by Rod Mengham
For you must realise that my nerves have been stretched thin like a net over the entire handicraft centre, have crept along the floor, smothered the walls like tapestry and covered the [work]shops and the smithy with a dense web. This phenomenon is known to science as telekinesis, which makes everything that happens in the shops, the planing shed, and so on seem to happen directly on my skin as well.40
Schulz’s nervous system is given the properties of a net, a web, and even a tapestry; and these different kinds of textile are identified with the text written directly on the skin. Nerves are meshed with language; writing embodies an acute sensitivity to pleasure and pain. Schulz understands his own writing as a means of working out a response to certain key images; he calls them images, but they are more like primal scenes, the imagination’s version of childhood feelings that persist as adult anxieties and wishful thinking. They tend to amplify an acute vulnerability, a child’s sense of being undefended, unprotected, even when they acknowledge the sincere efforts to reassure the child made by inadequate parental figures:
Another of those images for me is that of a child carried by its father through the spaces of an overwhelming night, conducting a conversation with the darkness. The father caresses the child, folds him in his arms, shields him from the natural element that chatters on and on, but to the child these arms are transparent; the night cuts straight through them, and over the father’s soothing words he hears its sinister blandishments without interruption.41
Schulz’s attraction to eroticised forms of powerlessness must arise partly from the need to convert the impotence of these primal scenes into the basis of an adult resilience, through the constant rehearsing of an equivalent dynamic. Schulz’s own understanding of this process figures writing as a species of rewriting, an interminable practice of reconstituting the same elements, over and over again:
These early images mark out to artists the boundaries of their creative powers. The works they create represent drafts on existing balances. They do not discover anything new after that, they only learn how to understand better and better the secret entrusted to them at the outset; their creative effort goes into an unending exegesis, a commentary on that one couplet of poetry assigned to them.42
The couplet is the poetic equivalent of the architectural confined space, and the exegesis conducted by Schulz’s work across all media operates much more frequently through the registers of topography and architecture than through the register of poetry. The specific combination of subject matter and formal method in his writings and drawings can be thought of as manifesting a poetics of abasement. The endless variations on a primal scene that is never rendered conclusively simulates the building of a structure ‘many stories high’ over a basement that remains hidden. It is appropriate that Schulz’s house on Florianska Street is only one storey high, and that the style chosen for that single storey would be better suited to a much larger building. Like so many nineteenth century dwellings across Poland and the Ukraine, the ambition to add further stories in subsequent stages of construction was never realised. The hoped-for prosperity that would allow this simply never materialised. In Schulz’s case, the ambition was realised through a style of architectural exegesis in writing. In text after text, the boundaries of a confined space were surpassed imaginatively through the exegetical expansion of space and time. Many of Schulz’s scenes of writing resemble the confined space of a camera obscura entered by a panorama of the world outside. Perhaps the most tantalising exploration of this idea is found in ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’, in the episode where the chamber of the camera obscura itself is extended and articulated:
The room behind the shop was still empty. Through a glass door some light filtered in from the shop. On the walls the shop assistants’ overcoats hung from hooks. I opened the parcel and, by the faint light from the door, read the enclosed letter.
The letter informed me that the book I had ordered was unfortunately out of stock. They would look out for it, although the result of the search was uncertain; meanwhile, they were sending me, without obligation, a certain object, which, they were sure, would interest me. There followed a complicated description of a folding telescope with great refractive power and many other virtues. Interested, I took the instrument out of the wrapping. It was made of black oilcloth or canvas and was folded into the shape of a flattened accordion. I have always had a weakness for telescopes. I began to unfold the pleats of the instrument. Stiffened with thin rods, it rose under my fingers until it almost filled the room; a kind of enormous bellows, a labyrinth of black chambers, a long complex of camera obscuras, one within another. It looked, too, like a long-bodied automobile made of patent leather, a theatrical prop, its lightweight paper and stiff canvas imitating the bulkiness of reality. I looked into the black funnel of the instrument and saw deep inside the vague outline of the back of the Sanatorium. Intrigued, I put my head deeper into the rear chamber of the apparatus. I could now see in my field of vision the maid walking along the darkened corridor of the Sanatorium, carrying a tray. She turned round and smiled. ‘Can she see me?’ I asked myself. An overwhelming drowsiness misted my eyes. I was sitting, as it were, in the rear chamber of the telescope as if in the back seat of a limousine. A light touch on a lever and the apparatus began to rustle like a paper butterfly; I felt that it was moving and turning toward the door.
Like a large black caterpillar, the telescope crept into the lighted shop – an enormous paper arthropod with two imitation headlights on the front. The customers clustered together, retreating before this blind paper dragon; the shop assistants flung open the door to the street, and I rode slowly in my paper car amid rows of onlookers, who followed with scandalised eyes my truly outrageous exit.43
This curious apparatus, which undergoes a series of permutations from the moment it is unwrapped, has been sent to Joseph as a substitute for a book, which means that in some sense it must be understood as serving the same purpose as a book. Moreover, the book originally ordered by Joseph is supposed to be a pornographic text, which makes the characteristic stiffness and extensibility of the substitute machine correspond to the desired effect of pornographic stimulation. As the hand-held object grows in volume to such an extent that Joseph can climb inside it, it seems also to contain the entire geography of the story in which it features, allowing its protagonist to review once again the scene of his first arrival at the sanatorium. The moving ‘complex of camera obscuras’ epitomises the dynamic of Schulz’s text, which circles obsessively and disproportionately around a single point of origin, its exegetical energy fuelled by desire, and its capacity for infinite transformation signaled by the conjunction of references to caterpillar and butterfly. And the narrator’s pleasure at being considered outrageous is an index of Schulz’s achievement in effecting the metamorphosis of powerlessness into pleasure, ensuring that compulsion is always given enough scope to expand into creativity.
2011
Essaying
The Habitus of the Text
The movement of thought in Montaigne’s essays, composed and recomposed over a period of twenty years, is hesitant, impulsive, easily distracted, decoyed by sudden enthusiasms, snared by the memory of other texts, lured by the reflecting fragments of similar preoccupations in the minds of others. It is above all else a movement inward and outward, attentive to the occasions of thinking and writing, to the circumstances of time and place in which an ‘attempt’ is made (an ‘essai’) to compose something out of scattered materials, out of the books that chance to be at hand, the ideas that happen to rise to the surface of the mind, the smells, the sounds, the temperature of the place in which the writer is lodged; it feeds on all these things as it drifts from one thing to another; it ruminates. It pays very close attention to its own inclinations, both physical and mental, it retreats further and further inside itself, precisely in order to gather itself for a series of excursions, a succession of forays, that carry it as far as possible from its point of origin,
almost to the point of no return, before feeling its way back again, more by homing instinct than by design. This recoiling movement that governs the writing and reading of the text, setting in motion the reader’s attentiveness, keeping it afloat but seeming to lead it astray, off course, before drawing it back again to the author’s mind from which its itinerary has derived, is implicit in the spatial arrangements of the Essais’ scene of writing, the arrangements that Montaigne put in place to imitate in his provincial French chateau the conditions of a Renaissance studiolo – his library in a tower:
When at home, I turn aside a little more often to my library, from which at one sweep I command a view of my household. I am over the entrance, and see below me my garden, my farmyard, my courtyard, and into most of the parts of my house. There I leaf through now one book, now another, without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments. One moment I muse, another moment I set down or dictate, walking back and forth, these fancies of mine that you see here.
It is on the third floor of a tower; the first is my chapel, the second a bedroom and dressing room, where I often sleep in order to be alone. Above it is a great wardrobe. In the past it was the most useless place in my house. In my library I spend most of the days of my life, and most of the hours of the day. I am never there at night. Adjoining it is a rather elegant little room, in which a fire may be laid in winter, very pleasantly lighted by a window. And if I feared the trouble no more than the expense, the trouble that drives me from all business, I could easily add on to each side a gallery a hundred paces long and twelve wide, on the same level, having found all the walls raised, for another purpose, to the necessary height. Every place of retirement requires a place to walk. My thoughts fall asleep if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it. Those who study without a book are all in the same boat.
The shape of my library is round, the only flat side being the part needed for my table and chair; and curving round me it presents at a glance all my books, arranged in five rows of shelves on all sides. It offers rich and free views in three directions, and sixteen paces of free space in diameter. (Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Three Kinds of Association’, 1585–88)
His tower gives Montaigne solitude, exclusiveness, the freedom to be himself, answerable to no one else; it gives him containment, concentration, the opportunity to distil himself and his thoughts; it gives him a vantage point, a commanding position from which he can see in almost every direction and over great distances; and it gives him time, a means of exit from the time of ‘business’ and entry into the time of the mind; time in which to imagine the construction of new buildings and time in which to realise the constructions of the imagination. Montaigne’s reflections on his tower merge with his observations on his own writing. The compactness of the tower, its microcosmic character, its radial design and its circular library that epitomises the knowledge of the world, such that a few paces in any direction take its user across centuries of time and the geography of the known world, all these features of the place in which Montaigne sits down to write correspond to the organising principles of the essay, with its small compass, its self-containment, its telescopic enlargement of the small detail, and the exceptional freedom it grants to wander at will in any direction, and in any dimension. Its informality has helped to give the impression that the essay is among the most modest of genres, but its conceptual scope permits it to be one of the most ambitious, the most extravagant.
Montaigne’s writing lays down a template for the essay which has remained crucial to its subsequent development. It is formally and conceptually a niche in time and space, an insignificant interval when seen from outside, that once entered begins to expand, seemingly beyond natural limits, and sending probes into unknown territory. It is a place that you withdraw to on your own, a place that you make your own, and that seems to be right inside you; an interior that you look out from. Sooner or later the whole world goes past; it is a ‘place of retirement’ that is also ‘a place to walk’. Elsewhere in the same text, Montaigne encapsulates the contrariness of the essay, its paradoxical ability to open outwards while seeming to fold inwards, its subtle reversal of the magnetic poles of self-communing and a sort of communicative abandon: ‘Solitude of place, to tell the truth, rather makes me stretch and expand outward; I throw myself into affairs of state and into the world more readily when I am alone.’
But in many ways, Montaigne’s work is also more radical than that of the vast majority of his followers, in that it cultivates an allergic resistance to the conclusive, the legislative, the incontrovertible. The habitual brevity and density of the essay have often fostered a weakness for trying to accomplish the impossible, the rendering down of an already very concentrated passage of thought into a single point. It is the minimal forms of literature that have most often succumbed to the maxim. Take the case of Sir Francis Bacon, the first writer in English to publish a series of texts under the title of ‘Essays’. Bacon’s writing gravitates almost automatically towards the sententious. It is a machine for the manufacture of pensa, of medicinal thoughts in pill-form, salutary pronouncements, each one the end product of a forensic procedure seeking to adjudicate between prescriptions for the best course in life. Montaigne avoids the shape, texture, weight and odour of the Great Thought, and if he ever seems to have it within reach in one sentence, it has slipped through his fingers in the next. The more he wrote, the less satisfied he became by the rounding off, the trimming and packaging of thoughts, the more fascinated he became by the brittleness and elusiveness of the process of thinking. If the freedom of the essay has meant that the essayist is all too often smitten by the higher purpose of his own thoughts, for Montaigne, true freedom of thought consists in thinking to no purpose.
Montaigne’s tower is justly celebrated; like few other writers’ houses it feels like the integument of a writing practice to which it is joined directly, organically. Montaigne returns to it every day, just as he handles the essay on a daily basis, without expectation, without a sense of occasion, since the occasions for writing are usually commonplace ones; like the tower, the essay absorbs the full range of different kinds of information from the outside world; it feeds on variety, thrives on the miscellaneous, on principle, and without prejudice, bearing out its author’s famous claim, inscribed on his library ceiling, ‘nothing human is foreign to me’. Like the tower, the essay functions ahead of its time like a kind of camera obscura for the projection of ideas, bringing closer and making clear the movement of thought, its surges and hesitations, its branching off in different directions, its arrivals and departures, its errors. It is an interior whose sole purpose is the manner of its linkage to the outside world. The tower is the focus of the surrounding countryside; the library is the conceptual heart of the tower; and Montaigne’s body, sitting, getting up, walking a few paces, turning around, is the nerve-centre for the whole operation…
2012
Vacant History
At Dover, Matthew Arnold turned to Sophocles from a cold latitude: ‘this distant northern sea’. He spoke from a familiar place as if from a great distance, although it was really his own times that seemed remote. Above the beach, a faded newsprint copy of his poem is fixed to the wall of a terraced house. The owner of the house, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, plays host to an idea that Arnold wrote the poem in one of his rooms. The poem imagines the world not as the threshold between dream and reality, but as a perilous brink between dream and nightmare. The ghost of Arnold’s idea – a self-haunting reverie – isn’t knocking around in the cellarage or the wardrobes at the foot of the cliffs, but has a strange afterlife higher up, in the fragile archaeology of war lying scattered around on the brink of the chalk.
Here is the true vantage point for the darkling plain, the bomber’s moon and ship-infested seas; here is where one imagines most clearly the withdrawal of dream and advance of nightmare; here perhaps the melancholy ebb and flow of military thinking, the prolonged echo of Arnold’s ig
norant armies, forever clashing by night.
The ruins on the Langdon site were built between 1884 and 1885 to house convict labour. The prisoners were earmarked for the construction of a new Admiralty harbour, but all they did was sew mailbags and chop firewood. In 1901, the name and function of the site changed to Dover Military Prison. Expansion over the following year turned it into the biggest military jail in the country.
In the same year, the Langdon Battery was installed nearby, housing three enormous 9.2 inch guns. They were so long at 37 feet and so heavy at 27 tons that transporting them through the streets of the town proved impossible, and the monster barrels had to be rolled over the fields, for a distance of one mile. They saw action in the First World War but their main use was as a threat to shipping. They could not repulse the German Zeppelins, calling for quick-response anti-aircraft fire. According to the Langdon Fort Record Book, the Zeppelin threat was frequent and the airships were not deterred by AA fire, often cheating the gunners’ best efforts. Despite their size, they frustrated attempts to bring them down, even when crippled. On 9 August 1915, a Zeppelin that had dropped bombs on Dover harbour was severely damaged by fire from the battery, but rather than plunge to earth or water, it ‘rose and disappeared in cloud’.