As Is. En route to Tel Quel.

This time I am going for Derrida through the pages of another author associated with Tel Quel. I am also trying a new technique. Frustrated awhile back and perhaps too hasty in my assessment, I said that Holsinger's argument is limited in that it projects, at least according to one reading, to cast Derrida as a reader of medieval texts and a writer of medievalisms, when really, he is just a reader. If we all have our notebooks, those external, paper, and electronic, and most importantly, that curious internal one or ones, we might think of all our knowledge, experiences, as our little libraries whose cataloguing system is always imperfect and unable to be explained. We dig through our dusty, or probably more often our most current pages to produce our readings. We have theories of the moment, which, contrary to what I believed a year ago, are not those of philosophers. Its our current grasp, the state of our understandings.

I am finding some more of the pieces toward a satisfactory reading of parts of Glas. Although like many authors, Sollers wanted to unhook himself almost immediately from Le Parc, what he does there, in his writings in his orange exercise book, is to reject the idea that language is an instrument, it is not for the communication of information, but for itself. The thing cannot be separated from the way it is expressed, or, as Sollers wrote in capitals in a 1968 issue of TQ called Théorie D'Ensemble,

L'ECRITURE DANS SON FONCTIONNNEMENT VERBAL N'EST PAS REPRESENTATION.'

[I wonder what Chrétien would say about this proposal. In his insistence on the importance of the way in which a story is told and put together, accepting that he considers both of these fundamental to the elaboration of a novel conte, does he necessarily realize that these are inseparable?] In Sollers, as Barthes says in Sollers écrivain, we must conceive of time in a new way, "Here, literally, there is no time other than that of the words," to which Sollers, speaking of Poussin might put thusly (but in French): "It is not…a 'moment' or a boring succession of more or less complete images, but the passage of time which has been deliberately ranged in tiers, directed, played with, neutralized, annulled in a solid physical scale" (L'Intermédiaire translated and cited in Roland Barthes, Writer Sollers, Philip Thody trans. Univ. of Minnesota UP, 1987). It is not that the time is new (or now), it is a new idea of time. The same for language. I suspect, but we never really know, that this will eventually help me to disassemble Bataille's: l'acte sexuel est dans le temps ce que le tigre est dans l'espace.

This is surely, in part, why he and Derrida are so difficult to read in places. Glas, now I understand more fully, is an attempt to illustrate this new theory of language. The trick, however, is in the how. When Derrida quotes Gérard Genette, he does so, I think, to show us the impossibility of understanding Genette according to our old theories of language. Strangely, however, as far as what I have been able to determine, his reading of Genette does not appear altogether strange or incomprehensible. The strange is elsewhere, in his arrangement of the text, in the judas, in its placement next to Hegel. Derrida places the reader in an uncomfortable situation such that s/he can learn, but not necessarily succeed in learning, to learn to read language again, from an uncomfortable place. The wordplay pushes the reader into the inner margins, into the false commentary, and the commentary pushes the reader back into the words. This is part of the book-violence of Glas.

For all of these ideas about undoing the idea of story, I would never give up the idea that even the most wild novel cannot resist, fully, our compulsion to organize it, to pick out some pieces to call our own. I can make a story out of Le Parc, I know.

Yesterday I sat for over four hours in front of the Cifar facsimile and the some 240 amazing miniatures of the Paris MS. There was a point in which I spent 20 minutes thinking about a story that Cifar tells his wife early on of a King who, afraid of lightening and thunder, builds an underground palace. Lost in the example, I made up my own versions. Some would say that what I had done was utterly medieval, my amending, my bringing to life of someone else's work. I would not trade these digressions for anything, those moments of quiet, at our most primitive, stuck studying the walls of our places below the surface.