“…he could turn into John Vincent Moon, one of Borges’ heroes, for example, or into an accumulation of literary quotations; he could become a mental enclave where several personalities could shelter and coexist, and thus, perhaps without even any real effort, manage to shape a strictly individual voice, the ambitious base for a nomadic heteronymous profile…”
Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (trans. Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean)
There are moments when the high irony of Dublinesque edges toward exhaustion, the kind that comes not from fatigue but from a too-conscious performance of literary sensibility. And yet I return, again and again, for the voice. Not its wit, or its clever layering of allusion, but the subtle way it gives space for this: the possibility that identity might not require consolidation. That a voice might be neither confession nor construction, but an enclave, a place of refuge for other selves, not one’s own necessarily, but borrowed, provisional, provisional, still speaking.
Having just been reading Larkin’s poem of the same title, I really must seek this out.
Thanks, I didn’t know that one, not that I’m much of a Larkin fan. Pewter light is quite nice, I’ll remember that.