Joanna Walsh's Reading List

"I like the fact that he invented his own name. He was born Daniil Ivánovich Yuvatchov. It marks a step into artificiality. He was a necessarily political author – he died in prison after falling foul of the Soviet regime in 1942, as many people did. But his absurdism seems to be more socially or linguistically oriented. His stories are also about storytelling itself, so there’s one about women tumbling out of windows, which is very short – many of his stories no more than a paragraph. He often abandons narrative towards the end. So here’s “Tumbling Women”: Because of her excessive curiosity, one old woman, tumbled out of her window, fell and shattered to pieces. Another old woman leaned out to look at the one who’d shattered but out of excessive curiosity also tumbled out of her window, fell and shattered to pieces. Then, a third old woman tumbled out of her window, and then a fourth and a fifth. When the sixth old woman tumbled out of her window, I got sick of watching them and walked over to the Mal’tseviskiy Market where, they say, a blind man had been given a knitted shawl. Yes, I love how he gives up on the narrative, and it seems very relevant today – with the distraction of the internet, which might, in his day, have been gossip, rumour, or the sort of celebrity chasing that went on the newspapers. Another thing I love is that sudden break between something that’s fairly realistic and something that really isn’t – and it’s a very fine line to cross. So you have the first old woman falling out of her window and then all of a sudden she shatters to pieces. We go from something we might see every day, to something very confusing: suddenly she becomes an object. “Because of her excessive curiosity, one old woman, tumbled out of her window, fell and shattered to pieces” A lot of absurdism is concerned with that dividing line between people and objects, and people and animals. You see it in Isabel Waidner’s book and in Leonora Carrington’s. Carrington is very interested in people and animals. And Waidner is particularly interested in the line between people and things. Many of the stories are about the ways in which the systems in which we live make us into objects of use to each other or to some unknown power that might be governmental or it might be cultural. One common trope in absurdist literature is to imagine people as objects, or bring objects to life. That’s very much a part of what Kharms was doing. He also did that via language, treating words as intermediary objects between the speaker and the thing that the speaker is referring to. A word becomes an object in itself, a material thing with a certain number of letters and a certain sound, that hovers between the intent of a speaker and the actual thing. Language is absurd in that we say the word ‘cow’ and we expect someone else to be able to conjure what that is. It’s just a three-letter word that takes up a certain amount of aural or physical space. I keep coming back, again and again, to this idea: how much can language be applied to the external world? I’m guessing from speaking to you earlier that you must be at least trilingual and so you’ll know this from experience. As soon as you start learning another language seriously you realise where the gaps are in your own language, and where the gaps are in the new language – how these words govern what can be thought. European Futurism was a violent movement and notoriously linked to Fascism. I’m interested in the violent clashes in literature. In the story about the tumbling old women, for instance, Kharms conjures a shattering but also the violence of setting one half of a sentence against another. I like another Russian writer of the same period, Viktor Shklovsky, who was involved in many of the same literary movements as Kharms, and his idea of ostranenie (estrangement), of making deliberately jolty links. I use that a lot – not because I want to copy Shklovsky, but because that is the way I see the world. I see a series of things that are difficult to bring together through language and narrative. Stories usually aim to be smooth things, but the idea of consequence and beginnings, middles and endings is something that interests me because I want to work against it. Absurdists writers tend to be unfriendly writers in a way – they’re rebellious. If you look at Carrington, there’s the wonderful title story, in which a hyena comes to live with the family of “The Debutante” of the title, who, as Carrington did, is about to make her ‘debut’ at a society ball and who, like Carrington, loathes the entire process. The hyena kills a maid and chews off her face so she can use it to go to the ball disguised in her place. At the ball, the hyena eats disgustingly and exudes strong animal smells, and it seems that Carrington is talking about the things that were forbidden to her as a polite society woman."

"Carrington was aligned with surrealism because of her paintings, and because she became a writer and painter while she was living in the south of France in her early twenties with the surrealist artist Max Ernst. She had kind of a long-distance relationship with surrealism, as many of the female artists at the time did, partly because they were not invited to be involved in the construction of its manifestos, but also because they often occupied an ambiguous position as both muse and artist. The role of the muse was particularly powerful in surrealist ideology and was both enabling and limiting for women because it put them at the centre of the movement, but it also put them in a certain place. Some surrealist writing describes women as conduits of the subconscious but incapable of manipulating, and turning this into art. Carrington was very sceptical about all of this. She said, in one of her few interviews, towards the end of her life: ‘I was not a surrealist, I was just with Max.’ “I keep coming back again and again to this idea: how much can language be applied to the external world?” Surrealism has a direct link to psychoanalysis and to Freudian and Jungian ideas of the unconscious, whereas Carrington’s work also contains social critique – so I quite confidently place her as an absurdist writer. Carrington liked to think through totems: in her later life in Mexico she became interested in Mayan mythic figures, but she began with her nursery rocking horse, which appears in a number of her early paintings and self-portraits. She identifies with the figure of the horse throughout her stories. It might be to do with the idea of fragmented-ness, that violence and clashing within the absurdist style which, can be difficult to sustain at longer lengths (though Finnegans Wake gives the lie to that of course). Ben Marcus’s Age of Wire and String (1995), which is, I guess, a novel, is set out in little sections, too. That constant sense of self-fragmentation and narrative deconstruction can be taxing, for the reader as well as the writer."

"It makes me think of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) – they both have structure, with sections and subsections – they are catalogues, but of what? – and, again, they examine the absurdity of systems. One thing I’m very interested in, and am using increasingly in my own work, is the structures and language we use to impart knowledge to each other. Wikipedia fascinates me because it’s completely amateur so there’s absolutely no reason why its writers should imitate regular encyclopaedia entries, but mostly they do. Age of Wire and String creates systems of knowledge that push themselves towards absurdity. And because Marcus has often used structure without content that we can easily identify – although it has emotional resonances (he uses a lot of family vocabulary) – he’s creating a gap to enable a leap of imagination between the text and the reader… not an invitation to make some kind of direct sense of it, but to make it work in some way for us. That’s interesting. I didn’t find it easy to read myself but I didn’t feel angry by being made to feel I had to work things out – I suppose that’s because I enjoy that kind of thing. And I could see from very early on that the book wasn’t going to provide me with a ‘satisfactory’ explanation. Marcus’s book seems to be an experiment across or through language, and every sentence is itself some kind of attempt to wrestle with the materiality of words. I think about writing like I think about music: no one says ‘Can you condense that piece of music or explain it in a shorter piece? The experience of listening to music is not considered as something that necessarily has a subtext that is more important that the text. There’s this wonderful movie called Barcelona , directed by Whit Stillman. It’s very funny, and it’s about two American expats who are trying to settle in Spain and there are cultural tensions and they’re trying to get laid and all sorts of things are happening. One of them works in advertising – he’s a writer and he reads a lot – and his cousin – the other guy – is in the navy. One day the advertising guy’s cousin is asking him about reading books – he’s curious and doesn’t really know much – and he says ‘I’m always hearing about this thing called the subtext and it’s, like, what’s the thing that’s above the subtext?’ And the writer just says ‘Well, I think it’s called the text.’ “Being a writer is a very untrustworthy position – you are trusted, in that readers put themselves in your hands, but also distrusted, because they think you’re holding something back” There’s this feeling in reading that the writer is fooling you somehow, and that the point of reading the book is to find the thing that they are not saying instead of the things that they are saying. But writing can be, and should be, also evaluated at the level of the sounds it makes and the patterns that can be experienced in reading it. Being a writer is a very untrustworthy position – you are trusted, in that readers put themselves in your hands, but also distrusted, because they think you’re holding something back. I suppose absurdism’s habit of placing terrible human events into rather silly scenarios is a form of irony. But absurdism doesn’t tend to participate in the reticence that we associate with irony. Absurdism is completely out there – it’s about clashing and bright colours and over-the-top metaphors. Well, on the back it says “comic and disturbing” and I think I’d go with that. It has this nice modulation between cold and heated language, which is exhilarating. Its power lies in its combination of these things."

"There are two police barracks in the book. The first one doesn’t seem to be implausible as a physical situation. But the second one, which comes in later, is built between an interior and an exterior shell of a house. Beyond this, the landscape of the book isn’t particularly absurd – it’s somehow very conventional, and the countryside is described as beautiful, and pleasant. It’s when you get down to the details that things become disturbing – like the policeman who the protagonist meets in the first barracks who is assembling a series of boxes, each one smaller than the next until he gets to ones that are so small he can only work on them with microscopic tools under a magnifying glass. Yes, O’Brien is very good at this combination of the familiar and the horrifying. Like Daniil Kharms, O’Nolan had many pseudonyms. He wrote in Irish too, and he had pseudonyms in both languages, perhaps expressing a cultural discomfort. He said he thought it was ridiculous for an author to write everything under one name. It’s only one of them… O’Brien’s writing has all sort of targets. One of my favourites (to go back to encyclopaedias etc) is his creation of the philosopher de Selby, a character who never appears directly in the text, only in the anti-hero’s obsession with his works, and the heavily footnoted battles between de Selby’s critics and biographers. Sadly the Wikipedia page on de Selby gives away that he’s a fictional creation."

"Isabel Waidner is a debut writer published by a very small press in Manchester. I discovered her and Dostoyevsky Wannabe, which specialises in beautifully designed avant-garde literature, at the same time. What I was immediately struck by was her joyful linguistic playfulness. It seems a radical act. “Absurdism is completely out there – it’s about clashing and bright colours and over-the-top metaphors” Waidner and I talk – mostly on Twitter – and she tweeted to me once that avant-garde literature will come from women and writers of colour and queer writers. We were talking about the difficulty of radical writing and conservatism of form: radical standpoints don’t always produce the stylistically or structurally innovative writing that would seem the logical extension of such standpoint . But Waidner’s language is a joyful assault on sense, that she doesn’t try too hard to explain in any way, and she throws in the odd brand name or place name – like Brixton – and we hold on to it for some kind of anchorage. And then she puts in a lot of words that are just made up – there are whole sentences that just switch back, and she uses real things to refer to not-real things, and not-real things to refer to real things… And she builds up this whole posited world of a “Socialist Britain”, where [the TV channel] Channel 4’s entire remit is to produce increasingly diverse programmes. It’s a very funny, affectionate and satirical take on the very idea of diversity politics. It’s very funny and full of terrible puns, and then you realise that some bits do mean something specific and that she’s stealth-building a kind of taxonomy of queer cultural history. But on another level her writing is about words interacting with words and about language being as important in driving the narrative as character and physical setting. I love the exclamatory nature of the writing, and that’s something that’s more specifically to do with her than with absurdism as a whole. Her writing behaves like speech – it has this kind of momentum, with lots of exclamation marks and very little redundancy – there’s no time for ‘he said, she said’. And we are expected, as readers, to keep up. What I like in all of the books I have chosen is the exhilarating reading experience. It’s a wonderful way to read. It’s something I’m always thinking about – as all writers are, really – not just about absurdist literature but about literature in general: what can writing do, especially in this increasingly sharp political climate? To go back to Viktor Shlovsky, he wrote an essay in 1954 about writing and propaganda. He said that, happily, it is difficult to use writing as propaganda because it’s like trying to use a samovar to hammer in nails. “It’s nice to think that writing is too slippery to easily be used for propaganda, but this means it’s also difficult to use for more laudable political aims” It’s nice to think that writing is too slippery to easily be used for propaganda, but this means it’s also difficult to use for more laudable political aims. Absurdist writing, with its mix of violent joy, can express and stir up discontent, but its delight in the structure of language and the materiality of words, means it is impossible to harness in the service of anything in particular."