Genius, Novel and Thoughtcrime

As mentioned in the previous blog, my focus has been away from public activity, while there’s been a lot going on. Now more settled, Barcelos and its surrounds has fast become the favoured location for our long-term residence. This year I had a notional schedule to blog the Text Festival anniversaries to lead into posts on my latest theories arising from that experience and dialogues in literature and current state of geopolitics. The first element of blogging happened but the Barcelos move left a bigger gap than I had anticipated. So, now to get back on track, ensconced paradisaically peripheral (a state which I’ve always preferred to occupy), I feel more inclined to insert a ‘progress overview’ before moving on to the meat of the matters – to paraphrase Louis Althusser, a theoretical text is affected in its modality and dispositive by practice. Where are we up to after my last update in 2023?

The Genius Cantos

The explanation of why I needed to take on Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos from a communist perspective can be found in the 2023 blog, but in the context of the impending global catastrophe, Pound’s location at the end of the Second World War makes this project more imperatively poised at the beginning of Third World War. As my first Canto (LXXIV) observes:

Blind. Silent. Jesus asked: is this resurrection?

            Truth can only be half-said’

                        this is the war cantos

cadaver eyes upon me see … nothing,

                                                USICA soaked

bring me the head of stupid

a world where Xi is synonymous Salazar - this ain’t,

warrior queens repurposed glossator utopias 

Rome did shall perish in the blood she has spilt,

            holding democracy in contempt, as we should

leech-gatherers.

Genius is still in progress; Cantos so far completed – with their thematic dynamic – are:

 

LXXIV (The Axiom of Separation)

LXXV (Space)

LXXVI (Interiority)

LXXVII (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

LXXVIII (In the spring and autumn)

Responses from a select group of trenchant readers and critics have been gratifying so far. Of the other Cantos, ‘Toussaint Rouge’, ‘The Clowde of Knowyng’ and ‘Toward Interregnum Closure’ being written concurrently and are all about halfway in:

LXXIX (Toussaint Rouge)

LXXX (Sociedade do cansaço)

LXXXI (Urim Thummim)

LXXXII (The Clowde of Knowyng)

LXXXIII (Incoherence)

LXXXIV (Toward Interregnum Closure)

One of the initiating factors for writing Genius was its pivotal contribution to a projected sequence of novels, however, the poem’s own epic logic and its obligation and objective to respond to the gathering fascistic darkness in the world have intensified its independent urgency.

Poetry as Thoughtcrime

I have blogged about this contextually three or four times (Poetry as Thoughtcrime and In Search of Method). I have developed the promised theoretical framework and a manifesto for future literary resistance, but it has not felt useful for my own creative output to articulate it here. I could romanticise this as a sort of Fermat’s Last Theorem margin throwaway  but I confess also it is a mix of laziness and my propensity to be interested in the next problem rather than the last. According to Alain Badiou’s ‘Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil’, my failure to articulate the discovery of this fidelity is “Evil in the sense of betrayal”; I feel the guilt of that sin and will fulfil my duty shortly after this blog.

Novel

Truth be told, I have already tested my theory, let’s call it what it is – manifesto, with artistic and literary peers. The main criticism being that my focus on poetry is too narrow because its strategies apply equally well across art practice in general, analogous to Tristan Tzara or André Breton in relation of manifesto to movement. I don’t intend to expand my thinking in this direction, simply because of my self-defeating tendency to think too big. But while my creative output has been focused on ‘Genius’ this year, ie the associated novels on hold, I have been indulging myself with applying the manifesto to literature in general, which has initiated another project called ‘Novel’, triggered by Kundera’s Art of the Novel, Calvino’s Literature Machine, Blanchot, Ricardou, Lukács, etc. This is a book of essays investigating questions of fictive form and practice, and literary imperatives facing apocalypse. One entertaining me at the moment is examination of the generalist fallacy of canon and a provocative alternative approach. Instead of the ubiquitous and facile list of the 50 or 100 best books of all time, the question is what do those books that are thusly categorized do? And what are the ontological connections between one ‘great’ book and another(s)? According to what principle are the component elements of the texts related to each other? On this latter, I have adopted structural concepts of ‘Place’, ‘Form’, ‘Endurance’, ‘Space’. By way of a taster, within ‘my’ canonical list, I am working on comparative analysis of deBeauvoir’s ‘The Mandarins’ to Marquez’s ‘100 Years of Solitude’; Simon’s ‘Georgics’ to Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ and Vonnegut’s ‘Hocus Pocus’ (most best books lists go with ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ which I attribute to lazy readers); Shute’s ‘On The Beach’ to de Saint-Exupery’s ‘Flight to Arras’ and Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’; Robbe-Grillet’s ‘The Voyeur’ with Golding’s ‘The Inheritors’ and Iain M. Banks’ ‘Excession’; Hesses’ ‘Glass Bead Game’ to Dick’s ‘The Man in the High Castle’ and Bulgakov’s ‘The Master and Margarita’. Etc.

 

Barcelos

 

After the commemoration of the Text Festival anniversary, I had intended to continue blogging with some new theoretical thinking but that schedule went out of the window (temporarily) due to various pressing activities in Portugal and back in Manchester. The biggest change was our move to the town of Barcelos. Like Porto, it is UNESCO heritage listed but is a much quieter and gentler pace; fewer tourists, and more often noticeably visiting, passing through, with a different purpose - our new place is actually on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. 

Barcelos is a beautiful little town, in easy reach of Porto and Braga. It has surprised me to discover that I can say I have never lived somewhere that makes me as genuinely happy as Barcelos does.