A Working Definition: On Roubaud and Poirier

I suspect my fascination with etymologies is rooted in the two semesters of Latin I took in high school.  I don’t remember a lick of it, but I have remembered how to break words down and root out the bits that can (maybe) tell you something on their own, which might get you by if you find yourself in a jam (the jam, at the time, being standardized tests).  I am by no means a linguist; I’ve no formal experience with the inheritances of words.  They’re a playground, a rabbit hole.  I admittedly enjoy how irresponsibly I follow their transformations, considering how the parts of a word have made up that word, and how they mislead, how easily a word’s present form can overwrite its past and still arrive at the same understanding for all the wrong reasons, and how then each root word leads you to suspect it is the root of another.  Suffuse: suf-, alternate of sub-, meaning under, beneath, up to; but ‘fuse.’  I think: parallel to infusion, but, while infuse has pleasant connotations, suffuse casts a glance towards submission, willing or unwilling.  It walks a fine line between terror and bliss, between a hot shower after a hard day and waterboarding.  Of course, this is trumping things up quite a bit, akin to exploring the significance of two plus two equalling four by means of numerology.  ‘Suffuse’ means, simply, ‘to pour liquid over a surface,’ though pour is misleading.  One Established Dictionary says ‘overspread,’ instead of pour, even as it says the root Latin word is ‘to pour.’  (Unexpectedly, ‘fountain’ has nothing to do with fundere, the Latin root.)  Or: one would expect ’sect’ to follow from the root ‘to cut.’  A sect, one could assume, is a small group separated from— by an incision, a de-cision— but still part of a larger group.  But ’sect’ comes from ’secta’ for ‘following.’

‘Do your work, and I shall know you,’ [Emerson] says in ‘Self-Reliance’.  ‘Work’ is a way to confront the essential facts of existence and to discover in doing so the power of human desire which turns facts into mythologies and mythologies into facts.  – Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature, p. 94

Perhaps the most interesting aspect, the thing that keeps me going through Roubaud’s not always fun to read The Great Fire of London, is the dissonance of reading in the present tense.  We often consider grammatical tense and the effect it has on what is being narrated.  But rarely do we consider the tense of the activity of writing, except in such rare circumstances when it becomes so problematic, by the author’s intention or not, that we cannot help but notice it.  There is a bifurcation between experiencing self and writing self.  How an author handles such a dilemma, in an individual work or in their general method, I find to be one of the most interesting moves an author can make (can, because many do not).

Filed under: Poirier, Roubaud, Writing

from Roubaud’s “The Great Fire of London”

§136 Something that would be a project (a future), a project for existence

In a project for existence— it doesn’t matter which— only a single, pragmatic answer exists to the overall “what’s-the-point?”: time passes.  Every project, particularly a formal project of writing, like mine today, which has outlived all its value (I ascribed the Project value, thus opposing it to the what’s-the-point), takes up time, structures it, erases its empty pockets.  Each hour determines another, pushes it along, consumes and nullifies it.

If I myself seek (and I don’t, really) some sort of organized answer to the overall what’s-the-point today, I only come up with skepticism; I declare myself a skeptic in the classical style of Sextus Empiricus; I seek an ataractic calm in reading and “suspended judgement.”

From a philosophical point of view, my skepticism is essentialy shallow; I don’t seek the philosophical possibility of living skeptically, but simply (a lid on the kettle of appalling thoughts) some kind of protection for an affirmation: belief in nothing so as to not have death be my only belief.

This is a voluntarist attitude, whose corollary is a strategy for life that I’ve practice spontaneously, unreflectively, and unsystematically for a long while; I’ll dub it avoidism.  I avoid time by means of tasks—counting; describing, and searching for sonnets in libraries; this work at hand, pushing along and then recopying these black lines.  I avoid the world and its remains: I don’t answer letters, nor the telephone; I walk, I keep to myself, I keep my activity to a minimum.

It is true that in all this I am neither really “consistent” nor absolute.  Perhaps such is not possible without rapidly falling into the conclusions of a total what’s-the-point, but along another path, through a sort of death by starvation.  But precisely in this probable inconsistency (I don’t really subject it to questioning) lies the possibility for my current skeptical existence.  I practice a modest skepticism; I don’t allow myself to be dragged into the pitfall of passionately denying my contradictions.

This “avoidist” version of skepticism (which I acknowledge can only prompt an irritated shrug from a philosopher…), my own version of skepticism is, finally, rather close to what Coleridge recommended to fiction readers in his famous expression: “willing suspension of disbelief.”  I find this position eminently skeptical: entering into the novel (and more generally, placing yourself before the poem, the work of art) in such a frame of mind means (and the use of the word suspension, as in the skeptic principle of “suspension of judgment,” seems characteristic) living out my reading in the same exact terms as I live my daily life: by willingly suspending my belief, by deciding momentarily, and for a limited time, to believe in nothing at all.  The skeptical world is a world of the incredible that can be entered only in brief fragments odf demarcated time, in which the impossibility of accepting that things and worlds exist will be suspended between parentheses.  And the world of a novel is penetrated similarly; the world of the great novels imposes its force of conviction, not in its capacity as an exact replica or the revelation of a world that might be our own, but because by immersing ourselves withini t we gradualy yield our consent to the fact—though with an inner conviction that we remain masters of this choice—that every life is on the whole improbable.

Filed under: Quotes, Roubaud

Manipulating Storytellers, Pt. 3: Synecdoche, NY

Part one and two. [Where major spoilers start in the following is noted.]

In a fascinating interview with Wired magazine, Kaufman and his interviewer discuss how conceits provide a framework for his movies. Adaptation has the recursive loop of the events on screen affecting the written screen-play of the events on screen; Eternal Sunshine requires the viewer to deduce, even in scenes not blatantly presented as such, that the majority of the movie is Joel’s memory. But Synecdoche, says Kaufman, “doesn’t turn out [to be] anything other than what you’re watching.” There is the conceit of the title, of course, but there is no resolution of the conceit to tie the story off or justify its peculiarities. Knowing I’d seen it, a friend asked when Hazel’s house was first shown, “Okay, that house is actually on fire, right?” Then later, “Her house is still on fire, right?

Synecdoche is a sly movie. To start, everything from the soundtrack to the color palette appears to be standard quirky indie-movie fare: it opens with a sort-of-lighthearted but faintly macabre catchy song, muted colors, and the story of an artist struggling to realize a great work. It lets you get comfortable with your expectations.

Filed under: Analysis, Film, Kaufman, Synecdoche

Manipulating Storytellers: von Trier and Kaufman (Pt. 2)

(Forewarning: spoilers for just about all of Kaufman’s movies follow, except Synecdoche.)

As I hinted at the end of the last post, the reason Kaufman’s movies appeals to me more than von Trier’s is their openness to both the fact that we manipulate the things about which we tell stories and the fact that we are in turn manipulated by them. von Trier focuses on the human relationship of manipulator and manipulated, and though he is obviously concerned with the repercussions (Dogville) or lack thereof (Dancer), he is only secondarily concerned with how that relationship originated or its reflexive properties. Hence, Grace simply moves from persecuted to persecutor like a chess piece moving spaces, a feat that succeeds due to the overtly allegorical tone of the film, with its historical names, bare set, and chapter titles.

Looking back, the theme of reflexive manipulation becomes apparent in nascent form through most of Kaufman’s movies. There’s the tragic version in Being John Malkovich, when Craig ends up trapped in his wife’s child after attempting to reenter Malkovich, and the comic version in Eternal Sunshine, when Joel and Clementine decide to pursue their relationship despite the knowledge that it hurt them both tremendously the first time around— an ending still potentially tragic, or at best bitter-sweetly comic. (Interestingly, neither were the original endings in the draft scripts, which Kaufman rewrote at the director’s request. The original script for Malkovich goes crazy in the end, revealing that Lester, through a pact with Satan, becomes the literal puppet overlord of the world by controlling Malkovich [and I do mean literally: the final shot pans up the filaments attached to Craig's arms as he tricks Lotte out of her Eden-like safe-haven from Lester's control]; Eternal Sunshine ended with Clementine returning as an old women to Merzwiak’s clinic, oblivious that this is her fifth erasure of Joel, an ending still hinted at in the loop over which the credits roll.)

In Adaptation, this theme gets its first full treatment, though it is still subordinate to Kaufman’s most prominent theme of the inextricability of reality and fiction from each other.

Filed under: Film, Kaufman, Synecdoche, von Trier

Manipulating Storytellers: von Trier and Kaufman (Pt. 1)

Caden Cotard unintentionally upsets his daughter, while “just trying to explain plumbing,” when he says that it’s nothing to be afraid of, that’s it’s everywhere. She responds with a shocked, “Every single where?!” It’s a fear that seems to prevail in Synecdoche, NY, both in its main character, forever expanding his project, and its viewers, trying to keep track of everything. The movie is indeed monstrous in its scope. It takes you over. One friend commented that it’s one of the only movies he’s seen that puts you in the mood to watch it, whereas most movies you’re “in the mood for” before you decide to watch them. Another friend reacted negatively to such extreme manipulation, essentially criticizing it as not playing fair— it forces you to have an empathetic reaction to a character he felt to be so blind to his own absurdity and selfishness that he doesn’t merit empathy. Another thought it interesting but severely bloated, that Kaufman didn’t have a handle on what he was trying to do and so had to continually introduce new characters and subplots just to keep it afloat.

Filed under: Film, Kaufman, Synecdoche, von Trier

“Seek? More than that: create.”

Daily, I attach less value to the intellect. Daily, I realize more clearly that only away from it can the writer repossess something of our past impressions, that is attain to something of himself and to the one subject-matter of art. … Compared with the past, the intimate essence of ourselves, the truths of the intellect seem quite unreal. … But it is to the intellect we must look all the same to establish the inferiority of the intellect. The intellect may not deserve the supreme accolade, but it alone is capable of bestowing it. It may hold only second place in the hierarchy of virtues but only it is capable of proclaiming that instinct has to occupy the first.
-Preface to Contre Sainte-Beuve (pp. 1, 7, 8), Marcel Proust

But in art there are no initiators or precursors (at least in the scientific sense). Everything is in the individual, each individual starts the artistic or literary endeavour over again, on his own account; the works of his predecessors do not constitute, unlike in science, an acquired truth from which he who follows after may profit. A writer of genius today has everything to do. He is not much further advanced than Homer.
-’The Method of Saint-Beuve’ (p. 11)

If we want to try and understand this self, it is deep inside us, by trying to recreate it within us, that we may succeed. … It is a truth every bit of which we have to create…
- (p. 12)

… what one gives to the public is what one has written when alone, for oneself, it is very much the work of one’s self… And not having seen the gulf which separates the writer from the society man, not having understood that the writer’s self shows itself only in his books, that he only shows society men… a society man like themselves, [Sainte-Beuve] was to launch that famous method which… consists, in order to understand a poet or writer, in questioning avidly those who knew him,… who may be able to tell us how he behaved in the matter of women, etc., that is, on all those very points where the poet’s true self is not involved.
- (pp. 15, 16)

If we follow the guidelines given in this preliminary work, a puzzling combination of fiction and criticism, the first fitful attempts at a style which would eventually come to be the style of Proust’s epic, we are directed in how to approach the narrator(s), both the embryonic form it takes in Contre Sainte-Beuve and its full-fledged form in A la recherche... Even here, in a piece which is almost automatically assumed autobiographical, we cannot call our narrator Marcel Proust.

Filed under: Beckett, Proust, Ranciére, Writing

The Particular Burden of Reality

To cut off Medusa’s head without being turned to stone, Perseus supports himself on the very lightest of things, the winds and the clouds, and fixes his gaze upon what can be revealed only by indirect vision, an image caught in a mirror.  I am immediately tempted to see this myth as an allegory on the poet’s relationship to the world, a lesson in the method to follow when writing.  But I know that any interpretation impoverishes the myth and suffocates it.  With myths, one should not be in a hurry.  It is better to let them settle into the memory, to stop and dwell on every detail, to reflect on them without losing touch with their language of images.  The lesson we can learn from a myth lies in the literal narrative, not in what we add to it from the outside.

The relationship between Perseus and the Gorgon is a complex one and does not end with the beheading of the monster.  …  Perseus does not abandom [the severed head] but carries it concealed in a bag.  When his enemies are about to overcome him, he has only to display it, holding it by its snaky locks, and this bloodstained booty becomes an invincible weapon in the hero’s hand.  It is a weapon he uses only in cases of dire necessity, and only against those who deserve the punishment of being turned into statues.  Here, certainly, the myth is telling us something, something implicit in the images that can’t be explained in any other way.  Perseus succeeds in mastering that horrendous face by keeping it hidden, just as in the first place he vanquished it by viewing it in a mirror.  Perseus’s strength always lies in a refusal to look directly, but not in a refusal of the reality in which he is fated to live; he carries the reality with him and accepts it as his particular burden.

— Italo Calvino, ‘Lightness,’ Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Filed under: Calvino, Quotes

from “How is Literature Possible?”

Being now in the midst of the pre-term-paper research panic, it will probably be dead here for a little while, but stumbling into this essay by Blanchot fairly well made my afternoon. Here’s a rather large (and lightly edited) excerpt:

According to some, the mission of language is correctly to express thought, to make itself into its faithful interpreter, to submit t it as to a sovereign that it acknowledges. But for others expression is only the prosaic destiny of everyday languages; the true role of language is not to express but to communicate, nt to translate but t be; and it would be absurd to see in it only an intermediary, a miserable agent: it has a power unique to itself, which it is exactly the writer’s duty to discover or to restore. There, it seems, are the two families of thought, each completely foreign to the other. What could they possibly have in common?

We have seen that come struggled against language because they saw in it an imperfect means of expression and because they wished for language a complete perfection of intelligibility. To what does this ambition lead? To the invention of a language without commonplaces, a language without apparent ambiguity, in fact a language that no longer offers a common measure and is completely removed from comprehension. And we have also seen that others struggled against language that was considered a too-complete or over-perfect means of expression and consequently a nonliterary language and that, by their pitiless demand, their concern for an inaccessible purity, they ended up hunting down conventions, rules, genres, all the way to a total prohibition of literature, satisfied if they could make their secret perceptible outside f any literary form. But it must now be added that these consequences— rejection of language, rejection of literature— are not the only ones to which both parties yielded. It also necessarily happens that their enterprise against words, their desire not to take them into account in order to leave thought its empire whole, their obsessive fear of indifference, all provoke an extreme care for language whose consequence is verbalism. That is a significant fate, at once deplorable and fortunate. Whoever wants to be absent from words at every instant or to be present only to those that he reinvents is endlessly occupied with them so that, of all authors, those who most eagerly seek to avoid the reproach of verbalism are also exactly the ones that are most exposed to this reproach.

It is the same for those who through the marvels of asceticism have had the illusion of distancing themselves from all literature. For having wanted to rid themselves of conventions and of forms, in order to touch directly the secret world and the profound metaphysics that they meant to reveal, they finally contented themselves with using this world, this secret, this metaphysics as they would conventions and forms that they complacently exhibited and that constituted at once the visible framework and the foundation of their works. In other words, for this kind of writer metaphysics, religion, and emotions take the place of technique and language. They are a system of expression, a literary genre – in a word, literature.

Now we are ready to give an answer to the question, How is literature possible? It is actually through virtue of a double illusion— illusion of some who struggle against commonplaces; illusion of others who, renouncing literary conventions or, as we say, literature, cause it to be reborn in a form (metaphysics, religion, etc.) that is not its own. It is from this illusion and from the awareness of this illusion that Jean Paulhan [the author of the work under review in this essay], through a revolution that can be called Copernican, like that of Kant, proposes to draw the most precise and rigorous literary reign. Let us note how bold this revolution is at first sight, for finally it is a question of putting an end to the essential illusion that allows literature. It is a question of revealing to the writer that he gives birth to art only through a vain, blind struggle against it, that the works that he thought he wrenched from common, vulgar language exists thanks to the vulgarization of virgin language, through an excess of impurity and debasement. There is in this discovery enough to cause the silence of Rimbaud to fall on everyone. But just as for man the fact of knowing that the world is the projection of his mind does not destroy the world, but on the contrary assures knowledge of it, represents its limits and makes clear its meaning, so does the writer, if he knows that the more he struggles against commonplaces the more he is bound to them, or if he learns that he writes only with the help of what he detests, has the chance to see the extent of his power and the means of his authority more clearly. In any case, instead of being unknowingly ruled by words or indirectly governed by rules (for his refusal of rules causes him to depend on them), he will seek for mastery of them. Instead of submitting to commonplaces, he will be able to make them; and knowing that he cannot struggle against literature, that he could eschew conventions only to accept their constraints, he will receive the rules, not as artificial guidelines that point out the way to follow and the world to discover but as the means of his discovery and the law of his progress through the darkness where there is neither a way nor an outline.

(collected in Faux Pas, translated by Charlotte Mandell)

RSB has an introduction to the work under review in this essay, Jean Paulhan’s The Flowers of Tarbes.

Filed under: Blanchot, Quotes, Writing

The Existence Machine on Josipovici on the Bible

The Bible does not offer reasons why things happen or why certain people are affected or chosen–why Abraham? for example; indeed, why the Jews?–and of course this is how life is. Things happen. Things are. What matters is how we respond to things. In this way, he argues, the Bible is above all, realistic, which may seem odd to us, given how used to the conventions of the so-called realist novel we are, and how unlike such a novel the Bible is, regardless of our attempts to read it as if it were one.

From Richard’s excellent post about Josipovici’s discussion of the Bible, which I mentioned briefly in my last post, which, as always, feels utterly inadequate once the enthusiasm of saying it has worn off…  Luckily, Richard decided to discuss one of the essays that has influenced my thinking on the subject, so be sure and read him talking about it much more eloquently than I did.

Filed under: Josipovici, Quotes

—Used Language

I have been thinking lately about what, for lack of a better term, would be my ‘aesthetics’— what I think makes good art good art (or just what makes art art— that’s one I wish we’d talk about more: is only good art art?). Taking courses in ‘analytic aesthetics’ and ‘continental aesthetics’ back to back forces you to spend a lot of time circling those words. Reading Heidegger over and over again in an effort to actually follow the progression of thought, the evolution within the single work of his own vocabulary (the dizziness that sets in when you think that that goes on in forty more volumes before and after!), and then thinking about others I am having to read— Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida— and my own reading outside of class— Proust, Josipovici, Blanchot— it is a rigorous tactility in the writing itself that snares me. I would be remiss to say that I think Heidegger is right, that his philosophy has it pinned down, but I nevertheless feel drawn to his language, his way of talking about it, as I do Derrida and Proust and Josipovici and Blanchot— almost irrespective of the actual thought being developed, I am entranced by the development. To coopt some of the language from Origin, it is writing that does not ‘use up’ language.

How is that, though? On the practical level, when I am reading or watching something, what is it that makes me say, or, how is it that I actually can say, “This does not ‘use up’ its medium”?

Filed under: Heidegger, Josipovici, Synecdoche, Writing