Bartleby Co. By Enrique Vila-Matas

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According to Enrique Vila-Matas there's a Literature of the No which doesn't exist but is still very important. Well, there's also a Reviewer of the No and it's me, and I say

NO

to this maundering waffly postmodern excuse. In order to say YES to this book you need to enjoy

a) many many many references to writers you will never have heard of unless you are a student of second-division European literature. Do these names show up on your radar?

Bobi Bazlen
Marcel Schwob
Gustav Janouch
Clement Cadou
Felipe Alfau
Jacob von Gunten
Ernesto Hernando Busten
Barbey D'Aurevilly

b) oh also, just to add to the fun, some of them might be made up. Obscure Hungarian novelists who didn't write much for thirtyfive years – and might not exist! yay. My pulses were racing.

c) you have to enjoy passages of which there are many like this :

And the point is, as Blanchot says, what he was searching for, the source of all writing, that space where he could write, that light which ought to be circumscribed, in space, demanded of him and confirmed in him dispositions which made him unsuitable for any ordinary literary work or distracted him from the same.

or

Julio Ramon Ribeyro – a Peruvian writer, Walserian in his discretion. Always harboured the suspicion, which turned into conviction, that there is a series of books which form part of the history of the No, though they may not exist. These phantom books, invisible texts, are the ones that knock at our door one day and, when we go to receive them, for what is often a trivial reason*, they disappear; we open the door and they are no longer there, they have gone.

(*perhaps to borrow a cup of sugar)

This book is a straight-up wannabeBorges, and I can appreciate that because Borges is a great writer, so who wouldn't, if they have something of the total book geek about them, wish to emulate the old omniscience. This book even starts from a good place, because I'm a great fan of Herman Melville's great story Bartleby. But the idea of the Literature of the No just falls apart like a badly stitched Frankenstein experiment. These writers who declined to write – most of the time it wasn't because of some grand philosophical gesture : I could write, but writing, it is now impossible, in this modern world, after [atrocity of your choice], not some dramatic Duchampian abandonment of art for chess or revolution. It was because they took to drink or had a brain injury or discovered sex or went round the twist and were shut up in asylums or disappeared in Mexican water or Guinean jungles or they had a career change and became full time acrobats or chemical plant executives. Or ran out of inspiration. So, you know, who cares about these mopes?

My dear friends, give this one a miss and try instead Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges and Bartleby by Herman Melville
Paperback La literatura (y la vida) del no. Los escritores que, como Bartleby el escribiente de Herman Melville, llegaron a la conclusión, por un camino u otro, de que preferirían no hacerlo.

Algunas cuestiones previas:

¿Te apasionan autores como Schopenhauer, Walser, Kafka, Rulfo, Salinger, Bernhard, Rimbaud... o sus nombres te producen dentera lectora?

¿Eres capaz de leer frases como la que sigue sin que te levanten dolor de cabeza?

escribir es intentar saber qué escribiríamos si escribiéramos decía Marguerite Duras

Pues si has superado este test, el libro te puede interesar, como me ha interesado a mí, aunque a ratos es un poco rollete. En general trata de la pulsión destructiva hacia la literatura, el nihilismo que hace ver que todo es inútil y que abarcar la realidad o nuestros sentimientos a través del lenguaje es imposible. Esto es especialmente evidente en la literatura contemporánea, que ha producido textos absurdos, oscuros o difíciles y parece encontrarse en un callejón sin salida:

En realidad, la enfermedad, el síndrome de Bartleby, viene de lejos. Hoy ya es un mal endémico de las literaturas contemporáneas, esta pulsión negativa o atracción por la nada que hace que ciertos autores literarios no lleguen, en apariencia, a serlo nunca.

Vila-Matas organiza sus reflexiones en forma de notas numeradas a un texto inexistente. En todo momento su estilo personal se manifiesta y utiliza distintos artificios literarios para estructurar este ensayo, que también incorpora la ficción, novelándose a sí mismo y haciendo intervenir a un autor imaginario, Robert Derain, que le escribe para proporcionarle materiales sobre el tema.

En algunos momentos, el autor combate el nihilismo literario y encuentra motivos que continúan justificando la existencia de la literatura:

La literatura, por mucho que nos apasione negarla, permite rescatar del olvido todo eso sobre lo que la mirada contemporánea, cada día más inmoral, pretende deslizarse con las más absoluta indiferencia.

En resumidas cuentas: brillante, profundo, alambicado, intelectual, como todo lo que escribe Vila-Matas, quien también nos deleita con algo de cotilleo sobre las vidas - complicadas - de los adalides del no, e incluso sobre sí mismo:

Encuentro cierto placer en ser arisco, en estafar a la vida, en jugar a adoptar posturas de radical héroe negativo de la literatura (es decir, en jugar a no ser como los protagonistas de estas notas sin texto), en observar la vida y ver que, la pobre, está falta de vida propia. Paperback “To write is not to speak. To be quiet. To howl without the noise.” (Marguerite Duras)

There is a famous French saying, “Do what you need to do, whatever may happen.” Near the end of his life, Tolstoy wrote only...”Fais ce que dois, adv...” but he never finished it. Here lies the heart of this book. Books not written, things left unsaid, a follow up book published forty years later, or a writer who never writes again?

Why? Enter Bartleby and company. The history of NO.

Herman Melville created Bartleby, a scribe who prefers not to proof read. Enrique Vila-Matas gives us a compendium of writers that fall into this literary following. Joseph Joubert, contemporary of Chateaubriand never wrote a book, but was known for his sayings. JD Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye) went into seclusion and Juan Rulfo (Pedro Paramo) went silent after his uncle Celerino passed away. Was he the source of his stories? Oscar Wilde stopped writing in his last years in Paris.

Edmundo de Bettencourt, a Portuguese poet published some new work after thirty years, and was criticized by fellow writer Miguel Torga. He never published again. Or the Frenchman Clement Cadou. He longed to be a writer but after meeting the Polish writer Gombrowicz, he became a painter of furniture, naming each piece a self-portrait. Why? Because furniture does not write!

Strange and wonderfully sad tales of affected writers lost in their art. Or is it lost in their minds. Secretive, aloof and bizarre characters, this book makes one think about fame, the publishing world and of course, all those who never were.

The bigger question, is why write? Or is it, when do you stop writing? Or maybe, why bother writing? How about poetry:

Poetry is not written, but if it lives in your mind, it is the most beautiful thing for someone about to stop writing. (JV Foix)

“Art is a stupidity” (Jaque Vache)

These collections of notes (86 of them) are told by our collector of “El No”. It’s 1999 and one gets a hint of the end of the millennium as the symbolic end of writing. But of course Vila-Matas is playing with us. The collector has published them in this book, his second after a gap of twenty-five years (a failed love story which even his parents hated). So he is in good standing with the rest.

This is not your standard book. If you are a lover of literature, and in particular, love those quirky stories that give a glimpse of the artist’s struggle to create, publish and be famous, you will love this book. Otherwise perhaps stay away.

“All the rest is silence.”

A big shout out to BO for his astute review. He was right! Paperback This book is called a novel but I found it to be really a collection of essays about authors. It’s a homage to books and authors. The author uses the term a ‘Bartleby,’ or ‘the No’s’ to mean writers who stopped writing or never actually wrote. This group includes some great writers, but also some relatively obscure authors, and authors he invented, Many of the books and authors are Spanish. Bartleby refers to Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener’s classic line “I would prefer not to.”

Fiction or non-fiction? We assume a little of both, but we are hopeful that when Vila-Matas quotes a famous writer he is not simply adding to the wealth of fake quotes out there floating around on Facebook. The book is structured as footnotes to a non-existent novel. There are 86 in all and, as I say, I describe them as 86 two-page essays with wit and humor. The author delights in giving us reasons why authors stop writing.

Some examples of what you are in for if you read the book:

Juan Rulfo wrote Pedro Paramo, a Mexican classic that all Mexican high school kids read. (I reviewed it – a great book!) He wrote nothing else in the remaining 30 years until his death. When asked why he had not produced more works he said “Well, my Uncle Celerino died and it was he who told me the stories.”



Same with Rimbaud; two classics by age 19 and nothing else before he died 20 years later.

Felipe Alfau wrote Chromos, about Spanish immigrants in New York City in the 1940s. (I also reviewed that and found it quite good.) He wrote it when he first moved to New York from Spain. That was it. After he learned English he said, in effect, that ‘his mind was overwhelmed by the complexity of language after he learned English.’

Vila-Matas intersperses some personal stories. He tells us of a woman he formerly loved who wrote a book ‘in her head’ all her life and never committed it to paper. She is one of many such ‘mental’ authors. The author tells us of an online website that accepts any book that has been previously unpublished or rejected.

Thomas de Quincey wrote the famous essay Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. He wrote nothing else between ages 19 and 36 because, let’s say, ‘he was impaired.’

JD Salinger wrote four well-known stories including Catcher in the Rye from 1951 to 1963. He then went silent and dropped off the radar until his death 47 years later. Thomas Pynchon is another author known for his disappearing act, although Pynchon published a novel in 2013 and may still be around; if so he’s 84.

Borges wrote an essay about a great poet who, at the time of Borges’ writing, had been silent for 25 years. In the essay Borges speculated that the poet’s dexterity was so great that ‘he saw literature as a game that was too easy.’

The author mentions Portuguese writer and poet Fernando Pessoa a couple of times. Pessoa killed off one of his fictional ‘other selves’ because that invented character despaired of being able to write superior art.

Oscar Wilde went silent the last years of his short life. Supposedly he told a Paris newspaper: “When did not know life, I wrote; now that I know its meaning, I have nothing more to write.”

I find books like these useful in acquainting us with other great works. For example, I'm now curious to read Call It Sleep by Henry Roth. The novel itself had two lives. Roth published it when he was 28, a recent Jewish immigrant to the US from Europe. It received a few decent reviews but went largely unnoticed and did not sell well. Roth gave up writing. Then 30 years later in 1964 it was republished and burst upon the literary scene as a ‘lost classic.’ Roth wrote one more work in his 70s and 80s, a four-volume work called Mercy of a Rude Stream. He wrote in his old age “to make dying easier.”



The last story I’ll share is heartwarming but terribly sad. Puerto Rican/Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956. His wife was dying of cancer at the time and Nobel Committee gave the couple special unpublicized notice that he would win the award so his wife would know before she passed away, which she did two days after she heard the news. She was his muse. The poet never wrote again and died two year later.

One more last one: Kafka wrote “A writer who does not write is a monster who invites madness.”



A Bartleby T-shirt from praxisstvdio.com
Spanish stamp honoring the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez from dreamstime.com
The author from Goodreads.com
Paperback بطل هذه الرواية كاتب, كتب رواية واحدة وتوقف عن الكتابة لمدة 25 سنة
يحاول العودة للكتابة مرة أخرى بكتابة هذه الملاحظات أو اليوميات, موضوع هذه الملاحظات هو كُتاب أدب ال لا و( لا) معناها هنا لا للكتابة
أي الكُتاب الذين توقفوا عن فعل الكتابة ويسميهم باسم بارتلبي - شخصية من رواية للكاتب هرمان ملفيل- وهو شخص انعزالي رافض للعالم
عن الكُتاب والمبدعين الذين قرروا الانعزال ورفضوا الاستمرار بالكتابة لأسباب واضحة وأخرى غير واضحة وغير مفهومة
فقدان الرغبة, صعوبة الوصول للأفكار, الإحساس باللاجدوى, وغيرها.بحث في هذه الأسرار والأسباب ومحاولة لفهمها

الرواية تعرض الكثير من الكتب, والكُتاب وبعض مراحل حياتهم وأعمالهم الأدبية وآراءهم
ويظل عالم الأدب والأدباء عالم مثير جدا للاهتمام Paperback

«Nunca tuve suerte con las mujeres, soporto con resignación una penosa joroba, todos mis familiares más cercanos han muerto, soy un pobre solitario que trabaja en una oficina pavorosa. Por lo demás, soy feliz.»

Cómo no va a gustarme un libro que tiene tal inicio, como no va a gustarme este no-escritor de novelas que son ensayos o de ensayos que son ficción, atormentado por la inutilidad o la imposibilidad o la magnificencia inalcanzable de su oficio, que se cuestiona con Rimbaud si el arte no será en el fondo una tontería.

¿Por qué escribir? ¿Por qué no? Vila-Matas agrupa en torno a Bartleby (el célebre personaje de Melville que igualmente podría haber sido Wakefield, el famoso personaje de Hawthorne) a autores que se negaron a escribir o que callaron tras una o dos obras sobresalientes.

«Hablar -parecen indicarnos tanto Wakefield como Bartleby- es pactar con el sinsentido del existir. En los dos habita una profunda negación del mundo.»

Porque en paralelo al cuestionamiento de la literatura hay un cuestionamiento de la vida misma. Nuevamente Vila-Matas mezcla vida y literatura hasta transformarlas, para desgracia de los escritores, en una misma cosa. Pocos son aquellos que abandonan la literatura precisamente para abrazar la vida, la gran mayoría justifican su abandono por razones que de igual manera pudieran servir para contestar a ese famoso TO BE OR NOT TO BE, esa cuestión fundamental de la filosofía que decía Camus.

Así nos toparemos con escritores que se paralizaron ante el abismo inaccesible de lo que buscaban o a los que, por vagos, les parecía una tarea impropia, o a los que, por ineptos, se sintieron del todo incapaces de la tarea, o a los que, quizás por vanidosos, calificaron el oficio de despropósito. También están los que pensaban que la palabra escrita era del todo insuficiente o sus primos cercanos que necesitaban llegar a la raíz del asunto, encontrar aquello que no sabían qué era ni dónde buscarlo pero que aun así intuían que en el mismo momento en el que se toparan con ello se darían cuenta del sinsentido de la tarea.

Sin faltar los que aducen que sus obras no les pertenecen pues fueron escritas como al dictado o bajo el influjo de alucinaciones, o aquellos para los que la escritura se despoja de todo atractivo o necesidad tras la muerte del amante, o aquellos desmotivados porque ya se ha escrito todo, o aquellos que ven en la literatura la razón de su perdición, o esas mentes privilegiadas para las que la literatura es un juego demasiado fácil, desprecio de la literatura que puede venir acompañado por otro desprecio aún más hiriente, el dirigido al gremio de los posibles lectores.

¿Por qué escribir? ¿Por qué vivir? ¿Por qué dejar de escribir? ¿Por qué dejar de vivir? La respuesta posiblemente más inteligente y, al mismo tiempo, más estúpida es la que dio Jacques Vaché: «El arte es una estupidez»… y se mató.

Pero ninguna razón convence a Vila-Matas, obviamente, que argumenta, como años más tarde hará en su obra El mal de Montano: «escribir es una actividad de alto riesgo… la obra escrita está fundada sobre la nada y un texto, si quiere tener validez, debe abrir nuevos caminos y tratar de decir lo que aún no se ha dicho». Un argumento excesivamente aristocrático que no creo que fuera capaz de disuadir a mucha gente ni de su silencio ni de su suicidio. Y yo, que soy más bien plebeyo, prefiero quedarme con la frase de Del Giudice: «Escribir no es importante, pero no se puede hacer otra cosa» o simplemente con el humilde objetivo de dejar atrás un trabajo bien hecho.

«Ayer me dieron la extremaunción y hoy escribo esto. El tiempo es breve, las ansias crecen, las esperanzas menguan, y con todo esto, llevo la vida sobre el deseo que tengo de vivir.» (Persiles. Cervantes)

Paperback Take a minute and think about all of the books that you will read in your life. Imagine a large room, books stacked floor to ceiling - everything you've read. Now imagine outside of that room all of the books that you will never read - they line the halls, choke the doorway and cascade down the front steps to a sea of tomes that looks endless down the street. As a reader, those books are as good as having never been writ. You can know of them, but without sampling between the covers you can't really know them.

Now imagine the Alexandria library. Before Caesar puts the torch to it. All those books, all that knowledge, those stories. And then it is gone. We can mourn the loss of those books, but what do we really long for? The potential? We don't know what they contained. We just want to make that loss personal. Like all those books we won't ever read. I've resigned myself to the fact that I probably will never read all of Dickens, and to me, they may as well have been in that Alexandrian blaze.

Reading is an adventure in solipsism, a personal quest that we can occasionally run parallel with others, but in the end what we decide to read - and how we receive it - is uniquely our own. If you are with me so far, then you are in the No, and you are aware that your reading life isn't just everything you have read, it's everything you won't read - whether by conscious decision or by running out of time.

In his brilliant un-novel, Vila-Matas wants to add to the legion of No those authors, like Bartleby, that Preferred Not To. Some wrote a novel, or two or three, and then stopped writing for a long time, some of them forever. Others are novelists that never wrote. Is that such a thing? Does an author need a book to become as such? Vila-Matas's hunchbacked narrator shares with the reader his footnoted Bartlebyan thesis of the No, and when you read this book, you just might come away with re-definitions, new filters. I know I did. Paperback Un escritor que no escribe es un monstruo cortejando a la locura Franz Kafka

Este año ha sido muy intenso para mí en lo que a literatura se refiere, y parte de esa intensidad se debe a la gran cantidad de clásicos que pude leer, pero además porque tuve la oportunidad de descubrir muchos autores y libros que nunca había leído y que me han resultado maravillosos, gratificantes, encantadores.
En el caso de los autores conocí a Yukio Mishima, Anne Brontë, Leonid Andreiev, H.C. Lewis, William Golding, Miguel de Unamuno, Philip K. Dick Stephan Zweig, Mijaíl Bulgákov y John Williams, entre otros, a quienes no había leído por desconocimiento, falta de tiempo o por terminar de leer la obra de mis preferidos como Dostoievski o Kafka.
Hay libros que me llevaré en el corazón cuando este 2016 termine. Algunos de ellos, Ulises (mi mayor desafío como lector), El Caballero que cayó al Mar, Niebla, Novela de Ajedrez, Stoner, Ubik, 1984, Jane Eyre, Almas Muertas, Los Hermanos Karamazov, El Maestro y Margarita (el mejor que leí este año) y éste libro de Enrique Vila-Matas.
Lo de Vila-Matas es genial. En este libro escrito como una mezcla entre la novela, el diario y el ensayo he podido repasar a tantos autores (y personajes) que encajan dentro del síndrome de Bartleby, el famoso personaje de Herman Melville, quien formara parte de una extensa listas de escritores del No.
¿A qué se refiere el autor cuando los denomina de esa manera? Bueno, siguiendo la famosa frase del copista de Melville, Preferiría no hacerlo, Vila-Matas enumera una gran cantidad de autores que por alguna razón abandonaron la literatura de diversas maneras. Para ellos se vale de un gran estudio e investigación ahondando en la historia de la literatura y lo demuestra con gran maestría.
Por su libro, compuesto de distintas entradas de un diario ficticio o notas al pie de un libro inexistente, el autor nos enumera una lista muy variada, comenzando por los mas famosos, como Juan Rulfo y su falta de inspiración a causa de la muerte de su tío Celerino, pasando por J.D. Salinger y su reclusión de treinta y dos años, Arthur Rimbaud, quien abandonara todo desde muy joven para dedicarse a cualquier cosa menos escribir, la lista se extiende a Robert Walser y su desmoralización kafkiana, al mismísimo Franz Kafka, quien siempre se mantuvo al borde del parate total y desvarío por sus contradicciones literatura versus oficina versus matrimonio versus existencia, hasta autores menos conocidos. Todos ellos abandonaron la literatura por ocio, falta de inspiración, prisión, locura, búsquedas místicas, ayunos interminables y mil motivos más.
Pero también extiende Vila-Matas esta lista a personajes que siguieron la línea de Bartleby, como lo fueron el curioso y (kafkiano también) personaje de Nathaniel Hawthorne Wakefield, o el conocido Gregor Samsa.
Hay despedidas de autores que renunciaron casi al final de sus vidas como Oscar Wilde, Miguel de Cervantes y su despedida escrita en su último libro Persiles a horas de su muerte o la última frase del diario de León Tolstoi antes de huir para morir en una estación de tren.
Vila-Matas nos cuenta de libros que no existieron, que nunca se escribieron, cuentos que no se terminan como las Narraciones incompletas de Felisberto Hernández, de frases para el recuerdo, de personajes tristemente célebres y del mismísimo Herman Melville sucumbiendo al embrujo de su propio personaje para terminar aislado de todo y fracasado en la literatura mientras trabaja su aburrimiento en un triste despacho de aduana.
Enrique Vila-Matas logra escribir una gran libro, de menos de doscientas páginas, pero repleto de abundante información de todos estos autores, libros y personajes bartlebianos, narrado de manera amena, muy entretenido, casi como si el lector fuera un amigo que lo escucha durante una tarde de inspirada charla. Su lectura me mantuvo atento puesto que soy un gran fan de todo aquello que involucre lo biográfico como lo histórico en la literatura.
Mas allá de que creo que olvidó agregar a Harper Lee, quien luego del éxito de Matar a un ruiseñor, se retiró de la literatura para no escribir más, le digo gracias, don Vila-Matas. Más no puedo pedir este año tan, pero tan intenso. Intensidad y alegría es algo que sólo la literatura me puede dar. Paperback A Theology of the Imagination

Bartleby & Co. is a survey of the negative literature of the last two centuries - what hasn’t been written and why - with interludes of fiction. It is fascinating, informative and wonderfully inspiring. The book promotes the adoption of silence as the preferred aesthetic response in a whole range of circumstances; but also encourages positive expression because “Only from the negative impulse, from the labyrinth of the No, can the writing of the future appear.” What Vila-Matas has created, in his own estimation, is less than a book, but obviously more than silence. He calls it “footnotes commenting on a text that is invisible,” that is to say, the book he didn’t write.

“The literature of the No,” as Vila-Matas calls this genre he invented by giving it a name, is typified by Herman Melville’s story of Bartleby the Scrivener, the writer who never writes, in fact he never leaves his business office, “not even on Sunday.” Bartleby is Everyman, or at least that 99% of the human population who don’t write and don’t regret not writing. But it also includes a large proportion of writers who indefinitely defer, temporarily abandon, or abort their writing entirely. It is all these for whom “Their soul emerges through their pores. What soul? God.” They are, in short, untold stories, but nonetheless stories and these stories are in some sense divine.

So Vila-Matas has an underlying theme of a popular theology, popular not in the sense of simplistic or even simplified but in the sense that it concerns everyone not just God-professionals like theologians, clerics and religious enthusiasts. In a very particular way these non-writers, failed writers and former writers are God-like: “It is well known that God keeps quiet, is a master of silence, ... is a consummate writer of the No.” Vila-Matas quotes approvingly from an invented philosopher: “I could not agree more with Marius Ambrosinus, who said, “In my opinion, God is an exceptional person.” And every writer of the No is exceptional.

What is most exceptional about God, of course, is his hiddenness, his transcendence, his inaccessibility to human thought. He is the Other masked in his own subjectivity. God is literally no-thing. He is alien, a void, just like another human being into which we pour meaning out of our own subjectivity. And this nothing exercises enormous power within the human mind through “the negative impulse or attraction towards nothingness.” The serious consideration of this condition is something ancient called negative theology, the study of what God is not.

The origins of negative theology are Greek. The philosophical incomprehensibility of the Divine was imported into Christianity and, at least in the Eastern Orthodox Church, acted as a sort of brake on the doctrinal ambitions of the ecclesiastical establishment (one reason for the relative emphasis on liturgy in the Eastern Church). But the Western Church, with its doctrinal focus (and consequent dependence) on language, had a real problem squaring the Christian claims of revelatory access to divine secrets with the simultaneous recognition of the ineffability of God.

It was the 13th century Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, who devised a solution. His theory was that revelation of the transcendent was facilitated by analogy, what he called the analogia entis, or analogy of being. God, Thomas said, was not a being like created things. God’s nature of being was entirely different, completely alien to that of human existence; but, he claims, it is possible to make analogies between the two kinds of being. So ‘God is love’, ‘God is Trinitarian’, etc. are not definitions, nor even metaphors, they are purported inferences or translations from one mode of being to another.

The analogia entis, however, is obvious theological double-speak. If the being of God is beyond human understanding, human language is fundamentally inadequate as a foundation for the transfer of meaning from one kind of being to another. Language is just as transcendent, just as ineffable, just as incomprehensible in its being as God is in his. The 20th century theologian, Karl Barth, spent most of his professional life trashing the analogia entis as an invention of the Catholic Church, the purpose of which was to avoid what he believed were the authentic implications of Christian faith. By presuming that language was within human control, the analogia entis avoided confronting the very close analogy between language and God.

Vila-Matas presents an entirely new (that is to say ancient) version of negative theology in his book, and a very serviceable theory of how it complements revelation (or in more modern terms: imagination). Implicitly he bases this theory on what might be called the analogia novae rei, the analogy of new things, or perhaps more simply, the analogy of creativity. And quite appropriately he presents this theory as literary rather than theological. Nonetheless, it is patently both, which is its most exciting aspect: “Literature, as much as we delight in denying it, allows us to recall from oblivion all that which the contemporary eye, more immoral every day, endeavours to pass over with absolute indifference.”

The analogy of creativity translates between writing and reading. Writing is expressive, persuasive, and active; it is art. But silence, hiddeness, reticence, inaction are also creative. To put it another way, reading is the negative or apophatic twin of writing. They are equally creative positions in the world. Reading and writing are not, however, complementary activities; they are in fact antithetical ways of considering that which is transcendent and beyond our control and comprehension, namely language.

Reading is not merely not-writing; it is an attack on writing. Whatever meaning or intention went into writing is subverted by the reader through an interpretation over which the writer has no control. The only thing that reading and writing have in common is language. Not the language of a particular writer’s text but the infinite potential of language in general. The non-writer is the arbiter of the written word. The reader is a constraint not a person, or better “a tendency that asks the question, ‘What is writing and where is it?’”

Reading, like its counterpart of mysticism in religion, shows “the vanity of all initiative, the vanity of life itself.” Reading shows writing to be a transient thing, something of arbitrary and passing fashion. It creates for the writer “an aesthetics of bewilderment” by demonstrating “the antiquity of the new.” Just as even negative theology says something positive about God - namely his incomprehensibility - so reading makes the meaning of any text infinitely variable and thus impossible to pin down definitively.

Writing may be vain but it is not insignificant. It points to an effectively divine ideal that is beyond human capability to achieve. Vila-Matas quotes a writer who ceased to write, “I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem.” To merge with the infinity of language is what a writer wants to do. It is an essential aspect of pataphysics, the process of imagination. Reading, as a sort of counter-imagination, both encourages and frustrates writerly ambition. Vila-Matas also quotes the 19th century French moralist and essayist, Joseph Joubert: “One must resemble art without resembling a single work.” This union with language can only be achieved by reading, not writing.

Joubert was also the one who “wondered how to look in the right place when one does not even know what one is looking for.” And so it was Joubert who “spent his life searching for a book he never wrote, though, when all is considered, he wrote it without realising, thinking of writing it.” This is the ultimate creativity implied by reading - the permanent search which prevents writing from becoming a literally doctrinaire occupation. There is no final say, no definitive interpretation. The creativity of reading both limits and promotes the creativity of writing. This is the analogy of creativity. Reading and writing are incommensurate with each other except by the analogia novae rei.

Christianity, particularly Western Christianity, has misconceived language, and therefore literature, especially its own literature. It has claimed divine status for itself. By pretending to be superior to language, it divinizes itself and asserts the right to dominate not just writing, which is something perhaps tolerable in a religion of the Book, but also reading, that is, interpretation. This is, in its own terms, idolatry. God and language are indistinguishable in their transcendent power, their universal presence, and their unlimited potential for knowing. Neither God nor language can be constrained with impunity. By sterilizing negative theology, and persistently censuring the literature of the No (what it calls mysticism), Christianity has stopped the search for its own goal; it has become purposeless.

So Karl Barth was correct: the analogia entis is a ruse. But his fideistic response to that ruse is also self-defeating because it requires quite literally a deus ex machina that grabs people by the emotional throat and demands irrational intellectual assent and blind belief. What Vila-Matas provides is an alternative connection between God and man, between the infinitely powerful universe and the struggling individual. This connection is not through being but through creativity, not just the ability to make new and interesting interpretations of one’s existence, but also the necessity to do this continuously and permanently. The ability to read as well as write is a kind of grace that comes as a gift from elsewhere.

This is the biblical ‘image of God’ which demands not faith but only readerly hope to achieve. It also helps in understanding the seriousness of Oscar Wilde’s allusion to religion: “It is to do nothing that the elect exist.” Salvation is not achieved but is received by reading, by doing nothing. Reading demands not blind faith but rather blind hope that there is something to be found by simply absorbing what is there, the content of which is entirely unknown. The negative theology of reading cannot help but make a positive statement. This is a theology of the imagination in which “Everything remains, but changes; the everlasting is repeated mortally in the new, which is gone in a flash.” Paperback Story about stories… What makes authors write… And what makes them stop…

These phantom books, invisible texts, are the ones that knock at our door one day and, when we go to receive them, for what is often a trivial reason, they disappear; we open the door and they are no longer there, they have gone.

Take an exhaustive excursion to a library of unwritten masterpieces, to a cemetery of buried ambitions, dead hopes and ruined aspirations and Enrique Vila-Matas will be your scholarly and knowledgeable guide…

Everything changes except God. ‘In six months even death changes fashion,’ Paul Morand observed. But God never changes, I tell myself it is well known that God keeps quiet, is a master of silence, hears all the pianos in the world, is a consummate writer of the No, and for that reason He is transcendent.

In Jorge Luis Borges’ perfectly mystifying and encyclopedic style Enrique Vila-Matas investigates, analyzes, studies and anatomizes the reasons why writers stop writing and prefer to become voiceless and wordless.

Among those who in Don Quixote have given up writing is the canon, who confesses to having written ‘more than a hundred sheets’ of a book of chivalry which he discontinues because he realizes, among other things, that it is not worth making the effort in order to submit himself ‘to the confused judgement of the unthinking masses’.

The rest is silence… Paperback

In Bartleby Co., an enormously enjoyable novel, Enrique Vila-Matas tackles the theme of silence in literature: the writers and non-writers who, like the scrivener Bartleby of the Herman Melville story, in answer to any question or demand, replies: I would prefer not to. Addressing such artists of refusal as Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, Herman Melville, and J. D. Salinger, Bartleby Co. could be described as a meditation: a walking tour through the annals of literature. Written as a series of footnotes (a non-work itself), Bartleby embarks on such questions as why do we write, why do we exist? The answer lies in the novel itself: told from the point of view of a hermetic hunchback who has no luck with women, and is himself unable to write, Bartleby is an utterly engaging work of profound and philosophical beauty. Bartleby Co.