Bartleby has company

Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Jonathan Dunne (The Harvill Press, 2004)


(Note: The following is not a review but a transcription. While flipping through my copy of the Vila-Matas novel, three sheets of folded paper with writing on one side suddenly fell from between the pages. There appears to be consecutive numbers in superscript in the text. I reproduce the text below. It is signed "V" on the last page.

Bartleby & Co. is the Week 3 selection of Spanish Lit Month, hosted by Stu of Winstonsdad's Blog and Richard of Caravana de recuerdos.)

[1]

Writing is terrifying. The mind is occupied by what heart and soul dictates. Doubts accompany every pronouncement and sentence. The structure of the prose makes impossible demands. Stumbling blocks arise from every awkward-sounding phrase. Writerly confidence evaporates. The tongue-tied draft discourages the careful patience of the craft. Literature is seasonally abolished. If I keep silent, who will hear me from among the invisible hierarchies of invisible cities?

This book, if it is a book, if it amounts to a book, is my stream of semi-consciousness. He, the other character, will introduce himself in the footnotes. Bottom-dweller, he will crawl the floor of the pages, searching out his company of terrified writers. He shuffles to fill out the forms. I have faith in his capacity as protagonist and agonist.

Robert Walser¹, writer of infinitesimal codes, is not mere clerk of court. I laugh. Can miniature ideas be grand? I pour out these empty words. I pour this thought into the invisible ink. Uncle Celerino rests in peace. But the ghost of his nephew, Juan Rulfo, is wanted for a lie detector test.

When a thirteenth foreign language is understood, does it not rattle the tongue? Does it not colonize thought, adulterate the native mind? Go ask Felipe Alfau². If words are nothing but hallucinations, then a poet's refusal to record hallucinations³ must be heroic. I can't keep silent on this point, dear Socrates.

This long history⁴ of non-writing complex, or Block syndrome, is a beautiful subject to write about. To dig more about it is to imagine an empty mental hospital room being occupied, by someone mad⁵ or lacking in vanity. Someone with incontrovertible introversion⁶. (Between reading and writing, I'll take the first. Between rereading and rewriting, I'll definitely take the first. But I hope the narrator in the footnotes keep up. I hope he opens up new grounds⁷ I lay before him. I can't withstand the formulaic.)

One specifically writes to not forget the atrocities⁸ of history. Nunca mas!

And then there was the case of Cadou⁹, starstruck with an idolized author. At a glance from Gombrowicz, he transformed himself into a piece of furniture. Some writers are not born to write, and some mercifully receive the No letters¹⁰. My annotator has been nursing his literary eclipse¹¹ for some time. Next time we meet I must ask him if it was the solar or lunar kind.

What if writers draw inspiration¹² from their disappearance? As if they write firsthand account of their vanished souls? Here's your cue, close reader. Put the soul in the footnotes.

Not writing¹³ is still writing. Once ink is set beside paper, the writer unleashed his desire to be the paper. Desire is enough to retain the purity of a blank sheet. The imaginary contents of a universal library¹⁴ are enough to bring the unwritten to attention. The best thing is there's no fine to overdue imaginary books.

"I don't know" is a good place to begin¹⁵ a speech.

Poets are vultures. This includes my understudy who seeks an appointment with a vulture¹⁶ in order to supply the missing dead meat.

I look in the mirror¹⁷ and see someone else. A voice, writing after me, below me, marching and trailing one after another. One, two, three, ...

If the mirror has eyes, what do they see in a mirror?

In between the thinking thought and the written word is digression¹⁸. Ergo, to not write anything is to digress, which is a form of writing.

One does not write, not because they prefer not to do so, but because one doesn't know how to. If one knows how to write, then during the time he can not write, he simply doesn't know the way. One rebels either from knowledge of ignorance or ignorance of knowledge.

I must exercise to cheat death and to write¹⁹ some more.

For lack of ideas, you may conjure²⁰ up a letter. Or would you rather play chess?

I'm breaking my silence. I'm smashing the chains of self-censorship. I speak to you, character, creation. You are privileged to speak in the notes of this book. To structure its structure, carry on the imposture, trickery, charlatanry²¹. Only death²², not its impersonation, releases the manifold silences of a sonnet.

Imagination²³ is plenty, but its use is scarce. Yeah sure, invent characters²⁴ to characterize whatever it is you want to symbolize.

I think I know which of the two of us is fictitious, and which the original. Unlike Borges, at least I know which of the two of us is writing this page. Must you overcome²⁵ the challenge before you. Know what is dangerous to your health. For one, the dramatic practice²⁶ of silence without wit.

Writing the novel of denial²⁷ is impossible. Useful tip to a young novelist of denial: preach what you do not practice.

Dear footnote-taker, I assure you, you have not the past life²⁸ of a beast. Please make sure they didn't find out in the office that you fake your own depression. Else you're toast²⁹. Do not prolong the story of J.D.³⁰ anymore. Get to it³¹.

[2]

The literary genius, having known the limits of his literary imagination (i.e., none), opts to spurn literature³² for one reason. He can afford to do so. Only the non-genius tries and tries to type his mustard-piece but it always falls and falls short of the aim. Even heteronyms³³ know their boundaries. Literary expression is insufficient, says Hoffmannsthal's "Letter of Lord Chandos"³⁴, to embody human experience. Wars, for example, devalue language. Turn it into linguistic trauma. Mere stuttering³⁵.

I shall lead you to relevant materials, dear Marcelo, pro bono³⁶.

For example: Writing is inversely proportional to thinking³⁷ (see Valéry's Monsieur Teste). If one does not think, where is the spark when I say I would write no more (after Keats³⁸)? And Rimbaud's³⁹ "Adios, letras!" And Broch's dying Virgil assailed by loud, individuated voices⁴⁰ of ... silence. And Perec beginning his rap in the manner of Proust (maybe⁴¹): "Yes, it could begin this way, right here, just like that, in a rather slow and ponderous way, in this neutral place that belongs to all and to none, where people write almost without seeing each other, where the life of the building regularly and distantly resounds." Be resourceful. Literature does not participate⁴².

I found my objective: to produce a text that makes the invisible⁴³ visible. By writing about not writing, I pay tribute to the literature of the No. At the same time, I enact the literature of the Yes. There's no middle ground. No literature of Perhaps.

For this invisible book made visible, I have these as working titles⁴⁴:

Non-writers Anonymous
Unlimited Unwriting
Club of No
Blocked Heads

In freely quoting writers, in commenting about their literary (mis)behaviors, the annotator has my imprimatur. A gaze⁴⁵ is enough to read one's fortunes: publish or kapeesh, choose your own adventure. To live⁴⁶ in what one has finally written. Ultimately the story is not owned by anyone. The copyright belongs to the elements⁴⁷.

That Melville ended up a Bartleby⁴⁸, an office clerk, is beyond the scope of the literature of negation. We hew exclusively to the text (or non-text). To silent conversations between writers⁴⁹. To declarations, final, that the work of the poet⁵⁰, though endless, is over.

"Not writing for pleasure" can be one of the best gifts⁵¹ of freedom. You ask, Who will answer when the knock⁵² of the book-that-begs-to-be-written comes at the door? Why, the writer-in-you of course. Take the case of the octogenarian Henry Roth⁵³ who mercifully bided his time. He wrote from bondage – the bounty of existence – before calling it sleep.

The poet Juan Ramón Jiménez⁵⁴, who won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Literature, could not bring himself to celebrate. The love of his life expired three days after the prize announcement. Stricken by grief, he could not bring himself to attend the awarding ceremony in December of that year. He relayed a message to the Academy through a friend whom he asked to read his speech: "My wife Zenobia is the true winner of this Prize. Her companionship, her help, her inspiration made, for forty years, my work possible. Today, without her, I am desolate and helpless." Ramón Jiménez suffered two more years of despair not even close to literary in this world.

Quite the opposite of Kafka who had the dogged belief⁵⁵ that marriage is a condemnation not to write!

I once saw a film⁵⁶ by Antonioni – who also adapted Cortázar's story "Las babas del diablo" – where feelings dry up like sweat during an eclipse. Feelings like the inspiration to write.

My character delicately asked me, Can a short story⁵⁷ be inserted in a footnote? I think a novel can be made from footnotes, provided there's ample space and the ideas never run out of prose.

Another question from M: Are all writers practitioners of the theater of the No since, when it comes to it, all writers die⁵⁸ and their pens and papers with them?

I roll my eyes. So are readers and their failing eyes doomed in that sense.

Borges's tiger⁵⁹ lies in the realm of fiction. Thus, it's a non-tiger, but no less fearsome. I, the text, am the tiger (the idea of silent literature). The footnotes, parasites, feed on the non-carcass of the non-tiger stitching a non-novel out of its non-stripes.

[3]

Prolificacy⁶⁰ is a really rather unstoppable quality. After winning the Nobel Prize at age 76, Saramago was still writing for a living. He was unstoppable. A writer built to last. To think that he once declared, "It was becoming quite clear to me that I had nothing worthwhile to say." This after he abandoned his second novel, Skylight, after being ignored by the publisher he sent it to. "I had nothing to say, so I said nothing." It's that simple. After writing his first novel The Land of Sin in 1946, it would be close to twenty years before he would re-enter the Portuguese literary scene again, and some thirty years before another novel, Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, was to appear.

My disabled double has to produce some lasting impressions⁶¹ on his own. I worry for him (he's not sociable and is easily affected by normal human activities⁶²) as an author of an absent book⁶³ which is based on an absent one and based on the idea of absence.

"They say the first sentence⁶⁴ in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway." Wisława Szymborska's Nobel lecture, "The Poet and the World", was touched by the utmost humility. She continued, "But I have a feeling that the sentences to come – the third, the sixth, the tenth, and so on, up to the final line – will be just as hard, since I'm supposed to talk about poetry."

The totalitarian modus operandi of invasion of privacy is the most effective way to break a person's resolve. The Cuban Piñera⁶⁵ showed a way to dramatize the resistance. Writing on it was almost as good a way to resist.

I feel like this invisible-text-made-visible appears more and more like fictional footnotes materializing out of some primordial soup of chance. Random referents originating 100% from the ether. But I must see this text through if only because I have gone on long enough. Delusions⁶⁶ are free for the taking.

In the guise of a discouraging letter⁶⁷, more notes to supply the subconscious. The void⁶⁸ is the goal; Kafka shows the way.

Dearest A, my last request: Everything I leave behind me in the way of blank notebooks, bits of paper, news clippings (my own and others'), Post-its, anything unwritten, etc., to be burned in your mind. That they are blank is a telling evidence.... Yours, Enrique Martín

To mythologize or expose⁶⁹, it doesn't matter so long as you set out to disprove my claims. I await rebuttals of unsound claims perpetuated like bad books⁷⁰ on bestseller shelves. Readers are free tourists forever stranded⁷¹ by words traveling from page to page. Hypothetically, a novel is endless⁷² though it has to end somehow. With a period or a question mark or what eats, shoots, and leaves you have. With a hanging word or the symbol ∞.

Anti-readers can abandon their reading any time they choose. A clear exception is the Chilean poet who called himself the ideal reader⁷³ in one of his poems. Ideal because he read everything he can lay his hands on. For him every word is sacred. He ended his poem with a heartrending lament: "... I'm asking you [members of the jury] to give me / the Nobel Prize for Reading / as soon as impossible".

Insert a Kafkaesque nightmare⁷⁴ here.

"Become the night", says Emilio Adolfo Westphalen⁷⁵.

Look at the white face and black body of the Night until you stop perceiving the difference between whiteness and blackness.
Since you will only know Night if you lose yourself and disappear in the Night – if you become Night.

I do not lack essence⁷⁶ even if you will not acknowledge these pages. No, you will dream of them and think of them. You will enter an underground cave with words painted on its wall: "The last writer was here."

Then you will talk to your solitude in a soliloquy⁷⁷. Contemplate hunger strike⁷⁸. Wonder if a blocked writer descends from another. Wonder when will the real Thomas Pynchon stand up⁷⁹, where did Simenon⁸⁰ acquire the indefatigable energy to prefer to.

I'm not a key or master list. I just navigate the stream of a transparent liquid without oars. Mental or spiritual blockages are seldom forerunners of creativity, though they could spur one to think⁸¹. Of things like immortality⁸², thereby shielding the writer-thinker from trivial writing-thinking. The feeling⁸³ for poetry comes and goes. But poetry abides.

Consider the many masks of B. Traven⁸⁴. His reclusive life was built on multiple personalities. He took new names like wearing a shirt. He shed them just as easily from his naked self.

This is the penultimate statement⁸⁵ for footnoting: To end here would be awesome. But no, Marcelo my friend. I don't need to convince you.

"It is a minor question of style, and of consideration for the reader," writes F. L. Lucas in Style, "whether (apart from mere references) a writer should allow himself to use footnotes." He listed two issues against this device: (1) they are distracting; and (2) if the author took more trouble, he could weave them into his text. But Lucas eventually concluded, "But these arguments do not strike me as very convincing."

The last sentence in a work is probably just as hard as the first. So I will end with nary a metaphor or word⁸⁶.

This underground reality

1Q84: Book 4 by Murakami Haruki, trans. Philip Gabriel (Knopf, 2015)

Note: This review contains spoilers.




There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
– Hamlet



When the three-volume 1Q84 appeared in English four years ago, the readership was sharply divided. The cryptic novel was ambitious but it was poorly executed. The didactic and repetitive tendencies tended to underwhelm an otherwise mysterious and suspenseful story. With the publication of this latest volume of the story, Murakami closed a window and opened a new one from which to view the events in the first three books. I was fortunate to acquire an "advance reader's copy" of it.

Book 4 was a prequel, and it was as self-contained as a story as can be. It found its characters right in the middle of 1Q84 world which Tengo and Aomame barely escaped from by the end of December of that "shifted" year. The present story unfolded in the first quarter of the year, literally the 1Q of '84, but it contained flashbacks prior to the "descent" into this world.

This time, there was only one character telling the story, in Murakami Haruki's intimate first person. The telling, as in the first two books, was once again split into two parallel tracks. One should probably say, split into two voices, for it was the split personality of Tamotsu Fukada who figured in this book.

Tamotsu Fukada, the father of Fuka-Eri, was alternating his story as "Tamotsu", the idealistic leader of an agricultural commune, and as "Leader", the godlike leader of the Sakigake cult. The background of Tamotsu's/Leader's story were already prefigured in the first books. Professor Ebisuno, one time best friend of Tamotsu and eventually the adopted father of Fuka-Eri, had already recounted parts of the story to Tengo, while Leader himself talked about it to Aomame before she killed him. Aomame's research into the archives of library already provided the general arc of the key incident in Book 4. Also, the novella Air Chrysalis, as read by Aomame and described throughout the first books, already gave away some of the plot elements. Hence, it would appear at first that this was another repetition of the story. Surprisingly though, there were new elements to mine in this story, and there were several inconsistencies, slight modifications, between the versions of events and reality mentioned in the first three books and the events and reality of the present book.

(Had Murakami spun a new reality of 1Q84 only to subvert it? Was this another world entire, distinct from 1984 and 1Q84? Who knows. It did appear as though the world of 1Q84 was "altered" by what happened in the first three books: the escape of Tengo and Aomame in the emergency stairs of the Metropolitan Expressway and the publication of the rewritten version of Air Chrysalis?)

Notwithstanding the seeming inconsistencies in the plot, the book was now more political and ideological in tone, in keeping with titular Orwellian allusion. Inevitably, a central love story was also narrated, between the parents of Fuka-Eri.

The first track of the story (the chapters called "Leader") was the cult leader contemplating the events right after the 1981 "Lake Motosu Incident", the violent gun battle that put the commune on the news. The lake incident was the turning point of the story, when Tamotsu was chosen and "baptized" as the Leader of Sakigake. The second track of the story, the "Tamotsu" chapters, was built on flashbacks detailing how the young Tamotsu founded and maintained an agricultural commune, including his increasing alienation from his friend, Prof. Ebisuno. This second track recounted the circumstances that led to the split of the commune into two factions and contained some heated dialogues and debates between Tamotsu and several of his colleagues who were increasingly becoming more radical in their views.

Leader's narrative was the chilling voice of religious extremism, "ambiguous" depictions of pedophilia, and cult violence, while Tamotsu's narrative was an intimate voice describing his relationship with his family and the peace he was seeking along with peaceful members of the commune. One was ideology, the other utopia. The voice of one person and one principle, really, but currently split and becoming more and more eerie as they increasingly imitated each other and finally merged into one principle and entity.

One was the appearance of the Little People, the other was an increasing failure to stop the spread of fundamentalism. The climax of the story told of the slow emergence of the otherworldly (though comical) Little People from the mouths of the dead radicals after the gunfight in Lake Motosu, and their spinning of an air chrysalis to carry the villainous leader of the radical faction. It was a quite extraordinary "retrieval" scene, though previews of it were already witnessed a few times in the previous books.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Murakami explored what happened within the Sakigake compound. In the same way that Murakami wrote "The Place That Was Promised", the second part of the nonfiction Underground, because he felt the necessity to give voices to the members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, the novelist must have planned to provide a fictive parallel to the cult psychology before it branched out into the cult's terrorist act, the release of deadly sarin gas in Tokyo subway trains.

The notable things about this book were its more philosophical bent and the way the plot was quietly reined in, within a completely contained and isolated community, with minimum intervention from the outside world. The narrative therefore did not appear "all over the place" and messy and diffuse, qualities that marred the reading of the previous parts. Tengo, Aomame, and Ushikawa did not make their appearance in this book which concentrated on the radical and pacifist members of the commune.

Murakami, who must still be stinging from his not only being bypassed once again by the Nobel Prize Committee for literature, but also from seeing the prize go to one of his compatriots last October, had produced a worthy prequel to his lengthy story. This fourth book, which I am hoping against hope will be the last one for 1Q84, may partly exonerate him for his previous excesses. His constructed reality had now stopped expanding and this time contracted, tying all the loose strands and introducing open-ended shockers. The origin of the two moons was finally revealed in this book's epilogue. It was an engaging story within a story that justified the preponderance of "paper moons" reference in the early books. Who would have thought that behind the sickly green moon was a logical, though no less surreal, explanation?

Murakami courted greater risk with his presentation of the idea of a novelist as a cult figure, mainly through the disagreements between Tamotsu and the leader of the radical breakaway group. The dialectic was a bit forced though we could acknowledge Murakami's repeated attempts to avoid judging his characters, to avoid labelling their unorthodox actions and reactions as right or wrong. It was evident that Murakami had given the metaphorical role of novelists to both Leader and his nemesis, rather than to "Tamotsu". As early as Book 2 we could already glean how Leader, in his long conversation with Aomame, shared his strong ideas on the balance between good and evil.

   "In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good. This is what I mean when I say that I must die in order to keep things in balance."

Practically, these were the same words of Murakami in his 2010 New York Times essay, "Reality A and Reality B" (trans. Jay Rubin)—an essay which would make for a good afterword to the books.

The proper goal of a story is not to judge what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil. More important is for us to determine whether, inside us, the variable elements and the traditional elements are moving forward in harmony with each other, to determine whether individual stories and the communal stories inside us are joined at the root.

In the previous books of 1Q84 the major characters could be said to function, individually, as "stand-ins" for Murakami. There were similarities in what the characters said in the book and what the novelist said in his essays and interviews. For example, the gay bodyguard Tamaru had things to say about the way novels are written now:

We're drawing close to the end of the twentieth century. Things are different from back in Chekhov's time. No more horse-drawn carriages, no more women in corsets. Somehow the world survived the Nazis, the atomic bomb, and modern music. Even the way novels are composed has changed drastically.

The evolution of the novel to conform to the reflection of reality was also what the author had in mind in a passage from his NYT essay:

The moment our minds crossed the threshold of the new century, we also crossed the threshold of reality once and for all. We had no choice but to make the crossing, finally, and, as we do so, our stories are being forced to change their structures. The novels and stories we write will surely become increasingly different in character and feel from those that have come before, just as 20th-century fiction is sharply and clearly differentiated from 19th-century fiction.

Among the characters in the books, it was Leader who perhaps came closest to embodying the role of the novelist as a creator of underground worlds and realities: "How could I possibly know such things? By listening closely. That is my job—to listen to voices [or the voice, as the translators would alternately render it]." The same reliance on voice/voices, as if she was taking up a dictation like an office secretary, was how Elizabeth Costello, via J. M. Coetzee, defined her role as novelist: "I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible [after Czeslaw Milosz], one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. I merely write down the words and then test them, test their soundness, to make sure I have heard right." This voice and its transmission were also part of the receiver-perceiver pairing that ran through the books.

The most provocative element of this underground reality, however, was the dohta-maza conundrum. The self and its replicant, closely tied to the absence of a moral standard in the book. The dohta and maza remained just as troubling as they were outlined in the first three books. Murakami skirted the soundness of this formulation by making it part of the "belief system" of the cult. There was a danger of romanticizing the role of the novelist to the extent that whatever he dreamed up was to be accepted as is. Aomame herself had considered Leader's charismatic persona as "extraordinary" despite his sexual relations with pre-teenage girls.

Objectively, what this man [Leader] had been doing was perhaps an affront to humanity. But he himself was, in many senses, an extraordinary human being, and his extraordinariness, at least in part, appeared to transcend standards of good and evil. Ending his life had also been something extraordinary. It had left a strange kind of resonance in her [Aomame's] hands—an extraordinary resonance.

What was disturbing was the way Leader's sexual abuse of a young girl's dohta or female replicant—to the point of destroying her uterus—was considered merely, in Leader's words, an "outward manifestation of a concept", since she was not an "actual substance". Something must really be wrong in the 1Q84 world if there were young girls like Tsubasa who were "without substance", and their violation was but "one form of a concept". Incest, as well, was treated as a part of this concept. The concept, at bottom, was the sexual turpitude of Leader "possessed" by the power of the Little People. The Little People who were products of dark forces dwelling in the underground of the mind, from which the strands of chrysalis were to take shape and give birth into new "concepts". The dark forces dwelt like parasites in the minds of Leader and the radical members of Sakigake. Murakami was here treading dangerous grounds of his conceived reality, the underground reality in which women are treated as objects, in which morality was an unstable formless substance.

It didn't help, again, that this elaborate reality was couched in Murakami's serviceable prose. His writing smacked of self-validation and a nagging appeal to belief. Perhaps this latest installment could only be appreciated for its conception of an alternate underground reality whose plausibility could be accepted only in so far as this reality mimicked the main features of this reality: chaos, ambivalence, moral ambiguity. Perhaps we are living in it, always had been, in this "always only one reality" that Aomame was twice warned about. At least in Book 4, Murakami finally realized the novelistic vision he sketched in a 2001 NYT interview.

''What I write are stories in which the hero is looking for the right way in this world of chaos,'' he said. ''That is my theme. At the same time I think there is another world that is underground. You can access this inner world in your mind. Most protagonists in my books live in both worlds -- this realistic world and the underground world.

''If you are trained you can find the passage and come and go between the two worlds. It is easy to find an entrance into this closed circuit, but it is not easy to find an exit. Many gurus offer an entry into the circuit for free. But they don't offer a way out, because they want to keep followers trapped. Those people can be soldiers when they are ordered to be....''

The translation of this volume by Philip Gabriel demonstrated a natural and idiomatic grasp of Murakami's words. It was a good thing that Murakami had this time allowed his work to be edited and tightened for coherence and unity. The possibility of a sequel should not be discounted. Murakami, the perceiver, had the luxury to listen to the voice and transmit its imagined reality to us receivers. It was not hard to lose oneself in this underground reality. What was hard was to snap out of it.