by Lydia Davis
Our lives also contain possibilities for narratives: people do—writers and nonwriters alike—extract from the material of their lives single, meaningful narratives and present them as such, with, as Barthes says of love episodes, “a path which it is always possible to interpret according to a causality or finality—even, if need be, which can be moralized (‘I was out of my mind, I’m over it now’ ‘Love is a trap which must be avoided from now on’ etc.).”
(He also describes such a narrative in terms of a disease: “It develops, grows, causes suffering, and passes away.”)
Imposing this coherent order on a series of events that was in reality mixed up with random, extraneous material, giving it a “meaning,” is of course the “distortion” that Barthes talked about. One hears and sees what one is predisposed to hear and see, one interprets as one is biased to interpret; another will witness the same material and tell a different story. We see only one side.
The journal
Barthes says: “With the alibi of a pulverized discourse, a dissertation destroyed, one arrives at the regular practice of the fragment; then from the fragment one slips to the ‘journal.’ At which point, is not the point of all this to entitle oneself to write a ‘journal’?” (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes).
The journal or writer’s notebook: a partial, externalized form of his or her mind. Just as, if we take notes on our reading, either in or out of our notebooks, so that we don’t forget what we have read, then these notes become an externalized form of our memory.
My journal as my other mind, what I sometimes know, what I once knew. I consult my other mind and I see that although I do not know a certain thing at present, I once knew it; there it is in my other mind.
Barthes is self-centered
Barthes is self-centered, taking the word literally: he is centered on himself, centered in himself, and he is explicit in admitting this, using it, acting on it, assimilating it, and thereby achieving a paradoxical sort of distance from it and from himself. He himself becomes as much an object of interest to himself as other objects he examines. His mind in the act of apprehending fascinates him. In fact, if he occasionally refers to himself in the third person, as Joubert also does, perhaps it is precisely when he is most explicitly taking himself as an object of interest to himself.
What is unfinished
How different is it for Barthes to refer to himself in the third person and for Kafka, in his diary, to present himself as someone else, exaggerate and dramatize a situation he really finds himself in, and in this way create the beginning of a story? Many of these stories that he begins in his diaries don’t go on, are unfinished. But how much more unfinished is an unfinished story in Kafka’s diary than one of Barthes’s “brief bursts”?
Doesn’t it also have to do with our expectations? If we did not expect the narrative, once begun, to continue, as we do not expect a nonnarrative statement in a journal to continue, then we would not even regard the story as unfinished. For Kafka it served a purpose, satisfied an impulse—nothing more had to be added.
The pleasure or pain of not finishing
In a short article I read recently on Sartre’s political writings, the writer—whose name I can’t remember—suggested that perhaps there were many works Sartre did not finish because he wrote for the pleasure of writing, not for the satisfaction of reaching conclusions. This seems to have something in common with what Barthes said about loving to begin. Kafka, on the other hand, appeared to be very distressed that he could not finish certain pieces of writing. Four years before he died, he wrote in his diary: “The misery of having perpetually to begin, the lack of the illusion that anything is more than, or even as much as, a beginning, the foolishness of those who do not know this” (October 16, 1921, Diaries 1914–1923, tr. Martin Greenberg). (Of course, this contradicts what I said above, that for Kafka nothing more need be added to a beginning of a story; in Kafka’s mind, there was the expectation that the story should go on.)
Joubert is reproached, either by himself or by his friends, with not knowing how to finish. He answers in his notebook: “To finish! What a word. We finish nothing when we stop, when we say we have come to the end” (Notebooks). Reproached with having finished before any beginning, he says: “When the last word is always the one that offers itself first, the work becomes difficult.”
What is allowed, formally, to be unfinished
I have always been more interested in Bouvard and Pécuchet than in Madame Bovary: to me, it was not only the preoccupation (subject) of Bouvard and Pécuchet that appealed (the autodidactic impulse carried to an absurd extreme) and not only the characters—the Laurel-and-Hardy or Beckettian couple, the androgynous or really sexless pair of males, males endowed with sentiment but no sexuality (this may be an inaccurate impression, left by a reading of the book decades ago), unaggressive, yet active, even passionate in their quests (i.e., pure minds? naked minds?)—but also the form of the book. It is horizontal rather than vertical (or paratactic rather than hypotactic): an endless series of episodes, endeavors, projects, a series that has only the feeblest of logical linking, a sequence that really has no logical conclusion because finality, causality, is not part of its nature and also because the book was in fact left unfinished by Flaubert. In this case, as in some others, can’t we say that it may be appropriate to the very nature, the very enterprise, of the work to be unfinished? That this could be allowed formally?
The Frankfurt Edition
Sieburth, in his introduction to Hölderlin’s Hymns, describes an edition that proposes a different way of reading fragments. This edition proposes to involve the reader in the text in a way that may stand as a paradigm for reading any fragment, as the reader is invited to take active part in its confusions, ellipses, and abbreviations.
“Whereas previous editions of Hölderlin had more or less masked (the) authorial (and authoritarian) role of the editor,” writes Sieburth,
the so-called Frankfurt Edition currently in progress under the direction of D. E. Sattler challenges the sovereign procedures of traditional Hölderlin scholarship by inviting the reader to participate in the generation of the text. Sattler first gives a photographic reproduction of the manuscript, followed by a diplomatic copy that transcribes the spatial configuration of the original. This is in turn succeeded by a “phase analysis,” which converts the spatial disposition of the page into a temporal sequence whose various stages of composition are indicated by different typefaces. Only at the end of this process is there finally printed a provisional version of the poem, or “reading text.”
What emerges from this new Frankfurt Edition, then, is not a closed canon of inert textual artifacts but rather a mapping of poems in process.… By presenting Hölderlin’s texts as events rather than objects, as processes rather than products, it converts the reader from passive consumer into active participant in the genesis of the poem, while at the same time calling attention to the fundamentally historical character of both the reader’s and writer’s activity.
A possible performance of Mozart’s Requiem
As Flaubert died before finishing Bouvard and Pécuchet, Mozart died before finishing his Requiem. What if this work were performed in a way similar to the approach of the Frankfurt Edition, so that the orchestra actually played it as it was left by Mozart in the manuscript, some parts fully realized, others suggested, a bar complete here and there, a theme alone in one instrument abruptly broken off. Would this be a performance with some of the same effect as Mallarmé’s broken-off poems, his notes for poems? In other words, would we hear the grief in the silences? Would we be moved by the silences as well as, or as much as, by the notes and the words? Can’t we say, coming back from a different direction to ask, really, the same thing, whether these fragments could not be regarded as a legitimate form?
When inarticulateness is not a defeat
Barthes justifies his own early choice of the fragment as form by saying that “incoherence is preferable to a distorting order�
�� (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes). In the case of Mallarmé, inarticulateness might seem preferable to articulateness when it comes to expressing a grief that is in fact unutterable. He writes, in A Tomb for Anatole:
It is true
that you have struck me
and you would have carefully chosen
your wound___
___etc.
___but
______
and vengeance
struggle between spirit and
death
One reviewer of the English translation, Sarah White, wrote that Mallarmé’s was “a mind groping toward transcendence, then lapsing into grief and protest.” He failed to transcend, he remained inside the grief, and the “notes,” too, remain inside the grief. The notes become the most immediate expression, the closest mirroring, of the writer’s emotion at the inspiring subject, the writer’s stutter, and the reader, witnessing the writer’s stutter, is witness not only to his grief but also to his process, to the workings of his mind, to his mind, closer to what we might think of as the origins of his writing.
Etc. and the invitation to the reader
Mallarmé did not take his “notes” to be finished works, publishable works, just as Joubert did not take the entries in his notebook to add up to a finished work. We, now, are the ones who read them as constituting a finished work. Sarah White, again, points out that “Mallarmé, despite his taste for sprung syntax, drastic ellipsis, and odd graphic arrangement, would never have released a poem containing the abbreviation ‘etc.’”
Etc. is a sign of the process of thinking and writing. Etc. is a note within a note from the author to himself reminding him of the rest of a thought or an association so evident to him that he does not need to write it out. Etc. in a work released to a reader invites a witness, a closer witness to the process, the act of writing. Etc. invites or demands that the reader complete the thought, the association; etc. says that both writer and reader know how this continues. Mallarmé’s etc. was not intended by him to be published but is published now and read by readers now not unused to finding etc. in a poem. The author did not intend these fragments as a work, but we, the readers, make them a work by reading them as a work, just as a writer may make a work by taking a text that was not meant to be a work and copying it, or parts of it, into his own work, which is a way of reading by writing or rewriting or rearranging, a form of reading that becomes so active that it turns into a kind of writing, in the hands of a writer.
Interruption
Doesn’t the unfinished work tend to throw our attention onto the work as artifact, or the work as process, rather than the work as conveyer of meaning, of message? Doesn’t this perhaps add to the pleasure or the interest of the text?
Any interruption, either of our expectations or of the smooth surface of the work itself—either by breaking it off, confusing it, leaving it actually unfinished—foregrounds the work as artifact, as object, rather than as invisible purveyor of meaning, emotion, atmosphere. Constant interruption, fragmentation, also keeps returning the reader not only to the real world but also to a consciousness of his or her own mind at work.
Two kinds of reading
When one’s attention is drawn to the text as artifact or process, this may add to the pleasure or the interest of the text, but what happens to the act of reading?
I can identify roughly, at least, two different ways I read, depending on the text: I read Anna Karenina in somewhat the same way I read Stephen King’s Firestarter in the sense that I lose sight of the text as artifact, the text becomes invisible, and I also lose sight of myself—my thinking mind, my discriminating mind. I lose my self as I lose myself in certain kinds of movies: the illusion is complete, the fiction has more reality than I do. I know people who do not like losing themselves this way and who never do—they remain critically awake (i.e., conscious of their thinking minds) during the movie; and some of them prefer not to read fiction.
The other way I read is the way I read when I read a work in which the text itself remains visible and present to me, an object of interest by its language and/or form; and in these cases I remain present to myself as well (i.e., conscious of my own thoughts).
Of these two ways of reading, years ago I read Madame Bovary the first way, Bouvard and Pécuchet the second way. Losing myself in the story of Madame Bovary was one kind of pleasure; involving myself actively with the form of Bouvard and Pécuchet was another kind of pleasure. I might go a step further and say that when I read Madame Bovary, Flaubert’s mind seemed—was?—further away from me; when I read Bouvard and Pécuchet, my mind encountered Flaubert’s mind; Flaubert himself was more present in Bouvard and Pécuchet than he was in Madame Bovary. Returning to the movie comparison, I could also imagine that it is easier to make a movie from a written work in which the text disappears—for me, Madame Bovary—than from one in which the text is foregrounded as object of interest.
The generosity of the fragment
Here, again, is Blanchot on Joubert: “What he was seeking—this source of writing, this space in which to write, this light to circumscribe in space— … made him unfit for all ordinary literary work” (Notebooks)—or, as Joubert said of himself, “unsuited to continuous discourse.” Blanchot, continuing, proposes that Joubert preferred “the center to the sphere, sacrificing results to the discovery of their conditions, and writing not in order to add one book to another but to take command of the point from which it seemed to him all books issued.”
Whether intended as works or not, these fragments can be characterized as less mediated than other forms of finished works (i.e., closer, really or apparently, to the origin of their writing, apparently more ragged, cruder, less refined, more revealing of the process of the writing, closer to being the raw data of the writer’s thought).
The less mediated a work is, the more personal, in a sense, and the more private, the more closely involved the reader feels in the process of the work and the more she or he participates or feels participation in the creation of the work, whence its generosity, and its modesty.
Form as response to doubt
Doubt, uneasiness, dissatisfaction with writing or with existing forms may result in the formal integration of these doubts by the creation of new forms, forms that in one way or another exceed or surprise our expectations. Whereas repeating old forms, traditional forms, implies a lack of desire or compulsion, or a refusal, to entertain doubt or feel dissatisfaction with them.
To work deliberately in the form of the fragment can be seen as stopping or appearing to stop a work closer, in the process, to what Blanchot would call the origin of writing, the center rather than the sphere. It may be seen as a formal integration, an integration into the form itself, of a question about the process of writing.
It can be seen as a response to the philosophical problem of seeing the written thing replace the subject of the writing. If we catch only a little of our subject, or only badly, clumsily, incoherently, perhaps we have not destroyed it. We have written about it, written it, and allowed it to live on at the same time, allowed it to live on in our ellipses, in our silences.
1986
Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits
The following are just my personal pieces of advice. They won’t be the same as someone else’s, and they may not fit your life or practice, but maybe you’ll pick up something useful.
* * *
1. Take notes regularly. This will sharpen both your powers of observation and your expressive ability. A productive feedback loop is established: through the habit of taking notes, you will inevitably come to observe more; observing more, you will have more to note down. Here are some examples from my own notebooks and also from the Austrian fiction writer Peter Handke’s notebook selection titled The Weight of the World. Other notebooks that might serve as useful models are Kafka’s and the painter Delacroix’s.
Observe your own activity.
From my notebook:
a. “I
keep hoping for a new and interesting email, and for hours now it has been the same subject line: ‘Used Kubota tractor for sale.’”
b. “I kept smelling a smell of cat pee but could not find where it was coming from, until I found the cat pee—on the tip of my very own nose.”
From Peter Handke’s notebook:
c. “Someone [a stranger] drops something and I pull my hand out of my pocket, but that’s all I do.”
Observe your own feelings (but not at tiresome length).
From Peter Handke’s notebook:
a. “At the sight of a woman with enormously protuberant eyes, my irritation vanished.”
From my notebook:
b. The feeling of love, it seems, in my response to Peter Bichsel’s stories—they are loving stories. They awaken in me a feeling (love) that I am then quicker to feel in response to other things.
Observe the behavior of others, both animal and human.
From my notebook: