Transmission and the Individual Remix by Tom McCarthy

Author:Tom McCarthy [McCarthy, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-80327-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

VI

HOW, THEN, DOES LITERATURE WORK? In tagging my deliberations on this question to the myth of Orpheus, I’m following the lead of (that is, reiterating, or perhaps modulating) the person who, in my opinion, has best addressed the question: Maurice Blanchot. In his short seminal 1955 text “The Gaze of Orpheus,” Blanchot identifies in the Thracian poet’s fatal backward glance toward Eurydice an enactment of the very origin of literature. It’s a moment, Blanchot writes, of madness, sacrifice, transgression; a moment when desire, surging and unmanageable, sweeps away all the writer’s previous concerns in a huge wave of “unconcern” that carries the literary work itself beyond all boundaries, not least the very ones that gave rise to it in the first place (in Orpheus’s case, the parameters, the rules and limits, governing and shaping his task of bringing Eurydice back to life); a moment of surrender to an impulse that’s at once both catastrophic and inspirational, that embodies inspiration itself. This, Blanchot continues, is the core, the primary spark, the big-bang moment, of all writing—and yet, at the same time, it’s a moment that could only “happen” after Orpheus’s poetry had already brought him to the Underworld and ushered him past its bouncers. “Which is to say,” Blanchot concludes, “that one can only begin to write if one is already writing”—which is to say that writing has no origin. Or, to be precise, it means to say that writing’s origin will always lie within this blind spot off the map and out of time—a spot whose retrieval is both impossible and the sole true task of any good writer (every significant literary work enacts, or reenacts, in some way or other, the doomed escapade of attempting to retrieve it, and surrenders itself to the consequences): an unsolvable quandary that leads Blanchot to tie writing to the act of suicide.

Blanchot’s contemporary Roland Barthes, although he doesn’t mention Orpheus directly, follows a similar line, describing writing, in the well-known passage from his 1967 essay The Death of the Author, as the “destruction … of every point of origin … the neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” It’s such a famous passage that I’m almost embarrassed to cite it. But it’s famous for a reason: it’s important. It binds the act of writing not to integrity and presence, but rather to the opposite, to disintegration and becoming absent. It also, we might note in passing, answers our Kraftwerk question. Who speaks? For Barthes, the answer is always: language—language speaks me, you, everyone, to such an extent that I and you and we and they are merely shifting and amorphous points, floating islands being continuously made and unmade by language’s flows and counterflows.

For our second Kraftwerk question, What is said?, we should turn back to Blanchot. His formulation’s more extreme than Barthes’s. Within literature, for Blanchot, it’s not just the writer who’s prone to disintegration,

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