A fundamental deprivation: Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas

Perhaps all novels seek to converge on a single point. 

The thought occurred to me as I read Vila-Matas' Montevideo, translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. A random thought, apparently, but also the kind of thought provoked by the passion of observation, anecdote and speculation in Vila-Matas' novels, each of which, however distinct, may be said to ask the question in the epigram to Montano's Malady: "What will we do to disappear?". If the single point is disappearance, from what do we disappear? 

The passion of observation, anecdote and speculation perhaps. If the writer and reader wishes to disappear from writing, to be free from the guile of games and the interval of abstraction, finally to be present to the world as it is, an answer is to give a firm "No!" to writing, as done by those featured in Bartleby & Co or, in a slight variation, to be forced into the world by writer's block. This is Montano's malady, a predicament similar to the literary publisher in Dublinesque who fears the disappearance of what has been his life's work. The alternative is to leave the world behind by disappearing into writing, which is what reading the epigram placed before the usual content of the novel promises and immediately threatens. Which kind of disappearance is it then?

It's significant that the epigram is taken from L'Entretien infini, Maurice Blanchot's essay collection translated as The Infinite Conversation. As Susan Hanson explains in the foreword to her translation, 'Entretien' has a nuance the English lacks, as it can mean "a between that is rigorously held to". We're between question and possible answer. The gift of everyday language and genre fiction is to be excused the question as words and world disappear into one another. 

Rigorously holding between is the comedy of Vila-Matas' novels and why regular readers become exasperated with what they see as "writing about writing", and especially because the comedy is not comedy as in Commedia in which one begins in Hell, passes through Purgatory and ends in Paradise. The novel is the by-product of disenchantment and as such maintains only the residue of the promise of another life. Recognition of the residue may be what defines the literary in literary fiction. The gift of genre fiction is to fulfil that promise, for a time. 

A clone of Vila-Matas narrates Montevideo because the quest for disappearance is personal. He goes in search of it in chapters each named after a city: as a young man he travels to Paris with the romantic notion of becoming a writer only to write nothing and find himself instead disappearing into "the seedy side" of the capital, going to boozy parties and dealing in drugs. Rather than the novel disappearing into a titillating account of crime and debauchery, the reader is pointed to Lucy Sante's The Other Paris before carrying on writing about writing. 

In the title chapter, the other form of disappearance is sought in a hotel room in the Uruguayan capital, the setting of The Sealed Door, a story by Julio Cortàzar that fascinates the clone. He books the same room  (no pun intended) to open the eponymous door, perhaps finally to enter the origin of literature. The Spanish book cover suggests what he finds. While it's a pity the Yale UP edition doesn't also use Hammershøi's painting, the unlovely digital adaptation reminds us of an artificiality holding disappearance at arm's length.

We might ask at this point: why do we have novels like Montevideo? Shouldn't they provide more serious investigations into life in the world? Even the anxiety expressed is done in such an insouciant manner that nothing can be taken on face value. In contrast, we have seen in recent years a remarkable surplus of very serious novels full of "heartstopping beauty...sumptuous prose [and] philosophical depth" ¹ invariably spanning several hundred pages and hailed as up there with the accepted greats of modernism, so calling books like Montevideo a novel appears to be not only a category error but an insult to the common reader. 

To answer, we need to reflect on a question Kafka asked in his diary. If writing expansively on his unhappiness appears to him as "a merciful surplus of strength" when he is in the depth of suffering, "what kind of surplus is it?".²

There's a short story by Jean Paulhan collected in the translation above called Aytré who gets out of the habit, written in 1910 but published in 1943, which can be described only incidentally as a murder mystery. It begins with an adjutant in the French colonial army in Madagascar writing a private diary discussing a French woman, Raymonde, with whom he was having an affair and who has been stabbed to death. While he deals with the aftermath, his sergeant Aytré takes over writing the official log of their journey escorting 300 Senegalese women from one side of the island to the other, and the diary is interrupted to include the log. For a time Aytré notes down the simple details demanded by the form – the distance covered each day, the condition of the women, the cost of chickens, etc. – which makes for less interesting reading than the diary but, after a couple of weeks, he begins to digress by writing up his own opinions, noting down cultural differences, including a long passage detailing the seven modes of transport he has witnessed on the island. As the title says, Aytré is getting out of the habit of military life. The story then returns to the adjutant's diary and ends with his discovery that Aytré killed Raymonde in a fit of jealousy. 

This is of course unremarkable and there's no apparent reason to disinter such an obscure story from a writer more or less unknown in English. So what is the point of all this? 

In an essay on the story published the same year, Blanchot claims that Aytré is a man who has felt an emptiness in himself: "a defect, a lack of something decisive, whose absence becomes, little by little, unbearable". Perhaps he was driven to an extreme act because for him the unbearable feeling took the form of a woman. This makes sense and leaves us with the question of toxic masculinity, thereby helping the common reader to disappear from literature into the world of socio-political considerations. For many, this is the literary in literary fiction. Blanchot takes a different path by arguing that the digressions in the log also constitute an attempt to fill the emptiness with the excess of language. This has unforeseen consequences. 

From this little story, it does not follow that literature must necessarily begin with crime or, failing that, with flight. But that it does imply a caving in, a kind of initial catastrophe, and the very emptiness that anxiety and care measure; yes, we can be tempted to believe that. But let us note that this catastrophe does not fall only on the world, the objects one handles, the things one sees; it, extends also to language[:] all the thick layering of words, the sedimentation of comfortable meanings that move off, detach themselves, become a slippery and dangerous slope. The threat spreads to anyone who allows himself to answer it. ³

After finding something decisive missing from his life, Aytré loses the habit of straightforward notation and tries to fill the absence with a thick layering of detail, only for the absence to reveal itself as part of writing too. Writing gets out of the habit of regular meaning. 

for [Aytré], recourse to the most literary or beautiful language signifies only the irreparable loss of the only language that was certain for him, that in which it was enough for him to write, "We are doing twenty kilometers a day." 

Blanchot points out that, following Mallarmé, every word consists of absence and, for this reason, questions whether Kafka is correct to think his extemporising on unhappiness with flourishes and ornamentations is in fact a surplus. The effect of being able to express unhappiness with as much eloquence as one can muster means that colloquial language, in which the words disappear into the world, is replaced by poetic language, which, as it does not allow for translation into other words, becomes paradoxically "a kind of poverty" because all other words cannot properly say the same thing. In effect it says nothing. Kafka's unhappiness is, in its finest expression, entirely separate from the experience, even to the one suffering it. Yes, we understand what 'unhappiness' means in general, but what does Kafka's unhappiness mean? This paradox, in which the exultation of self-expression and the gift of literature becomes "the first stirring of a fundamental deprivation", is, for Blanchot, the beginning of literature. The surplus of maximalist novels in recent years, rather than renewing modernism, can only evade the implications of the paradox, and evasion becomes the means of its critical reception; the longer the book, the better to forget. ⁴ The beginning may be the single point on which Vila-Matas' novels seek to converge. There is never any end to the novel.

 

Notes 

¹ From a tweet by Krapp's Last Vape. 

² From 19th September 1917.

³ From The Paradox of Aytré in The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell. 

⁴ It cannot be a coincidence that in Kafka's The Judgment Georg Bendemann's revelation that his friend in Russia to whom he writes with a freedom founded on evasion is in fact his father. He has the final word.