This Little Art

by Kate Briggs

  What is missing is me: my action, my further activity. These lines are not mine; I know that. The point is: I didn’t write them myself. This can’t be a general explanation of how all writing happens everywhere: there are other forces, other pressures, other motivations. But this is the proposition: that the lines producing the initial desire to write (what Barthes also calls ‘the hope of writing’) are those that, in their irreducible, unalterable, necessary power, invite, open themselves up to, make a stage for the collaboration – the audacious counteraction – of the active force that is me.

  Actively adding yourself to an existing work can take a whole variety of forms – different in terms of their actions, their labour, their purpose, their degree of mediation – and in the lecture of 1 December 1979 he makes an inventory of some of them. One, no doubt the most obvious and the most identifiable, is copying: copying out by hand. People do this, says Barthes, or at least they once did. Once upon a time, readers would carefully fill whole books with their most loved poems. Now there’s Twitter: a space for adding yourself actively to the lines you love: for retyping them, republishing them, circulating them among friends, siphoning off their authority, performing them as a part of a performance of yourself (investing them with your own subjectivity), as if they were, or to the extent that they begin to behave as if they were, authored by you, too.

  Another is translation. Translation doesn’t appear on Barthes’s list. But I hear this talk of the desire to write as a desire for the focused ambition to write the thing itself, only this time by myself, as one possible version – as a very precise way of phrasing my own experience – of the impulse to translate. Translation conceived as a means of writing the other’s work out with your own hands, in your own setting, your own time and in your own language with all the attention, thinking and searching, the testing and invention that the task requires. Translation as a laborious way of making the work present to yourself, of finding it again yourself, for yourself. Translation as a responsive and appropriative practising of an extant work at the level of the sentence, working it out: a workout on the basis of the desired work whose energy source is the inclusion of the new and different vitality that comes with and from me.

  Elena Ferrante has written about the peculiar hubris of wanting to rewrite sentences that you didn’t write. It seems in the first instance to be a matter of intensely felt identification. In an essay on reading Madame Bovary – an essay I read in Ann Goldstein’s translation – Ferrante writes: ‘I certainly saw myself in Berthe Bovary, Emma and Charles’s daughter, and felt a jolt.’ So not a caress, then, but something more painful, and this is important. A shock, a small sharp wound, possibly, like the snag of recognition that Barthes experiences when looking at certain photographs (That’s it! That’s exactly it!). Ferrante goes on: ‘I knew that I had my eyes on a page’ – she is aware of reading and not recalling – ‘I could see the words clearly, yet it seemed to me that I had approached my mother just as Berthe tried to approach Emma, catching hold of her par le bout, les rubans de son tablier (“the ends of her apron strings”).’

  Ferrante quotes Flaubert in French throughout her essay, offering the English translation (which one, we’re not sure) in brackets. She first read Madame Bovary at fourteen, she tells us: laboriously, in the original (‘on the orders of a cold, brilliant teacher’). The fact of reading the novel in French matters because it compounds Ferrante’s shock at finding her experience already written for her, but remarkably in another language, in the distant setting of a Normandy town: ‘par le bout,’ writes Flaubert. Par le bout, les rubans de son tablier. ‘By the end,’ – the comma here marking a vital half-breath of pause – ‘the strings’ (the ribbons? they could be: Emma likes pretty things) ‘of her apron’. But the original phrasing also matters because, if there is recognition and identification here, it is not only with Berthe, a character, the small, unwanted daughter, it is also with precisely this power to phrase, with the power of phrasing, forming this sentence rather than any other. ‘All my life since [that first reading],’ writes Ferrante, ‘I’ve wondered whether my mother, at least once, with Emma’s words precisely – the same terrible words – thought, looking at me, as Emma does with Berthe: “C’est une chose étrange comme cette enfant est laide!” (“It’s strange how ugly this child is.”) Ugly: to appear ugly to one’s own mother. I have rarely read-heard a better conceived, better written, more unbearable sentence.’

  The sentence about being grabbed by the apron strings recalled, for Ferrante, a scene from her own life; in the case of the sentence about the ugly child, on the other hand, it seems to be the other way around. Here the sentence seems to be producing life, occasioning it into being: here Ferrante is discovering her life by way of sentence, in the form of someone else’s sentence, a line that she might have heard, ‘that might as well have been’ addressed to her, by her own mother, at least once.

  Did her mother ever really say it? It’s not clear; it doesn’t matter.

  ‘I have rarely read-heard a better conceived, better written, more unbearable sentence.’ With that tiny hyphen, Ferrante brings reading and actually hearing, reading books and actually living, literature and life very close together. So very close, in fact, that the one could very easily get taken as seriously, and so pass, get mistaken for, or for a time swap places with the other. In this sense, Ferrante is reading like Emma Bovary, a character whose sensibility and manner of living (what the theorist and critic Marielle Macé might call her ‘style’ or ‘stylistics of being’) is directed by the sentences she finds in the novels she reads. In the most ‘burning, devastating way’, writes Barthes, Emma Bovary is ‘formed, fashioned (remote-controlled) by the (literary) Sentence’.

  C’est une chose étrange comme cette enfant est laide! Ferrante affirms that she has rarely read-heard a better conceived, better written, more unbearable sentence. But who wrote it? Who did the work of writing, of originally phrasing what Ferrante hears-reads (or feels-reads, which my Italian friend tells me might be an alternative translation of the first verb in this coupling of verbs) as a line that may as well have been lifted from her life?

  Ferrante’s answer is complicated.

  I did, she answers at first. The words entered and emerged from me: ‘When I read a book, I never think of who has written it – it’s as if I were doing it myself.’

  Then: no, that can’t be quite right.

  It was, of course, Gustave Flaubert. ‘In certain phases of my life,’ she writes, ‘I’ve imagined that only a man could conceive it, and only a man without children, a peevish Frenchman, a bear shut up in his house honing his complaints, a misogynist who thought of himself as both father and mother just because he had a niece. In other periods, I’ve believed, angrily, bitterly, that men who are masters of writing are able to have their female characters say what women truly think and say and live but do not dare write. Today, instead, I’ve returned to the beliefs of early adolescence. I think that authors are devoted, diligent scribes, who draw in black and white, following a more or less rigorous order of their own, but that the true writing, what counts, is the work of readers.’ She goes on: ‘It’s my mother who thought, but in her language, comm’è brutta chesta bambina (“How ugly this child is”). And I believe that she thought it for the same reason Emma thinks it of Berthe. So I’ve tried, over the years, to take that sentence out of French and place it somewhere on a page of my own, write it myself to feel its weight, transport it into the language of my mother, attribute it to her, hear it in her mouth and see if it’s a woman’s phrase, if a female really could say it, if I’ve ever thought it of my daughters, if, in other words, it should be rejected and erased or accepted and elaborated, removed from the page of masculine French and transported into the language of female-daughter-mother.’

  The path that Ferrante traces in her essay, from that first shock of feeling (the jolt, the pain of recognition, which prompts her to claim the sentence as her own) to then re-ascribing it, of c
ourse, to Flaubert, to this more recent and different effort of purposively writing out or retyping the words – that is, of materially writing out the sentence herself (‘I’ve tried, over the years, to take that sentence out of French and place it somewhere on a page of my own, write it myself to feel its weight’) – is also the path from adolescence to womanhood and writerhood. The point is, reading is its own work; it does its own extraordinary work. But it is not writing. It is not yet, not already, not practically writing. The difference between the first position (claiming the sentence as her own) and the most recent (trying to find a way of writing it herself) has to do with this shift: Ferrante’s later-in-life feeling-reader has become a reader-writer. And in this instance she is, very specifically, a translator: Flaubert’s sentence, should it ever appear on one of Ferrante’s pages, will have been placed, rewritten, recalibrated by her, in Neapolitan dialect. Laide: the ugly end-word in French, set now like a stone in its middle: brutta.

  Comm’è brutta chesta bambina!

  Translation as a way of practising of an extant work at the level of the sentence: of working on and at it, of working it out – but practising for what exactly? And how might this relate to preparing?

  The title of Barthes’s last lecture course in French is La Préparation du roman, and as the lectures progress the noun préparation, along with the preposition de, are invested with a range of possible meanings. Barthes speaks of preparation in terms of getting ready – yes: getting ready for writing. In his case, preparing for the novel. Working out and trying to establish what might be the conditions of possibility for a novel – or something like a novel, something of the order of a novel, something that one might be willing to call a novel – to be written today (in the late 1970s, when the form would appear to have already been exhausted – ‘I know the novel is dead,’ he is quoted as saying in an interview published in 1975). But, as it turns out, Barthes is less interested in the historical and social conditions of the novel than in the more particular and personal conditions that might enable a given writing subject, a given would-be writer (someone who wants to write) to actually manage to write one. A given subject such as himself, for whom the specific writing problem – as Barthes formulates it – is how to make the transition from writing short pieces, in fragments, and sort of discontinuously (from what he calls ‘a taste for the short form’) to writing something longer, more continuous and ongoing and sustained. The preparation of the title involves taking these personal conditions and capabilities into account: the would-be writer’s fascinations and his failings (his limitations). For instance: the kind of novels I like most, says Barthes, at the beginning of the course, are novels of recollection, made from memory: Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. But I can immediately identify a certain constitutional weakness in me that would prevent me from writing a novel of this order. That weak organ is my memory, the faculty of remembering. I have no memory! he declares. What I am capable of writing will be determined, to some extent, by this, in the same way as the smallness of a person’s hands makes it difficult for them to play the piano. If the novel of memory (made from memories) is unavailable to Barthes, then his novel will have to be made from the present. From what is happening right now, he says: under your eyes, beneath your nose. Hence the lecture course’s great interest in the haiku, considered here as an exemplary form of noting (capturing, in writing) the most minute details of daily, concomitant life. If preparation involves preparing the grounds, the conditions of possibility for the novel, especially as they related to the disposition and constitution of the writing subject, it also involves gathering one’s materials. For Barthes, preparing for the novel also means establishing what he calls a daily practice of notation, a mode of attending to and recording the detail of everyday life. These notes are what his projected novel will be made from. Preparing, then, in the way you might ready your ingredients before making a meal. Or – a different image which appears more than once in the course – in the way a dressmaker might lay out her different pieces of cloth in order to work out how best to stitch them together. In this manner, the preparation for the novel starts touching at and partaking in the preparation of the novel. In other words, preparing as a means of practising, exercising, learning – of readying oneself for the writing-to-still-come – and at the same time, preparing as already its own form of writing, as already taking the form of writing. Like translating, it is already massively invested in and takes the form of – it already is – writing.

  For or of, then? The de in French allows for and suggests both. After wondering and wondering how to translate the title of the course, I eventually came to the conclusion that the second kind of preparation – preparing for – could be heard in or at least extrapolated from the preparing of the novel. That is, it seemed to me that ‘The Preparation of the Novel’ contained the possibility of ‘The Preparation for the novel’ but that this was not the case the other way around. I was also concerned that to translate the title as ‘The Preparation for the Novel’ would be to keep the projected, fantasized novel at bay somehow; to posit a clear distinction between that final projected outcome (an actual novel, actually written by Roland Barthes, which of course was ultimately never produced) and the labour of its preparation. When it felt – and still feels – important to hold on to the idea that Barthes’s novel-writing was indeed already happening. When I wanted the title to make a space for the possibility that the late-in-life project for a novel was indeed in some way achieved – or, as Barthes puts it at one point, exhausted – by its preparation. A novel in the form of a public lecture course. This was my thinking.

  But a question still remains: why ‘Preparation’ and not the more active ‘Preparing’? Why not ‘The Preparing of the Novel’ or even, more simply, ‘Preparing the Novel’?

  Because, I thought to myself (although it’s a question I have not stopped thinking about since): if what mattered was a verb rather than a noun (and a noun which names a concept as much as an activity; a new way of thinking about the practice of writing and coming-to-write in the form of a lived account of essaying it) would Barthes not have written préparer?

  Préparer rather than La préparation?

  Préparer le roman?

  ‘C’est une chose étrange comme cette enfant est laide!’ It’s strange – it’s a strange thing – how ugly this child is!

  I imagine that for you, too, there must be a sentence. A paragraph. Or a longer part of someone else’s work that you feel you know well. You like it. You love it, even. Or perhaps you don’t. Perhaps it hurts you. But you are, nevertheless, for a complex of reasons, attached to it. Let’s say that it acts upon you. You find that it acts and has acted upon you. But it would appear that you have already, also, acted upon it. It addresses you. Or is it that you have made it address you? And now you love or are wounded by it because it addresses you, because it looks, reads or sounds as if it were written for you. At some point in the process of becoming attached to the work you have misrepresented the work to yourself and now you have come to love your misrepresentation more, in a process of productive mis-attachment that the novelist Nicholson Baker makes into the hook of U and I, his extended love letter to the work of John Updike, written as a 32-year-old published but still a self-described ‘beginning novelist’. There’s this line in particular, writes Baker. This one line from somewhere: vast, dying sea. Baker deliberately chooses not to go back and reread the Updike novels he has read and loves, nor even to read for the first time those he hasn’t yet. His project is explicitly unscholarly, anti-philological. It is to pay homage to Updike’s works as they exist for him, to Updike’s writings as Baker discovers himself in the act of thinking of them. As they are now lodged in his brain and his body and in the degree to which they have inspired and are continually inspiring (directing, fashioning, remotely controlling) his own writerly gestures. Among all the sentences Updike wrote, there is this one line, this small collection of lines. They might not be exactly what Updike wrot
e. This one – the vast, dying sea – is misheard, misread, misremembered. But it’s a really good line. Arguably, it’s now a better line. Certainly, it does something different.