I’m an inveterate comparer, so much so that I distrust the
subjective pivot of comparison only because I compare it with other approaches
to the true and the just. I compromise with that distrust by putting all
comparison under the sign of quote marks – I mention, but I do not speak in
propria persona.
So it is that, reading Skhlovsky’s Zoo, I thought: I wonder
if Barthes read Zoo?
Looking around, I have noticed another reader, Linda
Kaufmann, in Discourses of Desire, noticed: that Barthes’ Fragments of a
lover’s discourse, Derrida’s Post Card, and Skhlovsky’s Zoo, or Letters not
about Love have all used fragmentation to understand, or undergo, the spell of
love as a spelling, an incorrigibly and frustratingly logo-bent moment, in
which indirection is the only direction that can possibly find direction
out. And reader, he doesn’t marry her. That’s
not in the cards.
It is like that, eros and literature and its discontents.
The fragments part, though, those telegraphic, telepathic
one sentence paragraphs of Skhlovsky, they fascinate me. Spells are usually a
word, a phrase, a formula, which working against the causal current, bring
about a result – at least in the once upon a time world – overwhelming both the
producer and the receiver. The sorcerer may be distinguished from the sorcerer’s
apprentice by the ability to follow the spell with a negation, a limit. But that
is bluff.
Or at least out of the once upon a time world, in the world
of, say, Berlin, 1923, that has been revealed as bluff.
Revealed once, which throws a demystifying retrospective
over the entire past.
In Jameson’s Prison House of Language, Frederic Jameson connects
Shklovsky’s style, and the form of his thought, to Vasily Rozanov, the oddest
of Russian essayist:
“Rozanov illustrates the resolution of the novel back into
its raw materials, into a kind of linguistic collage, made up of journal
entries, newspaper clippings, letters, entries noted on stray envelopes and
scraps of paper and so forth. From the point of view of content, he may be seen
as a kind of Russian equivalent of Pirandello or Fernando Pessoa, with his
multiple personalities (he was a conservative columnist under his own name for
the Novoe Vremya, a liberal columnist under a pseudonym for the Russkoe Slovo).
It is worth noting that for Skhlovsky, even this ideological content is not
primary, but only the result of the form which it calls into being…”
What else is a form that calls something into being but a
spell?
Barthes was another such a maker of spell books. In Roland
Barthes by Roland Barthes (a beautiful title), Barthes writes that the question
that follows him around (like the rain cloud that follows Joe Btfsplk in the L’il
Abner cartoons) is “what does this mean?”:
“This mania never allows for futility: for example, if I
notice – and I force myself to notice – that in the country, I love to take a
leak in the garden and not elsewhere, I want to know what this means. This rage
to make the simplest facts signify socially marks the subject like a vice: one
must not break the chain of names, one must not unchain language: the excess of
namings is always ridiculous (M. Jourdain, Bouvard and Pecuchet)
(Even here, save in the amanuensis, of which it is precisely
the price, one never records anything that one does not make signify: one doesn’t
dare allow the fact to be left in a state of in-significance; this is the
movement of the fable, which pulls from every fragment of the real a lesson, a
sense. One can imagine a completely inverse book: which reports a thousand “incidents”
while forbidding itself to ever pull out of them a line of meanings; that would
be exactly a book of haikus.)”
Incidences without senses. Such is the threat posed by
filling up a book, a thing of pages and pages. The novelist is always trying to
give an impression of something going on without bogging it down to much in the
material of incidence – or at least one kind of novelist is. The novelist that
selects the mirror, that instrument which lacks the elements of editing, to be
his or her symbol. Joyce, though, knew better: Stephen Dedalus chooses the
cracked looking glass of a serving girl.
Science, magic, the teller, the tale, and the critic who
trails behind. Skhlovsky and Barthes are both writers first, even if they
accumulate the outer look of critics, or at least essayists. And that
essayistic melange was always destined to creep into, to infect, to invade, the
other genres. The poem, the novel, the story.
Well. Let’s go bowling, dude.
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