The Uncommon Reader

The Age of the Epic

The Homeric hero lives in the glory of his acts, in the splendour of immediate action. But the hero’s name depends upon the song in which he is celebrated. After the feast, the bard comes forward to sing; in the song, the hero lives. Didn’t the heroes of the wars of Homer’s poem know their fate? Hector says that before he dies he will accomplish something great ‘whereof even men yet to be born shall hear’. Agamemnon says ‘even men yet to be born shall hear’ of the shame of the Achaeans’ retreat from Troy. The heroes know their reward lies in posterity; their names will resound after they die.

Thus, the hero owes his existence to the telling, the song, to the language in which his deeds are repeated. True, the hero is unique – he has a name, and a unique glory as the bearer of this name that is sung in the great hall. A uniqueness born of the splendour of an act that his name substantialises, and this is the miracle, the surprise of heroism: a name can attach itself to such great deeds.

A human being can be marvellous: this is what the epic celebrates as it repeats the name of the hero, begining the tale again, over and again, embellishing it, transforming it even as it is yet the same tale. Sing of the Pandavas in the forest again! Sing the story of the Rama one more time! Tell us of Krishna’s deeds! It is true, Rama, Krishna, and the Pandava brothers name avatars, or men who can claim divine descent. Perhaps one should think of Heracles and Achilles instead – of Roland and Cid….

The epic is a tale without beginning or end. But the epic ends as a genre as history begins (‘and then darkness fell over India …). The hero does not belong to history. His time has passed – who now is capable of a deed which flashes out through heaven and earth? Who can lend his acts to the memory of the epic? Yet the hero exists in the tale and this is the condition of his existence: he is alive in the retelling of the tale – alive in the presence he has for the listener in the great hall.

Some say the Trojan and Theban wars were caused by Zeus in order to end the Heroic Age. In the Odyssey, it already seems the Trojan wars already belong to another era. All, even Ulysses, are keen to hear songs of Troy. And isn’t it knowledge of Troy that the Sirens promise to bestow? It is already, with the Odyssey, a time for song. Soon, the hero’s name will be eclipsed by the name of the singer. The bard steps out of obscurity and anonymity to lay claim to Achilles.

Now the act belongs to the bard (the author). Literature begins. Does the singer become a hero in turn? Is it necessary, now, to write rather than act – or to act and then write, recording one’s exploits? Must one create one’s own legend? The novel is on the horizon. Don Quixote and Pancho Santa are about to set off …

The Age of Humanism

For the Greeks, enthusiasmos named the way in which the individual voice was possessed by a higher authority. Language is, as it were, received: but the locus of this reception is not the poet alone with a quill. Reception occurs in what Russo and Simon call ‘a kind of common “field” in which poet, audience and the characters within the poems are all defined, with some blurring of the boundaries that normally separate the three’.

It is thus a gathering or assembling that, for the Greeks, marked the recitative event; the separation between text and reader that will lead to the unraveling of the self-presence of the recitation, the sundering of poet and audience, is as yet unmarked. With the birth of poetry, of literature, the Muse, the figure of inspiration, is given over to the disseminative effects of history. When literature becomes a delimitable body of writings, the scene of inspiration shifts; it is no longer the Muse who would allow human beings to reveal and receive the truth through the song, nor the God of whom the author would be the answering scribe.

Is it, then, the authorial authority, the creator-genius, who would be able to secure the origin of inspiration? This would seem to be the path Feuerbach clears when he argues that the idea of God springs from the human being alienated its powers and capacities. The human being receives the power to overcome this alienation and to begin to write, to speak in the name of humanity, delimiting a place from which it would be possible to call a halt to the infinite regress of the origin. Thus it is possible to speak of the era of humanism, whose faith lies in the power of the human being to work and transform the world.

God is now revealed as a pseudonym of the human being; the way is cleared for the Promethean artist and the total artwork (Wagner). But a profound transformation has occurred, for this is to isolate the power to create as the most important trait of God. It is not that the human being wants to supplant God, but that the human being can only understand God as a great producer, as a source of power. Feuerbach is wrong to argue that God was merely the product of the alienation of the human being; it is the human being who is born from an alienation which occurs at the heart of God. Art, now, is seen to be a matter of the powers of human creativity – but here the human creator is only an imitation of a delimited God.

What, though would it mean for God to be returned to the darkness and forgetting that he has been made to veil? Now comes another turning point in the history of the relationship between poetry and philosophy. Isn’t it Hölderlin who understands that the absence of the gods must be experienced, and that this experience is itself holy? And isn’t it he who understands that poetry, writing, must answer to that experience?

The time of distress, he calls it. Our time, says Hölderlin, bears witness to the absence of the gods, to the ruins of the temple, that Hölderlin develops his invented mythology, which is to say, his construction of an imaginary Europe in line with Herder’s palingenesis. Hölderlin pretends that this Europe exists and that he, the poet, speaks for its community. In so doing, he pretends there is a relationship between poet and audience of the sort he believed Pindar to have enjoyed even as he knows this relationship is impossible.

At the same time, as Constantine comments, this does not constitute an act of deception, since the ‘mythology’ itself is palpably mythological. The appeals for community, for the return of the gods and for a communicable myth are themselves mythological figures. Hölderlin’s mythical Europe is a way of marking its distress; to elect himself as the poet who is bound to its phantasmic community is another way of indicating the way in which we belong to a time of distress.

Itis not, with Hölderlin, that God has been delimited, but the contrary. God is unlimited all the way to dissolution … God has been torn apart across the sky. ‘Is God the unknown? Is he manifest as the sky? This rather I believe …’

But then, another phase. God is forgotten, and so is the forgetting of God. The holy recedes into an indifferent sky. The great era of humanism also recedes. What remains? Listen to a novelist recounting the vicissitudes of composition: ‘I wanted to say something about …’; ‘I write to express myself’: these innocuous statements reflect the hubris of supposing that it would be possible to lay hold of inspiration in one’s own name.

Is it the time of distress? Rather, the time without distress, where writing is part of the bustle of the world, where novelist, audience and characters occupy the same consensual reality. A final twist: in modernism as the eternally new, that comes at the end only to show there is no end, and that to have nothing to say and no means to say it is the beginning of writing and not the end. Writing is impossible, and for that reason, necessary. Impossible, and carrying with it the test of the impossibility that awaits the uncommon reader.

The Impossibility of Writing

Kafka wrote in bursts, in breaks. For long periods, he knew he could write nothing. So when it came, what he experienced as inspiration, he had to write as much as he could. Then the hours he sets aside for writing every night are not filled with activity. Kafka waits – he spends days and weeks waiting, and then …?

Some days it is possible to write, but on others … desolation; non-writing. And it is the same even when he has several books behind him. Nothing is sure for the writer, and the vocation of writing the least sure of all. What does it mean to want to write? Is it to subject writing to your will? Certainly that is part of it. But also, too, to be receptive. To have to wait upon inspiration. To wait for waiting to release you just enough for you to write …

Wait for the beginning – and when it comes, write as much as you can. Follow the story across the days and nights. For it is too easy to fall from writing! Too easy, and that is the risk! But even when you finish a story, what do you have? Are you a writer yet? Are you still a writer? In a sense, to write is always to be in lieu of writing.

And when you have written? How can you judge the worth of what you have done? There are no stories like The Judgement, none like Josephine; The Trial and The Castle are without precedents. In a sense, what he has written is also an obstacle to Kafka. For how can he gauge his own talent, his competence? True his work is admired by his friends; there is at least that. But compare Kafka’s calm prose with theirs; compare the sobriety of Metamorphosis with the gaudily covered review in which it was published. To write without prior criteria, with the great models of writing collapsed – how can Kafka experience his own work except as a failure?

There is no common field that brings together poet, audience and characters within the poems; no Sittlichkeit of which they are part. And so Kafka can write only as he runs up against the impossibility of writing, where the impossible does not name a limit beyond which it would not be possible to act; or the limit itself has become experiencable, and now Kafka is able to write along its edge, writing with a sense of the absolute precariousness of writing, which is why he attempts to complete his stories at one stroke.

The Hemiplegic

First of all, the attempt to find the time to write, to set nights aside. Then there is the waiting in those quiet hours, open to indifferent skies. Then, all too rarely, the merciful excess which grants the strength to begin to write. A sentence set down on the page gives way to another; by a surprising strength, writing is possible. But then, such writing depends upon a prior experience of failure, a sense of have exhausted every means. Until the beginning – that moment when the power to write is granted – must be understood to drag behind it a terrible weight. Or it is an attempt to push that weight just a little ahead of itself, to open a clearing …

To write is never simply to begin, to cast off into clear waters. The beginning runs up against the past, the eternal return of uncertainty. To begin is only to have pushed the rock, like Sisyphus, to the top of the hill only to see it roll down again. The beginning must perpetually be regained; the surplus of strength, with its mercy must rediscover itself in the writer.

Then to writing there belongs a peculiar temporality – a moment of initiative, with everything before it, collapses into weariness. This step forward was no step at all, but the return to the same interval in which nothing can begin. Or it is that the writer moves forward like a hemiplegic – moves and falls, both at once, until movement is indistinguishable from falling.

Absolute Failure

It is not only the ‘I’ who is the locus of writing. That the ‘I’, as Blanchot says, becomes ‘il’, becomes ‘it’ – that the first person gives way to the impersonal; that the ‘there is’ of ‘there is writing’ is like the dummy subject in the phrase ‘it is raining.’ There’s no ‘it’ to rain; no ‘I’ to write. There is writing – suffering, dying without subject. There is writing – but who writes in the absence of a writer?

In the active sense of the word (that is, as writing names an activity like any other) a writer does indeed write. There are words on the page. But would the writer be a writer (a literary writer, a modern writer) without the prior experience of absolute failure? An experience that blooms into a beginning, to be sure – but one that is also furled in what is written after that beginning.

Then it is that the ‘I’ and the ‘il’ are joined – that the writer who writes (writing as activity) is joined to writing as passion, as silent unaccomplishment (writing as passivity). To write is also to fail to write – how absurd! But to bear this absurdity as writing, and not only as its content. To bear it through every element of writing – through plot and character, through the details of the story and the rhythms of the prose. As though all of writing were magnetised by what it cannot say – not the ineffable, it is not that simple; nor silence, unless this names the thunder that rolls within a writing that endures the test of impossibility … Cannot say, but cannot not say, as the ‘common field’ that unites poet, audience and culture gives away to the uncommon experience of the impossible.

Writing, Reading

There is writing. But now that ‘there is’ redoubled, thickened, as though writing also spoke of itself – as though it lifted itself from that semblance of the world it was supposed to resemble. Or as though that power of resemblance had failed – that the possibility of reference had collapsed, and writing had fallen into itself, lost from all worlds. And this even as words lie on the page, and on page after page. This not despite those pages – the physical evidence of the book, as it substantialises an author – but through them, across them. The trace of the ‘il’ never substantialised. Of the writer as writer, which is to say, as no one yet.

Who writes? Who reads? In a sense, nothing is lighter than reading. To be born along by a story, to follow the lines on the page – all this answers to the most ordinary of human capacities. Reading is easy, even when the book is difficult, for at least that difficulty has a measure; at least it is judged according to the measure of the possible, instead of carrying the possible away with it. But isn’t there a reading that is the correlate of the ‘other’ writing? Isn’t the reader, too, reached as the ‘il’, as the one without measure?

Perhaps it is possible to say that the reader, too, undergoes a test. Perhaps there is a trial of reading just as there is a trial of writing. This time, the correlate of the author – the writer proud of the work that has made him as real as any other worker – is the cultured reader; the reader who will add the book to the great pile of finished books, who knows nothing of the need to reread, to begin over. This is the reader substantialised by reading, for whom culture is that sacrosanct realm of great names and great books.

But hasn’t the reader, too, been lost? Aren’t there books which so carry forward the impossibility of writing that it surges forward into the receptive reader? The opposite of resuscitation: not a breathing mouth clamped to your own, but a mouth that sucks out your breath. To read, to die: infinitives detached from substantives. The ‘there is reading’ that doubles up reading, that lets it wander in itself.

Of course it is always possible to put a book down. To forgo the reading, to leave it behind. But the possible, here, is measured by the ‘I can’ of the reader. An impossible reading is compelling, fascinating, for it is without an ‘I can’. Reading becomes a fate, just as writing that endures and answers to the test of the impossible is also fateful. A fate that is also a trial, a test.

Is this why it is necessary to reread some books and not others – as though by doing so one might come closer to the narrative voice that makes the whole fiction a cluster of indices pointing in the same direction. It is why the books of certain authors seem immeasurably more important than others, as though they bear upon the essential – as though, by following book after book, it becomes clear that they are pressing yet further into the peculiarly fascinating realm when writing gives voice to the impossibility of writing.

This is why the lives of certain authors are likewise fascinating – not simply the books they write, but their correspondence, their notebooks, and in fact the very way they pass from day to day. Nothing is negligible, nothing inconsequential; writing also involves an attitude, an ethos. Writing is not a profession like others. Or rather, if it is treated as such – if the writer consents to appear to the world as an author, resting in the power and glory of his renown, this is to betray the risk that writing also is; the fact that the writer as writer depends on that passivity in which the ‘il’ takes the place of the ‘I’, and reveals all subject positions to be usurpations.

The Age of Capital

Today the successful author is a brandname. Publicity surrounds the work as it surrounds everything. The ‘public’ it reaches is a phantasm of the publicity industry itself – a kind of dream or hallucination of a ‘target audience’, an audience constituted around certain demographics, ‘markers’ which indicate the kind of taste they ‘ought’ to have. This phantasmal public, the marketer’s dream, are the ones who are already familiar with everything written. They are both insatiable and satisfied; nothing will surprise them and they will always want more.

But beyond the ‘public’ of the great machines of publicity, there are readers the demographers cannot reach, the ones whose strange tastes deform the predictions of the market researchers. The secret reader each of us is or could be – each of us, any of us is already more than a denumerable consumer whose purchases would make up the great lists of bestsellers printed in the Sunday papers.

True, publicity calls to the ‘public’ and this ‘public’ to publicity, but somewhere, still, there are encounters with the impossible in writing, in reading, in life …