Paul Sheehan

Postmodernism and philosophy

This is the end Postmodernist thinking has typically reacted with suspicion to the notion of origins. As first cause or foundation, an origin - a transcendental ground to which all subsequent phenomena must pay obeisance - resurrects the deity that the “death of God” supposedly vanquished. This resistance to origins is matched by a much messier obsession with “ends.” Postmodernist endings are not so neat as the term suggests, however. They are thorny and recalcitrant, at the very least placing certain practices or instruments of thought off-limits; at most, the latter are rendered fallacious, untenable, “no longer possible.” An abiding example of this temper is the seemingly suicidal declamation of the end of philosophy. Where philosophy has engaged directly with postmodernism – let us call the result, for the moment, post-Nietzschean continental philosophy – it has produced a kind of thinking that cleaves to the shadow of its own mortality, compulsively rehearsing its own demise. But unlike other postmodernist annulments – the “ends” of authorial presence and ideology, for example – philosophy’s reprieve was granted in the same breath as its death sentence was pronounced. Which is to say, accompanying the termination was the possibility of renewal, ways of finding new uses for philosophical thinking. In fixating upon the conditions of its own abolition, then, philosophy turned those conditions into a kind of negative capability.

A Malady Of Dreaming

Oscar Wilde’s afterlife could be described as a case of ‘accelerated approbation’: by an overwhelming critical consensus, his work seems more and more contemporary with each passing year. Only three decades ago, Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling felt it necessary to defend Wilde against charges of ‘showy mediocrity’ by gently directing him away from Baudelaire and Flaubert and towards Blake. Now, however, he is the standard-bearer for Queer Theory; a critical combatant in the field of Anglo-Irish relations; and, not least, a poststructuralist avant la lettre. Terry Eagleton, for example, in the Foreword to his play Saint Oscar, describes Wilde’s way with self-referential language, with the fictional nature of truth and the illusory character of the human subject, and concludes that ‘Oscar Wilde looms up for us more and more as the Irish Roland Barthes.’ In similar fashion, Jonathan Dollimore says of ‘Wilde’s transgressive aesthetic’ that ‘insincerity, inauthenticity, and unnaturalness become the liberating attributes of decentred identity and desire, and inversion becomes central to Wilde’s expression of this aesthetic’; ‘inversion’, here, is clearly both sexual and textual, evoking same-sex male desire as well as playful epigrammatic paradox. But if, amidst this formidable lexicon of decentring and illusion, it is possible to talk of a ‘core’ or ‘essence’ of the Wildean aesthetic, then it consists in what I will call the ‘theatrical self’. This self is brought into being, is given the breath of life, through one precept in particular: the fundamentally undecidable nature of performance. To support this claim I suggest that, even though the theatre is no longer the mass-entertainment medium it was in Wilde’s lifetime, there is one vital theatrical tenet that still abides in the culture, even in our age of technological reason—and that is the confusion, uncertainty, ambiguity and ultimate unknowability of the performing person. Where does performance end and ‘real life’, or bare existence, begin? And what are the tools needed to make such a distinction? It is not so much the problem that Yeats refers to, of separating the ‘dancer’ from the ‘dance’, as of separating the dancer from the self, the performer from the person. The theatrical self, then, is predicated on the view that performers do not need a stage; that audiences can be composed of even the most unaware and oblivious bystanders; and that role-playing infiltrates every corner of our daily lives. If Dollimore’s reading of Wilde is correct, that ‘life is at best an energy which can only find expression through the forms which art offers it’, then it would seem that theatrical form is the primary mode, the one best suited to mobilising this life energy in aesthetically accomplished ways. The Picture of Dorian Gray is in some sense a commentary on this elusive quality of the theatrical. It is an oblique, yet sustained, meditation on the nature of the theatrical self, and on its primary condition of possibility: the notion that art and life are not separate,

Scenes of writing: Beckett and the technology of inscription

Writing as a form of information technology has historically inspired suspicion, mistrust and downright hostility. This essay considers the recent (re)conception of writing as a cognitive artefact, assisting in the mind’s extension into the world. The discussion focuses on two of Beckett’s ‘writing-oriented’ novels, Malone Dies and How It Is, and applies the Extended Mind (EM) thesis to the most revealing and forcible episodes of inscription in each work. Although Beckett abjures the benefits that cognitive extension can bring, reading these two novels in this light can elucidate both the potential applications and the pressure-points of the EM thesis.

Coetzee & co: failure, lies and autobiography

The most recent critical studies of J. M. Coetzees oeuvre have paid little attention to the writers autobiographical fictions, either downplaying their importance or ignoring them altogether. In this essay I make a case for the their formal and thematic significance. Focusing principally, though not exclusively, on the Scenes from Provincial Life (2011), I demonstrate how this trilogy of works is written against the generic impositions of life-writing. Those impositions turn on the notion of triumphalism: every memoir, auto/biography, confessional narrative, and so on, implicitly or explicitly affirms a teleology of achievement, in showing how the self-reflecting subject becomes a self-writing subject capable of narrating its own development. Coetzees auto-fictions, by contrast, stage a kind of agon with this generic demand by focusing on failure, on solipsistic distraction, and on the nature of belonging. In addition, and following clues from Coetzees unpublished notebooks, I suggest that the spurs for these textual reworkings can be found in French literature – in particular, the auto-fictive writings of Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The Scenes are finally shown to be not only central to Coetzees wider novelistic concerns, but also to his ethics of the outsider and the ordinary or everyday.

The world, the text and the author: Coetzee and untranslatability

Abstract This essay analyses Coetzee’s success as a world literary author, from two distinct angles. The first stems from his non-European ‘southern’ position (and self-positioning) as a South African and then Australian writer with South American links, and his subscription to an ‘imaginary of the South’. The second looks beyond the colonial indebtedness to Europe, focusing instead on some of the ‘minor’ European cultures to which the oeuvre refers, and then on the ways in which it evokes Asia. As will be seen, Coetzee’s work from the very start acknowledges the pivotal role of Asia in the formation of Western identity.

A history of smoke: W.G. Sebald and the memory of fire

In the expansive corpus of critical writing that has accrued around the works of W. G. Sebald, two factors are almost universally agreed upon. The first concerns the heterogeneous nature of his four ‘novels’, insofar as they combine elements of biography, memoir, travelogue, archival research, collage, photographic essay and fiction. The second near-unanimous claim is that the Holocaust is the ‘absent determinant’ that impels all his writing, and that accounts to some extent for the mixture of styles and genres (as a way of overcoming the prohibition on direct confrontation of that unrepresentable event). In this essay, I contest both claims. Focusing mainly on The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001), I stress the constants that bind Sebalds fiction together, starting with the motif of gaseous matter, particularly smoke, and then working through to the more historically overdetermined incidences of fire. In doing so, I suggest that the centre of gravity has shifted, and that Sebalds historical poetics has acquired a new historical grounding. Finally, I propose a pre-Socratic precedent for this summa theoretica of Sebalds work, widening the critical field as it threatens to devolve into a fixed roster of themes, influences and historical precedents.

Myth, Absence, Haunting: Toward a Zoopoetics of Extinction

This chapter surveys different critical modalities to ascertain how the nascent field of extinction studies might usefully be applied to the literary animal. Bringing these modalities to bear on the various forms of animal disappearance, Sheehan elaborates on what he calls “zoopoetics of extinction,” examining works by the American ecopoet W. S. Merwin, particularly his apocalyptic 1967 collection, The Lice, as well as more recent writings of the British musician and poet Richard Skelton, which focus on animal and mineral traces that continue to haunt the topographical imagination. Through these case studies, Sheehan questions the disappearing literary-poetic animal and whether its passage from the physical world to the realm of pure language is stymied or quickened by the mandates of appropriation.

30@30: the future of literary thinking

All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility?

The Company They Keep

“Friendship,” declared Maurice Blanchot, is “this relation without dependence, without episode, yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters.” Written to commemorate his 22-year personal and philosophical comradeship with Georges Bataille—an alliance based more on letters than on physical contact—Blanchot’s essay pays tribute to an intellectual friendship made possible through the intercession of the word. It also provides a model of sorts for the project that J.M. Coetzee initiated in 2008. After meeting Paul Auster at a literary festival in Adelaide, Coetzee’s adoptive hometown, he sensed that there was more between them than just a shared love for the writings of Beckett and Kafka. He saw Auster as a potential collaborator, and so suggested to him a two-year experiment: an exchange of letters that could function as a kind of workshop for ideas, observations, and reflections. The two years became three, and the fruits of that suggestion are now available for all to see in Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011 (2013). But if the Blanchot-Bataille precedent stops there—when death approached, in 1962, Bataille made a pact with his friend to destroy the bulk of their correspondence—the Auster-Coetzee “experiment” gets underway with not dissimilar thoughts about the nature of friendship. “[U]nlike love or politics, which are never what they seem to be,” writes Coetzee, “friendship is what it seems to be. Friendship is transparent.” Auster’s reply sets the tone for the rest of the book. He does not think that friendship is transparent (or only on rare occasions), but is rather a matter of “good manners, kindness, steadiness of affect.” Where Coetzee is philosophical, speculative, and often more than a little abstract, Auster invariably comes up with a down-to-earth, observational response. He also cites examples from his own published work, something that Coetzee almost never does. Part of the fascination of Here and Now, then, is this interaction (“clash” is too strong a word) of temperaments, which tends to redeem even the less-interesting colloquies. One topic of discussion begets the next and so, after a detour through the recent financial crisis, friendship leads to sport, one of the book’s cardinal topics. Both men avidly watch sporting broadcasts (cricket, tennis, and rugby, in Coetzee’s case, baseball and American football in Auster’s); and both lament the countless hours it has taken, and continues to take, from their lives. But if spectatorship is, as Auster puts it, “a useless activity, an utter waste a time,” sport itself possesses for both an unassailable cultural significance. Pinpointing the reasons for that significance occasions one of the liveliest exchanges of opinion. Is it because of the undeniable aesthetic pleasures that sport inculcates? Or is it the ethical demands that it makes of its participants, in the guise of grace, conscience, and heroism? Is a sporting here and noW: Letters, 2008–2011