Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

For that hardly numerous and variously scattered sect who wouldn’t have anything to do with this, mostly out of a purely physiological incompatibility, the only sign of mutual recognition left was “that very word literature, a word without honor, a belated arrival, useful above all for manuals,” a word that stands out all the more, alone and unscathed, when “the genres break up and the forms melt away, when on the one hand the world has no more need for literature and on the other every book seems alien to all the others and indifferent to the reality of the genres.” And here we are bound to acknowledge an extraordinary phenomenon: that to follow the chequered and tortuous history of absolute literature we will have to rely almost exclusively on the writers themselves. Certainly not on the historians, who have still to appreciate what has happened; and only rarely on those who are exclusively critics; while those other disciplines that claimed to have a role to play — semiology, for example — have turned out to be superfluous, or irksome. Only the writers are able to open up their secret laboratories for us. Capricious and elusive guides as they are, they are the only ones who know the territory well: when we read the essays of Baudelaire or Proust, of Hofmannsthal or Benn, Valéry or Auden, Brodsky or Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetayeva or Karl Kraus, Yeats or Montale, Borges or Nabokov, Manganelli, Calvino, Canetti, Kundera, we immediately sense — even though each may have hated, or ignored, or even opposed the other — that they are all talking about the same thing . Which doesn’t mean they are eager to put a name to it. Protected by a variety of masks, they know that the literature they’re talking about is not to be recognized by its observance of any theory, but rather by a certain vibration or luminescence of the sentence (or paragraph, or page, or chapter, or whole book even). This kind of literature is a creature that is sufficient unto itself. But that doesn’t mean that it is merely self-referential, as a new species of bigots would have it. These new bigots are in fact a mirror image of the ingenuous realists, who were demolished in a single remark of Nabokov’s when he spoke of the “reality” that can only be named between inverted commas. And on another occasion he observed how those commas dig their claws into it. There is no doubt of course that literature is self-referential: how can any form not be so? But at the same time it is omnivorous, like the stomachs of those animals that are found to contain nails, pot shards, and handkerchiefs — sometimes intact too, insolent reminders that something did happen down there, in that place made up of multiple, divergent, and poorly defined realia , which is the riverbed of all literature. But likewise of life in general.

We shall have to resign ourselves to this: that literature offers no signs, has never offered any signs, by which it can immediately be identified. The best, if not the only, test that we can apply is that suggested by Housman: check if a sequence of words, silently pronounced as the razor glides across our skin of a morning, sets the hairs of the beard on end, while a “shiver” goes “down the spine.” Nor is this mere physiological reductionism. He who recalls a line of verse while shaving experiences that shiver, that , or “horripilation,” that befalls Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gītā when overwhelmed by the epiphany of . And perhaps would better be translated as “happiness of the hairs,” because harm means “happiness,” as well as “erection,” including the sexual variety. This is typical of a language like Sanskrit that does not love the explicit, but hints that everything is sexual. As for Baudelaire, he was proud that Hugo had sensed, on reading his verses, a “new shiver.” How else could we recognize poetry — and its departure from what came before? Something happens, something Coomaraswamy defined as “the aesthetic shock.” Whether prompted by the apparition of a god or a sequence of words, the nature of that shock doesn’t change. And this is what poetry does: it makes us see what otherwise we wouldn’t have seen, through a sound that was never heard before.

But what did the writers I’ve mentioned mean when they said or thought of something, “It’s literature”? Allergic to the idea of belonging to anything, honorable members, no less than Groucho Marx, of the club of those who would never join a club that accepted them as members, they used that word to refer to the only landscape where they felt alive: a sort of second reality that opens out beyond the cracks of that other reality where everyone has agreed on the conventions that make the world machine go round. That these cracks exist is itself a metaphysical proposition — and not all of these writers were interested in practicing philosophy. Yet that is how they behaved, as if literature were a sort of natural metaphysics, irrepressible, based not on a chain of concepts but rather on irregular entities — scraps of images, assonance, rhythms, gestures, forms of whatever kind. Perhaps this is the crucial word: “form.” Repeated for centuries, for all kinds of reasons and in all kinds of guises, it still seems to be the base beneath all bases when one speaks of literature. An elusive base too, intrinsically incapable of being translated into some definition. For one can speak convincingly of form only by resorting to other forms. There is no language of a higher order than form which might explain it, or make it functional to something else — just as there is no language of a higher order than myth. Yet the notion that there is such a superordinate language has been the premise of entire disciplines and schools of thought that have swept over the world in swarm after swarm without ever so much as scratching the surface of what continues to be, in Goethe’s words, the “open mystery” of every form.

Looking back at this long process, one asks oneself: when is it that its distinctive and unmistakable timbre is heard for the first time? When is it that, reading this page or that, we feel sure we have found a foretaste of the extraordinary story to come, still unaware of itself, yet at the same time unassimilable to any previous story? Reading the “Monologue” of Novalis perhaps:

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 because 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 linguistic 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 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?