an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound,
text and image
Volume 7, January-February 2010, ISSN
1552-5112
Ignoring is a precondition for knowledge – love it or leave it. – Vincent F. Hendricks, Mainstream and Formal Epistemology I’d be there at last, I could go at last, it’s all I ask, no, I can’t
ask anything. Just the head and the two legs, or one, in the middle, I’d go hopping.
– Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing In the sound of a few leaves… For the listener, who listens in the snow, – Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man Can nothing
be knowledge? And if it can, what shape does it assume in relation to creativity
and style? More than a matter of course, and rather more as a matter of style,
some modern and postmodern texts claim to be about nothing. The assumption
is that literary imagination, when taking issue with the ‘nothing that is’
in relation to what kind of message or knowledge such nothingness nonetheless
construes, proposes, and transmits, relies on a presupposed poetics of form
as a stylized liminality. If thought not in terms of negative value, such
as when ‘nothing’ is conceptualized against the background of there being
something, the idea of ‘nothing’ opens up a liminal space where it can be
considered a pure abstract, yet only through a stylistic manoeuvre. When ‘nothing’
is represented, it is often represented through stylistic device as gap, ellipsis,
blank page, or silence in the text. ‘Nothing’ thus leaves a trace, as it is
itself traced by sight (or site). In other words, when ‘nothing’ is not thought
of in terms of structural and binary relations, it can only be conceived of
in terms of convergence towards the horizon of boundlessness. In formal philosophy,
methodology and convergence equals knowledge. In literature, methodology and
convergence can easily equal or rather prefigure knowledge as ‘nothing.’ As
Franco Moretti put it: “near the border, figurality goes up” (Moretti, 1998:
45). This essay will thus explore the following axioms: 1) in theory, there
is nothing more elegant than ‘nothing’; and 2) in style, creative writing
begins not in the chiasmic relation of ‘nothing’ to style or nothing in style
and style in nothing, but more in a relation of stripping: stripping style
of theory. My central question here will revolve around what happens when
form is stripped away by the power of nothing, and where that leaves the epistemic
knowledge which is contingent on creativity. The philosophical problem of nothingness in its relation to
the existing world of which we are part has not been investigated in any serious
terms until Leibniz. Leibniz’s paper, “On the Ultimate Origination of Things”
from 1697, in which he questions not the wonder of the world’s existence but
the fact that there is a world to begin with, opened the space for analytical
thinking that later inspired philosophers such as Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s
now famous formulation regarding which element is the more mysterious in the
conflation of the world with the modalities in which the world is perceived:
“Not how the world is, is the mystical,
but that it is” (Wittgenstein, 1922:
107), opens further the space in which nothingness can be considered not only
in its opposition to something, or in categorial terms that designate a void,
but as a dimension. I call this dimension the style of existence. Obviously the idea of nothing has pervaded literature and science
alike and we have countless considerations of nothing, from Shakespeare –
who was interested in how something can come out of nothing – to Sartre, whose
Being and Nothingness investigates
the paradoxes of nihilism and the origins of negation, as this statement suggests:
“The Being by which Nothingness is a Being such that in its Being, the Nothingness
of its Being is in question” (Sartre, 1998: 23). If for Sartre, to annihilate,
or ‘the nothing that is,’ is defined as that by which consciousness exists,
for Shakespeare, the designation of an empty space, of which men of religion
and philosophy at the time were suspicious, goes hand in hand with the formulation
of paradoxes through puns and wordplays. One needs only to think of the playful
passage in The Winter’s Tale: Is this nothing? Why, then the world,
and all that’s in’t, is nothing […] My wife is nothing,
nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing. (Shakespeare, 2009:
15) What these
examples show is a double concern: first, how to make sense of nothing in
relation to knowledge, and second, how to formulate a poetics of space in
which nothingness is part of a creative act. One can make the inference that,
if ‘nothing’ is to be expressed, then, it can only be so by virtue of a reduction.
But then the question is: how can ‘nothing’ be more reduced than it already
is by and in itself? If ‘nothing’ is
to be, to exist, then it can only be so by
virtue of its being reduced to stylistic representation. ‘Nothing’ thus begins
nothing and ends nothing. (And here I lose my trail on how to use the citation
marks around nothing, as any consideration of nothing, parenthetically speaking,
invites the thinker to consider following the logic of sense, rather than
the logic of reason.) And yet, taken as a frame of representation, ‘nothing’
can sanction the degree to which a text can be said to suggest movement, energy,
or what the creative impulse consists of. The clear link to style here is
in the question: is this text about nothing interesting? ‘Nothing’ thus undergoes
an aesthetic evaluation. In his popular science book, The Book of Nothing, John Barrow quotes Tim Joseph’s article, “Unified
Field Theory” (April 6, 1978, New York Times), which confers agency to nothing,
thus parodying the function that ‘nothing’ has, both in relation to style
and theory, insofar as both style and theory, when they profess interestingness,
do so by emphasizing how creation is possible out of nothing: In the beginning there
was Aristotle, And objects at rest
tended to remain at rest, And objects in motion
tended to come to rest, And soon everything
was at rest, And God saw that it
was boring (Barrow, 2001: 292) What is
an epistemology of creative writing? Taken against the background of the realization
that there is no such thing as artistic originality, personality, or singularity,
knowledge about the well of creativity is more about the realization that
a writer, if not original, is good enough. But good enough for what? In his
seminal collection of essays about modernist English and American poets, The
Strength of Poetry, James Fenton begins with anecdotal considerations
of how Renaissance artists contributed to the understanding of how creative
genius, while professing to start out of nothing, hence the epithet of genius,
was mainly the result of strings of information being entangled and shared
(Fenton, 2001: 1-5). Although Fenton does not mention it – in his account
of how paranoid Michelangelo was, keeping a secret and burning upon his nearing
end all of his notes and sketches of fear that someone might steal his ideas,
and how Leonardo da Vinci couldn’t care less about being credited or not for
his work – what becomes clear is that when several geniuses could not co-exist,
when one was good and the other only good enough, is the fact that the possibility
of inhabiting different places became the ultimate marker of how ‘the nothing
that is’ could be valued. If Leonardo was a genius in In his essay from The
Metaphysician in the Dark, on Fenton’s own work as a poet as well as a
critic, such as he appears in The Strength
of Poetry, contemporary poet and Pulitzer prize winner Charles Simic formulates
six answers that all attempt to say something about who the real author of
a poem is. Each is an example of different schools of theory which show how
genius is always tagged; not only with the question of nothing, but also with
that of the extent to which nothing can be stylized according to context.
Here’s Simic’s list:
1.
The poet and no one
else writes the poem.
2.
The unconscious of
the poet writes the poem.
3.
All of past poetry
writes the poem.
4.
Language itself writes
the poem.
5.
Some higher power,
angelic or demonic, writes the poem.
6.
The spirit of the
time writes the poem. (Simic, 2003: 125) Here,
while one is tempted to add: nothing writes the poem, one is also forced to
consider the materiality of nothing and anticipate some criticisms: what would
the New Critics say? The psychoanalysts? The Marxists? The structuralists?
The poststructuralists? The cultural theorists? And so on. ‘Nothing’ must
thus be calculated, but in relation to non-predictability. This is what Simic
has to say about the way in which a lyrical poem resists interpretation, suggesting
that it is perhaps precisely ‘nothing’ as style which “won’t reveal to us
the secret of how it came about or how it seduces the reader” (126). He follows
up on his argument by way of quoting Fenton: There must be such
a thing as causality, we assume; but we cannot expect to understand its workings.
In the writing of poetry we may say that the thing we predict will not happen.
If we can predict it, it is not poetry. We have to surprise ourselves. We
have to outpace our colder calculations. (Fenton in Simic, 126) And then
Simic concludes with this telling fragment: This is the crux of
the problem. If there’s no clear relationship between cause and effect – goodbye
theory. And if there’s no theory, how is the intellect going to revenge itself
against the imagination by locking it up in some conceptual cage? It is worth
emphasizing that the poet is not in control of his poems. He is like someone
who imagines he is driving from What Simic
does here that is interesting is point to the reduction of nowhere to elsewhere.
In this sense it is always the elsewhere that constitutes the stylistic device
of the nowhere, or nothing. In other words, the possibility of ‘elsewhere’
undermines the impossibility of nothing there to be articulated. Thus we come to formulating another axiom: (2) Keep it simple. Write nothing. Yet
as any axiom, it needs a proof. In mathematics the proof often relies on the
invention of a new symbolic idiom. In literature, all one needs to think about
is texts such as Samuel Beckett’s which combine an awareness of the fact that
in order for ‘nothing’ to take place it needs first of all to be stylized,
even if only by quotation marks. In Beckett, ‘nothing’ is both a matter of
style and a matter of theory. One of the most powerful suggestions of how
‘nothing’ depends on stylizing the minimal in one’s betrayal of language,
the body, and breath, is found in the exchange in Endgame,
when one of the characters, Hamm, says to the other, Clov, by way of summing
up the meaning of life: “It’s better than nothing,” to which Clov replies:
“Better than nothing? Is it possible?” (Beckett, 1986: 121) In most of Beckett’s
texts, we have a conscious movement from breaking up the linguistic idiom
by reducing it to enunciations that rely on stylizing ‘nothing’ to texts which
clearly are intended to convey a theory of nothingness, among other things
by letting breath take over. The breath thus usurps not only the language
which is made to fail on purpose, but it also transcends the decaying body.
In one of the last pieces written by Beckett in 1983, Worstward
Ho!, published under the tile, Nohow
On, Worstward Ho, we find a final variation of Beckett’s obsession with
how to go on when one cannot, in an elaborate stylization of the ‘and yet.’
In one of the beginning passages, the speaker, devoid of agency, manages not
only to establish, but also control the symmetry between style and theory,
between saying it in words and the radical eradication even of the attempt
to reach an empty space with words, as is the case in the end. Whose words? Ask in
vain. Or not in vain if say no knowing. No saying. No words for him whose
words. Him? One. No words for one whose words. One? It. No words for it whose
words. Better worse so. (Beckett, 1983: 19) According
to Dirk Van Hulle, what Beckett does in Worstward
Ho! is to “attempt to reach the worst possible condition, which proves
to be an asymptotic journey: like the infinitesimal attempt to reach ‘nothing’
with words, the worst cannot be attained with words” (Van Hulle, 2004). Between
the beginning of the piece, with its clear demand: “On. Say on.” and the final
words: “said nohow on,” Beckett circles around such concepts as the “unlessenable
least” (32), an “unworsenable worst” (33), a “meremost minimum” (9) that is
“better than nothing” (27) because it is “a little better worse than nothing
so” (23). This can be said to constitute Beckett’s final actual performance
of his earlier work entitled Texts for
Nothing (1955). Although critics have identified the workings of negativity
in all of Beckett’s works either as necessary manifestations of an a-theological
thought which aims at disclosing an inner authenticity (Arnaould, 1996), others
have also noted the countermovement in negativity, such as when negativity
is negated by its own negative dynamics (Wolosky, 1991). Shira Wolosky notes
that: The Texts for Nothing concede – indeed insist
– that language immediately plunges the self into multiplicity and exteriority.
But the Texts no less question whether
this need compromise the self – indeed, whether outside of this linguistic
multiplicity there is any self at all. (Wolosky, 1991: 226) Here I
am tempted to say that what Beckett does that can be considered a project
close to formulating an epistemology of creative writing is ask and answer
precisely this question “Whose words? Ask in vain.” For
Beckett the very condition of an inner interiority which is in constant
tension with the desire for authenticity that relies on an outer form for
expression is all about affirming the instance of the ‘and yet’ as the first
and “meremost minimum” of knowledge. For Beckett, one begins to know, not when one acknowledges
that one knows nothing, but when one acknowledges that ‘the nothing that is,’
in theory, is not a way of pushing “negation to its limit” (Conor, 1992: 89),
but a way of approximating the ‘and yet.’ The remarkable event that begins Texts for Nothing - and which we find in the lamentation of not being
able to go on - a disembodied voice in the text sounds and heralds in the
first line: “Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t anymore, I couldn’t
go on” (Beckett, 1967: 75). Such finds resonance precisely in the ‘and yet,’
as thinking beyond the materiality of the exterior sound, which conjures other
bodies into play. The next line thus indicates a search for strategies to
cope not only with the meaning of not being altogether there, physically,
but also the meaning of the meaning of such significance about void, or nothingness,
that only an exterior body can enact and make manifest. Thus there must be
someone. “Someone said, You can’t stay here. And I couldn’t stay there and
I couldn’t go on” (75). Going from a subjective first person narrative, the
voice then shifts to a third person narrative as soon as the thinking of chance
is produced, as if echoing the perennial, albeit romantic, question: what
are the odds of finding someone completely symmetrical with oneself? At this point the voice is not only complicit with itself but
also suggests that implicit in its argument is the idea that such questions
can only be answered by epistemologists who are better at betting than at
producing theories about knowledge. Thus enters Vincent, the voice’s accompanying
partner, who, through his physical presence, manages not only to undo the
lamentation about the limitation of life and language, but also perform it
in reverse. “I can’t go on” thus transforms into “and yet,” and the ground
for a symmetrical relation is thus laid in this line: “We envy each other,
I envy him, he envies me” (87). And yet again, as the reader reads on, she
understands that there is more to the relation between voice and appearance,
as this following passage, which begins with the desire not only to see the
other come but also explain the effects of his coming, indicates: To see the remains of Vincent arriving
in sheets of rain, with the brave involuntary swagger of the old tar, his
head swathed in a bloody clout and a glitter in his eye, was for the acute
observer an example of what man is capable of, in pursuit of his pleasure.
With one hand he sustained his sternum, with the heel of the other his spinal
column, as if tempted to break into a hornpipe, no, that’s all memories, last
shifts older than the flood. See what’s happening here, where there’s no one,
where nothing happens, get something to happen here, then put an end to it,
have silence, get into silence, or another sound, a sound of other voices
than those of life and death, of lives and deaths everyone’s but mine, get
into my story in order to get out of it (89). “Right,”
we exclaim. Or is it “write?” Or don’t write? And if one doesn’t (write or
write oneself out of the story), then what? If Beckett doesn’t get the reader
to think about writing, then he certainly gets the reader to contemplate the
possibility of the ‘and yet’, as in, ‘and yet, what if even nothing can yield
something? (with a little bit of skill, nothing
can in fact be arranged as Watt also suggested). Hence, perhaps, “write nothing,”
or rather, the demand that one write nothing must be seen in the Beckettian
scheme as the ultimate manifestation of the ‘and yet.’ In creative writing, being faced with the nothing of the white
page, is being faced with the question of when the ‘and yet’ begins to style
the writer’s thinking. How can we see this, and why is this so, one might
ask? Here I would venture to suggest that it is because of our Babylonian
existence; what any agent speaks is never his or her tongue, but always another’s.
A quick view of some of the titles to the latest essays on Beckett disclose
how much critics theorize, for instance, on Beckett’s modernism, his theories
on writing – of relevance for cultural studies – his theology, structuralism
or even post-structuralism, by way of stylizing Beckett’s own discourse. Here
I like Steven Connor’s “Absolute Rubbish,” Frank Kermode’s “Miserable Splendour,”
and Jean-Luc Nancy’s “The Unsacrificeable.” What these titles suggest is that in Beckett, contradictions
are always raised to the status of sublime logics of insufficient knowledge
and reason. What Beckett operates with is deploying the metaphysics of ontology
into epistemic knowledge. While the first is seen as an instance of abstract transcendence
of finitude, especially that of the body facing nothingness, or falling into
nothingness, the latter is construed as a concrete manifestation of figuring
out how finitude works when finitude is not thought of in terms of its opposite,
namely the infinite, but in terms of a constant possibility to go on as a
process of undermining the impossibility to go on. Beckett formulates this quite clearly in his work Molloy, which can be said to be one of
his works that articulates the best, his credo regarding the relation between
creative writing and epistemology. Thus he writes: To know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to
be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that
is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker. It is then the
true division begins, of twenty-two by seven for example, and the pages fill
with the true ciphers at last. (Beckett, 1958: 64) From this we can extrapolate a third axiom: 3) The
only way in which you can achieve nothing is if nothing is self-imposed. Beckett’s protagonists
– insofar as they can be said to go from the representation and figuration
of life and death – to the extent that one can say it, or put it into words
– to the abstract manifestation of life and death – to the extent that one
can acknowledge an impasse as words fail to represent such states – can be
said to be recalcitrant when it comes to the question of weighing figuration,
as in figuring out, wanting to know how one is, against uncountable states,
those states which do not lend themselves to knowing them by numbers, as it
were, such as the very act of dying. There is something refractory about dying which Beckett identifies
as a sort of nothing that is good enough where adequate knowledge about it
is concerned. Quite literally, one reduces one’s ideas of playing with the
cards one is dealt through life to an endgame that involves an attempt at
counting: what one did in the past, what one does now, what one will do in
the future, and so on. In a passage that accounts for the daily bodily functions,
literally counting how many times one farts in a day, Molloy exclaims: “Extraordinary
how mathematics help you to know yourself” (30). Thus we go from negativity,
from formulating suggestions that nothing is never good, but only good enough in relation to its own
radical absoluteness, to its polarization towards astonishment. For Beckett,
‘the nothing that is,’ insofar as it relies on a conditional, as he proposes
in this statement, “For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak
of it as though it were something” (Beckett, 1953: 77), becomes a matter of
an artifice raised to the power of two. What you say, or don’t want to say is what you say, or don’t
want to say, twice over. This is the cipher that fills the pages of composition.
Thus says Beckett further on, in a seminal fragment that sums up the notion
of what I suggest an epistemology of creative writing may be: Not to want to say,
not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you
want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to
keep in mind, even in the heat of composition (Beckett, 1958: 28) In theory
things get hot. In theory, you take a deep breath. Perhaps just before you
put it stylishly though: Westward, Ho! Unword Ho!
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound,
text and image Volume 7, January-February 2010, ISSN
1552-5112
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