Yesterday, I posted the podcast I did with Calleja about her new book, Fair: The Life-Art of Translation, which is a really fun conversation about a really interesting entry into the subgenre of “books by translators about translation.”

Coincidentally, just after recording that podcast, I was scanning the interview between Warren Motte and Christine Montalbetti from the Spring 2015 issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (an issue that exists thanks in large part to Alex Andriesse, who deserves a post or podcast dedicated to all the work he did for RCF and Dalkey—some of which has yet to see the light of day) when I stumbled onto an article by Jen Calleja about Markus Werner!

I’ll post something else about Werner next week that pertains more to the books of his that were translated and published by Dalkey Archive, but for now, here’s Calleja’s piece on Festland. A piece that is written in a similar voice to Fair, so if you like this—and I’m sure you will—you might want to grab a copy of the quite entertaining and very illuminating, Fair.

“Markus Werner’s Festland” by Jen Calleja

I first crossed paths with Markus Werner when, still wet behind the ears in translation, I reviewed Michael Hofmann’s translation of Zündel’s Exit for the Times Literary Supplement back in the summer of 2015. I’d not heard of Werner, though I was already a firm fan of Hofmann’s translations. Any translation of Hofmann’s is a friend of mine. I reveled in the book about a teacher gone AWOL and literally and figuratively falling apart in Greece, first in English and then in the original, right from page one (“O blankes Parkett” and the “spic and span floor,” “violet spew” and “den violetten Brei”).

I’m currently translating Marion Poschmann’s Die Kieferninseln (The Pine Islands) and I see a lot of Konrad Zündel’s petulant oversensitive nature in Gilbert Silvester, a dissatisfied academic researcher who dreams his wife is cheating on him and less than twenty-four hours later, high on paranoia, flees to Japan with what could be intentions similar to Zündel’s. Hofmann might be describing Gilbert when he says in a foreword to the novel that Zündel’s is “the tragic drama of the highly evolved, the uncontemporary, the thoughtful, the delicate, the unlikely.” With Gilbert, too, there’s the self-pitying whining, though there isn’t the violence, nor the aborted liaisons, and instead of fearing language like Zündel it’s actually the only thing keeping him alive. I celebrate these stories of desperate, unhinged downfalls amid the dull current trend in German-language literature (or maybe it’s been going for a while) of narratives about the aging intellectual running off more out of boredom than despair to find himself, usually in the mind of a woman not even half his age.

When I read the book, I felt that Werner was a huge writer, and almost a personal discovery, as one always feels when the thrill strikes and something arrives out of the blue that grips you, and that this could be him making a new kind of impact in a new, English form. But I have to admit that this acute fizz was followed by a hissing fade—from my mind and, arguably, as this profiling in the Review perhaps confirms, from wider public consciousness. The Werner part of my brain flared up sadly when he died, almost a year to the day after my review came out and a couple of weeks before the translation of Die kalte Schulter (Cold Shoulder) was published.

When I was asked if It like to write something on Werner, it brought all the memories of that great book back, that great writer. I bought his untranslated books and would have liked to have read them all in one go, but the kind of time I have right now wouldn't allow for it. Instead I laid out these four novels from the eighties and nineties, dressed in their painted or penciled Fischer and dtv covers, and tried to divine which one I would like to dedicate some time to in his honor from the blurbs and the first chapter. On that particular day it was Festland, but it could easily have been Froschnacht [Ed Note: Forthcoming from NYRB in Michael Hofmann’s translation as The Frog in the Throat.] or Bis Bald or Der gyptische Heinrich, and their days will also come, in Brockwell Park, or a café, or a bus going to no real destination. It’s not the end for them, it just isn't their time right now. Go back to sleep. And so to Festland, or “Mainland,” or how about: “Dry Land.”

“Whole worlds were between us and yet only fifteen minutes on the tram.” Julia receives a call not from her irritating boyfriend Josef but from her estranged father, Kaspar (“the voice was back”), asking to see her. It turns out they both live close to one another in Zurich and are having simultaneous nervous breakdowns—her after her exams have exhausted her, him after a strange run-in while away from home that has made him stop going in to the office. On the phone, she asks what has happened and he responds he doesn’t know. She goes to visit him and asks him again, what’s been going on, after he’s greeted her in a dressing gown in the afternoon, and he replies, “Not that much actually,” before recounting what had happened to him on his business trip in Vienna the previous day.

He left his luggage at the hotel after he had finished what business he had in Vienna and took a walk, when a dog missing a leg began to follow him. It unnerved him and he tried to shake it off, but the dog was persistent. He entered a shop and bought a hyper-precise watch (a Swiss man buying a watch in Austria?) he had toyed with the idea of getting for ages and decided to get on the spur of the moment—and the dog was waiting for him outside the shop. It followed him to his hotel, even tried to come inside, and as he left to get into a taxi to the station, the dog snapped at his coat. Once in the car he found the watch had a strange, depressing effect on him, he became weak and woozy, when he exited the station in Zurich there were birds tweeting at night, he returned home, called her, showered to get off the sweat.

Julia keeps coming back to talk with her father, and each time he is lying down or unshaved, and yet, though exhausted, seemingly brimming with life The second time she visits he says he’ll tell her a story about her. He recounts saving the life of a victim of a car accident after spotting an overturned lime green VW while riding around on his Vespa in his youth. His selflessness is reported in the paper, Julia is impatient and wants to know what this has to do with her, but he saves the rest of the story for another day, keeping his distance, but also keeping her coming back for more.

Six weeks after the report in the paper, a woman called Lena telephoned him at his parents’ house (he thinks it would do her voice a disservice if were to describe it as “limber and cloudless”) to congratulate him on being a hero. Lena would become his lover, and Julia's mother.

Lena was an interpreter, engaged to a Frenchman, and somewhat out of Kaspar’s league. He never seems to have ever reached her league either. After Lena’s enigmatic death, Julia was adopted by her mother’s parents. They continually referred to Kaspar as the “office boy” while she was growing up; t didn't want her seeing him ever again; they wouldn't even let him in the ho he was nothing more than a “Null.”

Julia wants to talk about “where she came from,” in the sense of why she is who she is, having not really known her parents. Kaspar, for his part, homes in on the erotic, how the erotic bond between him and Lena is where Julia came from, how important erotic love is, how fleeting it is, which she finds unpalatable to say the least. He seems disturbed by the modern woman—there are more and more flâneuses out in the street with “a badge on their bosoms that reads untouchable”—and he reminisces about when it was common and “still allowed” to call someone Fräulein. He’s clear that he’s not talking about forcing himself on women, but on mutual attraction, openness, and the joy of sex. This might all stem from how intimate he and Lena were with one another right from the start, right from their voices mingling on the line, but that for all he and Lena had in sexual chemistry, it ultimately turned out he didn't really know her true feelings and desires at all.

“Fort”—“away”—is the first word of Festland, and it’s repeated throughout the novel. The book is full of escapes: Julia’s grandfather who goes to Florence to die, Julia’s pulsing Fernweh, Lena's exit. Kaspar’s flight is somehow the least expected and yet most wholly predictable one of all. “The protagonists of Werner’s novels have quit their jobs” is the arguably reductive but admirably succinct first line of the brief description of Markus Werner’s body of work on Wikipedia. I like to think that when Werner quit his job as a teacher to become a writer he loved this singular event so much he wanted to relive and recreate it his whole life long. There are writers who write the same book over and over again because they're simply good at it, and to me Werner is one of those writers. I've been holding the line for Festland for years now; for all of us, maybe someone will pick up one day. But for now, do excuse me, I have to wake up the rest of his pack of underdogs and help them make good their escape. Away from here, but where to?

Books Available by Markus Werner in English Translation:

Cold Shoulder

The Frog in the Throat

Zündel’s Exit

I still have Christine Montalbetti on the brain, so I thought I would share this interview from the Spring 2015 issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (Vol. XXXV, No. 1) that she did with Warren Motte—and which goes far beyond anything I wrote about in my piece. She talks about her approach and all of her works that had come out at that time, including the ones that have yet to be translated into English. (But if there is a higher power, then . . . maybe?)

This issue of RCF doesn’t seem to be available online via ProQuest or EBSCO, nor can I find it on Bookshop.org or Amazon . . . which sucks! This is an issue dedicated to Kathryn Davis, Christine Montalbetti, and Markus Werner, and includes pieces by Christine Schutt, Michelle Latiolais, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Xabi Molia, Michael Hofmann, and Jen Calleja (but no “Book Review” section or “Letters for the Editor,” which, alas), and I know there were boxes of this in the Dalkey basement back in 2020 . . .

I’ll definitely post more pieces from this in the future, as well as from some of the other final issues (and, fingers crossed, unpublished yet finished ones) that might also have fallen through the cracks.

A Conversation with Christine Montalbetti

WARREN MOTTE: Christine Montalbetti, I would like to begin by asking you about your work as a whole, but first, I suppose I should ask you if you can think about “your work as a whole,” that is, if you have a sense of your writings as an oeuvre?

CHRISTINE MONTALBETTI: I can indeed think about my books as a whole (but one that is still open and evolving, I hope!).

Sometimes, there are more or less explicit links between one book and another, for example a character who reappears—as Simon does in Expérience de la campagne, without me specifying whether this is the same Simon as the one in Sa fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine (or sometimes, more rarely, there’s the vague homage of a homonym, like a certain Crèvecoeur in Western who echoes the Crèvecoeur in The Origin of Man). Sometimes, too—and here it’s not retrospective but prospective—a sentence or sequence unwittingly announces a novel to come: a paragraph in Sa fable achevée conjures up dreams of “cavemen,” though I had no idea the next novel would be about paleontology; Simon thinks of himself as a cowboy a few years before Western; and the narrator of Nothing but Waves and Wind, who, one night, on the doorstep of the bar, looks up at the moon and thinks of the dog Laika in his shuttle, anticipates the novel that followed, La Vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses.

And then, sometimes, there are diptychs (two Japanese novels, one set in ancient Japan, the other in contemporary Japan), or trilogies (three novels that take place in 2011: Love Hotel, La Vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses, Trouville Casino), or three novels that play with real-life protagonists (The Origin of Man, La Vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses, Trouville Casino), each time with a very different focus, and—if you compare any one of these novels to the other two—a very different ratio of information to fictionalization.

My books form a whole through these connections, and also, I imagine, because they’re always in my voice (and, of course, I also see certain recurrences—like the theme of running away).

At the same time, I try to experiment with something new in each book; each time out, I confront a new problem. That problem isn’t necessarily enjoyable for me, but it’s accompanied by a curiosity, a desire to go off and see someplace else. Sometimes, it’s voluntary and playful (suppose I try to write short stories, a genre that a priori forbids digression, which seems to be the very impetus of my writing? Fine, then here are the Nouvelles sur le sentiment amoureux); other times, I discover it in the course of the work: faced with the avalanche of visual documents, it didn’t make sense to invent even the details of La Vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses, so I quickly set up the constraint that everything in the book would be true. At first, it was painful for me to live with that constraint (I forbade myself the pleasure of fiction, which is to make worlds spring out of sentences—worlds that didn’t exist a few minutes earlier), but then it became more pleasurable, once I found a way of giving imagination its place, while still respecting accuracy.

I think there’s also something vital about changing the terrain of the writing from one book to the next. Something that forces me to renew myself. And something that, at the same time, beyond mere novelty, brings out what’s necessary and constant, the most intimate elements of writing.

WM: Would you care to speak a bit about your literary influences, about writers who may have been important for you in the past, whom you may have read with more than just an amateur’s interest?

CM: I could speak about Claude Simon, whom I read a lot when I was a teenager (I began writing even before that, when I was seven or eight, and I could have started out by mentioning Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five, which has no doubt had more of an influence than I could easily express—and I’m not just joking, but thinking of the landscapes, and little Claude’s identification with a masculine model . . .). But the shock of discovering Claude Simon’s writing, reading The Battle of Pharsalus one summer, in a bedroom in Normandy, the rhythm of his sentences, the descriptive drive . . . Nathalie Sarraute, too, perhaps less directly as an influence, but I always want to pay tribute to her writing, because of the wonderful caution (the concern) it shows toward readymade statements and the reductive violence of certain words. I don’t know whether I can think of an author from an era before my own who’s given me the same kind of impulse to write, but, in any case, in Flaubert I am deeply moved by that dual relationship of his to the novelistic, that fear and that simultaneous fascination of falling right into it. A dual, contradictory commotion, which also inhabits me to some degree, I feel. And then, closer to our time, Jean Echenoz: reading each new book of his delights me. And Jean-Philippe Toussaint, because his use of humor is so singular, and that humor is at the very heart of his sentences.

WM: Your books display a rare hospitality to their reader. I know that your writerly sense of the reader has evolved during the course of your career. Would you care to say a few words about how you imagine your reader?

CM: I’ve said it often, but for me, writing is an act of address.

I’m constantly thinking of the reader when I write. More often than not, I have in mind a blurry, vague form—even if it’s also sometimes (more rarely) the case that I’m thinking of a particular reader I know.

The reader is the horizon of the text, its future, what justifies it. In general the novel sets up a bizarre, quirky, deferred relationship, but it sets up a relationship nevertheless. An author, and then a reader (and then another reader, etc.), ponders over the emotions of a character (or several characters). It’s this weird situation that interests me when I write.

This singular relationship—both impossible and powerful. This link—at once fragile, uncertain, and incredibly intimate.

A text strains toward its reading, and that tension toward the reader is at the very heart of the sort of sentence I write. The possibility of the reader gives it its energy. Not abstractly, like something I’d say to myself sitting at my desk, just before writing, but in its very dynamics. My sentence is addressed to the reader, it takes charge of him and takes him on its way. It supposes him, represents him, titillates him, holds out all sorts of relay batons toward him hoping he’ll grab them. It gives him plenty of room.

The journalist Thomas Stélandre recently pointed out to me (during an encounter at the Montpellier Book Fair) that the phrase “To tell you everything,” which opens La Vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses, essentially sums up the novel’s program: “everything,” which refers to the aesthetic of details, the propensity, in this space mission, to talk about even the “tiniest things”; the desire to tell stories, the presence of the narrator; the presence of the reader. Let’s say that “everything” isn’t present in every novel (quite the contrary, I like shadow zones, uncertainties, open-endedness), but every novel does indeed answer to the proposition: “to tell you.”

WM: You have written quite a bit for the theater. What kind of satisfactions do you find in that sort of work, as opposed to those that you find in writing prose fiction?

CM: There’s something very joyful about writing for the theater.

The performance of the text on stage, the immediate perception of the spectators’ emotions—these are very intense experiences.

There really is something celebratory about it.

Also, the sum of energies engaged, which take over, using the text as a matrix. The actors’ bodies, the director’s involvement, the work of the lighting designer and the sound engineer, the hand that designed the costumes, the hands that sewed them, the presence of the dressers at every performance . . . The whole staging is very moving.

It’s almost a reciprocal gift: I make a gift of the text, and in turn I’m made a gift of its incarnation.

At the same time, it’s also an experience of dispossession. But it’s a joyous dispossession. I don’t want to impose a vision of the text. I think, on the contrary, that a text is only valuable if it contains enough force to bring about all sorts of visions. So I’m not a theater writer who’ll say that the actors have to wear this or that type of costume, for example (I’ve read that now and then). As far as possible, I write theatrical texts without stage directions. To my mind, a stage direction is made to be defied. So it would be naïve (or masochistic) of me to write them.

If I myself had staged the texts I’d written, I’d have selected very different options. But I’m quite happy with what those differences offered me, the doors into new universes that those productions opened for me. They are also readings in action, visible and material readings, to which I suddenly have access (unlike those of novel readers, which take place in the secrecy of their living rooms or bedrooms).

WM: Are there stories that you would like to tell, but which—for whatever reasons—seem to resist the telling?

CM: That is a wonderful question, but I don’t know how to answer it . . . There are things that resist from time to time, but perhaps less because of anything to do with them than because, at that moment, I’m not there, I can’t work up the necessary energy. There are projects that remain unfinished, but usually because another one suddenly seems more urgent to me. There are also some territories I don’t want to visit. Talking about personal emotions explicitly involving relatives, for example. Maybe I don’t know how to do it. But I don’t want to do it, anyway. I don’t want to commit the violent act of turning them into characters. Or directly exposing aspects of their lives.

For three or four years now, I’ve been telling myself I’d like to write about the feeling I sometimes have of coming from another time . . . I began writing fiction on noisy, mechanical machines that must have bothered my neighbors—and which irritated my fingertips. But it’s a tricky subject . . . I can’t find quite the right tone to talk about it both seriously and lightly. A tone that’s not so much nostalgic as surprised. And which allows me to hold this feeling together with the opposite feeling—of belonging just as much to the present time.

WM: In another dimension of your life, you are a professor of literature and a student of literary theory. Has that activity informed your practice of literature in any way? Conversely, has your practice of literature informed the way you teach it, or the way you write about it, when you are working as a critic?

CM: My writing activities inform my teaching methods all the more since, in the last few years, I’ve only been teaching writing workshops at the university. As for the first part of the question—whether my familiarity with literary theory informed my way of writing—it’s a question that’s always troubled me. I think in the United States it’s very common that writers also teach literary theory. But here, I’ve often heard that question as a suspicion, as if I were equipped with a theoretical knowledge that I would then apply (and which, essentially, would sap all sincerity from the act). But it’s not like that at all, of course. For me, the heart of writing is the sentence (to be comfortable in the sentence, to give that comfort to the reader, finding one’s voice). I write in a kind of fog, which is the opposite of the state of clarity, of clarification, proper to the theoretician. I write energetically, in a flurry, in a desire; I’m not in the realm of knowledge, nor precisely in that of thought. Even if, at certain moments in the writing of this or that book, I may run up against a more theoretical question that I find interesting. How to write a novel in which everything is true down to the smallest details while still remaining a novel, for example, in the case of La Vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses. The formulation of that type of question, which sort of pops up in the course of writing, is theoretical, but I don’t use theory to solve it, I work through the question in the very stuff of the sentence.

WM: You have often situated the action of your novels in places other than France: in the United States, notably, or in Japan. How does the notion of place—and particularly the idea of “foreign” place—play into the manner in which you imagine fictional worlds?

CM: I think that writing, for me, is always, to a certain degree, going off to see someplace else. I don’t write about the world closest to me—the world of my little neighborhood—nor, more widely, about Paris, where I’ve lived almost all my life. I don’t think of my writing as the corroboration of a microcosm, which would be mine, and which I would paint with little touches of sociological notation. Rather, in each book, I need to build a fantasy space. To start with my fascination with a place that’s in one way or another foreign to me and work from there. What’s nice about a foreign place is both the excitement its newness produces (the sort of aesthetic shock) and the fact that it’s difficult to understand.

Those two characteristics are linked to the act of writing for me. On one hand, the aesthetic surprise beckons the sentence to express it. It’s energizing. Several of my novels were born out of my encounter with a place. On the other hand, the writing unfolds in the perplexity of this little-known space, in a flurry of exploration. It seeks to formulate words, it advances toward understanding, but toward a cautious, incomplete understanding that preserves the inherent complexity of things—that celebrates this complexity, to some extent.

But what’s foreign to me isn’t only the Oklahoma of American Journal (those flat plains, which fascinate me, because of all the space they leave for the sky, the prairie, which stokes the imagination so powerfully, but also where I wonder if I could live), the West Coast of Nothing but Waves and Wind (the oceanic, volcanic, intense and violent landscape of Cannon Beach in the off-season) or Japan (the predominance of the forest, the paper houses of yesteryear, the docks of present-day Kamogawa). It’s also the countryside. That is precisely what Expérience de la campagne is about—the feeling of strangeness I experience there, coming from the big city. In that sense, all my novels up to now unfold in spaces that maintain a strangeness for me, including my so-called French novels, the first (countryside, seaside) as well as the second (the Picardy of The Origin of Man, whose landscapes I discovered in order to write that novel).

There was also a moment when I realized that the disguises that these places provided (the cowboy outfit of Western, the kimono in L’Évaporation de l’oncle) allowed me to address trauma or painful issues (grief, the compulsion to wander, one’s own as well as that of others) in a playful way, and to invite the reader in turn to re-play his own traumas, but in a space where he could put those disguises on, too.

The literal, geographical distancing also allows me to speak more intimately.

WM: Still thinking about fictional worlds and their ontologies, we readers immigrate easily (in most cases) between those worlds and the phenomenal world, and I imagine that the same is true (in most cases) of writers. Would you like to say something about the kind of dual nationality that literature puts on offer?

CM: That’s a difficult question. The question of nationality is also such a painful question. Such a devastating, deleterious, deadly idea, and this metaphor of “nationality” brings me back to the word’s more concrete meaning. To be a writer is perhaps to situate oneself in a space other than that of nationality. It’s to write with a language (often one’s own, because that’s the one most fully mastered), but free from the hindrance of borders. A language that inevitably taps into the history of its use, where every word chimes with other authors’ usages, a language that serves (most often unconsciously) as a vehicle for imaginary worlds, swallows them up in its sentences, but in such a way that the sentences can catch anything and everything, that nothing in itself is forbidden them, that they are at the greatest of liberties. And to be a reader, too, is to wander freely, without customs or checkpoints, from one fictional universe to another. The reader has total freedom of movement.

As for the movement between the real world and fictional worlds—as for that border—I don’t know. It exists, it has to exist or we’ll all turn into Don Quixotes or Emma Bovarys (which we are also, of course), but then again, it’s overwhelmingly porous. And this porousness is not a question of realism. A soap opera or a television movie are also inscribed in a sociological reality that they may pretend to represent, but they’re miles away from reality, because they offer a totally false version of it, by simplifying it. Literature, on the other hand, reveals the complexity of the real. It simultaneously deforms it (distends it) and restores it. It’s the anamorphosis of the real. We shouldn’t take what so-called airport novels tell us about for genuine coin. Real literature makes reality resonate, its tempos and soundwaves; it makes it vibrate; it tests its timbre.

WM: Thinking about the notion of “conversation,” do you have the sense that you are engaged in a conversation with any other writers, or with artists practicing other media, such as film, or graphic art, or music? If so, what are the boundaries of such a conversation? Is it real, for instance, or is it merely virtual?

CM: Actual conversations? Yes, of course, we have them, we have dinner together (with Eric Laurrent, Tanguy Viel, sometimes Patrick Deville, sometimes Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Roberto Ferrucci, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others besides), and inevitably we talk about (among other things) literature. But do I feel my books enter into a metaphorical conversation with other people’s books? Though it might not please Montaigne or Descartes, I wouldn’t say things like that, because conversation concerns itself with transmitting content, formulating thoughts, explaining a position. That’s not what a novel does. It conveys a vision of the world, which can’t be summarized in a few statements. To me, novels seem more like a concentrate of energy. And it strikes me that the relationship my books may maintain with other people’s books is rather of that nature. Reading a beautiful novel, one beautiful page of a novel, stimulates my own desire to write. It’s as if I were feeling the energy that presided over the other person’s writing and that, to some extent, is passed on to me. A writer friend told me a while ago that when he felt stuck in front of his screen, mired in a paragraph, he got up and went to reread a page of one of my books. Books support each other. I’m not talking about cases where writers say that, when they encounter a problem in one of their narratives, they go to their library to see how other authors have managed a similar problem (that gesture seems a little artificial to me, and, frankly, not altogether honest . . .). I mean the sort of contagious desire to write. The deep joy of creation. That kernel of joy that’s there even in the most painful, tormented books. Even in the hearts of those who’ve claimed to have sweat blood in order to write. Even—or maybe especially—those who’ve demanded cabins built by the seaside in which to live in fierce isolation.

As for the other arts, I have in fact written texts for visual artists, and it’s something that interests me, to tune in to their work and then write a bit of fiction to go with it (the travelogue from the perspective of a photon, for example, for the catalogue of a Jean-Marc Bustamante plexiglass exhibition).

WM: Would you like to speculate about the uses of fiction, or the purposes of fiction, in the world we inhabit, a world where the pressures of the real—the political, the social, the actual—seem to be overwhelming, leaving very little room for anything else?

CM: Fiction may be taking up much more room than we think. It’s moving in everywhere. In politics, too. Politicians construct characters for themselves. They’re drawing from typologies and manufacture characters. (François Hollande, for example, campaigned on the idea that he was a “normal guy”: apart from the fact that the expression doesn’t mean much, it seems to me ideologically debatable, because a candidate for the presidency of the Republic is certainly not—in the act of running for office, in the course of running for office—a “normal guy”; and anyway, that’s not what is asked of him—on the contrary, we want him to have an outstanding capacity for work, an acuity, a rapidity of analysis, expert knowledge that relieves us of having to acquire it in depth ourselves [during this time, thank you very much, we do something else—we write, we dream, we take a walk] and that leads us to entrust him with these powers.) Likewise, the visions that politicians develop invent, in their own way, worlds (utopias, to varying degrees), which they’re going to try to make the real world resemble. In science, too, fiction plays a role one doesn’t necessarily consider: a medical researcher friend of mine told me that scientific research proceeds in part like fiction, because it demands imagination.

Of course, all that has nothing to do with the question of the social status of fiction or literature, which is less impressive by the day. But fiction as the natural movement of thought, as a spontaneous propensity, as a compulsion, constantly animates us. We spend our time making fiction, if only in daydreams. No?

Translated from the French by Alex Andriesse

This is one of the few paid posts on here—which will be made available for free in a month—with the goal of raising money in order to pay contributors to write for this Substack about Dalkey and Dalkey-adjacent authors. This expansion of Mining the Dalkey Archive is still in its early stages, but hopefully by 2026 we’ll be approaching something like Context 2.0. In other words, subscribing to this Substack will allow it to grow and expand—all with the goal of introducing innovative literature from around the world, exploring the “Dalkey aesthetic,” through Readings, Letters from Abroad, Excerpts, Short Reviews, and Essays about Dalkey Archive and the world of nonprofit, indie publishing.

Again, I’m still sketching out how this could work, but if you’re interested in becoming a (hopefully paid) contributor, please feel free to reach out.

One final note: The next Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast episode about Dalkey’s Irish Literature Series will come out in late-August and focus on Alannah Hopkin’s The Dogs of Inishere. Hopkin is Higgins’s widow and author of his biography, A Very Strange Man, which is mentioned several times in the aforementioned podcast. Dogs is available at Bookshop.org and better bookstores everywhere in case you’d like to read along.

But, for now, here’s more information on Higgins’s oeuvre.

Aidan Higgins by Neil Murphy

That time, that place, was it all your own invention, that you shared with me? And I too perhaps was your invention.

—Aidan Higgins, Helsingor Station and Other Departures

More than thirty years ago Aidan Higgins indicated that all of his work followed his life, “like slug trails . . . all the fiction happened,” a comment that implies much more than autobiographical admission. In his earliest fictions, Felo de Se and Langrishe, Go Down, his birthplace, Springfield House, Celbridge, is a recurring setting, and Higgins was also to later acknowledge in his trio of autobiographies that the sisters in Langrishe were actually he and his brothers in fictional drag. Balcony of Europe is largely based in Andalucian Spain, where Higgins lived in the 1970s. Scenes from a Receding Past’s fictionalized setting of Sligo seems suspiciously like the Celbridge of his youth, and Bornholm Night-Ferry and Lions of the Grunewald revisit the northern European landscapes where Higgins lived during the early 1980s, partly under the benefice of Deutsch Akademischer Austauschdienst (Berlin). The fascination with autobiographical detail is obviously more overt in his travel writing and autobiographies as well as in the numerous short autobiographical sketches that he has penned throughout his career. The travel book Images of Africa recounts his journeys in South Africa with a marionette theater company, while the twin texts Helsingor Station and Other Departures and Rhonda Gorge and Other Precipices gather together many short fictions and straight autobiographical pieces. More recently, the author, still “consumed by memories” (Donkey’s Years) embarked on a trilogy of autobiographies: Donkey’s Years: Memories of a Life as Story Told, Dog Days, and The Whole Hog. [Ed. Note: All of these are available in a single volume, A Bestiary.] Everywhere in the work Higgins’s life finds expression, but in such a way that the distinction between autobiography and fiction gradually grows to mean less and less, and in some respects the final part of the autobiographical trilogy, The Whole Hog, reads like a fiction. This is because the traditional demarcations between fiction and reality are constantly confronted in Higgins’s work, and much of the significance of his writing finally rests on his deeply troubled response to the means with which we grapple with a life that so often refuses to be named, either in writing or in living.

When viewed in retrospect, the work of many writers reveals characteristic interests that are revisited throughout their writing lives. One of Aidan Higgins’s primary recurring epistemological concerns has always been with how the past is reshaped by memory and imagination, ensuring that the events recounted in his texts are rarely as poignant as their aftermaths. Furthermore, the fascination with the autobiographical past repeatedly takes thematic shape in dissolved or dissolving love affairs, absent or lost lovers, and a persistent struggle to make sense of the meaning of love. Hence, the defining thematic concerns of love and the past are never absent in Higgins’s fictions and are usually present in his travel writing and autobiographies. More significant perhaps are the formal implications that emerge as a result of his fascination with love and memory, both of which, as exemplified by Higgins’s various heroes, are intricately related to a range of epistemological issues that are the defining components of his work. The past in Higgins’s fictional universe is a deeply problematic concept, replete with puzzlement at its inaccuracy and dismay at its irrevocable passing and the essentially dreamlike status that he finally accords to it. The pastness of the accounts of his narrators’ various love affairs have a resounding impact, so much so that most of Higgins’s mature fiction seems consumed with the problem of how to locate a form to accommodate the strangeness of a life that is frequently incomprehensible, forever on the point of departure, but always somehow anchored by bright moments of love, however brief. Thus Scenes from a Receding Past and Balcony of Europe initiate Higgins’s lifelong defiance of linear narrative and use instead spatial narratives, more familiar to the visual arts, in the hope that some sense can be communicated by building extraordinary images from which networks of binding associations can emerge. Similarly so with Bornholm Night-Ferry, in which Higgins maximizes the particular advantages of the epistolary novel to evade the limits of sequential narrative and conventional characterization. This persistent desire to locate some kind of narrative structure that manages to contain, without distorting, the author’s vision of life is what is most intriguing about Higgins’s work on a formal level. His most recent novel, Lions of the Grunewald, revisits familiar subject matter, but fashions it in a way that is reminiscent of, though not as extensive as, the self-reflexivity of Calvino or Nabokov. In addition, the novel is structured around a series of seemingly disparate elements, like dream sequences, historical detail, digressions, and imagined conversations with real figures, all of which are tentatively held in place by the narrator’s troubled, but playful, consciousness. Ultimately, Higgins appears intent on exploring what consciousness means in terms of its relationship to the events we call life. The extraordinary factor that underpins all of Higgins’s work, finally, is the belief that his own reality is already an elaborate fiction, and thus the traditional distinction between fiction and reality is itself a ruse, a polarized game with which most writers seem to be engaged. If reality is already a fiction, a fluid, extraordinary one, how does the artist respond? This seems to be the defining question in all of Higgins's work, and the pitch of the question intensifies as the work matures.

The primary focus of this essay is Aidan Higgins’s fiction, an aim that is complicated somewhat by the enormously significant contribution to his work that his autobiographical writing represents. In addition, Higgins has reissued, relocated, and revised much of his writing in several ways, something that poses significant difficulties to serious readers of his work. For example, the first collection of stories, Felo de Se, was originally published in the U.S. as Killachter Meadow and later reprinted as Asylum and Other Stories. Some of the material from Felo de Se is included in Helsingor Station and Other Departures (most notably the stories “Killachter Meadow” and “Lebensraum”) and in the collected fiction and prose, Flotsam and Jetsam. Ronda Gorge and Other Precipices contains many autobiographical echoes of Bornholm Night-Ferry and also includes a reprint of Images of Africa, the early travel book. Many of the short fictions and prose pieces of Helsingor and Ronda Gorge are reprinted in Flotsam and Jetsam, and the stories of Felo de Se again reappear, though they are renamed and revised. Almost all of the material in Helsingor and Ronda continually echoes the novels. All of this is not to suggest that Higgins simply recycles his work. He has continually revised, added new material, and even renamed some of the shorter fictions and has, as he says in the Apologia to Lions of the Grunewald, tended to transplant “fugitive Ur-fiction” into its “proper context, relocated from embryonic themes.” The process appears to be all to Higgins.

Forced by necessity to choose one of the “versions” above the others, I have selected those that appear in their “proper context,” which generally means in the final versions of the novels, though in the interest of mapping development I have focused on the earliest versions of the stories that appear in Felo de Se. No doubt, however, a certain degree of revisitation is inevitable in work as integrated as Higgins’s. For this reason, I do not offer close analysis of Helsingor and Ronda, both of which are almost entirely comprised of work, or versions of it, that is found elsewhere in the novels and stories. Similarly with Flotsam and Jetsam, which is essentially a collection of short fictions and prose pieces that have all appeared elsewhere, though again, many have been revised.

[. . .]

Langrishe, Go Down

As with the embryonic story, Langrishe, Go Down retains the big-house themes of decay and inertia, and much of the imagery powerfully evokes the collapse of a class. The brief love affair between Imogen and Otto in “Killachter Meadow” is now a tempestuous relationship that stands at the center of the novel and radiates much of the text’s significance. Higgins also constructs a tragic tale of the dissolution of a culture, depicting the anguished passing of Ascendancy values into the modern world. In fact, Higgins’s attempt to evoke the plight of the Langrishe family gains some of its impetus from this traditional genre of decay. However, he avails of the genre only in a formal sense. There are many layers of significance in the novel that resonate far beyond the traditional theme of decay, as Vera Kreilkamp has convincingly argued by suggesting that Higgins redefines the form and reinvents it. Kreilkamp also accurately suggests that the author is ultimately concerned not just with his own birthplace, but with history itself: “In its most painful moments Langrishe, Go Down is about the loss of historical memory, and even more painfully, about living in a world where history itself has been transmuted into the debris of civilisation. For Stephen Dedalus, ‘history is a nightmare,’ for Helen Langrishe, history consists of the dead monuments of a dead culture.”

The big-house genre, a powerful symbol of transience, is used by Higgins as an extended metaphor that reaches beyond the social and historical. For example, Helen’s memory constructs an ordered movement that leads to her present situation, a movement in which little changes, “variations apart (the passing of her parents, the death of Emily), in the immutable order of events.” This is the source of her ultimate tragic disintegration. Her memories are sterile, and thus she has almost nothing with which she can sustain herself. Imogen’s musings on Helen, after she dies, elucidate the sad condition of her life: “And is it not strange, most strange, that a life which can be so positive, so placed, going on for years, seemingly endless, can one day go; and, which is strangest of all, leave little or no trace?” Thus Higgins’s positioning of his characters within the big-house framework allows him to approach the deeper epistemological concerns that always inform his work: the significance and unreliability of memory, the difficulty of knowing one’s existence, and the flood of transience that challenges such attempts to know one’s life.

Higgins’s fascination with the nature of memory and transience is mirrored in the novel’s structure, begun in medias res and followed by an analeptic account of Imogen and Otto’s doomed and torturous love affair, allowing us to witness the grim reality of a fading life, half-lived-out through clinging to frail memories. Again, this emphasizes the centrality in Higgins’s work of the relationship between memory and the historical past. Richard Kearney, in analyzing what he calls the postcritical novel, a tradition to which he asserts Higgins belongs, registers the problematic nature of this relationship: “Once this distinction between word and thing was deconstructed by Joyce and Beckett, the distance between the narrator’s subjective consciousness and the historical world which motivates the narrator’s quest for meaning in the first place-was greatly diminished.” Higgins registers the “distance between subjective consciousness and the historical world” throughout Langrishe, Go Down and in doing so creates the tension that lingers at the core of the novel: “The memory of things—are they better than the things themselves?” Imogen believes so: “Of that time, what do I remember now? What can I recall if I try? Was he good to me? Yes. He was good to me; good for me; kind and considerate.” In part 2, when Imogen’s narration is superseded by an anonymous narrator, the more objective rendition of Otto’s behavior indicates quite a different tale, revealing that Imogen’s subjective consciousness has greatly refashioned historical actuality. During one of Otto’s typically sensitive moments, he addresses Imogen: “You’re so soft, Otto said, staring before him with a vindictive face. Some soft spineless insect that’s been trodden on. I can feel you beginning to curl up at the sides.” The memory of things for Imogen is surely better than the things themselves. By depicting the difference between the actuality and the mind’s conception of it, Higgins implies the necessary consolatory nature of memory, which functions as a kind of automated panacea for human consciousness. Reality is relativized by the human imagination not simply in the act of telling, but in the act of self-preservation.

The past in Higgins’s novel is an evasive entity. It may affect the present, but it cannot be captured, and thus the lessons it can teach are indistinct at best. Patrick O’Neill incisively evaluates Higgins’s approach: “However, for Higgins, the big house theme is clearly not just a realist portrayal of the decline of a passing age of grace, beauty and culture—though it certainly is that—but also a symbol of the inevitable dissolution of all order, all form.” O’Neill’s analysis contains the kernel of Higgins’s endeavors. Langrishe, Go Down acknowledges that the lines of communication are down between word and thing, between the individual and his or her past, between perception and reality. It also accepts the artificial nature of human ordering systems and registers Higgins’s allegiance to flux. O’Neill extends his view of Langrishe, Go Down to include such matters: “This suggestion of the immutability and indifference of things, the essential existential irrelevance of human beings and their concerns, is repeated through the narrative in the attitudes of the Langrishe sisters.” The bleakness of Higgins’s vision finds utterance in the meaningless lives of most of his characters, who plod desperately onward. They exist on the periphery in a modernist, Godless, loveless universe, where all those things with which humanity comforts itself are absent, except memory, to which they cling tenaciously.

Langrishe, Go Down acknowledges the inheritance of Beckett and Joyce, and it accepts the frailty and transience of human ordering systems, but ultimately it evokes a message of hope, however meagre, for humanity and its ability to communicate. All of these aspects are constituent parts to a multifaceted fiction that always retains a power to generate discourse. Its value lies in the fact that it has the power to communicate the demise of a major cultural occasion and tells a moving and often sympathetic account of the lives of the Langrishe girls, Helen and Imogen in particular, while also acknowledging that order and the act of recapturing the past are problematic concepts. As such, the text attempts to fuse two seemingly paradoxical arguments. It accepts and assimilates the critical heritage of Joyce and Beckett while attempting to retain the act of representing the world. The central significance of such an approach is that the limitations of knowledge and communication must be named, but history cannot be discarded, flawed though it may be as a representative act. Higgins, all too aware of Beckett’s reductionist tendencies, refuses to abandon an engagement with reality despite his foregrounding of the intellectual modes and communicative methods with which we construct that engagement. Thus with Langrishe, Higgins still maintains dialogue with his world and yet takes as his primary emphasis the instability of reality, both in terms of human consciousness and in the forms we construct to contain our experience.

[. . .]

Scenes from a Receding Past

With Scenes from a Receding Past, the autobiographical web spins backward in time to the pre-Balcony of Europe years, on occasion even to prenatal times. Dan Ruttle is resurrected, as are his parents, siblings, and wife, as is Molly Cushen, with whom Otto Beck has an affair in Langrishe. Not only do fiction and autobiography collide, so too do fictional worlds themselves. In Scenes from a Receding Past the treatment of the past is similar to that in Balcony of Europe, and the author also returns to the big-house genre. In many ways Scenes from a Receding Past regroups many of Higgins’s previous concerns, particularly memory, and expresses them in another way. The epigraph from Richard Brautigan is a telling foretaste of things to come:

I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then.

I’ve been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.

In an attempt to understand the nature of transience, Dan attempts to reconstruct his youth by means of spatial narrative, recreating images of the past via a selection of ostensibly random vignettes. This reconstruction hinges on generating resonant images, like the chilling account of his brother Wally in a mental institution, a fate shared by his mother. What emerges through this kind of arrangement is a profound sense of despair, dissolution, indicating a deep sense of pathos in the face of human suffering, and, above all, the gradual drift of time. Later, when Dan meets Olivia, the reality of his lost youth is clearly expressed in contrast with his sense of her life: “Her past, obscure enough, had become more real than my own.” However, through his desire to possess his wife Olivia, he learns the insurmountable difficulties of communicating past events: “From my own imperfect memory, from no notes, from distractions and places, from my love of her, from her own retellings, emerges this rigmarole: her past that is more real than my own.” Or so it seems, and yet it too is a fabrication synthesized from all the means he has available to him. Through Olivia, the assumptions of traditional realism are exposed: “That was her past, part of it, as she told it to me, as I remember it, or what I remember of it.” Olivia’s past is qualified three times, questioned three times. Her version is a qualification, as is his memory, as is the selective nature of his memory. The inability to locate the past is a cause of grief to Dan, but nevertheless he continues piecing together the hazardous shreds of memory. In doing so, he demonstrates how his attempt to write her biography is essentially a work of imagination. The veracity of Dan’s account is thrown into disarray by his insistence on re-creating exacting landscapes from Olivia’s Past: “That place, your home, I can’t imagine it. You lived there in a house I cannot quite see, walking in an overgrown garden in the heat.” He can’t imagine it, yet proceeds to build elaborate scenarios. The implications that such a pursuit have for the reconstruction of his own receding past are clear. From the author’s opening note, which refers to, “those gentle times, those guileless gossoons, [which] are now consigned to oblivion,” the realistic aims of the narrative are intentionally deflated. Furthermore, the nature of the narrative itself, first-person present, creates the possibility of unreliability. Does an eleven-year-old boy think in terms as exotic as those espoused by the child Dan?: “Overhead huge white clouds are piled up, vasty citadels, white castles loom.” But Scenes from a Receding Past, like Balcony of Europe, is not a realist novel, rejecting as it does temporal sequence and causal logic in its attempt to say the past.

For example, when Dan is first absent from his home, Nullamore, he imagines it to be a source of unchanging order: “I miss Nullamore. I think: The place that never changes.” However, as with much else in the text, time dismantles the cosy certainties of his home: “It’s vacation. Nullamore seems to have shrunk.” Dan’s education begins here. That first certainty, familial security, fades, or rather Dan’s imagining mind dreams Nullamore into a kind of superreality that the actuality cannot match. His desire for certainty is frequently evident in the text, as is his dismay when he cannot achieve it. Discovering a fixed reality in a photograph, in the midst of change, he is astonished: “Nothing can change or disturb her. She is perfect, naked and coolly regarding me. Her expression does not change. She watches me.” This much-cherished certainty is not to be found in reality, but the desire for order finds its mirror image in an awareness of chaos. By the conclusion of the novel, acute awareness of disorder has forced Dan to an accommodation with impermanence:

Hold onto nothing; nothing lasts.

Long ago I was this, was that, twisting and turning, incredulous, baffled, believing nothing, believing all. Now I am, what? I feel frightened, sometimes, but may be just tired. I feel depressed quite often, but may just be hungry.

All but blind

In his chambered hole

Gropes for worms . . .

The closing image of a blind mole groping for worms suggests that Higgins’s accommodation is far from joyous, and the bleakness of his vision is clear. The author burrows deep into the past in an effort to comprehend his life and in doing so confronts the opaque reality of memory. All but blind, he understands the volatility of life and records it as such.

Higgins’s major themes of transience, memory, and decay emerge once again, although Scenes from a Receding Past responds to the issues of memory and transience in a more direct way than its predecessors, because it is less restrained by their concessions to form, however innovative. Fundamentally, Scenes from a Receding Past is a fictionalized autobiography that foregrounds and formally illustrates the essential problems associated with reconstructing the past. In formal terms it is less strictly literary than Balcony of Europe or Langrishe, Go Down in that the author seems less concerned with interweaving binding associations and images. Higgins presents much incidental detail, including lists of boarding-school requirements, cricket scores, and much particularized geographical data. The only binding force is the narrator himself and the images that emerge in the telling, like Proustian madeleines. George O’Brien also comments on these qualities in the novel:

All that Higgins unrhetorically intends to claim, it seems, is that certain materials insist on presenting themselves—memories, vignettes, moments, quotations, gossip, arcana, rage, pleasure, boredom, love. . . . Higgins seems to say there is only the world, the other; the writer, clerk-like (attentive rather than subservient), takes—rather than raises—its stock. He proceeds in the direction of that nakedness which is more familiarly the painter’s objective. Simplicity and directness unveils while leaving intact. . . .

The author allows the randomness of reality to reveal itself. Much is omitted from what might constitute a life story. Thus the form of the novel depends on the interrelation of the moments presented. The threads of association are not strong, and beyond Ruttle’s selective consciousness, there is little in the way of unity—there are only “Impressions” which “offer themselves, focus, slip away.” Is this sufficient to bind a work of art? In a rare moment of overt self-reflexive advice, the narrator reveals himself: “Do as I tell you and you will find out my shape. There are no pure substances in nature. Each is contained in each.” The essential unity in nature, he implies, is the source of his shape. The artist who allows landscapes to reveal themselves, rather than attempt to interrogate their meaning, lets the chaos of the past life and the universe seep into the fiction. Freeing itself from the formal restraints of the novel genre, Scenes from a Receding Past aims to be just what its title suggests, scenes, and not a life bound together by illusory sequential narrative or the imposition of synthetic structures in search of order. In Scenes from a Receding Past Higgins begins to remove the frame from his pictures, a precarious activity, considering the essentially formal nature of fiction writing. He clearly attempts, in Scenes, an escape from the novelists’ guild, from the technical strategies with which the world is transformed. It is of little surprise, therefore, that Higgins takes an even greater technical risk with the novel that immediately follows and writes an epistolary novel, hardly the genre of choice among late-twentieth-century novelists.

[. . .]

Autobiographies

Although this essay is mainly a consideration of Higgins’s fiction, the nature of his frequent conflation of fiction and autobiography demands that his trilogy of autobiographies is offered some brief consideration, because, as he says, “stories . . . make up my life and lend it whatever veracity and purpose it may have.” In his trilogy of autobiographies, Donkey’s Years, Dog Days, and The Whole Hog, Higgins effectively abandons the transformative conventions of the fictive mode and writes what Dermot Healy calls “a straight narrative” account of the first half of his life. Because Higgins has always blurred generic differences between the novel and autobiography, he knows, of course, that there are technical differences between the masking process of autobiographical fiction and his autobiography, in which certain events “have become my own stories again.” However, the author’s subtitle to Donkey’s Years reveals his continued unwillingness to render that difference absolute: Memories of a Life as Story Told. This implies much, as does his description of Donkey’s Years: “this bogus autobiography, bogus as all honest autobiographies must be.” In fact, Higgins, having reclaimed his “own stories,” seems gleefully unwilling to allow them conventional autobiographical status, embedding, as he frequently does, slyly subversive comments throughout the trilogy, as in Dog Days: “Reality is concreteness rotating towards illusion, or vice versa, arsyversy; illusion rotating towards concreteness.” Again, of course, it is not as simple as a rejection of the possibility of representation. For Higgins, the story must be told, but as precisely that, a story. And it is all about stories: local folklore, private yarns that act as belief systems, rumors, “the greatest of all whores,” and how people are sustained throughout their lives not by accurate and true versions of reality, but by conceptions of themselves, stories of themselves. People live in narrative, play out their public and private conceptions of themselves in various narrative models. For example, the Bowsy Murray, local hero, is here described by Higgins with irony and humor: “The act of throwing a stumpy-booted and gaitered leg athwart the low saddle was a grave gesture both ceremonial and heraldic, man and machine (wrapped in symbolic flame, suggesting Mercury) emblazoned on some obscure escutcheon invoking Subordinacy, Humility, Obeisance, Homage, Destiny, Victualler!” The world and its inhabitants come to us as creatures who live by their own conceptions of themselves, often informed by ready-made models, like the heroic Bowsy, and Higgins’s ever-discerning eye witnesses a kind of prolonged story in the process of unfolding. It is his job to communicate a sense of the grand charade. And he does so with tenderness and sympathy.

Much of the material in the trilogy is familiar to readers of Higgins’s fiction, though certainly not the same. The autobiographies sometimes elaborate on or explain incidents in the fictions, offer fresh nuances, and add further “real” detail. Higgins’s youth, in various stages, throughout all three volumes, generates many connections with the early fictions, while The Whole Hog clarifies some of the events in Bornholm Night-Ferry and Balcony of Europe. Much of this is interesting to Higgins’s readers, but doesn’t really explain the curious power of the texts. The final volume in particular is immensely powerful, partly due to the delightful variety of writing styles, formal arrangements of material, and darkly comic undertow. The Whole Hog is a composite of intimate letters, lists, anecdotes, diary entries, imagined reconstructions (“Borges and I”), farewells to departed friends, inscriptions on cemetery headstones, observations on Karen Blixen and Djuna Barnes, among others, and a variety of curious takes on history. That the author manages to retain intelligibility is testament to his enormous gifts as a storyteller.

The curious texture of these most unconventional of autobiographies reminds one yet again of Higgins’s uncompromising writing. Consumed by memories, Higgins has sought to offer up a powerful sustained gaze at the life of Rory, as he calls himself in the trilogy. Predictable in his insistence of writing it as he understands it, sees it, the autobiographies are no mere accompaniment to the fictions, no simple gesture of clarification. Instead, the trilogy, autobiographical in name, paradoxically convinces one of Higgins’s masterful narrative craft and reminds one of his recurring insistence that life is already a fiction as one lives it. The implications for the genre of autobiography are clear.

Passing, as it does, through various developmental phases, Higgins’s work inevitably challenges simplistic categorization. In Langrishe and Felo De Se he bears witness not simply to Irish history and his own experiences, but to the demise of a culture in Europe, informed as much by the world wars as by the decline of the Ascendancy in Ireland. It is all connected for Higgins. In addition, his writing has always responded to modernist epistemological problems, especially those of memory, language, and perception. No doubt he learned valuable lessons from the modernist identification of language with experience and has perpetually sought to locate a fictional medium to frame his vision. However, in his quest to discover a framing narrative, the author has sought to avoid the mythic structuring devices preferred by modernism and rarely uses archetypal framing stories in his work. He has also generally refrained from highly stylized linguistic constructions like the dramatic interior monologues of Joyce or the informing symbolism of Woolf. There is, of course, a cost when one seeks to dispense with recognizable narrative order. Gradually, his work has blurred the generic differences between the novel, autobiography, and travel writing to the extent that it challenges the view that narrative points of recognition are necessary for the preservation of human discourse.

Ultimately, Higgins’s work suggests that one can write about one’s experiences without freezing them in some fixed order. The human reception of experience is an intensely complex phenomenon, and literature must confront that fact. Reacting against Joyce’s stylized example of Ulysses, Higgins is certainly influenced by Beckett's desire to accommodate the fragmentary nature of life, but again, Beckett’s example is only partially accepted. Where the world is an apocalyptic memory to many of Beckett’s heroes, Higgins’s characters are always situated in recognizable social landscapes. His characters and plots almost always have corresponding “real” referents, while those of his illustrious predecessor don’t.

However, Higgins’s work does display some of the technical characteristics of postmodern fiction. His epigraphs, allusions, overt epistemological questioning, and direct addressing of writerly matters are all self-reflexive acts. The flaunting of artifice gradually increases in Higgins’s work until in Lions the text draws attention to its own textual nature to such an extent that reality ostensibly becomes a product of the artistic mind, and while this represents Higgins’s primary fascination, it is also the source of the doubts about his final worth as an artist.

Admired by writers as varied as Beckett, Dermot Healy, Annie Proulx, John Banville, Harold Pinter, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and Thomas McGonigle, Higgins is also the winner of the James Tait Black Memorial prize (Langrishe, Go Down), the Berlin Residential Scholarship, the American-Irish Foundation Award, and the Irish Academy award, and he was short-listed for the Booker prize (Balcony of Europe), as well as being a member of Aosdána and a recipient of grants and bursaries from the Irish and British Arts Councils, all of which suggests a career that has been offered due recognition. Unfortunately, Higgins remains something of a peripheral figure in the literary world, or as Annie Proulx has observed, “Some pair him gingerly with Joyce and Beckett, some accuse him of not having yet written the Total Book, or of untidy endings, of density and melancholy, of abrupt stops and over-portrayal of frustration and accidie.” Higgins’s uncompromising artistic adventures partly account for such floundering neglect, because while book reviewers frequently cannot but acknowledge the extraordinary beauty of his prose, many appear simultaneously puzzled by the abrupt shifts in time and space and the perpetual retreat from linear narrative. In addition, his reputation in Ireland has not been helped by the frequent abandonment of Irish landscapes, and it is unsurprising that Langrishe, with its deeply Irish landscapes, remains his best-known novel in Ireland, despite him having penned a dozen books since then. Even the grand master, Joyce, planted his experiments in an Irish setting.

In Higgins’s writing human experience is already a fiction in the living (and remembering) of it. He does not, finally, differentiate between life and fiction, because life, once apprehended, is already a fiction. The question is how to communicate that apprehension. In refusing to avail of recognizable literary conventions in communicating his vision, Higgins effectively breaks the coded agreement between reader and writer, and in doing so, he erases many points of recognition necessary for the reader. In this, Higgins has always been uncompromising, illustrated by his chosen artistic direction after the commercially successful, and relatively accessible, Langrishe, Go Down. Above all, Langrishe proves that Higgins is, and has always been, more than capable of erecting formal structures. More important to the author is the need to construct a form that will accommodate his conception of a life that is characterized by fragmentation, transience, and unpredictability as much as it is by moments of illumination, love, and the residual effect of the past on people’s lives. Traditional narrative forms generate too much order to accommodate such a vision, and modernist artistic order essentially replaces one system for another. Thus Higgins risks incoherence in his writing in order to speak of a fragmentary life. Ultimately, his success depends on one’s conception of the purpose of art. Does art impose ordered structures upon human experience, metaphorical, social, or otherwise, as acts of consolation in the face of disorder? The very essence of narratology implicitly suggests this. If Higgins, like Beckett in this, refuses to construct consolatory narratives in the face of uncertainty, does it mean he has failed as an artist? I think not. In his effort to articulate what he sees as the essence of human life in narrative form, he does what all important writers have done: he finds a form that is appropriate to his vision. To berate Higgins’s work for refusing a transformative ordering system neglects to value his efforts to strike up an honest and meaningful dialogue with his experiences, surely the mark of all important writing of integrity. The success of his formal arrangement of his material is dependent on the author’s vision, and surely the act of reading is not simply an act of recognition—it is also an act of exploration during which we discover rather than simply recognize. Ultimately, this is the challenge that Higgins has offered us, a challenge to which, I suspect, many more readers will eventually rise.

Neil Murphy’s complete piece can be found in the Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. XXIII, No. 3 (Fall 2003).

Selected Works by Aidan Higgins

Balcony of Europe

A Bestiary

Blind Man’s Bluff

Bornholm Night-Ferry

Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air

Dog Days (included in A Bestiary)

Donkey’s Years (included in A Bestiary)

Felo de Se

Flotsam & Jetsam

Helsingor Station & Other Departures

Images of Africa

Langrishe, Go Down

Lions of the Grunewald

March Hares

Ronda Gorge & Other Precipices

Scenes from a Receding Past

The Whole Hog (included in A Bestiary)

Windy Arbours: Collected Criticism

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Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form