Between

1.

These are pleasant days, quite empty and calm, the flat above me as yet unoccupied by the students who are coming in September. I will remember these days as those in the wake of the Great Summer of Going Out, of the pubs in the Ouseburn Valley. But September is coming; summer has passed its midpoint, and now there is preparation to be done for the new term.

It is Thursday, but it could be any day. The flat is calm and quiet and I have just finished a book. The name of its author will not surprise you: Josipovici. And just like the last book of his I read, it has passages which are marvellously Blanchotian, beautifully so, taking what I love from the novels of that author and bringing them to life again, and in a new way.

Should I write here of Goldberg: Variations? I have already annotated a couple of chapters. Those towards the end – ah! Chapter 22, which recalls The Last Man! Chapter 26, which reminds me of The One Who Standing Apart From Me!

It is true that I decided to read it this evening to get it over and done with. That is an admission. I had thought, I am catching the many references here – to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (Chapter 18), to Sinclair (chapter 13), confidante of Holderlin. Catching them, but they are doing little for me. In fact, they are a little irritating. Exercises, that’s all. And do I really have to hear that Holderlin line about danger and saving grace again? It’s a cliche! And I thought: these variations, which leap from character to character are being told in the same voice. That’s what I thought.

True, I had half guessed what is to come: it was written, all of it, by a fictional author. The one we meet in the middle of the book, whose wife leaves him as he comes near to completing the book we are reading, and whom we meet several times more in the chapters near the end of the book. This device is familiar from lauded authors John F—-, Peter C—- and A. S. B—-, none of whom I care for. Indeed, it was reading such books that turned me from modern fiction for many years. How hate those authors and the whole crew! I thought: why is it I like none of the books others like? Why is it prize winning books are so dreadful?

2.

I have just put Goldberg: Variations book down; it is still new to me. I know the reading will work through me for a number of days, like a spreading wave. Yes, it will do its work and I will write about here, although I have much else to do and there is no more than a hour a day for ‘free’ writing.

Regular readers will know with what wonder and surprise I read the following exchange:

– Perhaps it is not the details that count, although every story is made up of details, but something else.

– What? he asks.

– That which lies in between, for example, the other says. In between the details and in between the different stories. Perhaps you have lost heart because you have lost the ability to recognise the importance of between.

– Of course, he goes on, such loss of confidence is almost inevitable, for if you could see the importance of between it would no longer be between and so would no longer be what is important.

– Between, the other goes on, is only a way of talking. It is perhaps the only way of talking about time. Time the healer, not time the destroyer. Only another way of asking you to trust in time, in the time of working and the time of reading.

The conversation, between the fictional writer and the ‘other’ who accompanies him in writing, continues. It is one I will quote again. It has a beauty I find nearly unbearable – not for the prose, which is lovely enough, but for the thinking enacted in that prose. What wisdom! What refinement!

I flatter myself that I have learnt some things by writing here and elsewhere. Learnt that the forces engaged by writing do not belong to the interior of the writer; that there is also a kind of kenosis, an emptying, that voids the writer of herself.

More recently, I learnt the lesson about details – the details which make up a fiction. That was through meditating on Kafka and Handke. And now? I am learning about the between – about the trust and the work of reading which carry you from one shore of the book to the other. Which is the between-the-shores of reading.

Reading this conversation, I considered myself corrected: I should have been watching for the between, should have allowed it to work through me. Instead, what did I do? Bored of the book, I took it to the gym. I wedged it in front of me, cracking its spine so its pages would stay open as read while I exercised on the elliptical trainer.

Then, a sense of shame. I thought: no, I should put this aside. I should pay more attention. I did; and took it up later in the quiet of my office. Hours passed; then I brought it home to the quiet flat and finished it here. Hours which seem propitious only in retrospect, since they lead me to the final chapters. For only then were they retrospectively illuminated by what I think of as the candle flame of the between.

What I mean to say is that the hours spent reading a book I thought I didn’t care for have been repaid me. That I have been returned a hundredfold for the effort of reading. The end of the book gave me its pages again. Wonderfully, the penultimate chapter is one which should, according to a chronological sequence, have been at the beginning (at least as it bore upon the story strand of Westfield and Goldberg). This is true delicacy! What grace! Reading it, I thought: and so I have regained the book, and these hours after the gym.

3.

I’m not sure why these notes are necessary. Why do I feel the need to mark reading here? Why do I feel a need to write this, here? Nothing is explained, not really; I seek only to redouble the movement of the book, trying to attest in my own way to its singularity. I am interested only in repetition, in the workings of a book and not in explanation. But in this repetition, the book comes to me again not in part but as a whole, in the great leap that it is. A leap that is the book’s freedom against which I do not want to test my own. This is beatitude.

4.

– Between, the other goes on, is only a way of talking. It is perhaps only a way of talking about time. Time the healer, not time the destroyer. Only another way of asking you to trust in time, in the time of working and the time of reading.

– But how can I trust in time when nothing that is done by me has the quality of authenticity?

– You and your questions, the other says. I have told you. Between is only a way of talking. What is important is not to be found  in any place and it is not to be found in any time, either the time before you began or the time after you have finished. It is not inside anything or outside anything, but is what has made these things happen. Do you understand me?

Who is speaking? The other. Who is the other? The voice comes, ‘What makes and has made these marks is not you, the other goes one, and it is not not you’. I would say this: it is the condition of fiction which speaks through its details – that a priori which leaves its traces across what is read.

It is the equivalent, if I may put it this way, of the castle of Kafka’s novel, as it stands it for what, in fiction, is at once the banal, the everyday (the castle is coextensive with the village; Klamm an ordinary man behind the desk) and at the same time, the reserve that turns and will not face you.

That turning is telling, and that telling occurs by way of details. Those turning details cannot but speak of the between that is the articulation, the hinge of telling. Of what cannot be written directly, but is the condition of writing.

Who speaks? The other. But the other who speaks is the narrative voice of the novel, the one in whom you must trust in order to be borne from moment to moment in the novel’s itinerary. The one in whom even the novelist must trust insofar as he is only his own first reader and does not know its secrets.

The novel begins. Its author is its occasion. But the beginning sets itself back further than the intentions of the novelist. It lapses into the space which can only repeat itself, saying the same thing over and over, I am, I am, I am. Literature is what lets speak this I am which is attached to no speaker.

The other speaks in Josipovici’s novel. Thus does literature speaks of itself, of its remove, of the between that, once you’ve come of the Goldberg: Variations, speaks the articulation of what its fictional narrator calls ‘this absurd charade […] this costume drama with only fragments of costume still clinging like seaweed to the bodies’. It is the candle within the magic lantern, and the lighted images that give themselves to reading are its gift.