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.
Kate Briggs, “Four Questions for Kate Briggs on Roland Barthes’ Preparation of the Novel” by Scott Esposito, Conversational Reading ? May 2013
Barthes refers to the protagonist of the story he’s telling (the story of someone who has experienced the desire to write and wants to set about writing a novel) as a “hero,” a “hero” who will have to undergo three “tests” or “trials.” So there’s already something mythical about the way this story is presented: writers as heroes who somehow manage to achieve their goals despite the setbacks, the difficulties, the interruptions, the breakdowns. Barthes is interested in the force, the desire-to-write that somehow sustains the writer throughout that process. In terms of the relationship between writing and desire, his point is that it’s a question that has been insufficiently studied in the field of literary theory — and this leads him to ask what for me are some very important, but very difficult questions: How is it that works of literature get written? What are the necessary conditions for writing to happen? Why is it that some readers, in love with certain books, feel compelled to write while others don’t?
Joseph Epstein, “Surveying the Surging Immensity of Life,” The Wall Street Journal 4 May 2013
Late in his short life, Gogol found religion and promptly lost art. Once Gogol began to think of himself as a Christian reformer, Nabokov writes, “he lost the magic of creating something out of nothing.” His genius for devising delicious details disappeared; his powers of invention deserted him. Before his death, he burned what he had written of the second volume of his novel. The last 10 years of his life Gogol suffered greatly from writer’s block; he died an excruciating death from anemia of the brain at the age of 43.
“Dead Souls,” meanwhile, is among that small number of uncompleted masterpieces that includes Tchaikovsky’s Unfinished Symphony, and Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities,” but with the important qualification that Nikolai Gogol’s great work is all the better for remaining unfinished.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.
Maggie Nelson, Bluets
For Mallarmé the perfect book is one whose pages have not been cut, their mystery forever preserved, like a folded bird’s wing, or a fan never opened [via].
Bram Van Velde, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram Van Velde by Charles Juliet
I paint the impossibility of painting [via].
Book of Blank Maps With Instructions
John Tottenham
If I killed myself it would completely validate the work. The only problem is I haven’t done the work [via].
An old story of mine, “Angel at a 25 Degree Angle” (written in 2000), was republished by Lit Up Magazine yesterday.
Anna Kamienska, “In that Great River: A Notebook,” Poetry Foundation
I like Simone Weil’s idea that writing is actually the translation of a text we already carry within us.
[See Dylan Nice (via Gary Lutz)’s idea of “a text beyond the writer to which the writer submits”.]
ANDREW GALLIX 