Personal Voice

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‘ . . . we are affected every moment of our lives by pressures for which a not wholly satisfactory analogy is the pressure of the air around us. I can’t conceive of the discovery and development of a personal voice that is totally or even largely unaware that its existence is threatened the whole time by those things in discourse or communication which are alien to its own being. One shapes the personal voice in some way. One either does or one doesn’t. And I would distinguish the first-rate artist from the others by precisely this ability. He or she is first-rate to the extent of having realised, often with very great difficulty, the personal note amid the acoustical din that surrounds us all. And the lesser artist is so because he is less able to hear and to elicit the voice of the authentic self from the many voices of the not-self and, indeed, from the many voices of our time, which are themselves drastically inauthentic.’

—Geoffrey Hill, The Paris Review interview (2000)

This strikes me as an acute way of defining the major and minor writers of any age.

Poor, fragile Macabéa

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‘Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.’ p.11

‘The more genuine part of my life is unrecognisable, extremely intimate and impossible to define.’ p.12

‘Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?’ p.15

‘Why do I write? First of all because I have captured the spirit of the language and at times it is the form that constitutes the content.’ p.17

‘Of one thing I am certain: this narrative will combine with something delicate: the creation of an entire human being who is as much alive as I am.’ p.19

‘I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in darkness.’ p. 70

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (t. Giovanni Pontiero)

This earlier translation by Giovanni Pontiero (Carcanet, 1986) is more fulfilling as a work of art than the later New Directions edition. I can’t comment on the success of the translation, but think Pontiero’s version a better piece of writing.

All intertwined – Maria Gabriela Llansol’s Trilogy

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It is reasonably rare, necessarily so, that a writer makes my senses quicken to a degree that I think about writing, reading, being, in ways that are interesting and useful. I’m reluctant to stop reading Maria Gabriela Llansol’s Geography of Rebels trilogy, but must at some point to follow threads back to Woolf, Spinoza, Bergson and so forth.

Llansol’s writing is peopled with figures, ‘living entities, constructs, nodes inside the text that are not necessarily people, but patterns, templates, shapes, forms, and apparitions. The Llansolian text does not progress thematically, but by an association of several scenes of fulgor in which the figures are revealed.’ To read her writing is to appreciate that we are this unceasing stream of sensory phenomena, aware at some level of bodily existence, but with an embodied memory of everything we have read and thought. Llansol’s figures are her expression of Spinoza’s intuition that ‘nevertheless we feel and know by experience that we are eternal.’

On my third pass through the first book of Llansol’s trilogy, The Book of Communities, it became clear that it is something of a roadmap for how to read her writing, that she is not just experimenting with form, but thinking differently about reality. Her narrative is formed temporally, a complex realm where past, present and future, are all arranged on a single plane. This is of course brings to mind Woolf’s treatment of interior time in Mrs. Dalloway: ‘There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.’

Llansol extends Woolf’s notion that reality is powerfully shaped by our perceptions and associative memories. Her narrator and figures are an act of continual creation, mirroring the way her writing communes with the intellect of her readers during the act of reading. As Rilke put it in The Book of a Monk’s Life, ‘a hundred drinking roots, all intertwined.’

It is hard to believe that this trilogy represents Llansol’s literary debut, as well as her first work to be translated into English. I can hardly bear that the rest of her writing remains untranslated, so I’ve begun learning Portuguese.

Idées Fixes of the Week

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St. Thomas Aquinas Confounding Averroes (1445-50), Giovanni di Paolo

“Any number of autonomous intelligences traced their fate on the books she made and which were secondary, primal was the documentation of a thinking vibration reflected in a perfectly unknown place and material. Her effectiveness did not depend on memory, but on knowledge. Looking at the writers sitting around the table, she found that this term was empty, and that their images were defined, more than anything, by the position of their gaze, and their abandonment of the old way of reading and writing. Meditating on their fates she saw that nothingness was approaching, but it was powerless. The long narrative that was going to take place did not come from the interpreted description of the lives, but from the evolution of their interior transitions, which might converge, at some points, with the universal adventure, their experimentation and flight.”

—Maria Gabriela Llansol, In the House of July and August

(My impressions of Llansol—to date—mostly posted here and here.)

”                    Again is the sacred
word, the profane sequence suddenly graced, by
coming back. More & more as we go deeper
I realise this aspect of hope, in the sense of
the future cashed in, the letter returned to sender.
How can I straighten the sure fact that
we do not do it, as we regret, trust, look
forward to etc? Since each time what
we have is increasingly the recall, not
the subject to which we have come. […]

I know I will go back
down & that it will not be the same though
I shall be sure it is so. and I shall be even
deeper by rhyme and cadence, more held
to what isn’t mine. […] [W]e
trifle with rhyme and again is the
sound of immortality.”

—J.H. Prynne

The Wonder of Reading

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Maria Gabriela Llansol

Transitory mental representations recorded on off-white paper in black printing ink convey a sequence of ideas from one self to another. Though we can describe the pattern recognition that makes this complex act possible, it is no less extraordinary that our species evolved cortical space surely wired originally for an entirely different process. How much is lost in the translation between one self and another we can only speculate as so much of reading is shaped by associative memories, environmental encoding and personal experience. However eloquently we can describe the science of reading, the improbability of reading and its transformative potential never fails to fill me with something close to spiritual awe.

Despite modernist literature’s attempt to stimulate a less socially conservative form, prose fiction remains locked into realist, figurative linear narrative, a form perfected in the nineteenth-century novel. Although other art forms, with different degrees of success, have shaped and stimulated their audience’s curiosity, literature seems unable to move substantially away from books that are easy to understand and consume, works that function to confirm preexisting assumptions.

There won’t be a large audience for Maria Gabriela Llansol’s fiction. It belongs to an earlier attempt to find a more authentic way than linear narrative to represent those transitory mental impressions. It is structured more like the way our minds swerve this way and that, pursuing different recollections and allusions, blending together voices from what we’ve read and lived. The absence of a subjective ‘I’ is as unsettling as when we first appreciate how illusory is our own experience of self as an integrated, cohesive character. Oscar Wilde is aware of the challenge of art, writing, “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” This propensity is asserted powerfully in the contemporary popularity of auto-fiction, embodying the narcissism that may be the hallmark of our age.

After a second reading, I’m reluctant to stop reading Llansol’s Geography of Rebels trilogy, an exhilarating mental and sensual experience that compels the reader to use their own imaginative resource.

Bits of Pipe

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“To say exactly what one means, even to one’s own private satisfaction , is difficult.” Not for Virginia Woolf, “the Chinese Wall of a private language”. “There is no a single sentence in The Waves that you would be likely to overhear on the street.” Yet the language is intelligible. “The experience of reading The Waves can be like listening to a piece of classical music that seems at first to have neither narrative nor structure.” This is good, what I am so often drawn to in fiction. “There is not a single unfocused shot in the entire book. Every passage, every sentence, every word is hard and bright. Where Woolf wants to shade or fade for the sake of effect, she does so as a painter does so, by taking a strong line and manipulating it. This is quite different from a line unfixed or ill-drawn.”

It is the finest part of Jeanette Winterson’s zealous encomium to art and her literary passions, this chapter on The Waves. Hugh Kenner often makes a similar argument for the clarity of Beckett’s prose: “Beckett has never written an obscure sentence. He is the clearest, most limpid, most disciplined joiner of words in the English language today.” Aside, arguably from Woolf. Both wrote literature that is not possible to read quickly. In both writer’s novels there are literary allusions, though in Beckett these appear to become less literary after Watt; some rely on the memory and knowledge of the reader, some more demanding, almost rarified and private. In a letter of 1972, Beckett wrote, “They are just bits of pipe I happen to have with me. I suppose all is reminiscence from womb to tomb.”

Winterson compels a reader back to the subtlest of Woolf’s novels, as Kenner does to Beckett’s fiction. These in turn remind me to return soon to Maria Gabriela Llansol’s The Geography of Rebels trilogy. There is in Llansol’s compression of thought a perpetuation of the attempt to evolve prose beyond the nineteenth century novel, which as Winterson acknowledges, still provides the form and style of at least ninety-five percent of contemporary fiction.

Difficulty/Overintellectuality

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“INTERVIEWER

What comes up often in reviews of your work is the idea of an overly intellectual bent; in recent reviews of The Triumph of Love, often the word difficult comes up. People mention that it’s worth going through or it isn’t worth going through.

[GEOFFREY] HILL

Like a Victorian wedding night, yes. Let’s take difficulty first. We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification. This thought does not originate with me, it’s been far better expressed by others. I think immediately of the German classicist and Kierkegaardian scholar Theodor Haecker, who went into what was called “inner exile” in the Nazi period, and kept a very fine notebook throughout that period, which miraculously survived, though his house was destroyed by Allied bombing. Haecker argues, with specific reference to the Nazis, that one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross oversimplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement. And any complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualifications and revelations . . . resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.

So much for difficulty. Now let’s take the other aspect—overintellectuality. I have said, almost to the point of boring myself and others, that I am as a poet simple, sensuous, and passionate. I’m quoting words of Milton, which were rediscovered and developed by Coleridge. Now, of course, in naming Milton and Coleridge, we were naming two interested parties, poets, thinkers, polemicists who are equally strong on sense and intellect. I would say confidently of Milton, slightly less confidently of Coleridge, that they recreate the sensuous intellect. The idea that the intellect is somehow alien to sensuousness, or vice versa, is one that I have never been able to connect with. I can accept that it is a prevalent belief, but it seems to me, nonetheless, a false notion. Ezra Pound defines logopaeia as “the dance of the intellect among words.” But elsewhere he changes intellect to intelligence. Logopaeia is the dance of the intelligence among words. I prefer intelligence to intellect here. I think we’re dealing with a phantom, or as Blake would say, a specter. The intellect—as the word is used generally—is a kind of specter, a false imagination, and it binds the majority with exactly the kind of mind-forged manacles that Blake so eloquently described. The intelligence is, I think, much more true, a true relation, a true accounting of what this elusive quality is. I think intelligence has a kind of range of sense and allows us to contemplate the coexistence of the conceptual aspect of thought and the emotional aspect of thought as ideally wedded, troth-plight, and the circumstances in which this troth-plight can be effected are to be found in the medium of language itself. I could speak about the thing more autobiographically; it’s the emphasis where one is most likely to be questioned, n’est-ce pas?”

—From Hill’s Paris Review interview.