Literature’s Remove

1.

How long do you live with a book? How long does it live inside you, explicating you, opening the world to one who is no longer the same and for whom the world is not the same? It is easy to be reclaimed by the same habits from which the book separated you – the same perceptions bound to the same self – but what if a threshold really were crossed: what if the reading of the book had irrevocably changed the one you were?

Perhaps there is a practice of writing that is the correlate of this experience of reading. Perhaps there is a writing that allows the writer to cross one threshold after another – to pass, with writing – not through writing, not in writing, but with writing, accompanying it – into that remove where no words give themselves to describe your experience directly and univocally.

That withdrawal, I tell myself today, my last in London, is the first experience. The second would be to repeat the first, to recall it and make it speak. The inexhaustibility of telling – telling’s inadequacy – is the gift of the withdrawal of the work. Why is necessary to read another book, or to write another? Because of that withdrawal and the abandon with which it marks reading and writing.

In the wake of Across, a book about thresholds, I feel that the remove of reading is close to me. That the book let speak this remove and allowed its nullity to press forward. I think: I have been at the head of the waters, at the source from which all telling flows. At the head which is the potency that calls for telling, for that speech which is never satisfied with anecdote and personal memory but searches for a telling adequate in its inadequacy to the remove into which the book withdraws.

Adequate in its inadequacy – but what does this mean? Perhaps the old model of propositional truth – the declarative phrase that would represent what is happening in the world – breaks down with respect to the remove in question. It is what allows literature its life as a wandering without truth, a passage without release. Perhaps literature is the attempt to speak the remove, knowing it cannot be spoken, but knowing too that it is not ineffable. Knowing, then, that literature does not depend upon a kind of mysticism.

To write is not to perform a raid on the inarticulable if this is understood to refer to an experience on the hither side of language. It is to speak with language, to draw on what language makes possible even as language is just one of many systems of signs. There is no pre-lapsarian language in which the world was named just once and forever; likewise, language bears no absolute privilege with respect to being.

But writing is a struggle with language just as directing, acting, editing and the whole complex of activity associated with filmmaking is a struggle with the image. Telling names the struggle that is narrative literature just as sculpting in time is a name for the struggle of filmmaking (Tarkovsky) and painting – the bare to paint – is a name for the struggle with painting (Bacon).

Each time it is a question of an event embodied in the medium in question. An event that occurs as reading, seeing or hearing, when the work finds its addressee. Each time it is a question of being as it is given in a material event – in the struggle with the medium which happens as the work of art. Each time a threshold is crossed; what is given is given in a new sense which means there is a new way in which the work withdraws and maintains its mystery. In which the work, dividing itself, at once removes itself from its addressee and appears in this removal. The mystery of the work does not lie in its depths, but at its surface. The surface as the tearing-apart, as the torn threshold where the addressee is met and the addressee changed.

Slovenian, for the narrator of Repetition is not an Edenic language. To learn a few words of Slovenian, though, is enough for the narrator to learn his German again. To reach into that remove which calls for telling. Even then, I wonder whether there is not nostalgia in Repetition and in Across. I wonder if literature’s remove is linked too strongly to the speech of Slovenians or (in Across), Virgil. I wonder if Handke is not too willing to understand this remove in terms of the plenitude of nature, of the natural world.

But then it is not Handke who speaks in these novels, and that is everything. What is marvellous is that he is close to the remove in question – I know it, I experienced at once, as soon as I began to read Repetition and as I began to read Across, though in both cases, that experience revealed itself only when I finished each novel. Close to that remove which must be figured (it can only be figured) and told (it can only be told) over and again. Literature’s remove.

2.

It’s night, and I’m back in the North, correcting this post and amending it. Now I’m removed from that remove – from the experience of reading. The book changes in my memory. Even as I finished it, Across seemed to come together, to assemble itself into something which bore meaning in all its parts. Until I finished, I was lost; I read, it is true, and felt the pressure of reading, but I didn’t know where the book was going. But I felt, even early on in the book, close to a reserve of immense force.

‘Why Handke?’ I asked myself. ‘Why has it happened with this book and not others I’ve recently read?’ I picked up my hardbacked copy of Across at intervals. I didn’t always want to read it. My eyes passed over the sentences as over a complete opaque surface. I admit it: I was lost, alienated from the book. I had to reread parts of it, and could only give myself to reading when I was bored, when I’d gone out of the flat and come in several times, having run out of excuses. There was the book; bored, I sunk to its level. It came to me and spoke to me then. It spoke because I was living at the level of the book.

All week I’ve thought to myself: I would like to write a book where the words barely assemble themselves into a meaningless whole. I would like to inhabit a speech that surges on relentlessly. Often I remembered the cliches Paul Auster permits himself in writing. He writes, let us say (I don’t know the facts) quickly; rather than seek, later, to replace those cliches, he leaves them in to maintain the flow of writing or perhaps to attest to it. I have dreamed of an unlimited flow, of a speech without form, without contour, which spreads itself like a fine net across the whole world.

At the same time, this flow would be born from that same boredom which brought me to Across and opened its pages to me. Boredom would permit that free floating attention Freud commended to the psychoanalyst, where no detail counts for more than any other, where being comes forward without coercion. There it is: the world. There it is, the everyday world, spreading before you. But what of the writing that would go out to meet it? Where is that writing – or where in you does it await explication?

Night. I return to the office and then to my flat. I’ve read through the proofs; R.M. is now far away. I won’t be there tomorrow morning to swing her legs over the edge of the bed to send her on her way to the job she tells me she hates. Where am I? The television is on; my dial-up links me to my favourite websites; there are no books here. But I think to myself: in my isolation and my boredom, I feel literature’s remove to be my forebear. I am descended from an act of reading; literature explicated me and I was turned over to the One-All that continues to watch over me.