What Is Not in the Dictionary
June 19, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Italo Calvino
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
The Preparation of These Beauties
June 19, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Jackson Matthews, “A Note on Valéry,” Monsieur Teste by Paul Valéry, 1947, VI-VII
Mallarmé’s work had given Valéry a peculiar formative shock. These marvelous little “crystal systems,” as he called Mallarmé’s poems, struck the terror of perfection into him. Reading them, he could feel nothing but despair (“beauty is that which makes us despair”). He was himself already writing some very good poems indeed, but now his mind was driven past poems themselves to wonder how these “crystal systems” were constructed; the one thing superior to a perfect poem, he thought, would be a full knowledge of how it was made. He was soon to give up writing poems himself and turn his intense powers to the study of “the preparation of these beauties,” the generation of poems in the poet’s mind. Valéry was already coming into possession of his own and proper subject: the mind behind the work.
The Demon of Possibility
June 18, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Paul Valéry, Preface, An Evening With M. Teste, 1925
Who knows but that most of the prodigious ideas over which so many great men, and a multitude of lesser ones, have for centuries turned gray, may be psychological deformities — Monster Ideas — spawned by the naïve exercise of our questioning faculties, which we carelessly apply here and there — without realizing that we should reasonably question only what can in fact give us an answer?
But the monsters of flesh rapidly perish. Yet not without having existed for a while. Nothing is more instructive than to meditate on their destiny.
Why is M. Teste impossible? That question is the soul of him. It turns you into M. Teste. For he is no other than the very demon of possibility. Regard for the sum total of what he can do rules him. He watches himself, he maneuvers, he is unwilling to be maneuvered. He knows only two values, two categories, those of consciousness reduced to its acts: the possible and the impossible. In this strange head, where philosophy has little credit, where language is always on trial, there is scarcely a thought that is not accompanied by the feeling that it is tentative; there exists hardly more than the anticipation and execution of definite operations.
Absence
June 16, 2013 § Leave a Comment
The Gravest of Misconceptions
June 12, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Alain Robbe-Grillet, “New Novel, New Man,” For a New Novel
To believe that the novelist has “something to say” and that he then looks for a way to say it represents the gravest of misconceptions. For it is precisely this “way,” this manner of speaking, which constitutes his enterprise as a writer, an enterprise more obscure than any other, and which will later be the uncertain content of his book.
Ten Memorable Books That Never Existed
June 10, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Unopened Book
May 30, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Stephen Sparks, “A Book I Haven’t Read,” Tin House 1 March 2013
I might even argue, with Mallarmé, that the ideal book is one that we never open, since an unopened book contains our dreams, whereas an open book contains someone else’s.
A Scissors and Paste Man
May 10, 2013 § Leave a Comment
James Joyce, Selected Letters
I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description [letter to George Antheil, 3 January 1931].
Words That Go Silent in Transit
May 6, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Anne Carson, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” A Public Space 7
Silence is as important as words in the practice and study of translation. [...] There are two kinds of silence that trouble a translator: physical silence and metaphysical silence. Physical silence happens when you are looking at, say, a poem of Sappho’s inscribed on a papyrus from two thousand years ago that has been torn in half. [...] Metaphysical silence happens inside words themselves. And its intentions are harder to define. Every translator knows the point where one language cannot be translated into another. [...] But now what if, within this silence, you discover a deeper one — a word that does not intend to be translatable. A word that stops itself.
[...] There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.
[...] The light comes in the name of the voice is a sentence that stops itself. Its components are simple yet it stays foreign, we cannot own it. Like Homer’s untranslatable MOLY it seems to come from somewhere else and it brings a whiff of immortality with it. We know that in Joan’s case this turned out to be a whiff of herself burning.
The Ruins of Books
May 6, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Kate Briggs, “Four Questions for Kate Briggs on Roland Barthes’ Preparation of the Novel by Scott Esposito, Conversational Reading ? May 2013
Barthes suggests that the destiny of all books is to end up as ruins, fragmented, remembered in bits and pieces but never in their entirety. I think the image he uses is a piece of lace: in our recollections of them, we turn the books we read into pieces of lace.
