Geoff Dyer. Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

"Hearing that I was ‘working on Lawrence’, an acquaintance lent me a book he thought I might find interesting: A Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence, edited by Peter Widdowson.  I glanced at the contents page:  old Eagleton was there, of course, together with some other state-of-the-fart theorists: Lydia Blanchard on‘Lawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality’ (in the section on ‘Gender, Sexuality, Feminism’), Daniel J. Schneider on ‘Alternatives to Logocentrism in D.H. Lawrence’ (in the section featuring ‘Post-Structuralist Turns’).  I could feel myself getting angry and then I flicked through the introductory essay on ‘Radical Indeterminacy: a post-modern Lawrence’ and become angrier still.  How could it have happened?  How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it?  I should have stopped there, should have avoided looking at any more, but I didn’t because telling myself to stop always has the effect of urging me on.  Instead, I kept looking at this group of wankers huddled in a circle, backs turned to the world so that no one would see them pulling each other off.  Oh, it was too much, it was too stupid.  I threw the book across the room and then I tried to tear it up but it was too resilient.  By now I was blazing mad.  I thought about getting Widdowson’s phone number and making threatening calls.  Then I looked around for the means to destroy his vile, filthy book.  In the end it took a whole box of matches and some risk of personal injury before I succeeded in deconstructing it.

"I burned it in self-defence.  It was the book or me because writing like that kills everything it touches.  That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches.  Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.  I recently met an academic who said that he taught German literature.  I was aghast: to think, this man who had been in universities all his life was teaching Rilke.  Rilke!  Oh, it was too much to bear. You don’t teach Rilke, I wanted, to say, you kill Rilke!  You turn him to dust and then you go off to conferences where dozens of other academic-morticians gather with the express intention of killing Rilke and turning him to dust.  Then as part of the cover-up, the conference papers are published, the dust is embalmed and before you know it literature is a vast graveyard of dust, a dustyard of graves.  I was beside myself with indignation.  I wanted to maim and harm this polite, well-meaning academic who, for all I knew, was a brilliant teacher who had turned on generations of students to the Duino Elegies.  Still, I thought to myself the following morning when I had calmed down, the general point stands:  how can you know anything about literature if all you’ve done is read books?"  (Out of Sheer Rage pp. 100-101)

"What has happened in the interim to the people who are in the picture and the people who should have been in it but aren't?  The same things that happen to everyone:  home ownership, marriage, a kid or two, disappointment, divorce, cancer scares, worsening hangovers, death of a parent or two, qualified success, school fees, depression, sudden rejuvenation following the discovery of Ecstasy, holidays in India or Ibiza, telly watching, coming out (as homosexuals), coming in (as heterosexuals), going to the gym, more telly watching, new computers, bad knees, less squash, more tennis, rewriting (and downplaying) of earlier ambitions to diminish scale of disappointment, fatal breast cancer, less sleep, less beer, more wine, more cocaine, hardly any acid, frightening ketamine overdose, total breakdown, more money, discreet tattoos, baldness, stopping going to the gym, yoga, even more telly watching....  looking at the picture and its inscription, I realize it was familiar to me back then, that the taste of ashes in the mouth was as much a generalized premonition as it was a particular reaction to a football result.  Destiny, I think, is not what lies in store for you; it's what is already stored up inside you -- and it's as patient as death."  (Otherwise Known, "On the Roof," pp. 372-73).

"It takes a bit of getting used to, the idea that spending 365 days a year doing exactly as you please might be a viable proposition.  Getting sacked from that job was what allowed this notion -- that the three years I spent as a student could actually be extended indefinitely and rather profitably -- to gain some kind of purchase on my adult consciousness.  Since then I've done pretty much as I pleased, letting life find its own rhythm, working when I felt like it, not working when I didn't.  I've not always been happy -- far from it -- but I've always felt responsible for my happiness and liable for my unhappiness.  I've been free to waste my time as I please -- and I have wasted  tons of it, but at least it's been me doing the wasting; as such, it's not been wasted at all, not a moment of it." (Otherwise Known, "Sacked," p. 366.)

(If I were teaching a course on "the essay," I'd bookend it with Montaigne and Dyer:  the former, looking intently at one's face, one's life, in the mirror, celebrating the significance of individual, human experience; the latter, breaking the mirror, combining, as James Woods has written of Dyer in a recent New Yorker review, "fiction, autobiography, travel writing, cultural criticism, literary theory, and a kind of comic English whining" into witty, exuberant, post-modern essays.  "The result," writes Woods, who is twice the better essayist but with a tenth of Dyer's range -- "the result ought to be mutant mulch but is almost always a louche and canny delight."

An Oxford grad with a Bachelor's in English, Dyer is the author of four novels and a half-dozen genre-busting alternatives.  My favorite is Out of Sheer Rage, which spends its time determined to write an academic work on Dyer's hero, D.H. Lawrence, only to find itself continually loitering on the author's doorstep, visiting his haunts, reading Rilke, moving from Rome to Greece, perpetually finding something to distract him -- "not quite pursuing his subject but hanging around it," writes Woods, "like a clever aimless boy on a street corner."  He's also written But Beautiful, on jazz; The Missing of the Somme; a travelogue, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It; and most recently a book-length, unreadable meditation on Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker, called Zona.

At times it's hard to take seriously an author who, in a recent column in the New York Times Book Review, spoke of bleeding on the pages -- only to reveal that he'd been picking his nose.  And at times there's something self-indulgent and adolescent about his repeated collapses into sex and E.  (There is an ecstatic essay on hanging out at Burning Man.)  But if he writes like a drunk, at times, he manages to keep his wits and his intelligence about him.  The result is probing, provocative, often insightful accounts of the works of Fitzgerald, Johnson, McEwan, DeLillo, West, Cheever, Sebald, and more.  Although E.B. White remains my gold standard for the modern essay, genial and humane; and although James Woods is the more insightful literary critic and David Foster Wallace is the most intelligent of the lot, nobody writes essays that take greater, insouciant delight in thinking and writing and living -- with all of its ecstasy and heartbreak and sorrow, all of its light and darkness, all of its humor and stupidity and despair and hope, its longing to soar on wings are made of wax and the feathers of old birds -- than Geoff Dyer.)