Thoughts fallen by the wayside

Since the early German romantics the thought has been around that criticism completes the work it criticises on a higher level of reflection. Put less obstrusely,a critic who reflects on or thinks about a work of art brings out aspects that are present in the work but not immediately seen at first glance. Sometimes these aspects are not even intentionally placed there by the author, but determined by his time, his social position, his unconscious hopes and fears. Of course, insofar as there is no end to possible interpretations of a single work, criticism – like the work itself – is a project without end, a utopian project.

This is a very flattering thought for a critic. We become sources of insights about works that not even their authors are aware of. Like little gods of the literary universe, we rest secure in our superior knowledge. Without us, all that makes literature worthwhile would remain hidden, intuited perhaps, but still buried beneath failing insight.

Yet experience, not least my own personal experience, seems to confirm the adage that those who can’t do, teach. Or in this case, criticise. How rare is a critical text that matches the eloquence, imaginative force, or simplicity of the text it criticises. Nor do critics, generally, make for good authors. Too much thought in fiction is like sand in one’s mouth. That granted, do critics do creative labour? Not creative in the sense of ‘the creative industries’ but creative precisely in the sense that authors are creative?

Creativity is allegedly one part inspiration and nine parts perspiration. The same holds true for criticism, whose prose style rarely even attempts to hide the perspiration that went into its production. In that sense it can even be said to be more honest. Criticism always lives off another text; it is never original. Tellingly it is also known as secondary literature. But, then, so do literary texts resonate with prior texts. Again, they are simply more covert about their sources (uncovering these is one of the tasks of criticism). And unlike other sciences – that in various ways claim to study the real world in which we live and breathe – criticism studies works of fiction, so how could it possibly lay claim to being less imaginary than its object of study? It’s all only words.

Still hard to comprehend that the books we read (sometimes) tell of the same world as the one we live in but are not identical to it.

Abstraction is to withdraw from something far enough until it can be studied in its entirety. A tree or a large house. That’s easy to imagine. Studying thinking should be more or less the same. To abstract from a thought until it can be thought about in its entirety. But since there is no distance involved, no measure for completeness, the very lack of boundaries becomes its own obstruction.

A bit of local colouring is advisable for the aspiring author. Begin with the specific which will, as if on its own, unfold into a general truth. A piece of advice it is inadvisable to listen to; it is rather the general that should crystallise into something specific, like a cloud produces snowflakes.

Cees Nooteboom, All Soul’s Day.

A novel that is a walk through Berlin, and a record of conversations held in Berlin. Mostly a clash between the familiar streets and the unfamiliar manner of conversing. Who talks like this? And if even my life brings me into contact with occasional glimpses of intellectual eccentricity, all of these taken together would not even fill a page of this book. But this difference, between the seen and the said, may well be one of the its pleasures. It contains things one could have been saying and a could is a promise.

But if Brandenburger Tor and Potsdamer Platz are places one is used to encounter in all kinds of representations of this city, from films to official documents to tourist brochures, the clash between what the novel narrates and my remembrance becomes almost laughable when Arthur Daane (the protagonist) decides to follow a woman into the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. A place where I have spent many hours and nonetheless one that still manages to unveil new nooks in its open 1960s architechture. I know exactly where each of the narrator’s footsteps falls (even the route between the Staatsbibliothek and the Ibero-Amerikanische Institut that, according to the novel, is only for those in the know) and yet the encounters he has in this building are so unlike any I have ever had there. And so I need to remind myself that I am reading a work of fiction and that even if I could remember every detail in the book before reading them there, the details I read would still differ from the real place that I remember.

In describing objects, a novel also always describes itself. And so the open space of Nooteboom’s Staatsbibliothek is not only like to the actual building, irregular, ochre-coloured, but also like to the book itself, lichtdurchflutet, yet full of nooks. Nis, Dutch for niche, is the first word that the book pauses to contemplate. Its untranslatability. And in like manner lichtdurchflutet, flowed through with light, is a word that seems to belong as uniquely to this building as it does to the German language.

An email tends to be answered at once or never, especially if it is an email to a friend. Because if such an email is not answered at once, the feeling of guilt for not having answered it alongside the responsibility to write a proper response make it impossible to write, and for each passing day the impossibility grows.

Tempted to assume that this is a result of our age of too-easy communication I was surprised to discover, when reading letters from around 1800, how many of them begin with an excuse for not having written sooner. And then it should be taken into consideration that at that time the receiver paid the postage. Which is to say that each letter placed a double burden on the receiver – not only the obligation to write back (and hence the threatening growing impossibility) but also a monetary debt, however minor (although, for instance, Elizabeth Hitchener had to almost destitute herself to receive Percy Bysshe Shelley’s enthusiastic letters). Generosity, then, would be to write with no expectation of a response.

Taking the time to write a letter should have the same weight as the time taken for a conversation. And as little distraction.

I would like to believe that two texts that cite the same third are related through this citation, a bit like two people who grew up with no knowledge of one another may be delighted to discover that they share a parent. This genealogy would thus be the occasion to trace resemblances between the two, again much like one does with siblings.

Of course, while any given author may be presumed to know whom and what she cites, there is no need to assume any knowledge of all or any of the other texts that cite the same source. The family relation between them would thus be a hidden one and any resemblances purely accidental.

Comparative literature is defined by comparison, yet there are no rules for what constitutes one. Presumably, the self-same cannot be compared to itself and thus comparative literature requires a minimal amount of difference that it then can proceed to cross. Alternatively, it could uncover differences within the apparently same.

This has two implications for comparing two texts on the basis of them citing the same third:

Firstly, the shared citation provides the point of similarity around which their differences crystallise.

Secondly, returning to the cited text after having read the texts citing it, one may expect to find differences within this self-same text and thus prove the already granted point that no one text can be read twice, let alone by different readers.

One could collect read titles like trinkets on a bracelet, or wild strawberries on a straw of grass at that time of summer when the berries are just ripe and one is just mature enough to be allowed to play with food. And so the books one has read would be strung like pearls across one’s mind. But when is a book really read?

Lately I have visions of reading, yet am struggling to find a book that could live up to them. So I leave a trail of half-read books that, over time, extends into a rope coiled around a sense of failure. Thus I decide to skip to the last page once I get sufficiently disappointed by a book, a substitute completion justified by the fact that it is impossible to remember each individual word anyway. Reading a book is suddenly little more than reading its last page and having a clue about what kind of loose ends are being tied up there. And the more such counterfeit reading I clock up, the more do I long for reading, the real thing.

I do not remember most of the books I read as a child. But I have a very clear memory of reading and it is this that I am having visions about. Then the fear: what if, just as the longing for certain places may just be a disguised longing for the time when one was there, my desire to read is desire for a time that is irrevocably past. A time when there was time -not time carved out out everyday routines, squeezes tight between tasks, appointments, commutes, and attempts to relax enough to fall asleep at night – but time pure and simple. Time without measure.

A poet not being read may take consolation in the number of artists who were misunderstood in their own time and only properly appreciated by posterity. But of course we do not know how many authors have consoled themselves thus without ever being discovered by those who came afterwards.

The idea of the misunderstood genius is a sideproduct of the romantic idea of the genius. Thus roughly 200 years old. It also coincides with the emergence of a book market and an expanded reading public. Which is to say sales figures that offer a very exact estimate of the extent of one’s not being read. Yet, around 1800 publishing was still cumbersome and expensive enough to keep the number of published works so small that even those who did not sell well would mostly get a mention in the reviews. Not so today. It is easier, cheaper, faster to publish than ever before and then to archive not only the published work but also all the intermediate drafts produced along the way. Posterity must be very patient indeed to sift through all these words.

Or has our 15 second, 140 character, post- culture, which has already and repeatedly heard the end of history proclaimed, made it impossible to write for something as anachronistic as posterity? And what consolation is then left for the unread writer?

An English learning exercise (whose full peculiarity never occurred to me when I was subject to it on a weekly basis back in school) was to repeat the conjucations of irregular verbs. The teacher says the infinitive and the class replies with the past simple and past participle of that verb:

be was been

do did done

eat ate eaten

read read read

sit sat sat

throw threw thrown

and so on, the whole class repeating in one voice. I can’t recall anyone ever being off-beat. And so, along with the conjucation of irregular verbs, we learned a lesson in rhythmics, in chanting a table of words that do not add upp into a meaningful sentence. And maybe it is precisely because the table has no semantic meaning in itself that it at times seemed to mean little more than the tempo of its sounds. In fact, English irregular verbs are still endowed with a special staccato rhythm in my mind.

But what strikes me now is the distance between the visual and the audible ‘read read read.’ There is nothing in the sound of the present tense ‘read’ and the past tense ‘read’ that suggests this identity of spelling. And yet, there it is, making it impossible to read ‘I read’ and know whether I am reading now or whether I have already read the thing being (or having been) read.