And just as I watch her while she reads, suppose she were to train a spyglass on me while I write? I sit at the desk with my back to the window, and there, behind me, I feel an eye that sucks up the flow of the sentences, leads the story in directions that elude me. Readers are my vampires. I feel a throng of readers looking over my shoulder and seizing the words as they are set down on paper. I am unable to write if there is someone watching me: I feel that what I am writing does not belong to me any more. I would like to vanish, to leave behind for that expectation lurking in their eyes the page stuck in the typewriter, or, at most, my fingers striking the keys.
How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone’s ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes ... Who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to transmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells.
Perhaps the woman I observe with the spyglass knows what I should write; or, rather, she does not know it, because she is in fact waiting for me to write what she does not know; but what she knows for certain is her waiting, the void that my words should fill.
At times I think of the subject matter of the book to be written as of something that already exists: thoughts already thought, dialogue already spoken, stories already happened, places and settings seen; the book should be simply the equivalent of the unwritten world translated into writing. At other times, on the contrary, I seem to understand that between the book to be written and things that already exist there can be only a kind of complementary relationship: the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.
I see that one way or another I keep circling around the idea of an interdependence between the unwritten world and the book I should write. This is why writing presents itself to me as an operation of such weight that I remain crushed by it. I put my eye to the spyglass and train it on the reader. Between her eyes and the page a white butterfly flutters. Whatever she may have been reading, now it is certainly the butterfly that has captured her attention. The unwritten world has its climax in that butterfly. The result at which I must aim is something specific, intimate, light.
Looking at the woman in the deck chair, I felt the need to write “from life,” that is, to write not her but her reading, to write anything at all, but thinking that it must pass through her reading.
Now, looking at the butterfly that lights on my book, I would like to write “from life,” bearing the butterfly in mind. To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow “resembles” the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly.
I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the horrible scene of a crime, so that the butterfly would become something frightful.
Idea for a story. Two writers, living in two chalets on opposite slopes of the valley, observe each other alternately. One of them is accustomed to write in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Mornings and afternoons, the writer who is not writing trains his spyglass on the one who is writing.
One of the two is a productive writer, the other a tormented writer. The tormented writer watches the productive writer filling pages with uniform lines, the manuscript growing in a pile of neat pages. In a little while the book will be finished: certainly a best seller—the tormented writer thinks with a certain contempt but also with envy. He considers the productive writer no more than a clever craftsman, capable of turning out machine-made novels catering to the taste of the public; but he cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodical self-confidence. It is not only envy, it is also admiration, yes, sincere admiration: in the way that man puts all of his energy into writing there is certainly a generosity, a faith in communication, in giving others what others expect of him, without creating introverted problems for himself. The tormented writer would give anything if he could resemble the productive writer; he would like to take him as a model; his greatest ambition now is to become like him.
The productive writer watches the tormented writer as the latter sits down at his desk, chews his fingernails, scratches himself, tears a page to bits, gets up and goes into the kitchen to fix himself some coffee, then some tea, then camomile, then reads a poem by Hölderlin (while it is clear that Hölderlin has absolutely nothing to do with what he is writing), copies a page already written and then crosses it all out line by line, telephones the cleaner’s (though it was settled that the blue slacks couldn’t be ready before Thursday), then writes some notes that will not be useful now but maybe later, then goes to the encyclopedia and looks up Tasmania (though it is obvious that in what he is writing there is no reference to Tasmania), tears up two pages, puts on a Ravel recording. The productive writer has never liked the works of the tormented writer; reading them, he always feels as if he is on the verge of grasping the decisive point, but then it eludes him and he is left with a sensation of uneasiness. But now that he is watching him write, he feels this man is struggling with something obscure, a tangle, a road to be dug leading no one knows where; at times he seems to see the other man walking on a tightrope stretched over the void, and he is overcome with admiration. Not only admiration, also envy; because he feels how limited his own work is, how superficial compared with what the tormented writer is seeking.
On the terrace of a chalet in the bottom of the valley a young woman is sunning herself, reading a book. The two writers observe her with the spyglass. “How enthralled she is! She’s holding her breath! How feverishly she turns the pages!” the tormented writer thinks. “Certainly she is reading a novel of great effect, like those of the productive writer!” “How enthralled she is! As if transfigured in meditation, as if she saw a mysterious truth being disclosed!” the productive writer thinks. “Surely she is reading a book rich in hidden meanings, like those of the tormented writer!”
The greatest desire of the tormented writer is to be read the way that young woman is reading. He starts writing a novel as he thinks the productive writer would write it. Meanwhile the greatest desire of the productive writer is to be read the way that young woman is reading; he starts writing a novel as he thinks the tormented writer would write it.
The young woman is approached first by one writer, then by the other. Both tell her they would like her to read the novel they have just finished writing.
The young woman receives the two manuscripts. After a few days she invites the authors to her house, together, to their great surprise. “What kind of joke is this?” She says. “You’ve given me two copies of the same novel!”
Or else:
The young woman gets the two manuscripts mixed up. She returns to the productive writer the tormented writer’s novel in the productive writer’s manner, and to the tormented writer the productive writer’s novel in the tormented writer’s manner. Both, seeing themselves counterfeited, have a violent reaction and rediscover their personal vein.
Or else:
A gust of wind shuffles the two manuscripts. The reader tries to reassemble them. A single novel results, stupendous, which the critics are unable to attribute. It is the novel that both the productive writer and the tormented writer have always dreamed of writing.
Or else:
The young woman had always been a passionate reader of the productive writer and has loathed
the tormented writer. Reading the productive writer’s new novel, she finds it phony and realizes that everything he wrote was phony; on the other hand, recalling the tormented writer’s works, she now finds them splendid and can’t wait to read his new novel. But she finds something completely different from what she was expecting, and she sends him to the devil, too.
Or else:
The same, replacing “productive” with “tormented” and “tormented” with “productive.”
Or else:
The young woman was a passionate admirer, et cetera, et cetera, of the productive writer and loathed the tormented one. Reading the productive writer’s new novel she doesn’t notice at all that something has changed; she likes it, without being especially enthusiastic. As for the manuscript of the tormented writer, she finds it insipid like all the rest of this author’s work. She replies to the two writers with a few polite words. Both are convinced that she can’t be a very alert reader and they pay no further attention to her.
Or else:
The same, replacing, et cetera.
I read in a book that the objectivity of thought can be expressed using the verb “to think” in the impersonal third person: saying not “I think” but “it thinks” as we say “it rains.” There is thought in the universe—this is the constant from which we must set out every time.
Will I ever be able to say, “Today it writes,” just like “Today it rains,” Today it is windy”? Only when it will come natural to me to use the verb “write” in the impersonal form will I be able to hope that through me is expressed something less limited than the personality of an individual.
And for the verb “to read”? Will we be able to say, Today it reads” as we say Today it rains”? If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, “I read, therefore it writes.”
This is the special bliss that I see appear in the reader’s face, and which is denied me.
On the wall facing my desk hangs a poster somebody gave me. The dog Snoopy is sitting at a typewriter, and in the cartoon you read the sentence, “It was a dark and stormy night....” Every time I sit down here I read, “It was a dark and stormy night...” and the impersonality of that incipit seems to open the passage from one world to the other, from the time and space of here and now to the time and space of the written word; I feel the thrill of a beginning that can be followed by multiple developments, inexhaustibly; I am convinced there is nothing better than a conventional opening, an attack from which you can expect everything and nothing; and I realize also that this mythomane dog will never succeed in adding to the first seven words another seven or another twelve without breaking the spell. The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.
Ever since I have had this poster before my eyes, I have no longer been able to end a page. I must take this damned Snoopy down from the wall as quickly as possible, but I can’t bring myself to do it; that childish figure has become for me an emblem of my condition, a warning, a challenge.
The romantic fascination produced in the pure state by the first sentences of the first chapter of many novels is soon lost in the continuation of the story: it is the promise of a time of reading that extends before us and can comprise all possible developments. I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object. But how could such a book be constructed? Would it break off after the first paragraph? Would the preliminaries be prolonged indefinitely? Would it set the beginning of one tale inside another, as in the Arabian Nights?
Today I will begin by copying the first sentences of a famous novel, to see if the charge of energy contained in that start is communicated to my hand, which, once it has received the right push, should run on its own.
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July, a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. Bridge.
I will copy out also the second, indispensable paragraph to allow myself to be carried along by the flow of the narration:
He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and it was more like a cupboard than a room. And so on until: He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.
At this point the next sentence attracts me so much that I can’t refrain from copying it: This was not because he was cowardly and abject: quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. While I’m about it, I could continue for the whole paragraph, or, indeed, for several pages, until the protagonist introduces himself to the old moneylender. “Raskolnikov, a student, I came here a month ago,” the young man made haste to mutter, with a half bow, remembering that he ought to be more polite.
I stop before I succumb to the temptation to copy out all of Crime and Punishment. For an instant I seem to understand the meaning and fascination of a now inconceivable vocation: that of the copyist. The copyist lived simultaneously in two temporal dimensions, that of reading and that of writing; he could write without the anguish of having the void open before his pen; read without the anguish of having his own act become concrete in some material object.
A man called on me, saying he is my translator, to warn me about an outrageous practice damaging to him and to me: the publication of unauthorized translations of my books. He showed me a volume, which I leafed through without getting much out of it: it was written in Japanese, and the only words in the Latin alphabet were my given name and surname on the title page.
“I can’t even figure out which of my books it is,” I said, handing the volume back to him. “Unfortunately, I don’t know Japanese.”
“Even if you knew the language you wouldn’t recognize the book,” my visitor said to me. “It’s a book you have never written.”
He explained to me that the great skill of the Japanese in manufacturing perfect facsimiles of Western products has spread to literature. A firm in Osaka has managed to get hold of the formula of Silas Flannery’s novels, and it manages to produce absolutely new ones, and first-class novels at that, so it can invade the world market. Retranslated into English (or, rather, translated into English, from which they claim to have been translated), they cannot be distinguished, by any critic, from true Flannerys.
The news of this diabolical swindle has profoundly upset me, but it goes beyond my understandable fury at the economic and moral injury: I feel also a timid attraction for these fakes, for this extension of myself that blossoms from the terrain of another civilization. I imagine an old Japanese in his kimono crossing a curved little bridge: he is my Nipponese self imagining one of my stories, and he succeeds in identifying himself with me through a spiritual itinerary that to me is completely alien. Whereby the false Flannerys turned out by the swindling firm in Osaka would be, of course, vulgar imitations; but at the same time they would contain a refined and arcane wisdom that true Flannerys lack completely.
Naturally, in the presence of a stranger, I had to conceal the ambiguity of my reactions, and I acted as if I were interested only in collecting all the data necessary for bringing a lawsuit.
“I will sue the counterfeiters and anyone who cooperates in the dissemination of the faked books!” I said, looking meaningfully into the translator’s eyes, because I suspected this young man was not without a role i
n the shady business. He said his name is Ermes Marana, a name I had never heard. His head is oblong horizontally, like a dirigible, and seems to hide many things behind the convexity of its brow.
I asked him where he lives. “For the moment, in Japan,” he answered me.
He declares himself outraged that anyone would make improper use of my name, and ready to help me put an end to the fraud, but he adds that in the final analysis there is nothing to be shocked about, since, in his view, literature’s worth lies in its power of mystification, in mystification it has its truth; therefore a fake, as the mystification of a mystification, is tantamount to a truth squared.
He went on expounding to me his theories, according to which the author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions. I feel I can share many of his affirmations, but I was careful not to let him know this. He says he is interested in me chiefly for two reasons: first, because I am an author who can be faked; and second, because he thinks I have the gifts necessary to be a great faker, to create perfect apocrypha. I could therefore incarnate what for him is the ideal author, that is, the author who is dissolved in the cloud of fictions that covers the world with its thick sheath. And since for him artifice is the true substance of everything, the author who devised a perfect system of artifices would succeed in identifying himself with the whole.