Category Archives: Phantom books

Like the Word on the Tip of Your Tongue

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Stephen Sparks, “An Imagined Book,” Invisible Stories 31 March 2013

An imagined book cannot be possessed. Any attempt to bring it into mental focus, to remember or conjure it up — which is it? have you held it or has it held you? — leaves you bereft, as if, like the word on the tip of your tongue, the book rests in your hand, nearly. It is a vague shape around which it is impossible to stake words.

When those readers fortunate enough to feel this sense of loss speak of the book, they do so in whispers, not with secrecy, although perhaps a little, but out of reverence and fear that doing so will damn them to forgetfulness. In speaking of the book they diminish it, syllable by syllable, without ever grasping it, a handful of water.

The Project

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Daniel Levin Becker, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature

The centerpiece of Roubaud’s oeuvre is a lifelong endeavor called le Projet (the Project), which began with a dream he had in 1961 about deciding to write a novel called The Great Fire of London. He started to act on his decision in waking life but eventually abandoned the project, and has now spent way more time writing about that abandonment than he did working on the novel. There are seven books that collectively constitute the Projet, in that they elaborate, in a pseudo-autobiographical style filled with digressions and interpolations and bifurcations, Roubaud’s failure to stick to the initial Projet. (Very Roubaldian distincrion: the imagined work, which he abandoned in 1978 for reasons he explains in a book called ‘the great fire if London’ (lowercase and in single quotes, to differentiate it from the unrealized dream-novel), is the “bigger project”; the actual published work is the “minimal project.”) “Everything I speak about is, in a way, linked to the old abandoned project,” he told an interviewer in 2008. “And if they’re not true, at least the events are told truthfully, as I remember them.”

Trivialities of Text

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Kenneth Grahame, “Marginalia,” Pagan Papers, 1898

Without actually suggesting this course to any of our living bards, when, I may ask — when shall that true poet arise who, disdaining the trivialities of text, shall give the world a book of verse consisting entirely of margin? How we shall shove and jostle for large paper copies!

A Thing in the World

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Gary Lutz, interview by Dylan Nice, Wag’s Revue 7 Fall 2010

I try not to trouble myself all that much with meaning. A sentence of mine is a layout of language. What the sentence might be about is of no permanent concern. I’m mostly drawn toward art that resists exegesis. Donald Barthelme, paraphrasing Kenneth Burke in an essay published in 1964, wrote that “the literary work becomes an object in the world rather than a text or commentary upon the world,” and a year later, Susan Sontag, in her essay “On Style,” made an eerily similar statement: “A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.” Both writers eventually backed away from that position, but I buy it.

The Infinitely Possible

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Roland Barthes, “Ecrire,” Oeuvres complètes, ed. Eric Marty, 5 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 4:422–423. Originally published as the preface to Roger Druet and Herman Grégoire, La civilisation de l’écriture (1976)

Even as I reflect on what I should write (as is happening at this very moment), I feel my hand move, turn, connect, dive, rise, and often enough, as I make my corrections, erase or even obliterate a line. This field expands until it reaches the margins, thus creating, out of seemingly functional and minuscule traces (letters), a space which is quite simply that of art. I am an artist, not because I represent an object, but more fundamentally, because, as I write, my body shudders [jouit] with the pleasure of marking itself, inscribing itself, rhythmically, on the virgin surface (virginity being the infinitely possible).

Locus of a Secret

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Maurice Blanchot, “Joubert and Space,” The Book to Come

… Joubert had this gift. He never wrote a book. He only prepared himself to write one, resolutely seeking the right conditions that would allow him to write. … He was thus one of the first entirely modern writers, preferring the center over the sphere, sacrificing results for the discovery of their conditions, not writing in order to add one book to another, but to make himself master of the point whence all books seemed to come, which, once found, would exempt him from writing them.

… [Ending a list of similarities between Joubert and Mallarmé] [T]he feeling that literature and poetry are the locus of a secret that should perhaps be preferred to anything else, even to the glory of making books.

… He seems to have been a failure. But he preferred this failure to the compromise of success.

Present Absence

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Lars Iyer, “Impossible Literature,” interview by Antônio Xerxenesky, 3:AM Magazine 6 February 2013

In The Savage Detectives, perhaps more than in the work of Vila-Matas and Bernhard, melancholy blossoms into a kind of promise. The disjunction between Modernism and the present, between Literature, capital ‘L’, and Politics, capital ‘P’, becomes utterly unbearable. For me, that unbearableness allows Literature to appear in its impossibility, as a kind of present absence, as a kind of disappearance, and along with it the vanished legacy of Modernism.