Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Emma L. E. Rees Answers Our Questions About "The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History"

We asked author Emma L. E. Rees a few questions about her book, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, out now in hardcover.

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Bloomsbury: Why write a serious book about The Vagina? What does it mean to you professionally? And personally?

Emma L. E. Rees: The vagina – not just as biological entity but as powerful cultural symbol – has become a hot topic in recent years. I owe an immense debt to Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues), of course, and although some aspects of her work come under fire in my book, I do acknowledge and respect her trailblazing bravery. We live in an age where pornography is more easily accessible than ever before and where, at the same time, it is utterly divorced from reality. Women face unprecedented physical and political attacks from legislators and spiritual leaders, as well as from men who quite simply hate women and girls. What struck me as I began to research the book was that the sometimes wilful misunderstandings of the vagina, and their resulting responses of fearful revulsion and hatred, were nothing new, but were in fact firmly rooted in deep-seated cultural assumptions. For example, in The Vagina, I draw pretty direct links between the sometimes brilliant satire of South Park and the explicit lyrics of 12^th-century itinerant European poet-musicians. I certainly never expected that to happen! I also demonstrate how the ancient myth of the vagina dentata (the ‘toothed vagina’) serves to justify some of the abhorrent practices being carried out against women, girls and transgendered people worldwide today. I’m pissed off by how powerful men cannot acknowledge the reality of the vagina, but instead want to control, demonise, or attack it. Being pissed off has always been a great motivator for me!

B: Describe the moment in which you realized you were writing a full length book about Vaginas?

ER: There’s a character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch called Casaubon – an awful, emotionally arid man – whose life’s work is a Key to All Mythologies. It’s – of course – a work he can never finish because of its vast scope. I set out with an unintentionally Casaubon-like aim: to write a history of all vaginas everywhere, ever. The total impossibility of that task very quickly dawned on me, of course, so, I tested the water by publishing a couple of vagina-related essays (on Shakespeare, and Charlotte Brontë). The responses were pretty positive and soon I began to see a clearer focus for a book. But it all started – as the book’s own narrative does – with an accidental visit to a remote parish church deep in the British countryside in the 1990s.*

*Explained in detail in Revealing the Vagina: Introduction

B: What was the most exhilarating aspect of your research for The Vagina?

ER: Realising that it was a book that could reach people; that could lead to activism beyond academia; realising that the zeitgeist was on my side – as senators debate women’s bodies and reproductive rights and as activists who reclaim the word ‘Pussy’ become the suffragettes of the 21^st century; and realising that I might be able to educate people and get them to look – really look – (metaphorically or – of course – literally) at the vagina and think about it in new, positive ways. 

B: What was the best reaction a friend or colleague had to the news of the subject of your forthcoming book?

ER: There isn’t one that stands out, really. People have been generally very supportive. The students I teach have been intrigued and, ultimately, enlightened. Family members have been supportive but won’t really see what I’m trying to do in the book until they read it. I think it’s fun telling people about the book and its uncompromisingly clear title. Reactions vary and nearly always make me laugh – I’ve learned to maintain eye-contact and say ‘My book is called The Vagina’, and watch as they sometimes blush, or, not being at all sure that they can have heard me correctly, ask me to repeat myself. Most often, though, there will be a long, drawn-out ‘Riiiiight …’ followed by – in the UK, at least – a quick change of topic to the weather or last night’s TV.

B: Can you describe some of the images in the book? How did you choose them?

ER: Several of the images are details from Judy Chicago’s momentous art installation, The Dinner Party. Judy was very generous and supportive in terms of giving permission. I just think it’s really important to be able to direct your reader to a visual image instead of increasing the interpretive distance by attempting to describe it. This is the case with the wonderful Artemisia Gentileschi painting I include, of Judith slaying Holofernes: the picture says so much more than I can say about it, so I really wanted it in there. An Italian friend was invaluable in terms of helping me negotiate the minefield of Italian bureaucracy in order to secure permission to use it. I only met official resistance in trying to get hold of two images which in the end I had to drop: one, a Frida Kahlo painting, is in the private collection of a globally-famous singer whose publicist tried to help out, but who ultimately couldn’t; the other was a painting by an artist best known for her large canvases which are, according to the Foundation and Museum who refused to give me permission to reproduce them in the book, of flowers – just flowers – and have no genital imagery in them at all. I just don’t buy that, and it’s a shame they’re not in the finished product.  I do think the book’s title and subject-matter scared some people off granting image reproduction permissions – but that just serves to underscore why there’s an urgent need for this very book!

B: What inspired you during the writing process? Any particular place, person, book or album?

ER: As with so much of what I do, I tend to write in an ‘all or nothing’ kind of way. Gladstone’s Library (a residential library in North Wales) was instrumental in getting the book finished. There, everything’s taken care of, and I can write flat out for, perhaps, 12 or more hours a day. Solidly. It’s a luxury that everyday life doesn’t afford. I have to work in silence, and am most productive on days when I’m not lecturing, when I can sit and read and write in the quiet of my home, preferably looking out at the garden, surrounded by my cats and dog. Walking Mitzvah, our Golden Retriever, is also a wonderful way to relax and to ponder the day’s work: her boundless joie de vivre takes me out of myself. Writing can be a pretty blissful existence. That sounds trite, I know, but my maternal grandmother was in service (she was a maid in a big house, very Downton Abbey style) and my paternal grandfather was almost killed in the Welsh coal pits (he trained as a teacher once he realised being a miner wasn’t for him), so I have little time for people who say that writing’s hard. It can be difficult and frustrating and all-consuming, but it’s not hard like working in a mine or lighting fires at 6am on a bitterly cold winter’s morning is hard. On a lighter note, watching DVD box sets with my husband is a perfect way to stop work: we’re just about to start Season 4 of Breaking Bad.

B: What are three incredible things you learned while writing this book?

ER: Two positive ones, and a negative. The first is a fact that’s always fascinated me, and that I could think more about for the book: it’s the idea of the reach of ideas. Anthropologically-speaking, before lines of communication were open between cultures, before any possibility of, if you like, intellectual contamination, very, very different and geographically isolated communities were coming up with their own stories about the vagina dentata. This suggests a remarkable pervasiveness of an almost primal misogyny and fear.

The second is that without language we cannot have meaning – a key plea in my book is to find a name for the unnameable. In other words, what does it mean that, in English-speaking culture, the single most abhorrent and taboo word is also the only accurate word for describing a woman’s sexual organs? Why is the ‘c-word’ not seen?

A third, more negative thing that has struck me is that there are an awful lot of people out there who are determined to be upset or affronted by this book without having read a page. And these haters, trolls and misogynists, who prowl the internet looking to make mischief, hurt feelings and cause emotional pain, are precisely the sort of people who make me confident that the time is right for The Vagina. The incredible fact is that for every lowlife hater there are many, many supporters. The lesson really is not to read the comments posted on articles online!

B: Why should people without vaginas read this book?

ER: Because they most likely know – and may even respect – some people with vaginas! Because they never previously realised how South Park or Sex and the City make important interventions into debates around the cultural centrality and paradox of the vagina. Because to be squeamish about the reality of women’s bodies is a ridiculous philosophical illogicality. And because not challenging one’s own prejudices perpetuates petty small-mindedness and conflict. In other words, why the hell shouldn’t they read it?!

B: What’s next? What comes after vaginas?

ER: The first and last words of The Vagina are the same – I’m not going to put a spoiler here, but the gist is that, in my writing, topics seem to find me, rather than me finding them. The next book is, to my mind, an entirely logical development from The Vagina, but to other people it will almost certainly look like a thematic departure. I’m not ready to share my thoughts and plans about it yet, but it’s safe to say that no other body parts are going to feature in quite the same way as they do in The Vagina!

In Conversation with Michael Lackey: Studying Nazi Christianity

Described as the 'Richard Dawkins of Literary Criticism' by Christopher Douglas (Associate Professor of English, University of Victoria), Michael Lackey is the author of our fascinating new book The Modernist God State in which he looks at the religious basis of modernist political movements. In this interview he reveals his experience of studying Nazi texts and his discoveries surrounding Nazi Christianity. His findings may well surprise you.

What was the most exhilarating aspect of your research for The Modernist God State?

As a college and graduate student, I was repeatedly taught that western culture was either totally secular or in the grip of a rapid secularization process. But this interpretation of intellectual, political, and literary history never struck me as accurate.  Indeed, a casual glance at twentieth-century literature and politics led me to draw a very different conclusion, specifically that the West had become by the twentieth century religious in new and frightening ways.  The most exhilarating part of this project was finding a way to clearly articulate the degree to which religion and the God concept continued to inform and determine the nature of the modernist body politic. 

Few people read thousands of pages of the actual texts of Hitler and the Nazis, why did you and what did you learn?

When I was an undergraduate taking theology courses in preparation for the seminary (my goal was to become a Catholic Priest), I heard vague rumours suggesting that the Catholic Church was anti-Semitic and, therefore, complicit in the Holocaust.  To understand the nature of the critique and to defend my faith, I started reading Nazi texts, primarily to demonstrate, as I had heard, that their secular and humanist views were the basis for the Holocaust. But, to my horror, I made some unsettling discoveries: The Nazis declared themselves to be a Christian Party in Point 24 of their official Party program.  In his first wireless speech to the German people after he came to power in 1933, Hitler announced that his political party regards “Christianity as the foundation of our national morality.”  Just two weeks later, he boldly declared in another speech his theological allegiance to Christianity: “it is Christians and not international atheists who now stand at the head of Germany.”  In a 1934 speech, Hitler specified the nature of the Nazi Party’s Christian orientation by claiming that the “National Socialist State professes its allegiance to positive Christianity.”  Put simply, Hitler believed that, given its commitment to positive Christianity, the Nazi Party “stands on the ground of a real Christianity,” because it is based on “Christian principles.”  These are not anomalous claims. As I demonstrate throughout my book, Hitler and many prominent Nazis consistently defined themselves and their Party as Christian. 

What I learned from all this is that there is an overwhelming amount of empirical evidence to demonstrate that Hitler and the Nazis called themselves Christian and that there is virtually no evidence that they ever called or considered themselves secular, humanist, anti-Christian, or atheist. 

Hitler & the Nazis understood themselves to be unambiguously Christian, yet they're frequently portrayed as atheists, humanists or secularists. What evidence did your reading of the source documents uncover?

As I immersed myself in the scholarship about the Holocaust, I was able to figure out why so many capable scholars drew a faulty conclusion about the religious orientation of Hitler and the Nazis.  Erich Voegelin articulated in 1938 what would become the dominant approach when he made the following claim: “the secularisation of life, which the concept of humanism brought with it, is precisely the soil in which anti-Christian religious movements such as National Socialism  could grow.”  Well-regarded scholars such as Hannah Arendt, Berel Lang, Doris Bergen, Charles Taylor, and Theodore Ziolkowski, to name only a few, have uncritically accepted this view.  But it is important to note that there is considerable confusion about the claim.  When scholars say that Hitler and the Nazis are anti-Christian secularists, it would seem that they mean that Hitler and the Nazis called themselves secular and/or anti-Christian.  But since there are literally thousands of passages in which Hitler and the Nazis declare themselves Christian, it is impossible for them to justify such an assertion.  So how can we explain their insistent claim that Hitler and the Nazis were atheists, humanists, or secularists?  When scholars make such a claim, here’s what they mean: ‘Granted, Hitler and the Nazis consistently called themselves Christian.  But they adopted a faulty version of Christianity.  Therefore, they were not really Christian.  To the contrary, they were anti-Christian.  Indeed, they were unwitting humanists and atheists.’ 

Recent scholars have posed a serious challenge to this traditional approach to Hitler and the Nazis.  Indeed, Richard Steigmann-Gall and Robert Michael have written first-rate studies that have demonstrated that Hitler and the Nazis called and considered themselves Christian, and my book contributes to this conversation by using many of their findings to illuminate literary texts.  But what has made the work of all of us possible are developments within postmodernism.  Postmodernists reject the idea that there is something such as a true Christianity.  Postmodernists realize that there are many versions of Christianity, some tolerant and humane, some not.  So instead of claiming that Hitler and the Nazis adopted a faulty version of Christianity and are, therefore, anti-Christian atheists, postmodernists seek to understand the version of Christianity that Hitler and the Nazis adopted.  From a postmodernist perspective, the real questions that need to be answered are these: Did Hitler and the Nazis consider themselves Christian?  If so, what was the version of Christianity that they adopted?  These are the questions that I answer in my book. 

What originally inspired you to study in this area?  What does it mean to you professionally?  And personally? 

It is difficult for me to make a clear distinction between the professional and the personal.  As a scholar, what I value most are intellectual honesty and scholarly precision.  But these are the very things that I want my students to learn in my classes and to use in their personal lives.  As I was writing The Modernist God State, I found myself thinking about two separate audiences.  The first consists of traditional Christian writers, who have worked vigorously and passionately to demonstrate that Hitler and the Nazis were not Christian because—to their minds—they were most certainly atheists.  The second audience consists of anti-religious atheists, who frequently demonize all versions of Christianity because they note that Hitler and many Nazis referred to themselves as Christians.  As a scholar, I consider the work of both traditional Christians and anti-religious atheists dishonest and sloppy.  The traditional Christians are dishonest because they refuse to acknowledge that Hitler and the Nazis consistently referred to themselves as Christian.  This explains why I cite so many passages from Hitler and the Nazis calling themselves and the Party Christian.  The anti-religious atheists are sloppy because they draw a faulty conclusion from the evidence about Hitler and the Nazis calling themselves Christian.  Hitler and the Nazis adopted a very specific version of Christianity, which I define in the book.  Therefore, it is illogical to claim that, because Hitler and the Nazis considered themselves Christian, Christianity entails National Socialism.  What inspired me to do this project was a desire to bring rigor, discipline, and nuance to a highly charged and controversial topic.

How would you describe your contribution to the scholarship in this area?

There are three separate contributions I make to the scholarship.  First, I offer a nuanced approach to the secularization hypothesis.  By demonstrating that intellectuals were becoming secular while the majority of the population in the West was becoming more intensely religious, I have been able to clarify why it would be more accurate to refer to the twentieth-century polity as a God state rather than a secular nation.  Second, I clarify why the novelist can illuminate intellectual and political history with an unparalleled precision and accuracy.  Finally, my work adds some clarity and depth to our understanding of the specific version of Christianity that Hitler and the Nazis adopted.

Modernism is often seen as secularist and inimical to Christianity, why do you believe otherwise?

While it is certainly true that many modernist intellectuals were indifferent or opposed to religious belief and/or the God concept, thus confirming the secularization hypothesis, it is also true that many prominent political leaders and most average citizens in the West remained deeply committed to Christianity, especially in relation to the body politic.  By doing close analyses of the writings of political leaders from King Leopold II to Hitler and the Nazis (1890s through the 1940s), I have been able to demonstrate that their political agendas are simply incomprehensible without taking into account their specific understanding of and approach to Christianity.  So in my book, instead of rejecting the secularization hypothesis altogether, I develop a nuanced approach to it.  Most modernist intellectuals embraced and even endorsed a secular approach to life, the political, and the world, but most political leaders and ordinary citizens embraced and even endorsed a religious approach to life, the political, and the world.  Therefore, when many prominent twentieth-century writers portray the modernist body politic, they frequently underscore the degree to which it is religious and the role religion plays in the shaping of the polity. 

You argue that novelists can represent intellectual and political history in a way that no other intellectual can. Why do you think this is so?

There are two separate reasons why the novelists in my study claim that they can portray intellectual and political history in a superior way to other professional intellectuals.  The first is based on the multi-disciplinary nature of the novel.  Prominent twentieth-century novelists were well-versed in philosophy and sociology, history and psychology, economics and politics.  What set them apart from other professional intellectuals was their capacity to represent one form of disciplinary knowledge in relation to or in conflict with other forms of disciplinary knowledge.  From this vantage point, novelists are superior not because they are masters of any single body of knowledge but because they are masters of polarizing, juxtaposing, negotiating, and integrating multiple bodies of knowledge.  Furthermore, they insist that the novel, more than any other intellectual medium, can insightfully and accurately portray the complex dynamics of the modern polity. 

The second reason is based on the novelist’s two-tiered conception of the human.  Nietzsche articulates this view most clearly in The Case of Wagner when he says: “all of us have, unconsciously, involuntarily in our bodies values, words, formulas, moralities of opposite descent—we are, physiologically considered, false.”  There exist in our bodies words, values, formulas, and moralities that frequently conflict with our rational conception of ourselves.  For instance, on a conscious level, we might say to ourselves and others: I am not a racist.  But at the level of the subconscious, many of us have absorbed and internalized certain racist words and values, which make many of us ‘racist’ despite our intentions to the contrary.  Given the way words, values, moralities, and formulas of opposite descent invade our bodies without our consent (“unconsciously, involuntarily”), it is impossible for us to be physiologically true.  However, if we can identify some of the subconscious words and values that inhabit our bodies, we can become less false.  This is exactly what the novelist does.  According to E.M. Forster, the novelist’s biggest contribution to intellectual and political history is the capacity to picture the subconscious short-circuiting into action.  Ideas, beliefs, and ideologies—these are the things that inhabit the subconscious and determine human action.  The problem is that most people lack the capacity to plumb the depths of their own inner lives, which means that a person’s “secret life” can be secret not only from others but also from one’s self.  But for the novelists, if we want an accurate representation of the ideologies that determine the nature of the polity, we need to examine not what people consciously say about themselves but what they subconsciously believe, think, and feel.  Therefore, it is incumbent upon the novelist to identify and define the subconscious ideology that determines human action and to devise strategies and techniques for charting the way a subconscious ideology makes its way into specific forms of socio-political action.

What will your next book explore?

In the late 1930s, Georg Lukacs argued that the biographical novel could never rise to the level of a legitimate historical novel, because the focus on “the biography of the hero” leads authors to overlook or misrepresent significant historical events and truths, and thus “reveals the historical weakness of the biographical form of the novel.”  With just a few exceptions, American novelists subscribed to Lukacs’ view, that is, until 1987, when Bruce Duffy published The World As I Found It, a novel which features characters such as Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence, and G.E. Moore.  After Duffy’s The World As I Found It, there was a veritable explosion of biographical novels, such as Jay Parini’s The Last Station (1990), a multi-perspective narrative account of Leo Tolstoy’s last year; Irvin D. Yalom’s When Nietzsche Wept (1992), an imaginative work featuring philosophical and psychological debates between Josef Breuer and Nietzsche; David Mamet’s The Old Religion (1997), a stream-of-consciousness narrative of Leo Frank coming to terms with his wrongful imprisonment for the rape and murder of a young white Southern factory girl; Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), a work that alternately dramatizes Virginia Woolf’s life and references her novel Mrs. Dalloway in order to illuminate the stories of women in the 1950s and the 1990s; M. Allen Cunningham’s Lost Son (2008), a novelization of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetic development through his relationship with Auguste Rodin and Lou Andreas-Salomé; Parini’s The Passages of H.M. (2010), an expansive narrative of Herman Melville’s struggles as an unacknowledged writer and a closeted homosexual; and Duffy’s Disaster Was My God (2011), a comprehensive picture of Arthur Rimbaud’s tumultuous and contradictory life as first a poet and then a gun-runner.  How are we to account for this wave of biographical novels?  What intellectual forces gave birth to this aesthetic form?  What role does this novel play in illuminating history?  And how does it differ from the traditional historical novel?  These are questions that I intend to answer over the next few years as I work on a three-book project about the American biographical novel. 

The first project is a Conversations with Jay Parini book, a collection of Parini’s interviews that will be coming out next year.  The second project will be a collection of interviews with prominent novelists about the aesthetic form of and the usages of history in the biographical novel.  The final project will be a monograph about the American biographical novel. 

The Modernist God State by Michael Lackey is now available to buy. You can read an exclusive digital preview of the book by clicking on the preview button to the left.

Jenny Tighe

In Conversation with David Tucker: Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx

David Tucker is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex and currently teaches at the University of Oxford, UK. He is the editor of British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 (Palgrave, 2011) and author of the latest book in our Historicizing Modernism series  - Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx: Tracing 'a literary fantasia' - the first full-length study of Samuel Beckett’s fascination with the seventeenth-century philosopher Arnold Geulincx. In this interview we ask David what fascinated him about their relationship, and how it changes our understanding of Beckett and his work.

What is the book about? How does it approach Beckett differently from other critical approaches?

It’s about Beckett’s interest in the obscure seventeenth-century philosopher Arnold Geulincx, and how this interest comes through in Beckett’s work. It uses some archival materials to help explore how and why Beckett thought of aspects of his own work as indebted to this idiosyncratic thinker. But while Beckett’s interest in Geulincx is itself a very interesting topic of study, it’s also one that allows a way of thinking about the historical developments of Beckett’s work more broadly. So I’d say the approach the book takes differs from others in that it’s sort of an experiment with using a finite set of resources to really try and trace across what Beckett called his ‘series’ or works in a search for continuities, breakages and broader shifts. I quite like that in sympathy with Beckett’s own works the project foregrounds a kind of minimalism, or sparseness, as integral to its own methodology and ways of ‘going on’.

What drew you to writing about Samuel Beckett’s relationship with Arnold Geulincx?

At one time I formally studied philosophy myself, but I was increasingly drawn to modern literature and to Beckett in particular, and I became fascinated by Beckett’s range of reference and how he distils complex and divergent ideas into something very much his own. Researching Beckett’s research into Geulincx meant I could study Beckett’s own studies, so to speak. It allowed me to navigate across disciplines in the context of Beckett’s specific ‘uses and abuses’ of philosophy for literature. So I’d say that the book is also therefore my own kind of fantasia at the same time as it navigates Beckett’s. It’s as much a licence to think creatively about Beckett as an empirically grounded historical narrative.

What was the most exhilarating aspect of your research for Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx?

Discovering some empirical fragments, previously hidden letters, drafts, that sort of thing that helped make the historical cases for what I’d started to believe and intuit about movements across the texts and years. So simply finding places Beckett discusses Geulincx that recur more regularly than previously noted by scholars, or fitting together various versions of the short story The End, and also thinking about puppetry in the late works. It’s exciting when otherwise archived materials can help support you out there on an interpretive limb.

In 1936 Beckett referred to ‘my Geulincx’ as ‘a literary fantasia’ – can you explain what he meant by this?

It’s probably no surprise that I talk about that quote a bit in the book. Fantasia is a strikingly un-Beckettian word to use, and as far as I know there’s no record of his using it again in the sort of way in which he uses it to describe Geulincx. He contrasts it with the word ‘Fach’, a German word used to classify Opera singers, and I describe how he’s giving himself license to interpret and reuse Geulincx however he sees fit, broaching generic boundaries rather than staying within a strict category, much as he does with his reading of Schopenhauer when he calls him a ‘tremendous thinker-poet’. The musical metaphors are just one instance of how Beckett can morph one type of knowledge into something else.  

What originally inspired you to study Samuel Beckett? What does he mean to you professionally? And personally?

When I first read Beckett I was very suddenly and wholly captivated by what appeared to be somehow impossible objects - his books seemed like they just somehow couldn’t exist, but evidently they did. In 1970 Leo Bersani wrote that “The metaphysical pathos of Beckett’s work is that it exists”, and I’ve wondered if that might get close to the sort of presentiment I had that first time reading Beckett. There was something paradoxical about his major prose works, though not in a solely formal, experimental way, but on an affective level. I was aged about twenty, so there you have it; impossible beauty and outmoded terms like ‘authenticity’.

“Professionally” Beckett means a vibrant and supportive community of scholars, and a lot of high-quality work.

In fifty years time, what will resonate with future generations about the life, works and philosophy of Samuel Beckett?

Tough one. Not least because many other truly great authors, like Dante, Shakespeare or Joyce for instance, often had a wide, inclusive approach to experience and the world. So we can go to them on virtually any topic and find it there somehow. Beckett famously strove, paradoxically, for kinds of incapacity (something that’s also central to Geulincx’s thought). I think he’ll always be a lesson in singular creative vision and originality, and hopefully this would temper any of the broad grey miserablism that sometimes accompanies his reputation.

What quote typifies Samuel Beckett? 

That’s one problem of his reception, I think, in his being encapsulated in sound-bite style quotes. I’ve seen them on mugs, sewn and framed, everywhere. I guess he had it coming though; after all, he did it a fair amount himself, not least with Geulincx’s ‘wherein you have no power, therein you should not will’.

What will your next book explore?

I’m scheduled to co-edit Beckett’s complete non-fiction prose - which is a very exciting project and will keep me busy for a while - as well as write a short-ish book on and produce a complete genetic edition of Beckett’s four Nouvelles for the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. After that, I really don’t know. I edited a book on British social realism recently, and I’d like to do some more work along that line, as well as try to find ways to write on some entirely new projects. There are too many things and not enough time, basically.

And finally, if readers only had time to read one book by Samuel Beckett, what would you suggest and why?

At the moment I seem to be going through a phase of interest in late works, works produced after those on which a reputation will rest. Whoever’s – Beckett’s or anyone’s. I like the kinds of sudden, unexpected veering turns in late works that nevertheless occur within a highly coherent system. Is that too abstract? Like in some of Bob Dylan’s witty late songs, where a self-consciously sentimental or traditional-style chorus suddenly anchors an otherwise disjointed narrative, or perhaps in the flashes of a certain shade of red in Lucian Freud. So along these lines maybe Company, where misty recollected sometimes semi-autobiographical scenes appear and dissipate again. Just that moment of the narrator suddenly standing still in the middle of a field, which I write about a bit in my book, is masterful. Beckett can really break your heart with just a description of someone standing, or of moving their hand up to their head as they sit in a chair in the short piece ‘Still’.

Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx: Tracing 'a literary fantasia' is now available to buy. Later this afternoon we'll be posting up an extract from the Introduction so check back on our blog or follow us on twitter so you can read it hot off the press!

To see all the other books in our Historicizing Modernism series click here

Jenny Tighe

In Conversation with John Schad: Walter Benjamin Revealed

John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Lancaster and author of our new fictional narrative The Late Walter Benjamin. 'Set partly in Watford and partly in the haunted wing of the English language' (Ian Macmillan, on BBC Radio 3's 'The Verb'), this documentary novel juxtaposes the life and death of Walter Benjamin with the days, hours and minutes of a working-class council estate on the edge of London in post-war Austerity England. Here John talks about his research for the book, the funny side of Walter Benjamin and why ‘The Metaphysics of Youth’ is his Benjamin essay of choice.

What was the most exhilarating aspect of your research for The Late Walter Benjamin?

Exploring what happened in the final hours of Benjamin’s life, before committing suicide on the Spanish border.  We know, for instance, that he made four telephone calls on the last night of his life; whom, though, did he call?  Again, we know that he once wrote that ‘Erotic motives may be at the bottom of suicide’; so, then, what role did the erotic play, at the last, for the dying philosopher?

Was there any exotic travel or exciting people you met and discussed Walter Benjamin with?

Alas, no - I went to Watford and was bored, but you have to be: ‘People who are not bored cannot tell stories,’ said Walter Benjamin.   Moreover, ‘we penetrate mystery,’ he says, ‘only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world.’

What does your book about Walter Benjamin do differently?

It sees the funny side of Walter Benjamin, hypnotised as I am by his ‘clowning of despair.’  To put it another way, the book revolves around his remark that ‘the comic figure is the only angel suited to this world.’ 

What originally inspired you to study Walter Benjamin? What do they mean to you professionally? And personally?

I'm not sure I can remember.  I had just written Someone Called Derrida. An Oxford Mystery, which is novelistic, albeit real-life, murder-mystery about not only the extraordinary philosopher but also the final years of my father’s very ordinary life.  I wanted to take further the trick of juxtaposing high, continental philosophy and low, English life and death.

Many people think they know Walter Benjamin but what – to your mind – still makes him so special and still relevant to modern readers?

It is , I think, that he is writing about us, always writing about us, and (indeed) has observed that, together, we are the secret Messiah:  ‘Our coming,’ he wrote, ‘was expected on earth, and we have been endowed with Messianic power.’

If readers only had time to read one book by Walter Benjamin, what would you suggest and why?

His 1914 essay, ‘The Metaphysics of Youth,’ (Selected Writings, vol.1). It teaches us how to dance and die, at the same time.

How would you describe your contribution to the immense amount of scholarship on Walter Benjamin? 

It is, I think that I attempt to misread him, to get him ‘wrong,’ if you like; in the sense that the book has him living in 1948, eight years after his death, and in a place he never even visited.  In short, I wrench him out of context, but in so doing I am, I hope, responding to his astonishing insistence that ‘Citation summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origin.’  

In fifty years time, what will resonant with future generations about the life, works and philosophy of Walter Benjamin?

His insistence that ‘the solution to the riddle of the universe is to be found where we least expect it’ - for example, Watford.

What quote typifies Walter Benjamin? 

‘Every second was the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter’

What will your next book explore?

What happened in June 1956 when Waiting for Godot was performed at the Grand Theatre in Blackpool and nearly everyone walked out, declaring it to be nonsense. It's called GodotOnSea, and like the Late Walter Benjamin it’s a documentary novel.  The first chapter can be read in a book I edited called Crrritic!

The Late Walter Benjamin is now available to buy. You can read the first 2 chapters from the book by clicking on the preview button to the left. Tomorrow on our twitter, we will be giving away a copy of this exciting new book! Follow us to be in with a chance of winning!

Jenny Tighe