Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Ian Curtis of Joy Division. Photograph: Kevin Cummins

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: Second Call for Papers from the Out of the Archive conference team
Samuel Beckett: Odds and Ends: A new feature at the Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies website
What 10 Classic Books Were Almost Called
Virginia Woolf: Short story, 'A Haunted House'
Joyce Carol Oates: Review of A Fair Maiden
Thomas Bernhard: London Review of Books on the Penguin reissue of Old Masters
Paul Auster: Arifa Akbar reviews Auster's new novel, Sunset Park
Paul Auster: Interviewed by The L Magazine about Sunset Park
James Boswell: Steve King profiles Samuel Johnson's biographer
Philip Roth: Tim Parks reviews Nemesis in the London Review of Books
Philip Roth: On literature and teaching
Gabriel Josipovici: Interview by Berfrois
Should the University Survive in its Current Form?
Ambit: New issue now available
Christopher Isherwood: Second volume of the Diaries 1960-1969 is now available
James Joyce: Position available at the James Joyce Centre
Sylvia Plath and Anne Stevenson
Saul Bellow: The Second Pass reviews Saul Bellow's Letters
Tom McCarthy: McCarthy discusses the influence of Sigmund Freud on C.
Electric Literature: An interview with the founders of Electric Literature

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Friedrich Nietzsche's Death Mask
FWSA Book Prize 2011
France in the 1960s: Your guide to the intellectual scene
Sigmund Freud: John Fletcher on 'Time and Trauma in Freud's Thought'
Sigmund Freud: Paul Crosthwaite on psychoanalysis and global economic collapse
So you want to get a PhD in the Humanities?

Theatre:

William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Globe Gesture Lab, 5-7 November 2010
Oliver, Shakespeare and the National
William Shakespeare: Hamlet and Poetry, call for papers

Music

Franz Kafka: György Kurtág's Kafka Fragments at the Barbican in London
Joy Division: New book of photography by Kevin Cummins
J. G. Ballard: Bryan Ferry notes the influence of Ballard on Roxy Music

Art, Design & Photography

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Review of An Inner Silence: The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson
Coffee BREAKDOWN: Ephemeral comic strip

Film

Alfred Hitchcock: Emanuel Berman on Hitchcock's Vertigo, 'The collapse of a rescue phantasy'
David Lynch: Short film of Lynch's lithographic work in Paris

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

Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters

Michael Hofmann reviews the reissue of Bernhard's distinctive novel

Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters

The London Review of Books weighs the significance of Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters, now reissued by Penguin:

The Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) once said: ‘You have to understand that in my writing the musical component comes first, and the subject matter is secondary.’ It’s a strange thing for this professional controversialist and Austropathic ranter to have said – that we should attend to the form, balance and measure in his work, when everything in it would seem to lead to the giggle and gasp of hurt given or received, or the hush and squeal of scandal – but it is sound advice. Before we talk about the quality of the opinions, or the kilotonnage of the diatribes, or the relentlessness of the assault (is anything exempt?), we ought to talk about the patterns of repetition and variation in the unspooling sentences of the unparagraphed prose. If Bernhard is anything, he is a stuck harpsichord record, knocking out its trapped and staggered shards of shrilly hammered phrases.

Old Masters, first published in Germany in 1985 and recently reissued, is Bernhard’s penultimate novel. It comes before Extinction and after Cutting Timber (also translated as Woodcutting), which was seized on publication because a couple who thought they recognised themselves in it, the Lampersbergs, old friends of Bernhard, had an injunction taken out against it. (Publicity not being an advantage to them in their circumstances, they eventually relented.) Old Masters is typical of Bernhard in that it is both a parodically eccentric version – one isn’t sure, or it’s not sure, as often in Bernhard, if it’s a skit or a rarefied, laboratory version – of life, but at the same time it is almost reassuringly normal. A Bernhard novel is a bizarrely skewed but immediately familiar planet, whose rules and concerns we grasp as readily as those of Le Petit Prince. Old Masters takes place in a single location, more or less in real time, and yet is able to include in its purview most things under the sun. Come to think of it, even the sun: ‘He avoids the sun, there is nothing he shuns more than the sun,’ it says in Ewald Osers’s terrific and calm and thoughtful translation. Nothing happens and little is revealed; it is mostly talk and remembered talk, and thought and remembered thought. [Read more]

Michael Hofmann, 'Reger Said'

London Review of Books, 4 November 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard
• Who is Thomas Bernhard?
• George Steiner on Thomas Bernhard
• Interview with Thomas Bernhard
• Thomas Bernhard: Ritter, Dene, Voss

Cartier-Bresson: An Inner Silence

French photographer's signature portraits of twentieth-century figures

Henri Cartier-Bresson,
An Inner Silence

Christopher Hirst reviews An Inner Silence: The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson: '[Cartier-Bresson] has captured his subjects lost in thought, even with such flibbertigibbets as Monroe and Capote. Beckett's glance retains a raptor quality. Sartre's alarming strabismus enables him to look fore and aft on the Pont des Arts. Pound glares madly, his forehead lined like a station approach. What an astonishing haul – and how gloriously they have been captured. Rembrandt would have loved this book. [Read more]'

Source: Christopher Hirst, 'An Inner Silence: The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson', The Independent, 29 October 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Portraits of Beckett as a famous writer
• Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Photographing America: Henri Cartier-Bresson / Walker Evans

Krapp's Last Tape Anniversary

First performed on this day in 1958

Patrick Magee in Krapp's Last Tape

Over at Daybook, Steve King reflects on the anniversary of Krapp's Last Tape: 'On this day in 1958 Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape was first performed. According to the authorized biography (Damned to Fame, James Knowlson, 1996), the play was one of the author's favorite works—a "nicely sad and sentimental" play about which he felt "as an old hen with her last chick," Beckett wrote in his letters at the time, but not likely to achieve the fame of Waiting for Godot and Endgame: "It will be like the little heart of an artichoke served before the tripes with excrement of Hamm and Clov. People will say: good gracious, there is blood circulating in the old man's veins after all, one would never have believed it; he must be getting old." [Read more]'

Source: Steve King, 'Beckett's Krapp', Daybook, 28 October 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Michael Gambon in Krapp's Last Tape
• Harold Pinter in Krapp's Last Tape
• Harold Pinter on Beckett and Krapp's Last Tape
• Rick Cluchey on Samuel Beckett

Christopher Isherwood's California

The second volume of Isherwood's diaries is released

Christopher Isherwood, The Sixties: Diaries, Volume Two - 1960-69
Edited by Katherine Bucknell

Richard Canning reviews the second volume of Christopher Isherwood's The Sixties: Diaries, Volume Two - 1960-69:

'I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.' Anyone familiar with the declaration by the narrator of Christopher Isherwood's most enduring work of fiction, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), will be surprised by how uncinematic, indeed incomprehensive, his diary entries can be. There's a lot of thinking, and nothing like the gestures towards abandoning subjectivity and self-consciousness that Isherwood crafted into his novels, not least the one masterpiece penned during the period covered by this second collection - A Single Man (1964).

As in the first volume of diaries, published in 1996, Isherwood comes across as, by turns, rebarbative, loving, insecure, opinionated, self-critical, self-destructive, reticent, controlling and grand. His sing-song voice - caught in the 2007 documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story - is hard to square with these entries, which are rarely light-hearted.

What they are, however, is a huge relief after this book's thousand-page predecessor. Although the years which that book covered - 1939 to 1960 - brought large changes for Isherwood (the controversial flight to America at the outset of war; his developmental interest in Vedantism; most vitally, his meeting the nineteen-year-old Don Bachardy, who, thirty-four years his junior, became the love of his life), they were equally characterised by violent mood swings and heavy drinking. In the diaries, if not also in life, the dominant notes were bitterness and self-pity. Surely the chief reason for the relative calm, generosity and self-acceptance Isherwood shows in The Sixties was his realisation (more gradual than one might think) that Bachardy was not only his 'significant other' but also his lodestar, muse and - notwithstanding Bachardy's palpable insecurities on the matter - intellectual and artistic equal. [Read more]

Richard Canning, 'California Dreaming'

Literary Review, October 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man

Philip Roth on Literature and Teaching

Roth talks to Esquire about Turgenev, Conrad, and his memories of teaching

Philip Roth. Photograph: Steve Pyke.

In an interview to promote his latest novel, Nemesis, Philip Roth shares what he's reading with Scott Raab, alongside his memories of teaching at the University of Pennsylvania:

Roth's talking about his reading these days, revisiting a revered Russian master of the nineteenth century, Ivan Turgenev.

"Fathers and Sons is a great book — there's a new translation of it. I think it's called Fathers and Children now, and the translation is wonderful. And there are several long short stories that are pearls. One is called 'The Torrents of Spring' or 'Spring Torrents,' which is a masterpiece, and the other — which is beyond masterpiece — is called 'First Love.' Read those two things."

Roth chortles with something like delight. He stopped teaching twenty or so years ago but still seems as if he'd fit in on any campus in any decade. It's not only his outfit — tan slacks, blue-and-white-checked shirt with the sleeves rolled loosely up his skinny forearms, brown walking shoes — but also his easy passion for those writers who've nourished his soul.

I mention Joseph Conrad, whose clinical eye, deceptive clarity, and long, loping rhythms remind me of Roth's own.

"He's a pure powerhouse. I recently read a biography of him that's kind of interesting, too, an English biography. There's also Conrad's great short novel, which I hadn't reread since I was in my twenties, The Nigger of the Narcissus. It's an absolute masterpiece. Beyond belief. And about race, it's brilliant. So brilliant. Conrad is rich. He's very rich."

Again with the chortle. To feast so deeply upon words, it says, is luscious beyond words, a way of being in the world while being free of the world's whims, and a way of knowing humanity free of the mess of humans. It is rich, very rich — a schoolboy's love rather than a scholar's.

"I've enjoyed teaching — not teaching writing. I taught literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and I liked that very much. It was a great way of getting out of the house, of not being stuck alone in my room all day, and, as I have Lonoff say in The Ghost Writer, I got to use a public urinal — that was a breakthrough — and also I got to read a lot. That was the best of it — I got to read and think about books and study books. My education comes from teaching, really." [Read more]

Scott Raab, 'Philip Roth Goes Home Again'

Esquire, 7 October 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth
• Philip Roth's Reading Habits
• Philip Roth compares life to a Beckett play
• Philip Roth talks about new novel, Nemesis
• Philip Roth's Nemeses: Short Novels

Freud and Global Economic Collapse

Paul Crosthwaite sits global economics on the analysand's couch

Horror or fascination? A banker looks on.

Paul Crosthwaite, a British academic known for his research of trauma in twentieth-century fiction, and global catastrophe in the work of Don DeLillo, has hit the headlines this weekend. In an article entitled 'Blood on the Trading Floor: Waste, Sacrifice, and Death in Financial Crises', Crosthwaite asks whether psychoanalysis or anthropology might help to explain the global economic crash.

But why the national fuss? How did critical theory find its way into the Sunday supplements? It seems the article, published in a recent academic journal, offers some rather controversial insights into motivations for the crash.

Crosthwaite argues that the actions of the bankers in high-pressure working environments seem to obey a kind of perverse logic. Using the work of Sigmund Freud, Crosthwaite applies theories of desire and the 'death drive' to the unconscious motivations of the bankers. In a working atmosphere defined by large stakes and huge potential losses, he argues that rational objectivity loses focus to self-destructive thrills and a movement toward personal and societal collapse - an idea that will be familiar to readers of Don DeLillo or J. G. Ballard.

At the heart of the article is a call toward greater regulation, asserting that 'financial policymakers must recognise that investor psychology is far more complex than their models have allowed up to now [...] They need to take much greater account of psychological factors such as emotion and desire, which affect how market actors behave in profound ways.'

The Telegraph offers an outline of Crosthwaite's suggestion:

With a theory that will alarm Business Secretary Vince Cable, Dr Paul Crosthwaite of Cardiff University has argued that bankers and other investors took on excessive risks not just to make money but for the "desire" and "exhilaration" of destruction.

'For its participants and speculators alike, the crash is not simply an object of fear or anxiety, or even of mere fascination, but also of an inchoate but urgent desire,' Dr Crosthwaite wrote in an article published in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

'In Blood on the Trading Floor: Waste, Sacrifice and Death in Financial Crises', Dr Crosthwaite claims his anthropological study of investors and traders found evidence of an element of masochistic satisfaction in running up losses.

He maintains that the crisis was the modern equivalent to the traditional Native American practice of "potlatch", a ritual ceremony in which the chiefs of rival tribes competed to destroy ever greater quantities of their own possessions as an expression of power and importance.

But in one fillip for the Business Secretary, Dr Crosthwaite says his research strengthens the case for tighter City regulation. It's human nature: the bankers could do it again. [Read More]

Louise Armitstead, 'Bankers 'caused credit crisis for kicks''

telegraph.co.uk, 23 October 2010

You can read Crosthwaite's article for yourself in the current issue of Angelaki:

In this essay, I range between popular fiction narratives of financial turmoil, psychoanalysis, and some highly heterodox strands of twentieth-century economic thought in order to piece together a theory of financial catastrophe that the prevailing paradigm in the discipline of economics cannot so much as contemplate: that for its participants and spectators alike, the crash is not simply an object of fear or anxiety, or even of mere fascination, but also of an inchoate but urgent desire.

Contemporary financial markets betray, in tension with their manifest urge towards profit and growth, a countervailing tendency – which is simultaneously structural and libidinal – towards waste, expenditure, and consumption: a 'death drive' that culminates in the mingled despair and euphoria of the crash. [Read More]

Paul Crosthwaite, 'Blood on the Trading Floor: Waste, Sacrifice, and Death in Financial Crises'
Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities
Volume 15 Issue 2 2010

In addition, you can listen to Crosthwaite discussing his research in more detail at the Cardiff University website.

Useful Links:

• Listen to Paul Crosthwaite discussing his work
• Dr Paul Crosthwaite: Cardiff University Staff Page
• The Western Mail: 'Thrills spurred bankers into credit crunch, says academic'

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Philip Roth. Photograph: Steve Pyke.

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941–1956 will be published by Cambridge University Press in August 2011
Samuel Beckett: Lois Overbeck to speak at the Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive conference in York, June 2011
James Joyce: This week, Frank DeLaney's podcast readings of Ulysses find Stephen discussing Shakespeare's Hamlet
Joseph Conrad: 3:AM Magazine reviews graphic novel adaptation of Heart of Darkness
Philip Roth: Elaine Showalter compares Roth's new novel, Nemesis, with Albert Camus' The Plague
Philip Roth: Nemesis gets The Complete Review treatment
Tom McCarthy: Jen Craig reads C, and asks whether McCarthy really is a modernist writer
Paul Celan: Translating Celan Conference, London, 23 November 2010
William S. Burroughs: Oliver Harris on re-editing the first trilogy (Junky, Queer, The Yage Letters)
Harvard University Press: Spring Catalogue 2011
HTML Giant launches literary magazine club
Indie Literary Sites start coming of age
Spike Magazine: The Book (Free PDF download)

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

History of Philosophy Podcast: Based at King's College, London
Socrates - a man for our times

Film:

Werner Herzog: A selection of documentaries to be shown at DocNYC.
Werner Herzog: The Guardian's Jonathan Jones on Herzog as performance artist
Blade Runner: The Guardian profiles Ridley Scott's science fiction masterpiece as part of its ongoing film season

Etc.

Melvyn Bragg: Discussions from radio programme In Our Time published in a new collection

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

Werner Herzog: Festival Pick at DocNYC

New York’s Documentary Festival
3-9 November 2010

Werner Herzog, while filming Cave of Forgotten Dreams

To take place at the IFC Center 323 Sixth Ave., New York, NY 10014
NYU-SCPS: Kimmel Center incl. Skirball, 60 Washington Sq.S.

Festival Selection: Werner Herzog

Land of Silence and Darkness
Director: Werner Herzog
Year: 1971
Section of Festival: Spotlight, Werner Herzog
In the book Herzog on Herzog, the director says, “Land of Silence and Darkness is a film particularly close to my heart. If I had not have made it there would be a great gap in my existence.” [Read more]

Wings of Hope
Director: Werner Herzog
Year: 1999
Section of Festival: Spotlight, Werner Herzog
In 1971, a plane came apart over the Peruvian jungle close to where Werner Herzog was filming Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The only survivor from nearly 100 passengers was Juliane Kopcke [Read more]

My Best Fiend
Director: Werner Herzog
Year: 1999
Section of Festival: Spotlight, Werner Herzog
In this personal essay film, Werner Herzog reflects on his friendship with the tempestuous actor Klaus Kinski whose memorable collaborations with the director include Aguirre, Nosferatu, Woyzeck and Fitzcarraldo. [Read more]

In Conversation with Werner Herzog
Director: Werner Herzog
Section of Festival: Spotlight, Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog is one of the great storytellers of our time, not only in films such as Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, but in general conversation. [Read more]

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (presented in 3D)
Director: Werner Herzog
Year: 2010
Section of Festival: Gala, Spotlight, Werner Herzog
Opening night gala: Wed. Nov. 3, 2010 – 7pm (NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts). [Read more]

Useful Links:

• New York's Documentary Festival: Werner Herzog
• International Committee for Preservation of Lascaux: Prehistoric Paintings in Danger

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Conquest of the Useless: Werner Herzog on Fitzcarraldo
• Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man
• Werner Herzog speaks to Time Magazine
• Bruno Schleinstein 1932-2010

Is Tom McCarthy a modernist writer?

Jen Craig on reading McCarthy's recent novel, C

Tom McCarthy, C

Jen Craig asks whether critics are right in suggesting that C, the new Booker-nominated novel from Tom McCarthy, can be thought of as a modernist text:

The very accumulation of unsentimental scientific detail, facts, objects, perhaps because it builds to this strong sense of pollution, the source of the shock that Serge sees in nearly everyone around him, almost reads as a parody of the kind of novel that I feared it might be – those novels in which you read about the origins of soap and glass, about obsessive (and thereby quaint) engineers or entomologists, about the history of a particular trade route – where the usual lyrically realist narrative is bolstered with so much exoticised information that the average reader, immune to the sentimentality, or rather secretly desiring it, is also able to say of the novel that it was absolutely fascinating.

And yet, is C modernist as some are claiming it to be? From the point of view of Josipovici’s conception of it in What Ever Happened to Modernism? which I also reread courtesy of the flu, I would say it is not. Quite apart from anything else, it’s the assuredness of the main character, Serge, and what turns out to be the predictability of his irrational moments and predilections – the whole elaborate, meticulously researched boy’s own product that it is – which makes me doubtful. The term ‘modernist’ must, to those writing newspaper copy, simply be a description of the level of a novel’s density (not an easy read) or perhaps the only term, now that post-modernism is out of vogue, for describing a novel that so sets itself against every pat lyrical ending, every supposedly beautifully written best seller that surrounds us by the thousands. McCarthy’s book doesn’t seem to me to be alive. This may, however, be his intention. [Read more]

Jen Craig, 'Reading C'

Being in Lieu, 13 October 2010

William S. Burroughs' First Trilogy

Oliver Harris edits a new collection of the American writer's work

Burroughs' manuscripts for The Yage Letters

Oliver Harris, Burroughs scholar and editor of The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945 to 1959, makes the case for Junkie, Queer and The Yage Letters to be considered as a collective trilogy:

Burroughs wrote his three manuscripts of “Junk,” “Queer,” and “Yage” during a period of under four years, back to back between early 1950 and late 1953. But they were published out of sequence and spread over four decades: Junkie appearing in 1953, Queer in 1985, and The Yage Letters in 1963. They really couldn’t have been written any closer together or published much further apart.

More than that, this scrambling of chronology and delays in publication had a direct impact on the reception of the three texts — on how they have been interpreted. This is one reason why they’ve hardly ever been read as a trilogy, with the result that Burroughs’ literary history, the chronology of his development from one text to another, has been disguised and confused. But even more fundamentally, this disordering of the trilogy turns out to beg questions about production, since the publication histories of the three titles decisively determined the form and content of each text — and not just separately but collectively. [Read more]

Oliver Harris, 'Confusion’s Masterpiece: Re-Editing William S. Burroughs’ First Trilogy'

Published at Reality Studio, 10 October 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: William S. Burroughs
• The Cat Inside: William Burroughs
• William Burroughs' Belongings
• 'The Ugly Spirit': Burroughs and the Naked Lunch
• Inmate in the cosmic madhouse: J. G. Ballard on Burroughs
• J. G. Ballard on William S. Burroughs

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: J. M. Coetzee, John Banville, John Minihan, Simon Critchley, John Calder all to attend Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive in June 2011
James Joyce: Wake in Progress: A new project that will attempt to illustrate James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
Gabriel Josipovici: The Millions reviews What Ever Happened to Modernism?
Paul Auster: 2003 interview with The Paris Review
Paul Auster: Review of The Red Notebook
Franz Kafka: Letter to the New York Times critiques Elif Batuman's portrait of Kafka
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Goethe's death mask
Philip Larkin: Review of Letters to Monica
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A. S. Byatt on Demons and political activism
State of Emergency: Censorship by Bullet in Mexico: Event to include readings from Paul Auster and Don DeLillo
Not the Booker Prize: Congratulations to the winners: Lee Rourke and Matthew Hooton
Marilyn Monroe's Reading Habits: New book, Fragments, includes references to Beckett, Conrad, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Camus, Ellison and more
Michael Dirda's favourite literary essayist
Saul Bellow: Rachel Cooke talks to Bellow's widow about the American writer, and also touches upon a collection of correspondence that includes John Cheever, Philip Roth and Martin Amis
William S. Burroughs shoots William Shakespeare

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

William Shakespeare: Cardiff Shakespeare launches publications page
Bible:  Review of Gordon Campbell's Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011

Art & Design:

Francis Bacon: Painting of cricketer to be auctioned in New York

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

Dostoyevsky's Demons: Political Activists

A. S. Byatt connects Dostoyevsky's fiction to political journalism in the 1900s

Leon Bakst, Portrait of Alexandre Benois (1894)

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky has been popping up quite regularly on A Piece of Monologue. This is due, in part, to the fact that I'm reading David McDuff's wonderful translation of The Brothers Karamazov, and, in part, to the wealth of superb reviews and criticism on Dostoyevsky's work.

Dostoyevsky has often been acknowledged as an influence on key thinkers and philosophers, from the nihilistic impulses of Friedrich Nietzsche to the psychological insights of Sigmund Freud. In many ways, we can think of Dostoyevsky as the first writer of the twentieth century, exploring the complex intersection of new political ideologies, troubling philosophical examinations, and a changing attitude towards religious belief. Each of his novels (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Notes from the Underground) articulate a crisis for individual in the modern world.

But Dostoyevsky was not simply an observer of his epoch's major cultural and historical shifts; in several senses, he was an active participant. In a wonderful review of Joseph Frank's epic biography of Dostoyevsky (Volume V: the mantle of the prophet, 1871-1881), A. S. Byatt discusses the writer's participation in nineteenth-century political journalism, and its subsequent influence on the narrative fabric of Demons:

The final part of Demons (also translated as The Possessed, or The Devils) appeared in 1873. It dealt with a real contemporary incident - the murder, by the nihilist Nechaev, of a fellow- conspirator, to silence him. Throughout the 1860s, Frank writes, Dostoevsky had been exposing the dangers of Russian nihilism, which was based on "rational egoism", and "a purely home-brewed mixture of Benthamite utilitarianism, atheism and utopian socialism". Dostoevsky believed that these ideas were imported from France, Germany and Britain and he himself, at this stage of his life, believed in Orthodox Christianity, the tsar, and the superiority of purely Russian culture and feelings. In the 1870s, idealistic young Russians gave up abstract arguments in favour of "going to the people", looking in villages for some Arcadian innocence and for a way to be useful. At this time, Dostoevsky became editor of The Citizen and offered his next novel to Notes of the Fatherland, edited by Nikolay Nekrasov, which was the leading Populist journal. Dostoevsky continued to believe that socialism, and Populism, were ultimately misguided because, in his view, they were essentially atheistic, and relied on flawed reason. But he found the Populists, with their respect for the "Russian people's truth" and Christ's teachings, less repugnant than the scientific atheists and anarchists, like Turgenev's Bazarov, in Fathers and Sons, or his own Raskolnikov and Stavrogin.

Between 1873 and 1881, at first as a column in The Citizen, and subsequently in monthly book format (intermittently), Dostoevsky published his Diary of a Writer, in which he created a new form, unlike anything I know by any other novelist. In it he commented on news and social problems, told anecdotes and discussed his own projects for fiction in the making, was satirical and sentimental, factual and visionary. It is part of its nature that it was first proposed by one of his characters, Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina in Demons, as a project for the subsequently murdered Shatov. Her idea was to combine the ephemeral newspaper reports of facts into yearly books. Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer is both a work of art in itself and a demonstration of how the art of fiction relates to "facts" - and to opinions.

Dostoevsky defined his own fiction as "fantastic realism". Its wild, phantasmagoric quality was intimately connected with his sense of the importance of the true sensational stories which appeared daily in the press. "For our writers, they are fantastic; they pay no attention to them, and yet they are reality because they are facts." Classic realist fiction concerns itself with the probable - characters like Anna Karenina and Vronsky are moving because the reader comes to understand that they are behaving as such lovers in such a situation must behave. All fictional narratives, to put it differently, show people who are both individuals and recognisable types. A writer can show his wise understanding of psychology. Or, like Dostoevsky, he can look for his types in the mess and furore of newspaper reality. And he can comment on his own observations. [Read more]

A. S. Byatt, 'Pursued by furies'

New Statesman, 16 September 2002

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Byatt on Dostoyevsky and Execution
• McGrath on Coetzee's Master of Petersburg
• Dostoyevsky on Politics and Personal Vanity
• Dostoyevsky: A Writer In His Time

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and other poems

Literature:

Mario Vargas Llosa: Winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature (New York Times)
Mario Vargas Llosa: BBC reports on Llosa's Nobel Prize award
Mario Vargas Llosa: Three Character Sketches, published in Granta
Franz Kafka: The New York Times unravels the legal history of the Kafka estate
Allen Ginsberg: Television interview with the American Beat poet
Philip Roth: Excerpt from Philip Roth's new novel, Nemesis
Philip Roth on the decline of the novel
Philip Roth's Literary Javelin
Philip Roth: J. M. Coetzee on Philip Roth's Nemesis
Gabriel Josipovici: Nicholas Lezard reviews Only Joking
Paul Auster: Graphic novel adaptation of Auster's City of Glass published on Playstation
J. M. Coetzee and Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Patrick McGrath on Coetzee's novel, The Master of Petersburg
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A. S. Byatt on David McDuff's translation of The Idiot
On book guilt
T. S. Eliot reads The Waste Land
William S. Burroughs: Interview with The Paris Review, 1965

Film & Television:

Philip K. Dick: Blade Runner director Ridley Scott to oversee four-part adaptation of Dick's The Man in the High Castle
John Berger: Landmark television documentary, Ways of Seeing, now available to watch online

Theatre:

William Shakespeare: Academic Conference, Shakespeare: Sources and Adaptation, University of Cambridge, September 2011

Music:

Barack Obama on Bob Dylan

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

J. M. Coetzee on Philip Roth's Nemesis

Coetzee explores the theme of mortality in Philip Roth's latest novel

Philip Roth in New York City with an old map of Newark, 2007

J. M. Coetzee reviews Nemesis, the latest novel by American writer Philip Roth, in the New York Review of Books:

In a 2008 interview, Philip Roth mentioned that he had been rereading The Plague. Now he has published Nemesis, set in Newark in the polio summer of 1944 (19,000 cases nationwide), thereby placing himself in a line of writers who have used the plague condition to explore the resolve of human beings and the durability of their institutions under attack by an invisible, inscrutable, and deadly force. In this respect—as Defoe, Camus, and Roth are aware—the plague condition is simply a heightened state of the condition of being mortal.

Eugene “Bucky” Cantor is a physical education instructor at a public school. Because of poor eyesight he has been exempted from the draft. He is ashamed of his good fortune and tries to pay for it by giving the children in his charge every care and attention. In return the children adore him, particularly the boys.

Bucky is twenty-three years old, levelheaded, dutiful, and scrupulously honest. Though not an intellectual, he thinks about things. He is a Jew, but an indifferent practitioner of his religion.

Polio breaks out in Newark and is soon sweeping through the Jewish section. Amid the general panic Bucky stays calm. Convinced that what children need in time of crisis is stability, he organizes a sports program for the boys and continues to run it against the doubts of the community, even when some of the boys begin to sicken and die. To set an example of human solidarity in the face of the plague, he openly shakes hands with the local simpleton, who is shunned by the boys as a carrier. (“Smell him!… He has shit all over him!… He’s the one who’s carrying the polio!”) In private Bucky rails against the “lunatic cruelty” of a God who kills innocent children.

Bucky has a girlfriend, Marcia, also a teacher, who is away helping run a summer camp in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Marcia puts pressure on Bucky to flee the infected city and join her in her haven. He resists. On the home front as much as in Normandy or the Pacific, he feels, these are extraordinary times calling for extraordinary sacrifice. Nonetheless, one day his principles inexplicably collapse. Yes, he says, he will come to her; he will abandon his boys and save himself. “How could he have done what he’d just done?” he asks himself the moment he hangs up. He has no answer. [Read more (Spoiler Warning: Reveals plot twists)]

J. M. Coetzee, 'On the Moral Brink'

New York Review of Books, October 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth
• Where to start with Philip Roth?
• Philip Roth's Nemeses: Short Novels
• Philip Roth talks about new novel, Nemesis
• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• J. M. Coetzee on Beckett's Letters

Byatt on Dostoyevsky and Execution

Byatt reviews the Penguin edition of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot

Ignace Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait (1860)

A. S. Byatt celebrates David McDuff's 2004 translation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1868 novel, The Idiot, for its portrayal of the condemned man:

I think The Idiot to be a masterpiece - flawed, occasionally tedious or overwrought, like many masterpieces - but a fact of world literature just as important as the densely dramatic Brothers Karamazov or the brilliantly subtle and terrifying Devils. In those two novels, as in the simpler Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky had plots and political and religious ideas working together. In The Idiot he is straining to grasp a story and a character converting themselves from Gothic to Saint's Life on the run. What makes the greatness is double -the character of the prince, and a powerful series of confrontations with death. The true subject of The Idiot is the imminence and immanence of death. The image of these things is Holbein's portrait of Christ taken down from the cross, a copy of which hangs in Rogozhin's house, and which was seen by both Dostoevsky and Prince Myshkin in Basle. It represents, we are told, a dead man who is totally flesh without life, damaged and destroyed, with no hint of a possible future resurrection. The form of the novel is shaped by the inexorable outbreak of Dostoevsky's deepest preoccupations. It is the quality of Dostoevsky's doubt and fear that is the intense religious emotion in this novel - to which Lawrence was no doubt reacting.

I had known, without fully understanding before I read this excellent new translation, that the idea of death in this novel is peculiarly pinned to the idea of execution - what I had not thought through was that in a materialist world the dead man in the painting is an executed man, whose consciousness has been brutally cut off. [Read more]

A. S. Byatt, 'Prince of fools'

The Guardian, 26 June 2004

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• McGrath on Coetzee's Master of Petersburg
• Dostoyevsky on Politics and Personal Vanity
• Dostoyevsky: A Writer In His Time

McGrath on Coetzee's Master of Petersburg

J. M. Coetzee imagines the life of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky

J. M. Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg

In a 1990s review for the New York Times, Patrick McGrath grapples with The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee's bleak re-imagining of the life of Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

A ferociously bleak sense of human isolation has characterized the work of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee. In each of his novels he has created figures who stand starkly silhouetted against a vast, harsh landscape and an equally harsh political system; they are belittled and dehumanized by both. His prime concern has been with survival, spiritual and physical, the scraping of meaning and sustenance from the most hostile of environments. There is no comfort to be had from this experience; for Mr. Coetzee's characters, to be conscious is to suffer.

That theme is Dostoyevskian, and in his strong, strange seventh novel, The Master of Petersburg, Mr. Coetzee has gone directly to the source. He has imagined Dostoyevsky returning to St. Petersburg from Dresden after the death of a stepson, Pavel. It is Mr. Coetzee's grimmest book yet, and suggests a new degree of darkness in an outlook that has yet to find much to celebrate in the human condition. The backdrop that here casts its brooding shadow over the characters is of course Russia. And like the South Africa that has provided the setting of most of his novels, this is a Russia poised on the brink of upheaval.

In a sense, Mr. Coetzee has written of Russia before. Waiting for the Barbarians, a novel published in 1980, is set in a garrison town on the border of a nameless empire apparently threatened by barbarian incursions from the north. It has a definite Central Asian feeling, with the distinct suggestion of Mongol hordes massing for pillage. The relevance of this political allegory to apartheid-era South Africa, and the increasingly vicious response of a doomed regime to what it perceives as the enemy at its gates, is clear at once. But what gives the story its universality is the inspired simplicity of the central image, that of a border region between the known and the unknown, and the associated human tendency to demonize what we do not know and then attack the demons. [Read more]

Patrick McGrath, 'To Be Conscious Is to Suffer'

New York Times, 20 November 1994

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive
• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• Coetzee's Summertime: A Disembodied Man
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• J. M. Coetzee on Beckett's Letters
• Dostoyevsky on Politics and Personal Vanity
• Dostoyevsky: A Writer In His Time

Kafka's Last Trial?

The New York Times profiles the legal history of Franz Kafka's unpublished manuscripts

A manuscript page from Franz Kafka's The Trial

Elif Batuman of The New York Times unravels the troubled legal history of the Franz Kafka literary estate:

During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. The Trial came out in 1925, followed by The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border. Thanks largely to Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s slim, enigmatic corpus was gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century literature.

The contents of Brod’s suitcase, meanwhile, became subject to more than 50 years of legal wrangling. While about two-thirds of the Kafka estate eventually found its way to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the remainder — believed to comprise drawings, travel diaries, letters and drafts — stayed in Brod’s possession until his death in Israel in 1968, when it passed to his secretary and presumed lover, Esther Hoffe. After Hoffe’s death in late 2007, at age 101, the National Library of Israel challenged the legality of her will, which bequeaths the materials to her two septuagenarian daughters, Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler. The library is claiming a right to the papers under the terms of Brod’s will. The case has dragged on for more than two years. If the court finds in the sisters’ favor, they will be free to follow Eva’s stated plan to sell some or all of the papers to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. They will also be free to keep whatever they don’t sell in their multiple Swiss and Israeli bank vaults and in the Tel Aviv apartment that Eva shares with an untold number of cats.

The situation has repeatedly been called Kafkaesque, reflecting, perhaps, the strangeness of the idea that Kafka can be anyone’s private property. Isn’t that what Brod demonstrated, when he disregarded Kafka’s last testament: that Kafka’s works weren’t even Kafka’s private property but, rather, belonged to humanity? [Read more]

Elif Batuman, 'Kafka's Last Trial'

New York Times, 22 September 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Kafka Safety Deposit Boxes to be opened
• McCrum on Kafka's Manuscripts
• Kafka Legal Battle Continues
• Smarten up with surrealism
• Kafka's Manuscripts on Trial
• Franz Kafka's Zürau Aphorisms

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Philip Roth's Everyman

Literature:

William S. Burroughs: This month's Featured Artist on A Piece of Monologue
J. G. Ballard on William S. Burroughs
Philip Roth: Interview about new novel, Nemesis, where Roth compares life to a Beckett play
Philip Roth: Interview with the Los Angeles Times on Nemesis
Philip Roth: Review of Nemesis that notes connections between other recent Roth books
Will Self: 3:AM Magazine reviews Self's new semi-fictional memoir, Walking to Hollywood
Will Self: The Independent reviews Walking to Hollywood
Where did the decadent novel go?
Subscribe to The Paris Review
Virginia Woolf Conference: June 2011
Being in Lieu: Jen Craig's new blog on contemporary literature

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Continuum Philosophy: 2011 Catalogue
Derren Brown: Nigel Warburton of Philosophy Bites talks to Derren Brown on 'appearance' and 'reality'
Simon Critchley: An extract that implies a link between Critchley and literary critic Gabriel Josipovici

Film & Television:

William S. Burroughs: BFI screens William Burroughs: A Man Within documentary
Allen Ginsberg: Bringing Ginsberg's Howl to the screen
Samuel Beckett: Harold Pinter stars in a 2006 production of Krapp's Last Tape
Will Self: Documentary covering Self's research for Walking to Hollywood, Obsessed with Walking interviews the author in London and Los Angeles

Theatre:

Samuel Beckett: Krapp's Last Tape opens in London, with Michael Gambon in the lead
Jan Kott: Superfluidities Redux profiles the theatre critic and theoretician
William Shakespeare: Cardiff Shakespeare is now on Twitter
Thomas Bernhard: New York Times reviews production of Bernhard's Ritter, Dene, Voss

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

Philip Roth's Nemeses: Short Novels

Christopher Tayler and Matt Thorne examine Roth's Nemesis alongside his other late work

Philip Roth's Nemeses: Short Novels

In a review of Philip Roth's most recent novel, Nemesis, Christopher Tayler of The Guardian notices an interesting development:

Roth's fifth novel in as many years comes with a reorganised "Books By Philip Roth" page. Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008) and The Humbling have been plucked from their old home under 'Other Books' and assigned, along with Nemesis, to 'Nemeses: Short Novels'. Perhaps these four books are now a quartet, to be published in single volume down the line. If so, they make a harsh and challenging one. Everyman, a stark, ferociously controlled account of the life and death of an anonymous New York ad man, with an emphasis on the death part, is difficult to fault. Indignation and The Humbling, on the other hand, are jaggedly assembled, red herring-littered books, held together mostly by Roth's buttonholing intensity. "The omnipotence of caprice. The likelihood of reversal. Yes, the unpredictable reversal and its power," a character rants in The Humbling (which was reviewed, a bit unfairly, as an exhibition of Harold Brodkey-like sexual grandiloquence). Individuals being destroyed by a cosmic caprice to which their errors of judgment are merely a garnish: this seems to be the tragic model in these two books. [Read more]

Christopher Tayler, 'Nemesis by Philip Roth'

The Guardian, 2 October 2010

Matt Thorne also reviews Roth's Nemesis for the Independent:

For some time now, Philip Roth has been tidying up his past publications page, shuffling his previous books into five main categories: Zuckerman books (novels about his novelist protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman); Roth books (novels about Philip Roth himself); Kepesh books (novels about his academic protagonist, David Kepesh); Miscellany (non-fiction-ish books about writing) and a vaguer category of "Other Books". With Nemesis, he has introduced a new category, "Nemeses: Short Novels", into which he has shuffled three books (Everyman, Indignation and The Humbling) previously placed in the "other" group.

Roth has described these as "cataclysmic" books, in which "you don't die, but everyone else does." But, revealing the arbitrariness of the distinction, he has also suggested that two other recent novels – Exit Ghost (a Zuckerman book) and The Plot Against America (a mere "other book") – would also fit this category. Adding to the confusion, Nemesis, which he describes as a short novel, is - at 280 pages - of greater length than many of his regularly-sized books.

The four Nemeses books do have thematic connections, and anyone who has read Indignation will probably guess the narrative surprise in this latest. They also have a stylistic link, often found in late works: the prose is utterly shorn of any authorial flourish. They represent a tailing-off of the stylistic brio that has marked every novel by Roth since Sabbath's Theatre reminded everyone of the scale of his talents.

Nemesis has a distinctly unpromising set-up. The bulk of the novel takes place in the summer of 1944, and concerns a sporty man, Bucky Cantor, who has become a playground director in Newark, New Jersey. [Read more]

Matt Thorne, 'Nemesis, by Philip Roth'

The Independent, 1 October 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philip Roth talks about new novel, Nemesis
• Where to start with Philip Roth?
• Writers: Philip Roth
• Philip Roth compares life to Beckett play

Philip Roth talks about new novel, Nemesis

Roth on 'old guys writing about cataclysm'

Philip Roth in 2010. Credit: Nancy Crampton / Handout

David L. Ulin of the Los Angeles Times interviews Philip Roth about parallels between his fiction and contemporary politics, his writing career, and the new novel, Nemesis:

Jacket Copy: Some readers considered your 2004 novel The Plot Against America a commentary on Bush-era excess, although you have said that this is not the case. Can we read Nemesis -- which, on one level, is about how fear and hysteria contaminate us -- as an allegory for our current circumstance?

Philip Roth: I can only tell you that I’m not conscious of it. I finished this book 13 months ago, in August ’09, and I began it in August ’08. Things weren’t so hysterical when I began.

I don’t tend to respond to what’s going on at the moment until about 30 years later. I think [my interest in polio] came out of my memory of the fear, and my memory of the parents on the street, the memory of their fear. Because the parents’ fear was much greater than ours. We knew that polio existed, we knew President Roosevelt had it; this was very important in the consciousness of polio. We knew that every summer was blighted by the threat of polio, and we knew somebody was going to get it. But even that we didn’t know. Very rarely did anybody get it in our neighborhood. So we would run off in the morning, hot summer day, to the playground. And there forgot completely, if we even thought about it, forgot completely about polio. It was a strange kind of menace. It was real and it was unreal. And when finally one friend of mine did get it -- I was about 10 -- then it was real to us.

In this way, it is like The Plot Against America because I wanted to think: What would it have been like for us if this had happened? It's a way I measure how lucky we were. I measure how much didn't happen to us. We heard about anti-Semitism, but aside from Father Coughlin being on the radio or something happening to one of our parents when they went out in the world, it was a huge menace that wasn't real. Polio also was a huge menace that wasn’t real.

Now I don’t know whether it's [that] old guys write about cataclysm or not... if you want to use that for your headline...

Jacket Copy: Old guys writing about cataclysm. We've found our theme.

Philip Roth: (Laughs) Well, I don’t know. I don't know what John [Updike] was writing about when he died. Bellow wrote Ravelstein, which is an exuberant book. I don’t like it very much, but it’s exuberant. Hemingway... well, he didn’t publish the last books he was writing -- he left them. He was writing The Garden of Eden, which I think is a wonderful book, and Islands in the Stream.

Islands in the Stream is very good. The first time Hemingway deals with having children, and it’s terrific. The kids come to visit him on his island. They’re all boys in their 20s, or 18 or 19, and the feeling between them is revealed and it’s so strong. He takes them out fishing, and the cataclysm occurs.

So I don’t know whether or not I'm going to do any more cataclysms. [Read more]

'Philip Roth talks to David L. Ulin'

Jacket Copy

Los Angeles Times, 01 October 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Where to start with Philip Roth?
• Writers: Philip Roth
• Philip Roth compares life to Beckett play