THE QUIVERING TOWEL

The Possessed is a potboiler, an unwilling gothic novel written by a European avant-garde writer; Witold Gombrowicz went to Argentina from Europe in 1939; he needed money: a quivering towel in the old kitchen, blue/black lips, like to like spreading like a virus, a crusty, withered, crazy prince in a castle; Signs, Treasure, Etc. Writing is restlessness. Everything in this narrative evades the narrative. Jack goes up the hill but he also goes down. A false novel, an infernal machine, said Sartre. Gombrowicz writes as he discards, discards as he writes. The Possessed is the sardonic tale of a rising tennis star, her coach, her fiancé, the castle down the road, the quivering towel, the old kitchen. A suggestion, fifty pages from the end of the book, is to declare war on the quivering towel, source of all evil. 

I have long loved what I called bad novels — by Mrs Henry Wood, Ouida, William Gerhardie, Kay Dick — all contentious — bad is always contentious. The Possessed is a bad novel. Is a bad novel a false novel, an infernal machine? Is all writing an infernal machine?

These are the layers of reading The Possessed, filling a glass with their variety, like layers of sand from the Holy Land.

We think the world of you, J.R. Ackerley

The last paragraph of We think the world of you is as poignant as a story gets. Evie the Alsatian dog holds the centre of the novel; she is the Tulip of My Dog Tulip, and the Queenie of J.R. Ackerley's life. He struggled with his human Ideal Friends; most of his humanity went to his dog, Queenie/Tulip/Evie, who was guardian of his solitude, for which he was grateful; it was what he wanted; or was it? What is about a novel that allows a writer to say more than he has in a memoir? The stretch of fiction, the stylising, the reducing or amalgamating, Ideal Friends, dogs, In-Laws, real or imagined, desired, or maybe not. This dog, Evie, takes jealous possession of his life.

Advancing age has only intensified her jealousy. I have lost all my old friends, they fear her and look at me with pity of contempt. We live entirely alone. Unless with her I can never go away. I can scarcely call my soul my own. Not that I am complaining, oh no, yet sometimes as we sit and my mind wanders back to the past, to my youthful ambitions and the freedom and independence I used to enjoy, I wonder what in the world has happened to me and how it all came about .... But that leads me into deep waters, too deep for fathoming; it leads me into the darkness of my own mind.

WHAT DO FOURTEEN YEAR-OLDS DREAM NOW

In Third Reich Germany, Charlotte Beradt began to notice how her own dreams expressed what, in a totalitarian state, she was unable to say. She asked others about their dreams, and wrote them down. What we can't say, can emerge in dreams. 

I'm riveted. This is my territory. How does one become a totalitarian subject? What—aside from the threat of violence—are the necessary conditions?, Zadie Smith asks in a review of a new English edition of this book of dreams. Now, in our times, do people mistake control for comfort? Are they nesting in algorithms? Are social media sucking out the marrow of our attention? There is much talk from E. Musk about freedom of speech. What has happened to freedom of thought? The OED's word for this year (they add a word every year) is brainrot (from too much mindless screen time). What kind of dreams does brainrot give you?

Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books ends her essay on The Third Reich of Dreams: the nightmares of a nation with an update: a talk she gave to 400 14 year-olds in Barcelona, ostensibly about fiction, but really they wanted to talk about social media. It was hard to get rid of slavery— it took riots, murder, changes in the law — the Third Reich needed world war two to bring it to an end. All you have to do to get rid of social media, she said to her young audience, is to look the other way.