APRIL 2006

Language and writing

Literature and the gods, by Roberto Calasso
review by Jocelyn Braddell

One of the most fascinating quotes in Calasso's book is from Novalis:

In speaking and in writing something mad occurs: the true conversation is a pure play of words. What's amazing, in fact, is that people should make such a ridiculous mistake as to imagine they are speaking of things. Precisely what is most characteristic of language - that it attends only to itself - everybody ignores. As a result it is a wondrous and fruitful mystery - to the point that if one speaks purely for the sake of speaking, one expresses the most splendid, the most original truths. But if a person wishes to speak of some particular thing, that capricious creature language has him say the most ridiculous and muddle-headed of stuff. Which explains the hatred some serious people have for language. They see its mischievousness, but they don't see that contemptible chatter is the infinitely serious side of language. If only one could have people understand that what applies to mathematical formulas applies to language too. they form a world apart, they play with each other, expressing only their own prodigious nature, which is precisely why they are so expressive - precisely why the strange play of relationships between things finds its reflection in them. Only by means of their freedom are they members of nature, and only in their free movements does the spirit of the world manifest itself and make itself the delicate measure and pattern of things. The same is true of language: He who has a subtle sense of its fingering, its timing, its musical spirit, he who intuits the delicate operation of its intimate nature, moving tongue or hand to it as he follows, he will be a prophet, conversely, he who knows this, but does not have the ear or the ability to write truths like these, will be mocked by language itself and derided by men, as was Cassandra by the Trojans. If in saying this I believe I have shown, in the clearest way possible, the essence and office of poetry, all the same I know that no one will be able to understand me and I will have said something foolish precisely becaquse I wanted to say it, so that no poetry has come out of it at all. But what if I felt compelled to speak? What if this linguist impulse to speak were the hallmark of the inspiration of language, of the operation of language, in me? What if my will wanted only what I am compelled to do? Might not this, in the end, without my realizing it or imagining it, be poetry and make a mystery of language comprehensible? And would I then be a writer by vocation, since a writer can only be someone who is possessed by language?

Calasso adds "Without equal either in the other writings of Novalis or indeed in Romantic literature in general, this page has to be quoted in full."....."Never before had language and reflection on language come so close together."

Drawing attention to Heidegger's objections to the above he diversifies from them to suggest that Heidegger was disturbed by the "volatile, even flighty nature of the passage, its strenuous resistance to conceptualization, and the effrontery with which it offers, as 'contemptible chatter', unfathomable speculation that takes us as close as possible to the wellspring of the word.........Heidegger was right not to trust that page of Novalis - It announced knowledge that refused to be subject to any other, and at the same time would creep into the cracks of all others. Literature grows like grass between the heavy grey paving stones of thought."

It would perhaps be thought unprincipleed to start a book review in the pages of the last chapter, but what I am getting to is Calasso's beautiful conclusion which follows some paragraphs on Nietzsche and his claim that it is precisely in simulation that "the intellect unleashes its principal strengths." Calasso predicates that knowledge, in Nietzsche's initial understanding is something invented. If one doesn't discover knowledge, but invents it, the implication is that it involves a powerful element of simulation. Knowledge and simulation are no longer enemies but accomplices.

Now this conclusion can be a revelation to those of us who feel weighed down by the implications with which knowledgeable people burden us. It is possible that we are free? Can it be? "And if every kind of knowledge is a form of simulation, art is nothing else, the most immediate and the most vibrant."

Reading this chapter to check my personification I see another variation in my mind open toward the conclusion that has occurred several pages before the last words. For if Nietzsche's "magic of extremes" enters the mental landscape anew, a different excitation of themes occurs so that not only can we comprehend the section on Proust that follows, the sense of beauty that enters the mind and that there, within the mind, becomes subject to the "mysterious" laws of the self . Or is it alternatively : of language, as a separate manifestation of our life's absorbtion of beauty from the world outside us. From where we stood "like a lover or a spy", looking...looking at a tree..... The work, the poem's necessity is seen as "the transmigration of an immortal body that uses the writer's body as a temporary shell, only to abandon it as soon as possible for fear of being suffocated."

As a human, will you reach out?As a god, the Greeks revealed Apollo with his arm outstretched.....................

Far from wishing to put a dialectical law on Calasso's book , nevertheless it is time to repeat his first words here: The gods are fugitive guests of literature.

Primarily Calasso reminds us that until the beginning of the last century and the explosion of the rhetoric of the history of literature that laid waste the landscape with lost particles of texts, poems, sentences and the syllables of words, mankind had rituals of repetition and gesture that held that real event of the written word, history, together like a Gordion knot. Studying Mallarme he quotes Mallarme's use of that concept, and of the mirror, and Calasso then moves back toward his discursive material, the syllable from which the weaver takes his threads, the poet his forms.Any poet who transforms his own understanding by filtering within his mental laboratory the evolving syllables of words, can give a testament to the magic extremes through which he may founder toward success or failure. Enter the absence, the empty mind and endure the lightning storms of energy that avoid your contact as this wonderful organ, the brain, like a beehive guards with a fatal sting the beauty of a moment's understanding.

Will such a superficial glance at this wonderful little book satisfy you?Within it hides the desperate even diabolic form, that of the modern "history", beckoning like an epileptic devil, as one or another distraught poet turns to seek himself with his very own word, his signature. For the truth of the mind is that it is empty, that the foliage that seemed to hide Adam and Eve was never there, that the naked and the dead stand alone, if they wish, or silent before the miracle of life - life that passes maybe under the heavy fist, the driving wheel of a long distance truck, or among the tongues of the loquacious strangers after work, with drink taken and the beams of sun reflecting from our path...