ENDPAPER
Writers of the No
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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A slender, beautiful and honest work about invisible writers and their phantom books.
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Del Duende
To write about not writing — that’s the theme of Bartleby and Co, a recently translated Spanish novel by Enrique Vila-Matas. Vila-Matas’s hero is a humpbacked clerk who feigns melancholy at the office, goes on med
ical leave, and sits down to meditate on all those writers who, for one reason or the other, gave up writing. This slender, beautiful and honest work is about invisible writers and their phantom books.
The theme of hermetic writers who stopped publishing or who simply were unable to write any longer has long held a fascination for me because it’s really about the theme of abandonment, renunciation, and silence in literature. Bartleby & Co (translated by Jonathan Dunne, New Directions) is written as a series of 86 footnotes, cataloguing known, less known and sometimes entirely invisible (not fictional) writers and artists who are all ‘Bartlebys’.
The book’s strange hero identifies himself with Herman Melville’s clerk, Bartleby, who simply puts down his pen one day saying, “I’d prefer not to.” The humpbacked narrator also once wrote an acclaimed novel about the impossibility of love, and has never written since.
And now, after 25 years, he is writing again to examine other silent writers — “writers of the No”, as he likes to term it. Some never published at all. And yet for our hero, such a writer of invisible books is a true writer! Some even killed themselves in order to never write again.
Who are these Bartlebys?, these writers of the No? Of those we know there is Melville himself; Rimbaud who said no to writing at the age of 19. J.D., of course, who still writes the Glass stories but does not publish, the mysterious B. Traven, Beckett and Borges whose work grew slimmer and slimmer, Kafka who was invisible in his lifetime, and Fernando Pessoa with his Book of Disquiet.
First time
Many I was hearing for the first time: the Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo, the Swiss writer Robert Walser, whose work is said to consist of voluminous illegible scribblings, and who traded his desk and pen for a room in a madhouse, the Spanish poet Ferrer Lerin, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his Letter of Lord Chandos that our hero calls an “emblematic text in the art of refusal”. And then there is that most invisible and silent of authors, the one who never wrote – God.
As the book progresses (that is, if footnotes can ever progress) we learn just a little more about our hero, our “tracker of Bartlebys”: “I never had much luck with women, I have a pitiful hump, which I am resigned to” he tells us at the beginning. He is also sick of his job, has no friends or family, feels overwhelmingly isolated, and is often anguished and alone. A being “inhabited by a profound denial of the world”, and yet “possessing a very demanding literary conscience.”
He is compelled to write again, and begins this diary in the form of footnotes. “A book of notes”, he observes”, “without a text…with a labyrinthine theme which lacks a centre… the 86 footnotes are fragments, chance finds, the sudden recollection of books, lives, texts or simply individual sentences that gradually enlarge the dimensions of the labyrinth”.
This way our hero sets up a dialogue between these hermetic writers. In asking why these writers stopped writing and publishing, our hero answers that they wanted “to let their silence do the talking instead”.
The uncompleted, the suspended, the only imagined book becomes purer than what is completed and published. If they write, they write only for themselves. Many of these writers refused to write more because it became an act of vanity for them.
Is this not what the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, once called ‘elected silence’? I remember also DeLillo writing in one of his novels: “The withheld work of art is the only eloquence left.” There’s purity, integrity, and a sense of mystery, beauty and terror to such retreat from the world of art to silence. The paradox that Vila Matas wants us to relish is that this deep meditation on not writing, not performing, not going public, is the text that is completed and published.
It becomes this Spanish Bartleby’s last act: footnotes on invisible writers and their phantom texts. With this, our humpbacked narrator — literature’s radical non-hero — sums up on behalf of all the Bartlebys: “The great book that was inside us, the one we were really destined to write, our book, the very book we shall never be able to write or read now.
But that book, let it be clear, exists, it is held in suspension in the history of the art of the No.”
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