Author: DAW
DAW, Lewis Blog #2
The Guardian’s section on ‘Culture’ in the magazine print version of 8th February 2025 contained John Banville’s review of W.G. Sebald’s Essays in Austrian Literature, as translated by Jo Catling. Banville’s tilt at ‘high theory’ – apparently to include the rapt heirs of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, post/structuralism (my hyphen to underscore the deconstructive relationship between these two terms), postmodernism, ‘und so weiter’ – embraces this ‘gnomic’ comment from Sebald himself, and might be relevant to Lewis’s predominant critical/aesthetic category: ‘The invariability of art is an indication that it is its own closed system, which, like that of power, projects the fear of its own energy onto imaginative affirmative or destructive endings’.
Banville doesn’t like this formulation because it’s not sufficiently transparent to its supposed meaning. But what is? Didn’t modernism include making art that pressed up against, and sometimes exceeded, the limits of sense? Finnegan’s Wake? Enemy of the Stars? Postmodernism’s jamming together of disparate ingredients wasn’t exactly lambent, or an example of what Foucault thought of as continuous history. Or am I missing something?
Banville sniffs a category mistake: ‘…to present in the guise of a volume of mainstream essays the spade- work left over from a life of academic toil can only diminish the posthumous reputation of a writer who, in books like The Rings of Saturn and the superb Austerlitz, allowed himself to be one of the past masters from the great age of Mitteleuropean high literature that is now drawing to a close, in its own silent catastrophe.’
So, and once again: it’s closing time in the gardens of the West. Presumably Banville thinks that ‘high theory’ is somewhat responsible because clarity of utterance gave way to impossibly complicated, high falutin’, or smudgy ideas, thus to encourage all that problematizing (old hat buzzword) at the level of language. (Saussure: ‘in language there are only differences without positive terms’, und so weiter.) But for those of us who laboured to understand the 1972 Routledge translation of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (published in 1984) any balm is short-lived. If we really are in a ‘post-theory’ conjuncture what about the histories, nay the historiographies, of ‘theory’ itself? After all, everyone is working with some sort of theory about how to read texts, and through texts phenomena. And post-theory is really post/theory anyway. You can’t go ‘back’ to a text without a theory; it would be a bit like saying you can study ideas without ideology. Banville and others may regret the loss of Truth (philosophically legitimated by Richard Rorty’s anti-foundational neo-pragmatism, where Nietzsche – mentioned by Banville as one of the raptors – is a key player). Yet even under the yoke of our contemporary culture wars, it’s a mistake to force coherence onto disparity or uncertainty. If things are aporetic, you can’t arbitrarily decide that they can be fitted together – it would be like pretending that the world is not dirempted, or that representational systems give unproblematic access to the ding an sich.
Of course, it’s uncomfortable to lose track of ‘common’ sense, especially when you know that things are just so. Perhaps Truth threatens to become merely theistic, yet as with Kant the category endures… In any event defamiliarization remains a vital critical category, and a source of hope. What the Russian formalists called ostraenie (остранение) is a way of recontextualizing the given, to include modes of narrative writing. In Lewis’s case this includes those examples of linguistic brilliance in parts of the Wild Body stories, and later The Apes of God, opening the question of how difference can and should be envisaged in modernist terms. So, and at the risk of being too academic about matters, the obvious meat and drink questions for Lewis bloggers:
- What kind of ‘theory’ do we need to untangle his texts?
- Where is Lewis to be situated in the gardens of the West, especially if he thought they had already closed?
- How are we to assess Lewis’s various political statements in these contexts?
I raise you ten.
DAW