Hotel: A New Journal for Literature and the Arts

Call for submissions

An announcement from Hotel:

A Hotel is defined by its inhabitants: Commenting on the role of the novelist at mid-Century, Alain Robbe-Grillet would declare that the genuine writer “has nothing to say” but rather “only a way of speaking.” Whilst his conceit is here broadly prevalent as an exploratory view of the formalist interests that help us, as readers, discern a view of the Modern work of fiction and its largely self-reflexive interests, its implicit declaration is the apparent “otherness” of the work of art in the contemporary age. This is, of course, a point of contention that secures innovation, experiment, and the avant-garde a subsidiary status that allocates its significance as something only tangible amongst a group of readers privy to a sense of the novel’s history and as such, subsequently, conversations regarding the futurology of the novel’s form are then questions only accorded in the annals of academic culture. HOTEL would take this interest as central to its observations. Robbe-Grillet’s “genuine” writer here equivocates with a “genuine” reader, and this is the key notion that HOTEL would seek to explore. HOTEL seeks to accommodate fiction, poetry and contemporary thought on form, medium and authorial intentionality.

Contact: hoteleditorial@gmail.com

Twelve Seminars with W. G. Sebald

Luke Williams on Sebald as a teacher and a writer

W. G. Sebald

Luke Williams (New Writing) has written a reflective account of his experiences with W. G. Sebald, first as a writer, and then as a creative writing teacher at the University of East Anglia (link via 3:AM Magazine):

I want to write about the two incarnations in which I knew W. G. Sebald: first through his writing, and then through his being my tutor at UEA. When I first encountered his work, in the winter of 1999, I had recently moved to Paris, a city new to me. I had discovered my French was worse than I thought. Having arrived there with no plan, for no clear reason, I was experiencing a sense of mounting frustration and bewilderment.

What was frustrating was not the fact of my bewilderment – I had become used to the sensation – but that I wished to articulate it, and yet had found no way to do so. I did not want simply to forget or overcome my confusion, but, through writing, to examine its complicated paths. And yet the very confusion about which I wanted to write was preventing me from writing anything much at all. Whenever I tried to set something down, my prose seemed bleak and tedious. Reading Sebald offered me a brilliant example: here was writing which spoke honestly about loss and confusion, about a world on the verge of destruction, in a voice that was itself compelling and precise. What is more, Sebald’s voice seemed to recognise the difficulty, even the impossibility, of expressing that sense of loss and confusion, even as he set out to do so.

At the time I was trying to write my way into a novel. I had come to a standstill. I suspect now this was related to the books I had been reading. In my early twenties I had felt drawn to a cadre of writers who had opposed themselves to what has come to be known as literary realism: Fernando Pessoa, for instance, and Natalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Georges Perec, Salman Rushdie. I had no desire to write the kind of novel which tried to imitate reality, at least the ‘realism’ of clock time and easy human empathy and knowing narrators, the kind that flourished in the nineteenth century and which, despite the insights of literary modernism, remains the predominant form.

What I especially resisted was the characterisation in realist novels: it was true that the heroes of those tales were sometimes confused or destabilised, but, it seemed to me, only superficially; because their confusion was not really confusion, not the kind of bafflement I was experiencing, which tended to unsettle all things, all feelings, and which pointed towards silence. No, these writers created a kind of teasing befuddlement, I felt. They toyed with confusion, tamed character and made internal disorder seem ultimately quite knowable.

Books such as Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy or Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children were not so articulate. If they wrote about character at all they wrote of an empty vessel into which conflicting elements might be poured. They spoke of the world and its people not as repositories of meaning but as things impossible for the imagination to grasp. It was a notion to which my sense of bewilderment bore witness. So I wanted my own novel to exist in their company. But – and this is where my problem lay – I also felt tired of the empty play of character or absence of story in these books, which were at times too coolly intellectual, concerned only with abstract structural problems. They rarely gave me pleasure, and less often left me feeling emotionally engaged. What is more, I could not understand how the radical insights these novels offered up – the dissolution of character, the breakdown of language and perspective – could lead to such confident, endlessly playful books.

It was with these thoughts in mind, coupled with my feeling of isolation in a foreign city, that I discovered The Rings of Saturn. I read: ‘Lost in the thoughts that went round in my head incessantly, and numbed by this crazed flowering, I stuck to the sandy path until to my astonishment, not to say horror, I found myself back again at the same tangled thicket from which I had emerged about an hour before.’ I read: ‘he was convinced that everything he had written hitherto consisted solely in a string of the most abysmal errors and lies.’ And this: ‘It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.’ This sentence appears in the end-section of The Rings of Saturn. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: W. G. Sebald
• W. G. Sebald: Writing Tips
• W. G. Sebald on Writing, Memory and Modern Culture
• W. G. Sebald on History, Memory and Austerlitz
• W. G. Sebald Interviewed on Bookworm
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Paul Auster: 'You write sentences, you cross out sentences.'
• Toni Morrison's Writing Routine

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Why I Love Barthes

Polity publishes a new collection of essays on the French thinker

Roland Barthes

In this week's TLS, Neil Badmington reviews a selection of Alain Robbe-Grillet's writings on Roland Barthes. Entitled Why I Love Barthes, the book is edited by Olivier Corpet and translated by Andrew Brown:

This slim volume brings together four texts: a transcription of Alain Robbe-Grillet's talk and the ensuing discussion at the Cerisy conference devoted to Roland Barthes in 1977, and three shorter pieces from 1980, 1981 and 1995. There are internal echoes - anecdotes and phrases recur - and parts of the second chapter appeared in Robbe-Grillet's autobiographical Le Miroir qui revient in 1984.

Having announced his 'shady, suspicious' friendship with Barthes, Robbe-Grillet makes a point that resonates throughout the book: the appeal of Barthes's work lies in its slipperiness, in the way that it 'never stops abandoning positions that it pretends to have won'. Barthes was an eel, he continues, whose writings destroy 'all temptation of dogmatism', closure and certainty. This is no cause for concern: 'Truth', Robbe-Grillet declares, 'in the last analysis, has never served anything but oppression', and Barthes's refusal to be 'an intellectual guru who'd come along to deliver a truth, a message' recast him, for Robbe-Grillet, as a fellow novelist. (The penultimate chapter, from 1995, imagines Barthes alive and busy rewriting Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.)

Neil Badmington, 'Alain Robbe-Grillet, Why I Love Barthes'

Times Literary Supplement, 21 October 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Roland Barthes translated into Txt-spk
• Roland Barthes and the Preparation of the Novel
• Badmington on Roland Barthes and Mythologies
• Roland Barthes on Cafés
• Reading on Roland Barthes on Reading
• Robbe-Grillet: 'Towards a New Novel'

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Woody Allen

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: Volume 2 of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, covering the years 1941-1956, to be released August 2011
Samuel Beckett: Grove Atlantic release The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett: This weeks Ends and Odds from the Debts and Legacies website
Samuel Beckett: BookGeeks reviews the new Faber edition of Company, and other short prose works.
Samuel Beckett: Beckett included in a recent Irish Times article about resistance heroes of the Second World War
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale celebrates its 25th Anniversary this year
Joyce Carol Oates: HarperCollins release Sourland, a new collection of short stories
J. M. Coetzee: Patrick McGrath reviews The Master of Petersburg
Michel Houellebecq: 2010 Interview in The Paris Review
25 words of fewer: 'Hint fiction'
Ian McEwan: Could British novelist's son hold cure for the common cold?
J. G. Ballard: Norton releases The Complete Short Stories in Paperback
Paul Auster: Biblioklept compiles six online interviews with the American author
Paul Auster: Interview with Paul Auster about his new novel, Sunset Park
Paul Auster's favourite books
Paul Auster: Borders interviews Auster about Sunset Park
Paul Auster on Book Reviews: Interview in the Wall Street Journal
Don DeLillo: A review of what is perhaps DeLillo's signature novel, White Noise
English Literature: A very short introduction: Jonathan Bate's guide reviewed in The Independent
AHRC: Funding opportunity for 'a new generation of thinkers'
wwword: A new website for lovers of language and literature

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Assuming Gender: Annual Lecture at Cardiff University, 1 December, free to attend
Simon Critchley: Interview with Frieze
Shakespeare and Derrida: Call for Papers
Roland Barthes on Alain Robbe-Grillet

Theatre:

Samuel Beckett: New production of Happy Days produced by the Corn Exchange in Dublin
Samuel Beckett: Mary Bryden unravels the cultural and historical significance of Beckett's Godot
Samuel Beckett: Queen Elizabeth is reportedly a fan of Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett: Michael Lawrence writes and stars in Krapp, 39, a personal adaptation of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape
William Shakespeare: Fabler Shakespeare Readers in Cardiff

Music

Bob Dylan After the Fall: NYRB reviews writings on Dylan by Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus
Franz Kafka: Review of György Kurtág's Fragments

Film

Woody Allen: Illustrated online biography of the early Woody Allen, 1952-1971

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

Robbe-Grillet: 'Towards a New Novel'

Andrew Gallix on the revolutionary potential of Alain Robbe-Grillet's writing

Andrew Gallix outlines the potential of Alain Robbe-Grillet's step 'Towards a New Novel':

David Shields recently dismissed most contemporary novels as "antediluvian texts" that "could have been written by Flaubert 150 years ago". "In no way," claimed the author of Reality Hunger, "do they convey what it feels like to live in the 21st century."

He has a point – albeit one that Alain Robbe-Grillet had already made in 1965 when he deplored the fact that young French novelists were praised for writing "like Stendhal" but castigated as soon as they refused to abide by the "dead rules" of a bygone age. Along with Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon – the main proponents of the new novel (nouveau roman) – Robbe-Grillet stood resolutely in the second camp. In his essays, he returns time and again to the notion that the novel, from Stendhal to Joyce, has constantly evolved – hence the absurdity of using "the norms of the past" to judge the fiction of today. Far from representing a rejection of the past, the quest for a new novel was thus very much in keeping with the history of a genre which, by definition, must always be renewed.

Feeling that his work was too often misrepresented by the critical establishment (with a few notable exceptions including Barthes, Blanchot and Nabokov), Robbe-Grillet published a series of articles to set the record straight. In 1963 they were collected in Towards a New Novel – for my money, one of the most important works of postwar literary criticism. However, these "critical reflections" were never meant to constitute a manifesto. Every novel, according to Robbe-Grillet, is a self-sufficient work of art which cannot be reduced to some external meaning or truth that is "known in advance". "The New Novel," as he put it, "is not a theory, it is an exploration." Why bother writing a book that illustrates a rule when "the statement of the rule would suffice"?

Quoting Heidegger at the beginning of an essay on Waiting For Godot, Robbe-Grillet writes that the human condition is "to be there". In another essay, he states that it is "chiefly in its presence that the world's reality resides". So there you have it. Man is here, the world is there and the distance between the two lies at the heart of the new novel project. We endow the world with meaning (or meaninglessness) in order to control it. From this point of view, the writer's traditional role was to excavate nature in order to unearth the "hidden soul of things". Robbe-Grillet calls for the creation of a new form of fiction that reflects the "more modest, less anthropomorphic world" we live in today – one which is "neither significant nor absurd," but simply is. [Read the article]

Andrew Gallix, 'In theory: Towards a New Novel'

guardian.co.uk, 13 May 2010

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

Whatever happened to the literary avant garde?

Robert McCrum on the decline of an artistic movement

Robert McCrum has written a short article for The Guardian's online website, mourning the loss of the literary avant garde:

Half a century ago, when Waiting for Godot was the succès d'estime of 1950s Paris and London, Beckett was certainly avant garde, as was his disciple, Harold Pinter. In the UK, next to these innovators, there was the translated work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Fernando Arrabal, author of The Burial of the Sardine. And from the US there was William Burroughs, and the heirs to the Beat generation. You never had to go far in a bookshop to bump into the avant garde, and some publishers – Calder & Boyars, for instance – even made a living out of it (though the less said about their methods the better). From roughly 1950 to 1980, the avant garde was alive and well.

But now what? Nothing to speak of, really. The most surreal news from the world of books is the trade press report that The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, is going to be launched in September from Random House with the biggest ever global first print run (some 6.5m copies) in the publisher's history.

Robert McCrum, 'Whatever happened to the avant garde?'

guardian.co.uk, 20 July 2009

Michel Foucault on Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot'

French cultural theorist and historian on the influence of Samuel Beckett's work

Excerpted from James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault:

Foucault's own youthful epiphany was not nearly so sudden. It all began, as he later recalled, in a darkened theater one night in the winter of 1953.


The curtain went up, and revealed a barren set. Just the skeleton of a tree. On stage appeared two tramps. "Nothing to be done," says one. "I'm beginning to come round to that opinion," says the other.


Of no discernible age or calling, the tramps chatter idly.


"What about hanging ourselves," says one.


"Hmmm. It'd give us an erection," says the other.


"An erection! ... Let's hang ourselves immediately.'


But this exchange, like every other, comes to nothing.


Off stage, a whip cracks. A man appears, leading a slave tethered to a rope tied around his neck. "I present myself," the master says with pompous grandiloquence: "Pozzo"


A play-within-theplay unfolds. The slave will perform. Pozzo jerks the rope: "Think, pig!" The otherwise mute man abruptly lurhces into a shouted soliloquy: "Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell..."


This explosion of words is doubtless the most exciting single moment in a nearly three-hour performance. For the rest, it is a matter of endless waiting - waiting for someone called Godot.


Samuel Beckett's play was the intellectual event of that season in Paris. It rocked the intelligentsia, such as Sartre's lecture on existentialism had eight years before. Night after night, audiences sat solemnly, as if watching a dramatization of Heidegger's philosophy - which is precisely what the young novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet declared the play to be. A farce with the air of tragedy, its vagrant heroes had nothing to do and little to say, their hyponotically boring patter broken only by the slave's mad parody of scholasticism. Offered as a kind of philosophical parable, the play seduced Parisian audiences with its irresistible hints of a deep and important mystery just waiting to be unravelled.


It is obvious, Robbe-Grillet declared in his influential review, that Godot is God: "After all, why not? Godot - why not, just as well? - is the earthly ideal of a better social order. Do we not aspire to a better life, better food, better clothes, as well as the possibility of no longer being beaten? And this Pozzo, who is precisely not Godot - is he not the man who keeps thought enslaved? Or else Godot is death: tomorrow we will hang ourselves, if it does not come all by itself. Godot is silence; we must speak while waiting for it: in order to have the right, ultimately, to keep still. Godot is that inaccessible self Beckett pursues through his entire oeuvre, with this constant hope, 'This time, perhaps, it will be me at last.'"


Shortly before his death, Foucault summed up his intellectual odyssey in these years. "I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology, and existentialism," he said. "For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance."


That this drama of futility, folly, and aborted metaphysics should have suggested the best way yet to escape from Sartre's "terrorism" is not accidental. The world of Godot is a world where the very ideas of freedom and responsiobility have been dramatically emptied of any lingering moral significance. "Moral values are not accessible," Beckett would later declare. "It is not even possible to talk about truth, that's part of the anguish. Paradoxically, through form, by giving form to what is formless, the artist can find a possible way out."


In the winter of 1953, Foucault had yet to invent his own "possible way out." But that would come soon enough. For this time, perhaps, it was himself, at last, that he was finding.