Mystery in literature

People happily talk about the mystery of poetry and of literature. They talk about it ad nauseam. However, nothing is explained, I have to confess, by alluding here to magic or religious ecstasy, wishing stones or observant animals. To talk about the ineffable is to say precisely nothing at all. To talk about secrets is to confess nothing. Poets may indeed be devout, but to what are they devoted? Writers may know a great deal, but what kind of knowledge is it?

It is seventy years since Jean Paulhan wrote this, the introductory paragraph The Flowers of Tarbes, his study of literary language, and it seems pretty dated. After all, isn't everything in the process of being explained? Now it is clear they don't talk about the mystery of poetry and of literature ad nauseam. Mystery has been replaced. In the US, according to BookForum, "the enormous novel of technical, scientific, or historical knowledge [has] become the highest credential for male writers". The buzz in bookchat rises when fiction dramatises and enables discussion about current ideas and events, perhaps because this also encourages popular consumption and debate among those for whom fiction is so much play. The situation is due to many contingent factors - such as those outlined in Mark McGurl's The Program Era reviewed above - but the underlying trend suggests a fundamental disconnect with the origins and direction of art. While people still respond to the deep current of literature - why else are we stirred by fiction? - rationalism and commerce has drowned the happy talk. Paulhan goes on to accuse critics of neglecting mystery. But what mystery is there to be found?

Summarised crudely, Paulhan examines the place of mystery in literature by outlining the two opposing conceptions of literary language. One – which he calls Terrorist – that is at war with cliché as it seeks to bring the absolute immediacy of actual lived experience to the word, while the other – Rhetoricist – is content to work with conventional language to maintain clarity and order. While the implications go beyond literature, we can summarise its literary aspect with a reminder of the historical opposition of, for example, Joycean stream-of-consciousness and Edwardian fiction. To make it contemporary, we are all familiar with the widespread perplexity over the distinction between literary and genre fiction. Paulhan finds the Terrorist conception wrongheaded. After all, a word is also a sign - its referent's Platonic ideal perhaps - a cliché by necessity. The reader recognises unrefined, authentic language only by failing to remember its ideality. The war on cliché demands an impossible private language. Even when a populist like Nick Hornby complains about "opaquely written" fiction, he isn't claiming it's gibberish. Whatever we write, literature takes possession of it; thus "experimental" writing is as far from the ineffable real as the most formulaic genre piece. Mystery, it turns out, is in the illusion of literature's absence.

So how does the individual, uncontent with illusion and compelled to resist silence in order to capture the pressing matter of real thought and real experience, begin to write? Paulhan recommends ceding to cliché and working within its constraints - comparable today perhaps to Daniel Green's championing of literary aesthetics. We can see how this has been embraced in its crudest form in mass market book culture. Here the highest praise for a writer is that she does "a good professional job for the reader". The irony is that in the embrace of constraint, cliché itself becomes an elitist private language, indistinguishable from its sworn enemy. Unless one has been initiated into the true meaning of clichés, they can appear like cryptic clues to the machinations of an arcane world (hence the apocryphal nerdism of genre communities). One has to read very carefully before one can forget one is reading. Genre literature thereby performs a dual function - worldly and mysterious.

Given this happy double, it's no surprise that creative writers submit to the constraints of technical, scientific and historical knowledge. It also explains the emergence of autobiography – the so-called misery memoir – as a force in the literary marketplace. Shorn of artifice, the life story purports to be truth in the raw, closer to reality than the contrivances of novels. Of course, as the James Frey Controversy revealed, fiction is not so easily dispensed with. Oprah Winfrey's public admonition of the author is perhaps revealed as less an expression of propriety than one of distress and disbelief in the mysterious, illusory movement of the Book, the form she has otherwise embraced as a means of self-help and social empowerment.

Between night and day

On a Monday morning soon after sleep I wrote out a fragment of a dream. Its violence and purity provoked an impulse to record. Why was this apparent non-event so much more vital and haunting than the remote disturbances of consciousness? It's a question such writing asks between night and day.

The hope is that violence and purity will emerge in the scribbled commentary; words containing, as Beckett put it, "the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind". However, once written, the breeze dies; estrangement from the purity of the dream is indistinguishable from that of the day. Conscious narrative can only reinstate the uncertainty that the dream itself terminated. In writing, experience enters the realm of possibility rather than actuality; only asking remains. This must be why I feel no pressure to write out lived experience nor to reproduce the dream narrative here; that is, no wish to make an object subject to interpretation. Perhaps actuality is the termination of objects.

What was written was interpreted. Rather than the written dream revealing a Freudian cliché of unconscious desire, the purity, I realised, was a product of the dream's dramatisation of two or more contradictory impulses and their distillation into one. For this reason, it was an event that it could never play out in actual existence. To make the truth known, it had to be a lived fiction. Conscious existence seems lesser because it cannot maintain itself without contradiction. No wonder there was an urge to record the dream. And while it could be said only the individual who dreamt could appreciate the urgency of the revelation, a dream also means this: the end of individuality.

There is an added consequence: dream writing, as a means of responding to the pure work of sleep, thereby becomes a form of literary criticism. However one writes out one's recollection of the dream, it is already a commentary, already an idea of the thing, an act of reception, not the thing itself. The primary event itself resists repetition. Yet the primary event, the pure work, is not the real thing either. The real thing takes its course and we are left to respond in the stillness of midnight. The dream's actuality is the actuality of art; writing upon writing.

Keep going wrong

In response to this post at RSB.

Cerise summer

A new online literary and arts journal Cerise Press has posted its first issue. The site says it is based in the United States and France and aims to build "cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works."

Despite that, in this issue you can find translations of poems by the Russians Akhmatova, Mandelshtam and Tsvetaeva as well as those from the French of Apollinaire and Abdelwahab Meddeb.

Under fiction there's Robert Kelly's Letter to Thomas Bernhard, which begins by addressing an obvious issue:

I don't know why I'm bothering to write to you. You're dead, for one thing. All we really share is a love for Glenn Gould and long sentences, probably that's the same love in different forms. Forms of art. I think it's mostly because I want to borrow your complaining tone.

Blanchot: Political Writings, 1953–1993

In early 2010, Fordham University Press is publishing Zakir Paul's translation of Maurice Blanchot's Ecrits politiques: 1953-1993.

This posthumously published volume collects his political writings from 1953 to 1993, from the French-Algerian War and the mass movements of May 1968 to postwar debates about the Shoah and beyond. A large number of the essays, letters, and fragments it contains were written anonymously and signed collectively, often in response to current events.

While political writings as such do not interest me, Blanchot's are an inevitable exception.

When read together, these pieces form a testament to what political writing could be: not merely writing about the political or politicizing the written word, but unalterably transforming the singular authority of the writer and his signature.

Walking with Celan

The falling chestnuts hit the ground with a dry sound. Detonations. It’s nature massed in the air that turns and rolls like bursts of a meteor.
— So it is possible that the earth is a limit to the infinite of language…

After a long silence punctured with noise, he continues:
— The world is of glass.
— And disappearance is within us.

From Jean Daive's Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, via Nomadics.

Under ancient skies

Apparently we read only because what is written is already there, laying itself out before our eyes. Apparently. But the first one to write, the one who cut into stone and wood under ancient skies, was hardly responding to the demands of a view requiring a reference point and giving it a meaning; rather, he was changing all relations between seeing and the visible. What he left behind was not something more, something added to other things; it was not even something less – a subtraction of matter, a hollow in relation to a relief. Then what was it? A gap in the universe: nothing that was visible, nothing invisible. I suppose the first reader was engulfed by this non-absent absence, but without knowing anything about it. And there was no second reader because reading, from now on understood as the vision of a presence immediately visible, that is to say intelligible, was affirmed precisely in order to make this disappearance into the absence of the book impossible.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation pp422-423 (translated by Susan Hanson).

Brutal rhythm

Writing delights me. That's nothing new. That's the only thing that still supports me, that will also come to an end. That's how it is. One does not live forever. But as long as I live I live writing. That's how I exist. There are months or years when I cannot write. Then it comes back. Such rhythm is both brutal and at the same time a great thing, something others don't experience.

Thomas Bernhard, via Spurious.