean-Michel Rabaté and Beckett and Postructuralism author Anthony Uhlmann. But there's more. Mark Nixon's work at the Reading archive uncovers new insights into Beckett's time in Germany during the 1930s. Shane Weller moves toward an ethical understanding of the Irish writer's work - while  C. J. Ackerley and Brett Stevens survey the influence of science and mathematics respectively.

Marjorie Perloff analyses Beckett's poetry in the third part of the collection, 'Acts of Fiction', and is complimented by work from S. E. Gontarski, C. J. Ackerley and Dirk Van Hulle. I'm particularly interested by some of the issues raised by Susan Mooney's essay, 'Malone Dies: Postmodern Masculinity', which stresses the continuing relevance of Beckett's writing to new cultural ideas of identity and culture.

The fourth and final part of the book addresses Samuel Beckett's theatrical work and issues of performance, from Mary Bryden's 'Clowning with Beckett' to Enoch Brater's survey of the 'Seated Figure' and David Bradby on Beckett's German production of Waiting for Godot. There is also an intriguing survey of Beckett's works for television, which has been under-represented in much academic criticism.

In short, A Companion to Samuel Beckett promises to be a significant contribution to contemporary academic debates on his work. The contents page (see below), is a veritable Who's Who of the last 40 years of Beckett scholarship, with just a few key names missing from the roster. Its resourceful use of the most recent archival materials make the Companion a relevant and important contribution to international Beckett scholarship. In fact, I would not be surprised if Gontarski's clever and expansive collection becomes one of the go-to texts for distinguished scholars and newcomers alike.

Contents:

Part 1: A Life in Letters

A Writer's Homes - A Writer's Life
James Knowlson

Within a Budding Grove: Publishing Beckett in America
S. E. Gontarski

Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot
Lois Gordon

Beginning to End: Publishing and Producing Beckett
Barney Rosset


Part II: Charting Territories

A Critique of Aesthetic Judgment: Beckett's "Dissonance of Ends and Means"
John Pilling

The Legacy of Samuel Beckett: An Anatomy
H. Porter Abbott

Beckett and Philosophy
Anthony Uhlmann

Philosophizing with Beckett: Adorno and Badiou
Jean-Michel Rabaté

Beckett and Ethics
Shane Weller

Beckett and Germany in the 1930s: The Development of a Poetics
Mark Nixon

Samuel Beckett and Science
C. J. Ackerley

A Purgatorial Calculus: Beckett's Mathematics in "Quad"
Brett Stevens

Beckett and Obsessional Ireland
David Pattie

Beckett in French and English
Sinéad Mooney


Part III: Acts of Fiction

Beckett the Poet
Marjorie Perloff

The "Dream" Poems: Poems in Personae
Sean Lawlor

Figures of Script: The Development of Beckett's Short Prose and the "Aesthetic of Inaudibilities"
Dirk Van Hulle

Molloy, or Life without a Chambermaid
Patrick A. McCarthy

Malone Dies: Postmodernist Masculinity
Susan Mooney

"The Knowing Non-Exister": Thirteen Ways of Reading Texts for Nothing
S. E. Gontarski and C. J. Ackerley

What We Are Given to Mean: Endgame
Paul Shields

"In the Old Style," Yet Anew: Happy Days in the "AfterBeckett"
William Hutchings


Part IV: Acts of Performance

Beckett's Production of Waiting for Godot (Warten auf Godot)
David Bradby

The Seated Figure on Beckett's Stage
Enoch Brater

Clowning with Beckett
Mary Bryden

"Down, all going down ...": The Spiral Structure of Beckett's Theater
Xerxes Mehta

Beckett on Television
Graley Herren

Staging Beckett in Spain: Theater and Politics
Antonia Rodríguez-Gago


Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Disjecta: This week's links

Jenny Trigg directs an adaptation of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable

This week we have a number of exciting Beckett-related news items for fans of literature, theatre, photography and film. A letter reveals Philip K. Dick's personal response to seeing Blade Runner realized on-screen. The Brick City Bike Collective traces a path to Philip Roth's childhood home. And Martin Scorsese directs a tribute to one of his directing heroes, the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock.

Literature:

Don DeLillo: On White Noise and Point Omega
Don DeLillo: Jewish Journal reviews Point Omega
Samuel Beckett: Beckett and contemporary atheism
Samuel Beckett: An extract from The Unnamable
Philip K. Dick: A response to seeing Blade Runner realized on-screen
Thomas Bernhard: On uncanny primates
Thomas Bernhard: Correspondence with publisher released
William Shakespeare: New Cardiff Shakespeare website launched
William Shakespeare: The Guardian asks 'Who really wrote Shakespeare'?
Philip Roth: Brick City Bike Collective visits Roth's childhood home
William Faulkner: On writers and their work
Keith Ridgway: John Self on Ridgway's Horses
Haruki Murakami: Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood to score Norwegian Wood adaptation
52 Poems: Faber & Faber's poem of the week

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Jean Baudrillard: The Violence of the Image (2004)
Samuel Beckett: A Lacanian reading of the Three Novels, 'Undermining the Symbolic'

Film:

Samuel Beckett: Jenny Trigg's adaptation of The Unnamable, reminiscent of early David Lynch
Stanley Kubrick: Film poster artwork
Andrei Tarkovsky: Graphic artwork of Tarkovsky's films
Alfred Hitchcock: Review of David Thomson's The Moment of Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock: Exploring Hitchcock's influence on Martin Scorsese
Alfred Hitchcock: Scorsese directs Hitchcock tribute, Key to Reserva
Chris Petit: Iain Sinclair on Content

Art and Photography:

Samuel Beckett: Bob Adelman's photographs of Beckett in Paris
Samuel Beckett: Save the Portobello Road Mural campaign
Andy Warhol: Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg on Andy Warhol

Theatre:

Samuel Beckett: A new production of Endgame begins in Dallas, Texas.

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the
A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Beckett's Endgame: Dallas, Texas

A new production runs from April to early May

A production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame is running from April 7 to May 8 at the Undermain Theatre in Dallas, Texas. Photographs of the production are by Ashley Randall, who has more available on her personal website. You can contact the box office, and find out more about the pricing and scheduling of performances, at the Undermain Theatre's official website.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable

An extract from Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable

To go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

William Faulkner on Writers and their Work

An interview with the American writer

In a 1958 interview, American writer William Faulkner reflects on the relative importance of an author to a literary text. His point raises an interesting question on the nature and role of the author, and the importance of culture and history in determining artistic work:

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.

William Faulkner

in Writers at Work : The Paris Review Interviews

edited by Malcolm Cowley

Thomas Bernhard's Publisher Correspondence

TLS reviews a recently translated collection

Ritchie Robertson reviews Der Briefwechsel, correspondence between Thomas Bernhard and his publisher Siegfried Unseld. I've singled out a passage for its insight into the the Austrian novelist's stubborn yet playful character. Later in the same article, published in this week's Times Literary Supplement, Robertson takes a look at Bernhard's Meine Preise, a 'posthumously published, highly entertaining account of the numerous award ceremonies he attended'. Both volumes are published in German by Suhrkamp.

Siegfried Unseld was the most dynamic publisher in post-war Germany. When Peter Suhrkamp, founder of the Suhrkamp Verlag, died in 1959, Unseld stepped into his shoes, and in 1963 took over the Insel Verlag, an older and highly respected literary press which, decades before, had published Rilke. One of the current Insel authors Unseld thus acquired was Thomas Bernhard, whose great novel Frost appeared there in May 1963. Unseld recognized in Bernhard a genius who must form part of the new canon of German-language writers he hoped to create. He may not immediately have realized just how awkward, obstinate, inconsistent and totally unreasonable Bernhard was. But he can have been left in no doubt when, at their first meeting in January 1965, Bernhard touched him for a loan of 40,000 Deutschmarks with which to buy a house.

The loan, and Bernhard's evasions about repayment, form a leitmotif in this astonishing and riveting volume of correspondence, which runs from 1961 until November 1988, less than three months before Bernhard's death. For long stretches is a comedy, full of unexpected twists and turns, in which Bernhard sees how much he can get away with and Unseld, despite remonstrances, generally gives way.

Unseld, who was loyal to his authors even when personal relations were tense, advised and helped Bernhard through many difficulties which Bernhard largely brought on himself. Thus we see him reassuring Bernhard that he will not be thrown into prison for non-payment of taxes or for describing the Austrian periodical Die Firche as a "quintessence of perverted Catholic-Nazi stupidity", and advising him to find an accountant or a lawyer. But Bernhard never really seems helpless. In his letters, as in his novels, he is a superb performer of monologues. When he begins a letter: "Naturally I won't sign your contract", or ends one with "P.S. 1: At present I couldn't care less how you behave, I find it all far too ridiculous", he knows exactly what he is doing, and Unseld usually yields to his pressure, knowing exactly what he is doing. [...]

Ritchie Robertson, 'Close your eyes, think of the Nobel'

Times Literary Supplement, 5 March 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard

On DeLillo's Point Omega and White Noise

Comparisons between the two novels

Leo Robson reviews Don DeLillo's new novel, Point Omega, in the New Statesman. Taking DeLillo's other books into account, the article settles on a kind of comparative study between Point Omega and his early masterstroke, White Noise:

Don DeLillo took an eventful run-up to writing the four books that established him as the beadiest and canniest of American novelists. He spent the 1970s palming around for an exciting subject and a fruitful approach, and eventually found both in White Noise (1985) and parts of both in Libra (1988), Mao II (1991) and Underworld (1997). His earlier novels take aim at industries and state apparatuses - journalism, espionage - yet he proved less adept at exposing secret machinations than at tracing the shadows they cast on the public stage. DeLillo is an excavator, a pathfinder - a specialist in the "secret history" of observable phenomena and recorded facts.

There has been a corresponding process of abdication over the years since Underworld - signs of contracting appetite and of what the author himself (diagnosing a CIA operative in Libra) called "motivational exhaustion". De Lillo's dream of purpose was comprehensively realised in his loose, four-part work concerning the atmosphere of panic and dread that prevailed in the US between the 1950s and the 1980s - an atmosphere that made the idea of American reality such a slippery beast. Too slippery, thought Philip Roth and Norman Mailer, for the novelist to capture it. But DeLillo managed to.

The solution was an obvious one. DeLillo squared up to American reality on its own turf and terms, made his fiction a repository for catastrophes greater and absurdities sillier than those thrown up at the time of writing. Confronted with the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination, the stoners in Underworld are amazed that "there were forces in the culture that could out-imagine them, make their druggiest terrors seem futile and cheap". By the time he wrote that scene, DeLillo had already succeeded in out-imagining the culture. In White Noise and then Mao II, he practised a form of satire at once dark and daft - though more or less prophetic, as things turned out.

He also performed a thorough job of revealing what the culture had "imagined". Woody Allen used to joke that he was working on a non-fiction version of the Warren Commission report: DeLillo spun a vast novel - Libra - out of the uncharted conduct of Oswald, Ruby and the crooks and spooks who puppeteered them. Underworld - vaster still - portrayed the whole of American society during the cold war as a single network connected by germs and baseball and the bomb. As J Edgar Hoover reflects in the novel's opening scene: "All these people formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods and the jokes they tell and the cars they drive have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction." [Read the article]

Leo Robson, 'Point Omega'

New Statesman, 8 March 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Don DeLillo

Bob Adelman's images of Samuel Beckett

Rare photographs of Beckett in Paris

A selection of photographs of Samuel Beckett from Bob Adelman's official website:

See more:

• Bob Adelman's official website
• A Piece of Monologue: Writers: Samuel Beckett

Thomas Bernhard on Uncanny Primates

An extract from The Voice Imitator

In one of the 104 short stories that comprise The Voice Imitator, Thomas Bernhard describes an uncanny encounter with primates:

Even though I have always hated zoological gardens and actually find that my suspicions are aroused by people who visit zoological gardens, I still could not avoid going out to Schönbrunn on one occasion and, at the request of my companion, a professor of theology, standing in front of the monkeys' cage to look at the monkeys, which my companion fed with some food he had brought with him for the purpose. The professor of theology, an old friend of mine from the university, who had asked me to go to Schönbrunn with him had, as time went on, fed all the food he had brought with him to the monkeys, when suddenly the monkeys, for their part, scratched together all the food that had fallen to the ground and offered it to us through the bars. The professor of theology and I were so startled by the monkeys' sudden behavior that in a flash we turned on our heels and left Schönbrunn through the nearest exit.

Thomas Bernhard, 'The Tables Turned'

in The Voice Imitator

Translated by Kenneth J. Northcott

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard

The Later Work of Philip Roth

Stuart Evers on the American writers recent work

In the space of a week two email exchanges ended with my correspondent saying practically the same thing. "Don't write him off," they said of two different English novelists. "He may yet pull a Roth." It was both a lamentation for an author's sad decline and a vain hope for a barely credible return to form. In the modern novel Philip Roth's case is unique. No one has come in from the cold in quite the way Roth did in the mid-90s. Or at least that's the official critical line.

The fact is that Roth has always been a maddeningly erratic writer. The sequence of novels that began with Sabbath's Theatre in 1995 and ended with 2000's The Human Stain are books of howling rage and bitter elegy – genuine works of art. But they were not without precedent, even when Roth's career was commercially and critically in dire straits. The Counterlife in 1987, for example, may well be his best book. What critics feasted on was that most hateful of modern expression his "journey": the bad boy of letters, now realising his potential and becoming the greatest living American novelist. The second coming of Roth was as much predicated on the literary community's surprise that he had bucked the established writerly trajectory – an early establishing period, a peak in middle age, terminal decline – as it was on the undoubted quality of his work. [Read the article]

Stuart Evers, 'Will any other novelists 'pull a Roth'?'

guardian.co.uk, 8 March 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Roth and the fate of the Great American novel
• Philip Roth on the 'Lost Cause' of Literature
• Philip Roth discusses The Humbling
• Philip Roth's Reading Habits
• Philip Roth's corrections
• Philip Roth on Kafka and the Holocaust
• Paul Auster: Why Roth is wrong about the novel
• Philip Roth/Nathan Zuckerman on cell phones
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Writers' Autographs

Disjecta: This week's links

Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho (1993)

This week we celebrated World Book Day 2010, and the news kept coming in. There are plenty of reviews for Don DeLillo's new novel, Point Omega, and a newly edited volume of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. A podcast of Paul Auster's recent address on Samuel Beckett is now online. And new editions of Cormac McCarthy's novels have been released with a distinctive new design. In other news, Will Self's official website has confirmed that he does not use the social networking site Twitter, a landmark exhibition of women's art is being hosted by the Centre Pompidou, and - did I mention? - the first issue of Assuming Gender is now online. Enjoy!

Literature:

World Book Day
Don DeLillo: Featured artist here at A Piece of Monologue
Don DeLillo: The Independent reviews Point Omega
Don DeLillo: 'Thinkwriting' about Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo: UK Reviews of DeLillo's Point Omega
Don DeLillo: Ink Quest on why DeLillo writes such good books
Don DeLillo: Simon and Schuster's promotional website for Point Omega
Samuel Beckett: Paul Auster on Beckett (audio)
Barbara Bray 1924-2010: Critic, translator and Beckett partner
William S. Burroughs: Video interview on Ginsberg and Kerouac
Ralph Ellison: Writers on Writing event
Ralph Ellison: Interview with The Paris Review
Patricia Highsmith: Highsmith's New York
Primo Levi: On translation
Cormac McCarthy: New editions of McCarthy's novels
Jack Kerouac: Kerouac's essentials of spontaneous prose
Allen Ginsberg: Scenes from Allen's Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit
Franz Kafka: Typeface based on Kafka's handwriting
James Joyce: Houyhnhnm Press release newly edited Finnegans Wake
James Joyce: John Spain on new edition of Finnegans Wake
James Joyce: The Guardian website on new Finnegans Wake
James Joyce: The New Yorker on James Joyce and Sylvia Beach
Will Self: Official website confirms Twitter account is bogus
W. B. Yeats and King Oedipus
Crime Fiction: Jon Fosse on death as a puzzle to be solved
3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Award: A Piece of Monologue nominated
Books of the decade: The Guardian asks authors for their favourite books
Best Dystopian Books
Publishing Costs: Print versus Electronic books

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Assuming Gender: In case you missed it, the free academic journal is now online
Leslie Hill: Gerald Bruns reviews Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida and the Future of Criticism

Film:

Oscars 2010: The Nominees
Werner Herzog: Frontline Club arrange a season of his films
Chris Petit: Sight and Sound discusses Content and Radio On

Art:

Women in Art: Critical Cookie on a new exhibition at the Paris Centre Pompidou
24 Hour Psycho: Douglas Gordon's provocative take on Hitchcock's film
J. G. Ballard: Ballardian art exhibition at the Gargosian gallery
Jazz: Martel Chapman's portraits of jazz musicians at One Down, One Up

Music:

Jazz: Critic Ira Gitler's first LP liner notes

Etc.:

Cookie Crumbs: The month's links at Critical Cookie

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

New edition of Finnegans Wake

A scholarly edition of James Joyce's most ambitious work

A newly edited 'more comprehensible' edition of Finnegans Wake is finally ready, after thirty years of preparation, which boldly suggests we might finally be Joyce's contemporaries (via 3:AM Magazine):

Thirty years of work and 9,000 amendments later, a new edition of James Joyce's most perplexing novel, Finnegans Wake, is promising to provide readers with a smoother, more comprehensible version of the author's final work.

On its publication on 4 May 1939, a review of the book in the Guardian despaired of making sense of it. Pointing to a sample from the book – "Margaritomancy! Hyacinthous pervinciveness! Flowers. A cloud" – reviewer B Ifor Evans said that "the work is not written in English, or in any other language, as language is commonly known". "In 20 years' time, with sufficient study and with the aid of the commentary that will doubtless arise, one might be ready for an attempt to appraise it," he wrote. "Compared with this, Ulysses is a first-form primer."

Seventy years on, scholars Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon have reached the conclusion of 30 years of textual analysis. Poring over the tens of thousands of pages of notes, drafts, typescripts and proofs that make up, in Joyce's own words, his "litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of whirlwords", they have made 9,000 "minor yet crucial" amendments and corrections to the book, from misspellings to misplaced phrases, ruptured syntax and punctuation marks.

"I never thought I'd see this day," said Rose. "The complexity of the texts and the complexity of the social situation meant it was very, very difficult indeed, but we stuck with it and we got there. There were 20,000 pages of manuscript, and beyond that 60 notebooks, and beyond that it extended out into thousands of different volumes. It extends out and out and out – what Joyce was doing was distilling in and in and in. To reach the text we had to follow him back, and it's a lot harder to go backwards than forwards."

Joyce himself, reported to have said that he wrote the book "to keep the critics busy for 300 years", and that "the only demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works," would no doubt have been delighted by their lengthy efforts. [Read the article]

Alison Flood, 'Thirty years' editorial labours produce 'more comprehensible' Finnegans Wake'

guardian.co.uk, 5 March 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Beckett, Joyce and Irish Exile
• Writers' Autographs
• Blake Morrison on 'Ulysses and Us'
• James Joyce's Ulysses adapted as graphic novel
• 'Obliged by him': Jacques Derrida on James Joyce
• 'A House of life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Re Joyce

Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho

British artist's installation based on the 1960 Hitchcock film

24 Hour Psycho, as I see it, is not simply a work of appropriation. It is more like an act of affiliation... it wasn't a straightforward case of abduction. The original work is a masterpiece in its own right, and I've always loved to watch it. [...] I wanted to maintain the authorship of Hitchcock so that when an audience would see my 24 Hour Psycho they would think much more about Hitchcock and much less, or not at all, about me...

Douglas Gordon

In 1993, Scottish artist Douglas Gordon conceived 24 Hour Psycho, an art installation that manipulated the running time of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho to twenty-four hours. The exhibit is featured prominently in Don DeLillo's latest novel, Point Omega, and links to DeLillo's thematic interest in the nature of art, reality, representation, perception, and violence in American popular culture.

The [what have i done] exhibition begins with 24 Hour Psycho (1993), a slowed-down version of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho. A different take on a familiar classic, it introduces many of the important themes in Gordon's work: recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light.

The Guardian

The slightest camera movement was a profound shift in space and time but the camera was not moving now. Anthony Perkins is turning his head. It was like whole numbers. The man could count the gradations in the movement of Anthony Perkins' head. Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental moments rather than one continuous motion. It was like bricks in a wall, clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or a bird. Then again it was not like or unlike anything. Anthony Perkins' head swiveling over time on his long thin neck.

It was only the closest watching that yielded this perception. He found himself undistracted for some minutes by the coming and going of others and he was able to look at the film with the degree of intensity that was required. The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it. The film's merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not betray what was demanded. He stood and looked. In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. But it was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point. To see what's here, finally to look and to know you're looking, to feel time passing, to he alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion.

Don DeLillo, Point Omega

More on 24 Hour Psycho:

• Don DeLillo and 24 Hour Psycho
• The Guardian on Gordon's 'what have i done' exhibition 2002-3
• Youtube: Meet the artist: Douglas Gordon Part 1
• Youtube: Meet the artist: Douglas Gordon Part 2

Chris Petit: Content and Radio On

Sight and Sound profiles the work of the British director

In an online exclusive for Sight and Sound magazine, Mark Fisher explores the Ballardian landscape of Chris Petit's new film, Content, and reflects on it as an 'informal coda' to his hypnotic debut feature, Radio On:

At one point in Chris Petit’s haunting new film Content, we drive through Felixstowe container port. It was an uncanny moment for me, since Felixstowe is only a couple of miles from where I live – what Petit filmed could have been shot from our car window. What made it all the more uncanny was the fact that Petit never mentions that he is in Felixstowe; the hangars and looming cranes are so generic that I began to wonder if this might not be a doppelgänger container port somewhere else in the world. All of this somehow underlined the way Petit’s text describes these “blind buildings” while his camera tracks along them: “non-places”, “prosaic sheds”, “the first buildings of a new age” which render “architecture redundant”.

Content could be classified as an essay film, but it’s less essayistic than aphoristic. This isn’t to say that it’s disconnected or incoherent: Petit himself has called Content a “21st-century road movie, ambient”, and its reflections on ageing and parenthood, terrorism and new media are woven into a consistency that’s non-linear, but certainly not fragmentary. [...]

Radio On, Petit said in a recent interview, “ended with a car ‘stalled on the edge of the future’, which we didn’t know then would be Thatcherism.” Ahead lay a bizarre yet banal mix of the unprecedented and the archaic. Instead of accelerating down Kraftwerk’s autobahn, we found ourselves, as Petit puts it in Content, “reversing into a tomorrow based on a non-existent past”, as the popular modernism Radio On was part of found itself eclipsed by a toxic-addictive confection of consumer-driven populism, heritage kitsch, xenophobia and US corporate culture. In this light, Content stands as a quiet but emphatic reproach to the British cinema of the last 30 years, which in its dominant variants – drab social realism, faux gangster, picture-book costume drama or mid-Atlantic middle-class fantasia – has retreated from modernity. It isn’t only the poor and the non-white who are edited out of Notting Hill, for example – it’s also the Westway, west London’s Ballardian flyover, which now stands as a relic of “the modern city that London never became”.

Yet Content isn’t just a requiem for the lost possibilities of the last 30 years. In its use of stunning but underused locations – the ready-made post-Fordist science-fiction landscapes of Felixstowe container port, the eerie Cold War terrain of nearby Orford Ness – Content demonstrates not only what British cinema overlooks, but what it could still be. [Read the article]

Mark Fisher, 'Grey Area'

Sight and Sound: Online Exclusives

Content shows on More4 on 9 March. Independent cinema screening dates and venue details to be confirmed

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Radio On at Chapter Arts Centre
• Chris Petit on J. G. Ballard
• Radio On
• Watch Radio On free at A Piece of Monologue

Primo Levi on Translation

Challenges and difficulties

Writer and chemist Primo Levi conveys some of the central difficulties of translating texts from one language to another:

Translation is difficult work because the barriers between languages are higher than is generally thought ... knowing how to avoid the traps is not enough to make a good translator. The task is more arduous; it is a matter of transferring from one language to another the expressive force of the text, and this is a superhuman task, so much so that some celebrated translations (for example that of the Odyssey into Latin and the Bible into German) have marked transformations in the history of our civilisation.

Nonetheless, since writing results from a profound interaction between the creative talent of the writer and the language in which he expresses himself, to each translation is coupled an inevitable loss, comparable to the loss of changing money. This diminution varies in degree, great or small according to the ability of the translator and the nature of the original text. As a rule it is minimal for technical or scientific texts (but in this case the translator, in addition to knowing the two languages, needs to understand what he is translating; possess, that is to say, a third competence). It is maximal for poetry [...]

In David Mendel, 'Primo Levi and Translation'

Bulletin of the Society for Italian Studies, 1998

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Primo Levi on Shame
• Primo Levi on Dante and Arachnophobia
• Sic!

Barbara Bray 1924-2010

Friend and collaborator of Samuel Beckett's passes away

Barbara Bray, a champion of European literature and personal confidant to Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, has died aged 85. Andrew Todd details her rich and varied career, paying particular attention to her close personal relationship with Beckett:

Barbara Bray, who has died aged 85, was one of the most significant links between British and French literature in the 20th century. She was the principal translator and an early champion of Marguerite Duras, who was her close friend, and also translated the work of Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh and Alain Robbe-Grillet. As a young and influential script editor at the BBC in the 1950s, she fostered the work of many writers including Harold Pinter and, perhaps most importantly, Samuel Beckett, who became her personal and intellectual partner for more than 30 years. [...]

Working under Val Gielgud, Donald McWhinnie and John Morris, she was at the spearhead of a risky enterprise to introduce the postwar British public to avant-garde 20th-century drama. She was involved in recommending, commissioning and translating work by Duras, Robert Pinget, Ugo Betti and Luigi Pirandello. Bray supported Pinter in particular, assuring him a steady flow of commissions after the failure of his London theatre debut, The Birthday Party. Pinter wrote A Slight Ache, A Night Out and The Dwarfs initially as radio commissions for her, and remained grateful to her throughout his life for this crucial early support.

Bray met Beckett in 1956 during the production of his radio play All That Fall, and they became more closely involved when she helped him with Embers, his second BBC commission, in 1959. By then Bray was in a relationship with McWhinnie, her estranged husband having died in an accident in Cyprus, leaving her in sole charge of their two young daughters.

She said later that it took 30 seconds to fall in love with Beckett. Despite being drawn by his graceful, generous manner and his voice, which she described as sounding like the sea, she nonetheless kept her distance, and it was he who made the first moves in what was to become a relationship of central importance for both of them. [...]

Her relationship with Beckett lasted for the rest of his life. He sent her work in progress by mail (sometimes twice a day, even if they were meeting anyway) and worked with her, by her own account, as a sounding-board, as a direct help with translation (he translated his own work between French and English), and as a gadfly who would encourage him to complete projects.

She was the only person with whom he regularly shared his work in progress and one of very few with whom he discussed his work at all. She never claimed credit for his work, stating that she had no creative imagination at all. She "wasn't any influence on the nature of the work", she later recalled, "because he was absolutely unique and sure of himself and knew what he wanted to say". She described their relationship as one of equals, an impression corroborated by those who knew them at the time.

Beckett had just married Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil when Bray moved to Paris in 1961. Suzanne had helped him recover his health after he was stabbed in 1938, and both had been hunted by members of the Resistance during the latter part of the second world war. Bray claimed that Beckett remained faithful to both of them, a situation which was not without consequences for Bray and her children, who were brought up as the offspring of an occasionally anguished "other woman", devoted to her often-absent companion.

Beckett and Suzanne's relationship had been forged in adversity and before his fame. They had much less in common intellectually than he and Bray. His double life was most likely the point of departure for Play (1963), in which a man, wife and mistress confess their lives to an intermittent spotlight, confined to the neck in earthen jars. The similarly-confined but irrepressible Winnie in Happy Days (1960) has sometimes been likened to Bray, who was possessed of an unstoppable, effusive attitude bordering on the manic. She denied the link.

Bray spoke of writing a memoir of her life with Beckett, but never completed it. She abhorred others' tell-all accounts of sometimes superficial relations with him, and perhaps preferred in the end to allow silence to descend on the mystery of their relationship. We can nonetheless speculate whether the second part of his career would have been as varied and adventurous without her, ranging across television and film and inspired by sources including the Noh theatre, to which she introduced him. Her last collaborative act with him was to type his final work, What Is the Word (1989), which he composed when confined to the Tiers Temps nursing home in Paris. He died that December. His 713 letters to her are kept at Trinity College Dublin (he destroyed all personal correspondence he received). She left a brief account of her life with him in an interview with Marek Kedzierski.

After Beckett's death, Bray continued to translate, and she put great energy into the bilingual Paris-based theatre company Dear Conjunction, which she co-founded and for which she directed lesser-known Pinter and Beckett works. [Read the article]

Andrew Todd, 'Barbara Bray obituary'

guardian.co.uk, 4 March 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

UK Reviews of DeLillo's Point Omega

Recent critical reactions

The publisher PanMacMillan is promoting Don DeLillo's new novel, Point Omega, with a selection of reviews by the British press.

‘Of all DeLillo's post-Underworld novels, Point Omega is the most interesting . . . One hundred and twenty-eight pages of theatrical, uncanny prose and its over.’

Sunday Times Culture Section

‘The biggest news in literature this month is the arrival of a new novel from our favourite living American Don. Point Omega promises the usual furore of a literary event of massive global magnitude brilliant, slightly baffling (in a good way!) novel that's oddly sparse and airy but breathtakingly weighty at the same time. The really great bits of Point Omega read like the proclamations of an almost mystical being.’

Dazed and Confused

‘DeLillo is always great on the subject of film (the digressions on cinema are among the best passages in The Names, as are the reflections on the Zapruder footage in Underworld). His prose, with its stylised dialogue and minute attentiveness to effects of light, often seems to aspire to the condition of cinema, with the coolly jazzed cadences providing the score. These short sections of Point Omega, where the watcher meticulously observes his own and other people's reactions to the abstracted violence on the screen, are as sharp in their own right as you would expect. But they also – such is the appealing simplicity of the book's structure . . . the handling is subtle and deft, and it works powerfully . . . The mystery itself is left hanging, but certain hints in the text, along with an elegant manipulation of the time-frame, permit a satisfying, even touching ending (though not a comforting one). It requires careful reading, but as with the man in the gallery, and as with every other aspect of this finely austere novel, the harder you look, the more you see.’

James Lasdun, The Guardian

‘The patient reader will uncover a devastating vein of disquiet running beneath its tomb-cool surface. As in his recent novel Falling Man, which dealt with the attacks of 9/11, DeLillo chooses to take an oblique approach to a topic that might be blinding if viewed straight on. Like a hidden picture in a bland canvas, Elster’s desolation is difficult to make out at first. Once lodged in the mid, however, it is impossible to forget.’

Stephen Amidon Sunday Times

‘The brilliance of the book lies in DeLillo never once announcing that we are in Grand Theme territory. On the contrary, this unapologetic novel of ideas has its own stealthy logic . . Written in a style that is frugal, frequently staccato, yet also displaying great flashes of spare beauty, DeLillo’s strange, haunting tale can be read as an extended meditation on the way we use the theoretical concepts and conceits as a bulwark against the sheer unknowingness of other people, let alone ourselves. . . . this being a DeLillo novel, there are no answers to the vast metaphysical dilemmas of temporal existence. There are only the sort of densely posited questions that take you to all sorts of challenging places where you have forgotten that fiction can actually take you.’

Douglas Kennedy The Times

‘No other contemporary American novelist writes as acutely as DeLillo about power and its corollary, violence . . . the high concepts about politics and art are seeded inot the story sinuously and the painterly rendering of the desert setting, with its ‘blinding tides of light and sky’, imparts a wonderfully eerie atmosphere. The tone registers American relative decline, but DeLillo’s powers show no sign of fading.’

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney Financial Times

‘another formidable construction by a very distinctive writer’

Evening Standard

‘This is an important, post-terrorism novel not just for DeLillo, but for US fiction. It comes at a time when most of the post-second World War giants are dead: Gaddis, Bellow and Updike the artists; Mailer the chronicler; Heller and Vonnegut the comedians with a message; Burroughs the pulse. Most would agree that Richard Ford articulated the US’s Bush nightmare in The Lay of the Land (2006). But of the survivors of that somewhat older, pre-Ford, generation – Gore Vidal, Philip Roth, McCarthy – DeLillo, now 73, was always an original. He has always watched and listened, taken on popular culture, the environment, waste disposal, weaponry, cultural nuance, ethnic minorities and national paranoia. His characters represent the US on the run from itself, from Iraq, from a ‘now’ weighted by history – the now that has always, since the publication of his debut Americana in 1971, preoccupied Don DeLillo.’

Irish Times

More at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo: Featured Artist

This month's featured artist on A Piece of Monologue

American author Don DeLillo is this month's featured artist on A Piece of Monologue. Click here for more.