Dream: a writing in retreat, a writing that empties itself as it moves, as the people of old Russia retreated as Napoleon’s armies marched toward them. Retreated and opened the land they left as a terrifying, aching absence. The advancing troops died of Russia’s space and its people’s patience (but this a dream, and nothing to do with what might have been the case).
Absence: Napoleon’s troops passed through empty towns and along the empty roads, lost in a country that was indifferent to them. Or that lives its own life, and now I think of Stalker’s Zone: what resists? What comes forward as resistance? The deserted country – the objects on the nightstand reappear under water. It is not Stalker who dreams, as he lies down among the puddles, but the Zone itself. Then it is only the Zone that is real; only the empty space of Russia in its massive absence.
Writing’s remove: allow absence to dream of itself. Of itself – and across pages covered in writing.
2. What does writing, in its retreat, open behind it? Simone Weil’s God opened the universe as he fled; he is always turned in the other direction. And doesn’t he flee from himself? Isn’t his fleeing first of all that? The protagonist of Blanchot’s Death Sentence rents a series of rooms all at once in which to enjoy his absence. He is not there – and how offended he is when he knows a child has been looking into one those rooms, as though it had caught out his absence, seen it, instead of allowing absence to absent itself in darkness.
How to let writing be? How to turn your back upon writing by writing? And how to read such that writing does not give up its indifference?
3. Sometimes, foolishly, I think to myself: music without a voice is nothing, art without a face is nothing, even if the voice is torn up, even if the face is burned away. To drive away the face – to deafen yourself to the voice, but by way of the face, and by way of the voice. And then: writing needs plot, needs character; it needs an orientation, even if it is to point only to what tears plot and character from themselves, even if it is to allow writing to absent itself from itself.
Kafka’s skill: immense precision of writing. No detail is extraneous. But every detail (Klamm’s pince-nez, the peasant’s faces in the snow) seems to retreat from my reading, leaving that remove that is indifferent to my attempt to discover meaning. The eye passes along a glazed page. Sense refuses itself to sense, or meaning carries with it the retreat of meaning. What does the book say? What does it not say?
I discover something of the same in the best of Appelfeld. Not Badenheim, but The Iron Tracks, or The Healer; not The Story Of My Life, but For Every Sin, or Tzili. Could I say that it is writing’s retreat that fascinates me in Appelfeld, that lays claim to my reading? Then this would be a response (but an unsubstantiated and oblique one – a project for a response rather than a response) to Ellis Sharp’s post at Barbaric Document.
With some books, reading is drawn over a threshold, and, as Steve, from the first. ‘There are some books whose first lines, whose opening lines are enough’, he writes more recently. As though the fictions that follow them are gathered up into a threshold. Cross over. Pass. But you pass into nothing. Reading is only passage; the space opened by writing is already in retreat.
Lars Iyer's Blog 