Stuttering
Literature and Silence: Prasanta Chakravarty
Guest post by PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY
“Blanchot is even greater waste of time than Proust,” Georges Poulet had famously remarked. Poulet was hinting at the grandeur of wasted time. A ruthless negativity, a rigorous retreat must take on all forms of reparation and facile optimism of human agency. Unconcern must be at the front and centre of our concern. The work of art is. Nothing more. The very idea of elucidation—to dwell upon the actual object that a writer has to offer us—is aesthetically vulgar and politically reactionary. A deep futility marks all perfection. A creation, like Eurydice when Orpheus looks at her, must disappear. The work is remote from itself. It is the incapacity to stop feeling what is not there to be felt.
All quests are echoes. Foreign to presence. Any presence. Quests grasp us rather. But they exclude the writer. He is stupefied. He is idled out of his own work—hence he must go back to work, tirelessly. The lucidity of his insomniac regression keeps on emerging infernally in what we call art. Write he must. But only and solely by being on the verge of his ruinous look back.
The work is without any proof. It cannot be verified. A monotonous repetition appears—a stuttering indecisiveness to start all over again with each pronouncement, each turn of the phrase which is redundant. Silence is pervasive—a dull thud. When everything has been said, the mason-writer takes the chisel, not his pen. Language does not speak anymore. It is. One makes silence perceptible—a plenitude that is voided as soon as the mason-writer picks up his chisel. The confessional romantic is the perfect obverse to such a mason of echo. The writer is not anyone anymore.
“Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone, its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane spider floss on my cheek.”
~ Basil Bunting, Briggflatts
“He who writes the work is set aside; he who has written it is dismissed. He who is dismissed, moreover, doesn’t know it. This ignorance preserves him.”
~Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
“Blanchot is even greater waste of time than Proust,” Georges Poulet had famously remarked. Poulet was hinting at the grandeur of wasted time. A ruthless negativity, a rigorous retreat must take on all forms of reparation and facile optimism of human agency. Unconcern must be at the front and centre of our concern. The work of art is. Nothing more. The very idea of elucidation—to dwell upon the actual object that a writer has to offer us—is aesthetically vulgar and politically reactionary. A deep futility marks all perfection. A creation, like Eurydice when Orpheus looks at her, must disappear. The work is remote from itself. It is the incapacity to stop feeling what is not there to be felt.
All quests are echoes. Foreign to presence. Any presence. Quests grasp us rather. But they exclude the writer. He is stupefied. He is idled out of his own work—hence he must go back to work, tirelessly. The lucidity of his insomniac regression keeps on emerging infernally in what we call art. Write he must. But only and solely by being on the verge of his ruinous look back.
The work is without any proof. It cannot be verified. A monotonous repetition appears—a stuttering indecisiveness to start all over again with each pronouncement, each turn of the phrase which is redundant. Silence is pervasive—a dull thud. When everything has been said, the mason-writer takes the chisel, not his pen. Language does not speak anymore. It is. One makes silence perceptible—a plenitude that is voided as soon as the mason-writer picks up his chisel. The confessional romantic is the perfect obverse to such a mason of echo. The writer is not anyone anymore.
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