Why does the experience of the neutrality of language (as described in the previous post) escape most novels? Because they are content to reflect the world back to itself – because language is not uncanny, or its uncanniness lies solely in its capacity to effect a representation. Because language is made to bend to the virtuoso’s will– the novelist who is all too present, all too obtrusive. But then to allow sentence to fall gently after sentence – is it a matter of the novelist’s will? Is it a question, here, of what the novelist sets out to accomplish, or might one write of a kind of necessity or fate within writing itself? A fate that plays itself across the work of different authors?
The danger of imparting a kind of volition to writing is obvious: a dualistic metaphysics, where writing takes the place of what Schopenhauer would call the will. But to invoke writing is a way of figuring those movements which traverse the human being without being reducible to a particular will. For is the individual will not a way of connecting with transpersonal forces? Understand the human being in terms of the forces which traverse it without positing the primacy of the world of representation, and you have a monistic metaphysics.
Writing, then: no longer a question of the style of a particular individual (I will come back to this). It is a force – a becoming – but of what? Of language – and it will have been there from the start. Language, it appears, locks us into representation: call a cat a ‘cat’ and you have already assimilated it in its living immediacy into a category. But what if it was never even there in its immediacy – or if its immediacy was such that it is already given as a ‘cat’? Language articulates a world, it is true – but does not also co-constitute that world to the extent that to struggle against a determination of the world is also to struggle against language?
Fortunately, there is always an ‘outside’ of language – of any possible language: the ‘noise’ which separates message from medium, infinitely deferring the possibility of ever capturing the world in a language. This ‘noise’: rhythm, syntax, texture, sonority, colour offers a chance to resist. Irony, buffoonery, ‘improper’ and patois (Deleuze and Guattari: minor) uses of language can perform variations on major codes. Where is the novel in all of this? Perhaps what I have called writing falls into a genealogy of variations on a major language – variations linked to the literary work (as well as many other phenomena).
Plato allows Socrates to criticise the Rhapsode because he does not really know of what he would speak (he is only an imitator of Homer). And the novels which fill our bookshops? It is not, here, a question of what prizewinning novelists would know or what they would not know, but of the imitation of a particular model of the novel (a classicism). And to break with imitation? Perhaps it is to give way to an experience of writing that simply happens – and does so with particular vehemence in that period called literary modernism – in the joy of writing outside a classical idiom (the regulation of verse)? Perhaps this is too quick and too crude (for has this not already occurred with Cervantes and Sterne – and certainly with Holderlin)?
The classicism of the novel (of most, perhaps nearly all novels) is a retrenchment against the experience in question. Read Beckett’s The Unnameable, Kafka’s The Castle, Cixous’s work in general (The Book of Promethea) and what do you find? Summary in place of a reading: writing without model, writing writing writing.
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