Tessera

Morris Collins @morriscollins.bsky.social · last mo.

The history of the novel, the history of music as (World Cup?!) football match (in Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed (1993)) [1/2]

The Two Halves
The history of European music covers about a thou-
sand years (if I take as its beginnings the first experi-
ments in primitive polyphony). The history of the
European novel (if I take as its start the works of
Rabelais and Cervantes) covers about four centuries.
When I consider these two histories, I cannot shake the
sense that they developed in rhythms resembling, so to
speak, the two halves of a soccer game. The caesuras,
or halftime breaks, in the history Of music and in that
of the novel do not coincide. In the history of music,
the break stretches over a big part of the eighteenth
century (the symbolic apogee of the first half occurring
in Bach's The Art of Fugue, and the start of the second
half in the works of the earliest Classical composers)
the break in the history of the novel comes a little
later: between the eighteenth and the nineteenth cen-
turies—that is, between Laclos and Sterne on the one
side and, on the other, Scott and Balzac. This asyn-
chronism shows that the deepest causes governing the
rhythm of the history of the arts are not sociological or
political but aesthetic: bound up with the intrinsic
nature of one art or another; as if the art of the novel,
for instance, contained two different potentialities (two
different ways of being a novel) that could not be
worked out at the same time, in parallel, but could be
worked out only successively, one after the other.
The metaphor of the two halves of a game came to
me some time ago in the course of a conversation with
a friend and does not claim to be at all scholarly; it is
an ordinary, elementary observation, naively obvious:

from my essay on Kafka & Scholem & also an inspiration for my novel The Tavern at the End of History, which asks what use are our accounts of our experience. What can the novel say/what can be expressed? 1/

Dubyedee@wdclarke.bsky.social · last mo.

Also, this passage about our non-identity with those wishes/desires tutelary angels might have for us, instantly brought mind Todd Friendly’s backward-facing and - living Soul in Martin Amis' novel Time’s Arrow

According to Scholem there is a Talmudic tradition in which "the
personal angel of each human being represents the latter's secret self
and whose name nevertheless remains hidden from him This angel,
to be sure, can also enter into opposition to the earthly creature to
whom he is attached." So, whoever we are—and we are someone! We
have a secret self! We have a way we should be living!—we Will remain
mysterious to ourselves. Bleak, but no surprise: who among us has lived
as we wished? That is, we can't take our unfolding, which occurs
almost exclusively in the future, for granted, and to encounter our
angel, our secret self, is never easy: it shimmers with accusation,
protest, catastrophe.

Morris Collins @morriscollins.bsky.social · last mo.

Kafka's birthday is prob. a good time to repost this essay about Kafka, Jewish mysticism, and the difficulties of knowing how we should be living...

Dubyedee@wdclarke.bsky.social · last mo.

A superb meditation on how our imaginations mysteriously lead us on, through lives non-identical with those visions of ourselves which we cannot help but harbour (+ a phantom skeleton key to @morriscollins.bsky.social 2nd novel, The Tavern at the End of History?!) substack.com/home/post/p-...

I wrote about the life of the artist in Virginia Woolf's novel, The Voyage Out open.substack.com/pub/wdclarke...

Reading the Readers in The Voyage Out, by Virginia Woolf

The Tyro Novel as Psychomachia

open.substack.com

Most novels... (Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed)

Kafka’s Angel

In a letter to Walter Benjamin from Jerusalem in 1934, Gershom Scholem included a poem he had written about the relationship between Kafka’s The Trial and Jewish mysticism.

substack.com

On Cory Doctorow' book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (Capsule review & Partial/Tendentious Glossary) substack.com/home/post/p-...

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow

A Capsule review & Partial/Tendentious Glossary

substack.com

My Jane Austen Spring wdclarke.substack.com/p/my-jane-au...

My Jane Austen Spring

Ditching pride, unlearning prejudice, I finally take the plunge into AustenWorld

wdclarke.substack.com

I wrote some stuff on two books by Milan Kundera: A Kidnapped West (2023) and 89 Words (2025)... blog.wdclarke.org/a-kidnapped-...

A Kidnapped West and 89 Words by Milan Kundera (a rant followed by some notes)

A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe (2023) I am writing from a small nation which is currently under threat, not only from the Orange Buffoon who wants a 51st, 52nd and 53rd State (as i…

blog.wdclarke.org

Eric Williams@geoliminal.bsky.social · 2mo ago

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a bonesmashing Chad in possession of a polymarket account, must be in want of a foreign AI girlfriend

Statelymaxxed, plumpmogged Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing an iphone on which tiktoks played.

The Novelist (89 Words, Milan Kundera, 2025) ((A earlier draft of/supplement to a keywords list found in his The Art of the Novel, link to my midrash of which in reply))

NOVELIST (and the novelist's life). ' 'The artist must
make posterity think that he never existed, " Flaubert
said. Maupassant prevented his portrait from appearing
m a series of famous writers. 'The private life of a man
and his face don't belong to the public," he sald_
Hermann Broch said the following about himself, Musil,
and "Not one of us has a real biography. : : This
doesn't mean that their lives lacked interestmg events,
but that their lives weren't destined to be distinguished,
to be public, to become life-writing. When Karel Capek
is asked why he doesn't write poetry, he says: "Because 1
hate talking about myself The distinctive characteristic
of a ncnellst is they don't want to talk about themselves.
"l hate sticking my nose into the Intimate details of the
lives of great writers: and no biography can ever remove
the from my life," Nabokov said. Italo Calvino
warned others: he 'vas resolved to never say a single true
word to others about his life. And Faulkner wanted "to
be a nobody, kept out of history: leaving no trace at all,
other than what is in my books. (Let's emphasize
'books" and ' 'publlshed,:: and not manuscripts, letters:
and journals.) According to a famous metaphor: the
novelist destroys the house of his life in order to build
another with its bricks: die house of novels. With this in
mind: the biographies of a undo what the
novelist did: and redo "hat he had undone. Biographies,
which add nothing to art, cannot bring light, value, or
meaning to a novel. When Kafka attracts more attention
than Joseph K _ , then his posdlumous death IS undenvay_

aid*n @henribergson666.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The Novel's Beauty (Milan Kundera, 89 Words, 2025)

* BEAUTY (and KNOWLEDGE). Those who say, along with Broch,
that knowledge is the novel's only moral end are betrayed by the metallic
aura of the word "knowledge," which is compromised by its connections
to science. More is needed: the novel discovers every aspect of existence,
including beauty. The first novelists discovered adventure. It's thanks to
them that adventure seems beautiful and something we want. Kafka
described the situation of a person who is tragically trapped. Those who
study Kafka used to argue a lot about whether the author was giving us
any hope or not. No, no hope. Something else. But Kafka discovers how
the unlivable situation is both strange and full of black beauty. Beauty:
the last possible victory of a person who has lost hope. Beauty in art: the
light subtly emanating from the never-said. This light suffuses great
novels; there will never be a time when it fades because, human
existence being perpetually forgotten by people, the discoveries of
novelists, even when they become dated, will never cease to amaze us.

yay

Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 3mo ago

There is a gulf (Arnold Bennett, Literary taste How to Form It, 1909)

60
LITERARY TASTE
find them—I may as well out with the word—
dull. You may have found Lamb less diverting,
less interesting, than you hoped. You may have
had to whip yourself up again and again to the
effort Of reading him. In brief, Lamb has not,
for you, justified his terrific reputation. If a
classic is n classic because it gives pleasure to suc-
cecding generations of the people who are most
keenly interested in literature, and if Lamb fre-
quently strikes you as dull, then evidently there
is something wrong. The difficulty must be
fairly fronted, and the fronting of it brings us to
the very core of thc business of actually forming
the taste. If your taste were classical you would
discover in Lamb a continual fascination; where—
as what you in fact do discover in Lamb is a not
unpleasant flatness, enlivened by a vague humour
and an occasional pathos. You ought, according
to theory, to be enthusiastic; but you are apa-
thetic, or, at best, half-hearted. There is a gulf.
How to cross it?

Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 3mo ago

[If]

a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he
could write what he chose, not what he must, if
he could base his work upon his own feeling and
not upon convention, there would be no plot, no
comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe
in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button
sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged ;
life is a Luminous halo, a.emi-transparent•- envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to
the end. Is it not the task of thc novclist to convcy this
varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit,
whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with
as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?
We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity;
we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is
a little other than custom would have us believe it.

Stephen Hayes @marlowe7.bsky.social · 4mo ago

New blog is up today : stephen-hayes.ghost.io @officialqwf.bsky.social @montrealcomiccon.com @crimewriterscanada.bsky.social @mtlreviewofbooks.bsky.social @cultmtl.com @cjlo.com @piucaffe.bsky.social @salondulivrequebec.bsky.social @knowltonlitfest.bsky.social @mysterywriters.bsky.social

Stephen Hayes

Homebase for writer/director/radio host Stephen Hayes

stephen-hayes.ghost.io

Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Today is the day! (From Leonard Cohen'snovel, Beautiful Losers)

Morris Collins @morriscollins.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Really gratifying to be read so well, by such a good writer, in such great company. I esp. appreciate the mention of the book's prose--it's what I care most about...and what seems to get mentioned least in reviews. Thank you, Caleb!

Caleb Michael Sarvis@cmsarvis.bsky.social · 4mo ago

On Mark Z. Danielewski, @morriscollins.bsky.social, @avnerlandes.bsky.social, @legroff.bsky.social, Camille Bordas, and Brock Clarke. open.substack.com/pub/calebmsa...

Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I'll imagine this flock of wild turkeys as domestic so I can legit refer to them by the clearly superior "Rafter of Turkeys"

Yoon Kim @yoonkim.bsky.social · 5mo ago

"come-at-able" [Emma, Jane Austen (1816)] #c18th #18thc

After these came a second set; among the
most come-at-able of whom were Mrs. and
Miss Bates and Mrs. Goddard, three ladies
almost always at the service of an invitation
from Hartfield, and who were fetched and
carried home so often that Mr. Woodhouse
thought it no hardship for either James or the
horses. Had it taken place only once a year, it
would have been a grievance.

The word *literature* has no origin. […] I will have devoted my life to an elusive prey whose name had no meaning, no use, no function, no design, no origin, no end. — Pascal Quignard, L’Homme aux trois lettres (2020)

Feels apropos somehow

The Parthian Dart:
Endings and Epilogues in Fiction
PA T ROGERS
MY TITLE refers to the sense one gets at the end of many
traditional novels that the author is walking backwards
out of the narrative, vacating textual space at his or her
conclusion by reversing the perspective or redirecting the
angle of one vision on events. The technique may loosely be
called Parthian in that the author has saved up some of
his or her best shots until the moment of departure (there
is commonly a ceremony of leave-taking). Moreover, the
reader is Often on the retreat as well: as soon as the credits
come up, we head for the exit, craning over our shoulders to
catch the final words. But the emphasis here will be on the
writer's end of things.

Authors, Critics (fr W.H. Auden, The Dyer's hand)

If good literaly critics are rarer than good poets or novelists, one reason
is the nature of human egoism. A poet or a novelist has to leam to be humble
in the face of his subject matter which is life in general. But the subject
matter of a critic, before which he has to leam to be humble, is made up of
authors, that is to say, of human individuals, and this kind of humility is
much more difficult to acquire. It is far easier to say—"Life is more
impoltant than anything I can say about it"—than to say—"Mr. A' s work is
more important than anything I can say about it. "
There are people who are too intelligent to become authors, but they do
not become critics.
Authors can be stupid enough, God knows, but they are not always quite
so stupid as a certain kind of critic seems to think. The kind of critic, I mean,
to whom, when he condemns a work or a passage, the possibility never
occurs that its author may have foreseen exactly what he is going to say.

New Left Review @newleftreview.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Last day on the river this year... 14C and perhaps 40mm of rain tomorrow :(

In NLR 157: an interview with Ervand Abrahamian. A leading historian of modern Iran on the power structures of the Islamic Republic and the long-incubated American-Israeli assault. newleftreview.org/issues/ii157...