Naive Counter-Manifesto
by grandhotelabyss
What, then, is so terrible? The stalls of the marketplace provide a fascinating babble, a white noise for a well-adjusted lifetime. Let a thousand flowers bloom, etc. Perhaps the demise of Literature marks the end of a certain need. Perhaps we should give up the ghost. To what end do we require the pantomimic wraith of the poète maudit, the leering shade of Rimbaud or Lautréamont with its bottle of absinthe and its bloodshot eyes? For the pragmatic among us, the end of Literature is merely the end of a melodramatic model, a false hope that has gone the way of psychoanalysis, Marxism, punk rock and philosophy. But for the less pragmatic among us, we realise— we experience—what has been lost. Without Literature we lose Tragedy and Revolution both, and these are the two last best modalities of Hope. And when Tragedy disappears, we sink down into a gloom, a life whose vast sadness is that it is less than tragic. We crave tragedy, but where can we get it when tragedy has given way to farce? Shame and scorn are the only response now at literary readings to literary manifestos. All effort are belated now, all attempts are impostures. We know what we want to say and to hear, but our new instruments cannot hold the tune. We cannot do it again nor make it new since both of those actions have telescoped to equivalence—we are like circus clowns who cannot squeeze into their car. The words of Pessoa ring in our ears: ‘Since we are unable to extract beauty from life, we attempt at least to extract it from our incapacity to extract beauty from life.’ This is the task given us, our last, best chance.
–Lars Iyer, “Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss (A Literary Manifesto After the End of Literature and Manifestos)”
But everything has always been impossible. This is the problem with strong historicist and culturalist arguments: they’re written as if pain were somehow less real in other times and places. As if Sophocles or Dante or Woolf were able to do what they did because they faced fewer obstacles than we do. It turns the achievements of the past into products of luck, the canon into a gallery of welfare queens who lazily sucked down the privileges of coherent societies and smaller libraries and who thus didn’t really deserve to write works of enduring energy. Whereas we hyperboreans breathe the alpine air of our abstract society, and our parched ephemeral snow-scratchings testify to the integrity of our almost-entire-defeatedness.
The despair-inducing impenetrability of reality as it faces you is always irreducible. God has always been exactly this far away, and death this near. Your contemporaries have always been a pack of vicious mediocrities, and money has always been scarce. There was always a social price to pay for creating genuine art. There were always people starving and dying while you were dreaming of masterpieces. Politics was always a necessary sham, education a necessary containment. We always come too late because we think we must have just missed what has actually never existed anywhere else but in our visions. We think somebody somewhere—mom and dad, Homer and Virgil, Kafka and Rimbaud—had the primary experience in comparison with which ours feels so secondary. But that is the primary experience. Which doesn’t mean we don’t have visions, or should pretend not to have them. Puritanism is an inadequate response to false plenitude. Everybody has always had exactly as much reason to despair as you have right now. So write now.
