SubStance

SubStance 32.1 (2003) 72-73

Driven to Write

Steven Ungar

The questions concerning fascination and knowledge proposed by the gracious invitation to contribute to the hundredth issue of SubStance call for a profession of faith that, via Georges Bataille, I want to redirect from fascination toward something more intense:

Un peu plus, un peu moins, tout homme est suspendu aux récits, aux romans, qui lui révèlent la vérité multiple de la vie. Seuls ces récits, lus parfois dans les transes, le situent devant le destin. Nous devons donc chercher passionnément ce que peuvent être des récits—comment orienter l'effort par lequel le roman se renouvelle, ou mieux se perpétue.

Le souci de techniques différentes, qui remédient à la satiété des formes connues, occupe en effet les esprits. Mais je m'explique mal—si nous voulons savoir ce qu'un roman peut être—qu'un fondement ne soit pas d'abord aperçu et bien marqué. Le récit qui révèle les possibilities de la vie n'appelle pas forcément, mais il appelle un moment de rage, sans lequel son auteur serait aveugle à ces possibilities excessives. Je le crois: seule l'épreuve suffocante, impossible, donne à l'auteur le moyen d'atteindre la vision lointaine attendue par un lecteur las des proches limites imposés par les conventions.

Comment nous attarder à des livres auxquels, sensiblement, l'auteur n'a pas été contraint?

[To a greater or lesser extent, everyone depends on stories, on novels, to discover the manifold truth of life. Only such stories, read sometimes in a trance, have the power to confront a person with his fate. This is why we must keep passionately striving after what constitutes a story: how should we orient our efforts to renew or, rather, to perpetuate the novel?

Many minds are no doubt preoccupied with various techniques that will compensate for the surfeit of familiar forms. But what is the point in this—assuming that we wish to find out what a novel might be—unless first of all a ground is ascertained and clearly delineated? A story that reveals the possibilities of life is not necessarily an appeal; but it does appeal to a moment of fury without which its author would remain blind to these possibilities, which are those of excess. Of this I am sure: only an intolerable, impossible ordeal can give an author the means of achieving that wide-ranging vision that readers weary of the narrow limitations imposed by convention are waiting for.

How can we linger over books to which their authors have manifestly not been driven?]

Georges Bataille, The Blue of Noon, trans. Harry Mathews
(New York: Marion Boyers, 1986, p. 153) [End Page 72]

The passage appears at the very start of Bataille's foreword to Le Bleu du ciel, written in 1935 but only published twenty-two years later (Paris: Pauvert, 1957). The foreword is succinct, slightly more than two pages long. But it is notorious because it contains the misspelling of a Balzac title: Sarrasine instead of Sarrazine, that drove Roland Barthes to write S/Z as his farewell—indeed, a farewell with an edge—to structural analysis grounded in the dream of a science of literature.

What draws me to Bataille, and to Barthes via Bataille, is less a matter of fascination than the dynamism that some acts of writing and reading convey. Bataille describes Le Bleu du ciel as an abnormality he sets alongside Emily Bronté's Wuthering Heights, Kafka's The Trial, Proust's Recherche, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir, Sade's Eugénie de Franval, Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, and Maurice Blanchot's L'Arrêt de mort. The short list has nothing at all of a counter-tradition. But it has long driven me to reflect on writing and reading within what early postwar critics cast as a literature of extreme situations. Twenty-six years ago, SubStance provided me with a venue to edit "Flying White," an issue devoted to the writings of Maurice Blanchot (SubStance # 14, 1976).

The questions...