The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently. One might add a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing.
Franz Kafka
Nothing stimulates what Kafka calls the impossibility of writing more than the obligation to write. There are days that seem to be devoted to nothing other than the compulsive refusal of this imperative command.
Unfortunately, on days when writing is impossible, reading is no less easy.
Stories tell of events that unfold in time, a time that runs parallel to the time it takes to read or narrate any particular story. So there are two times running concurrently: the time of reading/listening and the time within the story.
Could one make these two temporalities run against one another’s grain and narrate a story backwards in the manner that a film can be run backwards? Taking the film analogy literally would imply that each sentence begins with its last word (if not its last sound) so that instead of a story that starts where it ends, one would be left with nothing but shreds of sense.
Poetry; etymologically from poiein, ‘to make’. Poetry makes and since it makes with words and words are generally taken to mean something, poetry may even be regarded as the production of meaning.
But any given poem is likely to mean different things to different people at different times. Therefore, if poetry produces meaning, it is in fact producing an excess of meaning.
In other words, no poem means one thing and if it means anything, this thing is the fact that it means more than its meaning and, one may even venture to say, primarily means this surplus.
Poetry makes the meaning that exceeds itself and is itself this excess.
A thought experiment: a world in which books are published without the name of the author. Not even a pseudonym. In this world literary criticism must be something very different: no appeals to the author’s biography for explanatory contexts, no way to trace developmental relations between different works by the same author, no categorisations according to gender, class, or ethnicity.
But precisely these losses may be gains: when the author’s persona not longer throws its shadow over the work it may well be that much easier to read it for what it is.
When Europe set out to colonise the world, its travellers laid the foundation for a legacy whose end is still hard to see. And this is not even meant as a comment on globalised capitalism or on the ease of international movement nowadays but on the impact of the Western colonial endeavour on personal identity. Is there still a place in the world where one can define oneself wholly apart from Western identity? The question is wrongly posed, of course, since our concept of identity is by and large a Western construct – and yet there seems to be something universally appealing in having an identity so defined. Its like a product that is first invented, and the need for it follows.
Yesterday, to the day, two hundred years ago Shelley and Byron met on the shore of Lake Geneva. Little knowing that books will come to be written about the friendship that sprung to life on this day. That it would spark scandal could perhaps be anticipated, but not that it would, over time, come to seem as intriguing as what they wrote.
But marking this anniversary, essentially treating life coincidences as editorial choices, also seems nonsensical. Days line up and have their dates arbitrarily assigned to them, and that now two hundred years worth of numbered days has passed may be aesthetically pleasing, but how can one expect any significance from it? Or anything more signficant than the date as an excuse to organise a commemorative event, itself a thing poised beween promotion and entertainment (to make the romantics seem present in the present by noting how distant their present is to this very present we’re presently in).
When dealing with artworks of the past, there seems to be a tendency to treat individual pieces as representatives of their whole era. The work of art is made to support an impression of the period it arose in – its worldview, beliefs and prejudices, its spirit. On the other hand, our own prejudice about contemporary artists is that they are eccentric, strange, not like other people.
Is it that the eccentric is the best position from which to describe the centre? The artists stand without, aside, removed from their contemporaries and so can better see what they are about.
The thought is more comforting than the other one that suggests itself: that the future will define our own era by our artists.
It is comforting to find the very same silence in different locations.
Is it as impossible to create a complete descriptive set of criteria for bad books as it is to create one for good books? One of the elements of a good book must be that it is, while resonating with other books, still unlike any other book one has read before. This irreducible difference makes it essentially impossible to characterise good books: no two great books are good in exactly the same way or for the exact same reasons. But what about bad books? Lack of originality is a contender for a criterium, but is it any more possible to bring the infinity of reasons why books may be bad into a systematically ordered whole than it is to predict what makes a book good?
An answer to the questions should not appeal to the subjective nature of taste judgments such as good or bad.
When faced with something one has written long ago to have forgotten all about it there seems to be two intuitive responses: embarassment or incomprehension. The first is quite self-explanatory, the second may be an outgrowth of the first: difficult to comprehend that out of the swaths of embarrasing writing one has amassed there are also parts that one need not be ashamed of, parts that therefore seem to break with the essence (or at least repetitive pattern) of one’s writing.
Thoughts fallen by the wayside 