I.
IN THE INTRODUCTION to his 1973 masterpiece Crash, J. G. Ballard ponders what he calls “the balance between fiction and reality.” “We live,” he writes,
in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.
The paragraphs that follow are a little disappointing, as Ballard unquestioningly endorses, firstly, a psychologism (the writer “offers the reader the contents of his own head”), then a positivism (he must “devise hypotheses and test them against the facts”), then a moralism (the main purpose of his novel is a cautionary one, a warning against a brutal technological future)—all of which isms now seem both dated and misplaced. But there’s still something here we can hold onto; something vital. And it hinges on this word invent. Ballard doesn’t tell us that a novelist should “discover” or “intuit” or “reveal” reality: they must invent it. Reality’s not there yet; it is something to be brought forth or produced; and this producing is the charge, duty and stake of writing.
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about reality in fiction; or reality versus fiction; a hunger for the real; a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t; and so on. I find this talk enticing and frustrating in equal measure. Actually, not in equal measure: I find it more frustrating than enticing. That half a century after Foucault’s relentless charting of the constructedness of all social contexts and knowledge categories; or, indeed, a century and a half after Nietzsche’s lyrical unmasking of truth itself as no more than “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymics, anthropomorphisms . . . a sum of human relations . . . poetically and rhetorically intensified . . . illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions”; not to mention other landmark interventions we might think of (those of Marx, Derrida, Lyotard, Kristeva, Deleuze-Guattari, and so forth)—that after all these, such simplistic oppositions can be proffered in the name of critical reflection on the novel is disheartening. It seems to me completely meaningless, or at least unproductive, to discuss such things unless, to borrow a formulation from the “realist” writer Raymond Carver, we first ask what we talk about when we talk about the real. And the first move in this direction would be to unpick the very terms the real, reality, and realism.
II.
Let’s start with realism, since it’s the easiest target of the lot—a sitting duck, in fact. What is it? It’s a literary convention—no more, no less. As such, it’s as laden with artifice as any other literary convention. Ford Madox Ford, in a passage from Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, brilliantly skewers the implicit claim a certain prose style—that of realism—makes to faithfully and objectively reflect, capture or report on historical events and mental activity:
Life does not say to you: In 1914 my next-door neighbour, Mr. Slack, erected a greenhouse and painted it with Cox’s green aluminium paint. . . . If you think about the matter you will remember, in various unordered pictures, how one day Mr. Slack appeared in his garden and contemplated the wall of his house. You will then try to remember the year of that occurrence and you will fix it as August 1914 because having had the foresight to bear the municipal stock of the City of Liège you were able to afford a first-class season ticket for the first time in your life. You will remember Mr. Slack—then much thinner because it was before he found out where to buy that cheap Burgundy of which he has since drunk an inordinate quantity though whisky you think would be much better for him! Mr. Slack again came into his garden, this time with a pale, weaselly-faced fellow, who touched his cap from time to time. Mr. Slack will point to his house-wall several times at different points, the weaselly fellow touching his cap at each pointing. Some days after, coming back from business you will have observed against Mr. Slack’s wall. . . . At this point you will remember that you were then the manager of the fresh-fish branch of Messrs. Catlin and Clovis in Fenchurch Street. . . . What a change since then! Millicent had not yet put her hair up. . . . You will remember how Millicent’s hair looked, rather pale and burnished in plaits. You will remember how it now looks, henna’d: and you will see in one corner of your mind’s eye a little picture of Mr. Mills the vicar talking—oh, very kindly—to Millicent after she has come back from Brighton. . . . But perhaps you had better not risk that. You remember some of the things said by means of which Millicent has made you cringe—and her expression! . . . Cox’s Aluminium Paint! . . . You remember the half empty tin that Mr. Slack showed you—he had a most undignified cold—with the name in a horseshoe over a blue circle that contained a red lion asleep in front of a real-gold sun. . . .
Once we’ve stopped snickering at the conjunction of the words Slack, erect and Cox (which, given the coy erotics of the passage, the way Millicent moves and stirs beneath its link-ups, strikes me as far from accidental), we have little choice, whatever our aesthetic disposition, but to surrender to Ford’s argument. This is, of course, exactly how both events and memory of them proceed: associatively, digressing, sliding, jolting, looping. William Burroughs makes the same point when discussing his cut-up technique:
Take a walk down a city street. . . . You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows—a montage of fragments . . . Consciousness is a cut-up; life is a cut-up.
He’s right as well: we don’t walk down the street saying to ourselves “As I walk down the street, comma, I contemplate the question of faith, or adultery, or x or y or z.” A paradox emerges: that the twentieth-century avant-garde often paints a far more realistic picture of experience than nineteenth-century realists ever did. A second paradox, though, is that realism’s founders (if not their descendants) fully appreciate the scaffolding of artifice holding their carefully-wrought edifices up, and take delight, from time to time, in shoving poles and ladders through the parlor windows. Flaubert may have written Madame Bovary, but he also wrote Bouvard and Pécuchet, in which two semi-educated men try to translate a series of cultural paradigms (“being” a gentleman gardener, “being” an aesthete or a lover) into experiences that they might live (or re-live) in an “authentic” manner, even reenacting the postures from book illustrations in their bid for this imagined authenticity—with effects as farcical as those produced by their own sixteenth-century predecessor Don Quixote. Balzac may have generated all the counts and countesses of his comédie humaine—rounded characters that have prompted countless readers to express their admiration for the way they seem to live and breathe as though imbued with life—but his novella Sarrasine is a ruthless laying bare of the very mechanism through which this fantasy (that of the “natural” and complete) operates. In mistaking a castrato—an inherently in complete being, a simulacrum that has no original—for the most genuine and unadulterated embodiment of woman, whom he then adopts as the source and origin of his own art, the sculptor Sarrasine enacts the system-error at the source of realism itself. When his error is revealed (in a move that imbues not life but death), both he and Balzac’s readers are confronted with the fact that (as Roland Barthes puts it in his seminal 1970 reading of Balzac’s piece) “realism (badly named, at any rate often badly interpreted) consists not in copying the real but in copying a (depicted) copy of the real . . . through secondary mimesis, [it] copies what is already a copy.” It is surely no coincidence that Bouvard and Pécuchet are, like Melville’s Bartleby, trained as copy-clerks.
The biggest paradox here is that the nineteenth-century realists seem to have taken a counter-realist impulse much further than the twentieth-century anti-realists. While both Ford and Burroughs post some kind of fundamental claim to depict lived life accurately, to have helped pioneer new and radical ways of doing so, Balzac and Flaubert whip the rug out from under the very possibility of doing this in any way at all, radical or not. What opens up beneath the place where this co-weft-and-warp of life and art once stood, the place we wrongly thought a solid floor was, is an abyss, endlessly regressive, of code on code, convention on convention, reading of reading of reading. (It’s telling that Flaubert’s last text, the endpoint to which this trajectory carries him, his final template for both literature and life, is nothing other than a dictionary: the Dictionary of Received Ideas into which Bouvard and Pécuchet tapers off.) That such blatant and splendid takedowns of naturalism, such eviscerations of any notion that writing might operate as a faithful, penetrative rendering of a reality itself unmediated, are written right into the source code of the realist tradition makes the naive or uncritical realism dominating contemporary middlebrow fiction, and the doctrine of authenticity peddled on creative writing classes the world over, all the more simple-minded.
III.
So much for realism. What, though, of the real? In a short scene from Nabokov’s novel Ada (a multilayered tale of brother-sister incest), the young hero Van visits the shop of Mrs. Tapirov, yet another copyist: people bring her objets d’art and antique furniture and she makes faithful reproductions of them. As I wrote this essay I couldn’t remember what it was that Van has brought for Mrs. Tapirov to copy; digging out my copy of the novel, I realized that Van doesn’t remember either, that Nabokov has deliberately elided or left blank the spot, actual or conceptual, in which original should stand. As Van waits to collect his goods, he idly strokes the flowers sitting in a vase on the counter—imitation ones, of course, like everything else in the shop—and suddenly finds himself
cheated of the sterile texture his fingertips had expected when cool life kissed them with pouting lips. “My daughter,” said Mrs. Tapirov, who saw his surprise, “always puts a bunch of real ones among the fake pour attraper le client. You drew the joker.”
An extraordinary scene, intensely (or, once more, regressively) allegorical. The term mimesis has an ancient connection to a type of flower (the mimosa’s contortions when touched were said in Aristotle’s time to mimic the grimaces of mime); Mrs. Tapirov’s artificial bloom-bunches not only imitate real ones but also stand for imitation itself, for all artifice, not least that of fiction-making. And there’s a real one hid among them: a real one pretending to be a fake one pretending to be a real one. Within this playing deck constantly being shuffled and re-dealt, a joker lurks that, like a shark, might break surface and leap out at you, jaws snapping, at any time: the real. What is this real, though? In a novel as full of Russian childhoods as Ada is, albeit ones grafted onto East-Coast America, cross-pollinated by a mish-mash of linguistic transpositions, genetically modified by encrypted literary histories and watered with variants on Nabokov’s own name, it’s tempting to ascribe to this real the contours of some personal family secret; to ascribe by extension to the novel, and perhaps to Nabokov’s whole oeuvre, the status of Mrs. Tapirov’s shop: an emporium of simulations and reflections in which this real might be paraded right before le client, remaining hidden by being disguised as the copy of what it actually is.
Alternatively, we could go less literal and instead think sideways or inversely, discerning another set of contours: ones whose coordinates are outlined in negative, by not being drawn. Perec’s La Disparition famously contains no letter e—not only the letter most used in French (as English) prose, but also the core of the words père and mère. Both of Perec’s parents having fallen victim to the Nazis (father in battle, mother in Auschwitz), several critics have astutely heard in the French e its homophone eux, them. The real that lurks beneath the playfulness and play thus becomes, in this instance, both a personal and a historical one, the joker card a marker for the twentieth century’s least funny moment. The same real—in particular the holocaust—could be attributed to all of Beckett’s work, whose unnameables and catastrophes and air full of cries convey the horror and unspeakability of this event to which they never refer far more profoundly than the directly representational writing of, say, Primo Levi. The claim of an exterior historical facticity to embody a work’s unspoken real is most lucidly stated, ironically enough, by one of Nazism’s intellectual architects, Carl Schmitt, who, writing on Hamlet, sees in the murder of James I’s father a lodestar or true north that, although absent in the text itself, orients all its compasses, making England—or, rather, Scotland—the real of Denmark, and the real of medieval Danish politics the modern Elizabethan court.
This line of thinking is both appealing and risky: appealing because it frames the fictional text as a cryptic and negative space haunted (like Elsinore) by the ghost of what it has excluded; risky because it sails close to the rocks of biographical or historical reductionism: find the real, “solve” the work. It’s not the fact that James I’s father was murdered that makes Hamlet monumental, nor some putative incestuous episode in Nabokov’s past that renders Ada rich and captivating. While I don’t want to lose sight of this version entirely, I’d like to think of the real in more structural terms. Michel Leiris, in his essay “Literature Considered as a Bull-fight,” compares the writer to a toreador. Imagine a bullfight without the bull: it would comprise a set of aesthetic maneuvers, pretty twirls and pirouettes and so forth—but there’d be no danger. The bull, crucially, brings this to the party; and for Leiris, that’s the real: the tip of the bull’s horn. He, too, goes on to disappoint, by proffering candid exposures of intimate personal peccadilloes as instances of dalliance with bullhorns—a confessional logic that would elevate Oprah’s sofa to the high throne from which all writing was assessed and legitimated. But, once more, there’s something to hold onto here. Leiris’s conceit is rich in ways that even he seems not to realize. Think about it: if a matador is gored, the bullfight, its entire spectacle, suddenly shudders to an appalled halt; what the bull’s horn brings to the party is not just danger but also the very thing that would catastrophically interrupt the party, plunging craft into chaos. If the bullfight is an analogue for literature, and if the bull’s horn gives us a vision of the real (and I concur with Leiris on both these propositions), then it’s a vision of the real not as a fact or secret, nor as a correspondence between the writer’s work and the empirically-understood world, but rather an event that would involve the violent rupture of the very form and procedure of the work itself. This rupture—nota bene—is emphatically not the same thing as authenticity.
Given that I started this whole essay with Ballard, I’d suggest that Crash enacts, in its finale, something close to this sudden intercession of the catastrophic real. The novel’s hero Vaughan, compulsive simulator of other people’s car crashes (Jayne Mansfield’s, Albert Camus’s, James Dean’s etc.), which he repeatedly re-stages with consummate skill and stylization (which makes him as much a proxy for the figure of artist or writer as Leiris’s matador), plots a “perfect” car crash in which his own vehicle will collide with Elizabeth Taylor’s (not a stand-in this time, but the actual actress—that is, the genuine stand-in) at the precise moment of his orgasm: a supremely-wrought marriage of techné, spectacle, sex, death and all the rest. He finds out when her car will pass such-and-such a spot, and plots the angles and trajectories and speed at which his own must meet it—but, disastrously, gets it fractionally wrong, misses her by inches and drowns in his own blood. Thus Vaughan, who has been in thousands of car crashes, meets with his first—and final—accident. The matador is gored; the shark breaks surface and wreaks havoc; a real of the type that I suggest we should embrace and celebrate punctures the screen or strip of film, destroying it: a real that happens, or forever threatens to do so, not as a result of the artist “getting it right” or overcoming inauthenticity, but rather as a radical and disastrous eruption within the always-and-irremediably inauthentic; a traumatic real; a real that’s linked to repetition; a real whose framework of comprehension is ultimately neither literary nor philosophical but psychoanalytic: the real that Lacan defines as “that which always returns to the same place” and as “that which is unassimilable by any system of representation.” The challenge, for the writer, would never be one of depicting this real realistically, or even “well”; but of approaching it in the full knowledge that, like some roving black hole, it represents (although that’s not the right word anymore) the point at which the writing’s entire project crumples and implodes.
IV.
The same question persists though: what would this real be? What form might it take? Leiris’s own writing might point us toward one possible answer: matter. In the “Critical Dictionary”—note Flaubert’s final literary model resurfacing—Leiris and his co-author Georges Bataille (whose own short novel Story of the Eye contains the most stunning matador-goring episode in all of literature—forget Hemingway), imagine a dictionary that would “begin when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks.” One of the more notable of these “tasks” (I’ve recently tried to unpack this in relation to Joyce’s writing) comes under the heading “Formless,” which envisages existence as a relentless and ongoing process of deformation that releases objects, and the world, the entire universe, from all categories and classes of the knowable and denotable until it “resembles nothing”; and envisages a philosophy and aesthetics, or counter-aesthetics, that would affirm this formlessness. Viewed from this position, a thing’s real would be touched in its own materiality: a sticky, messy and above all base materiality that overflows all boundaries damming in the thing’s—and everything’s—identity, and thus threatens ontology itself. “Matter,” Bataille writes elsewhere, “can only be defined as that non-logical difference that represents in relation to the economy of the universe what crime represents in relation to the law.”
Van’s flowers, by this measure, wouldn’t be a portal through which the real enters; rather, their smelly, pouting, wet-lipped, finger-smudging physicality would themselves constitute the real; facticity would reside in them, or explode out of them, splattering Van with a real-ness that neither Mrs. Tapirov’s craft-emporium nor the entire architecture of Ada could manage or contain. Bataille’s real is the material real that Francis Ponge spent his entire creative life failing to manage, the failure itself forming the raison d’être of his work. What happens when something as dumb and simple as an orange undergoes “the ordeal of expression”? he asks, his phrasing giving equal weight to two senses of “expression”: “representation” and “squeezing.” Unlike a sponge, he tells us (éponge in French; once more, the writer’s own name is encrypted here), which gathers its form back again, the orange loses its. Its cells are crushed, its tissue ripped; there is spillage; but a husk remains; and, on the squeezer’s part, a bitter sensation of seeds ejaculated too soon. The orange’s facticity imposes itself on the expresser, yet can’t be mastered or possessed by him—not empirically or mimetically or in any other way. Despite its debasing—indeed, in its very baseness—the orange, like Wallace Stevens’s plum, “survives its poems.” Stevens also turns to oranges, and in a surprisingly similar way: in “The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade” the fruit becomes the pithy counterpoint to the regimented order of whatever ideology or program in whose name the soldiers march; an interruption that allows the intercession, as the poem’s final couplet puts it,
Of the real that wrenches,
Of the quick that’s wry.
V.
For Heidegger, drawing on Hölderlin, “poetically man dwells.” In other words, poetry is not a representation of life, nor an embellishment of it, but rather the very mode and measure of our coming into being. Being, like poetry—or, rather, Being-as-poetry—entails a process of revealment (albeit one that unfolds in concealed form), through which reality is (to repeat the formulation I used earlier) brought forth or produced. To which we should add that this bringing-forth takes place, as the writers whom I’ve discussed here suggest time and again, in relation to a real that is resistant to this very process. I’ve spoken of this real in terms of trauma, and I’ve spoken of it in terms of matter—and it strikes me that in fact these aren’t really two separate subjects or categories. For Freud, psychic trauma is a quite material phenomenon, for the good reason that the entire field of mental existence is a material one: by 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he’s winding every organism, ours included, back to its core status as “an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation”; the central nervous system back to its core function as an “ectoderm” or outside skin that serves as “an organ for receiving stimuli” or “excitatory traces”; and he writes of embryology, of earliest marine life, germ-plasms and protozoa, ciliates and infusoria, storing and replaying “the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun.” Reprising these thoughts five years later in “A Note Upon The ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’ ” he describes “cathectic innervations” being “sent out and withdrawn in rapid periodic impulses”; describes how, jellyfish-like, “the unconscious stretches out feelers, through the medium of the system Pcpt.-Cs., towards the external world and hastily withdraws them as soon as they have sampled the excitations coming from it.” But what’s most astonishing, for me, about these medusozoan images is the fact that Freud houses them in a longer meditation on a reusable notepad consisting of a “slab of dark brown resin or wax” over which lie, firstly, a layer of translucent waxed paper and, secondly and outermost, a transparent piece of celluloid, such that inscriptions may be both kept and (on the paper although not the dark brown slab) erased. This is his decisive model for consciousness and, ultimately, for life. We are all writing machines, jellyfish included. In fact, jellyfish especially.
VI.
I want to leave you with, for reasons that will be abundantly clear, a short sequence from what I think might be the great—or at least the most greatly overlooked—mid-twentieth-century British (or rather, once again, Scottish) novel. Early on in Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book, the junky narrator embarks on a strangely Proustian sequence of perception and recall in which, watching a man urinating in a New York alley, he becomes
like a piece of sensitive photographic paper, waiting passively to feel the shock of impression. And then I was quivering like a leaf, more precisely like a mute hunk of appetitional plasm, a kind of sponge in which the business of being excited was going on, run through by a series of external stimuli: the lane, the man, the pale light, the lash of silver—at the ecstatic edge of something to be known.
Here is everything I’ve just been talking about: sponges; plasm; stimuli; the shock of impression; consciousness as photo-synthesis plus the reenactment of that primal trauma—all of which are brought into alignment and hypostatized by the act which is the actual and obsessive subject of Trocchi’s book: namely, the act of writing. The sequence kicks off a second recall-loop, an analepsis to an Edinburgh pub into which the narrator once followed another man whom he’d seen slipping something glinting back into his pocket as he emerged from an earlier (or, if you like, more primal) alley, and the (very Heideggerian) image of the narrator’s fingers following the outline of a woman’s body carved by a blade in rough wood (“I hadn’t known wood so intimately before”)—a loop whose eventual folding back into the present dictates that the narrator take the urinating man back to the scow or barge on which he lives and sleep with him. Just prior to the seduction, he tells us of the first man pulsing through the second:
I experienced a sly female lust to be impregnated by, beyond words and in a mystical way to confound myself with, not the man necessarily, though that was part of the possibility, but the secrecy of his gesture.
Not to “capture” or “decode” the gesture: to confound himself with its secrecy. Revealed concealment. This confounding, and its replay in the present, Trocchi tells us, is not just an “act of remembrance” but also “a making of significance” that generates each “fact” as “a selected fiction, and I am the agent also of what is unremembered.” The scow on which they make love floats on the “black ink” of the Atlantic; inside it there is virtually nothing: just a single bed, a coal stove, cupboard, dresser, chair and table—and a typewriter.
2014