Literature exists only when it discovers beneath apparent persons the power of an impersonal – which is not a generality, but a singularity at the highest point
Hélène Frichot, ‘Instructions for Literature and Life’
The same thought put differently:
The words I, you, they, are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblages of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘On Life’
If literature is our power to mingle in the I (I write it “I”, you read “I”, we both understand that this “I” is a narrative subject position that does not amount to ourselves), then why do we insist on its relation to life?
If I put this thought differently:
Two writers, separated by two hundred years of history, appear to suggest that the markers of personhood (I, you, they) will at the highest point of singularity dissolve into an impersonal one mind – a highly singular mind which may even be defined as one in which the I that is me is no different from the I that is you, or them. This is the mindset of literature (we read “I” in a literary text and we know that this “I” does not denote me or you). But because we are no longer ourselves in this “I” what right do we have to assume that it has anything to do with our lives? Is it not equally possible that literature is the point at which the impersonal is so modified as to eradicate any trace of my self in my writing, my reading of the word “I”?
It is a robbery of the highest order.
Not because we discover that what we think has already been thought, but because we discover that it was not even us thinking it.
Thoughts fallen by the wayside 