Skinny Dipping

§77 [22.iii.24.a : vendredi] Confession time: I have a compulsion for tidiness. I like to sort things, arrange them into categories, label them, file them, cross reference them, etc. &c et cetera. The mania for neatness interferes with my style. What I discovered in early 2018 (after years and years of failing) is that the kind of novels I want to write are messy, ambiguous, oblique … what I prefer are collages, mashups, rhizomic digressive dreamlike texts in which anything could happen, in which the characters could go anywhere in time & space to do anything they pleased. Writing novels (thus) has become a struggle against my nature. My compulsion for order could be why I became a scientist. I wanted to write books from a very early age, but I had so much that I wanted to write that all my attempts turned into messy explosions which I misunderstood as failures. I’d failed to make something that looked like what I thought it should look like. I could have given up. I could have said, I’m not cut out for this sort of messy work. It’s better that I remain in the laboratory where I can do tidy, systematic work that fits neatly into predetermined categories. But I didn’t do that. Instead, I just kept on writing messy unfinished failures until I realized, hey wait a minute! — I’m actually really, really good at this novel writing thing. Or maybe I’m not good at writing novels at all and it’s just a case of : writing novels (as bad as they are) is the best thing I can do.

I’m glad I’ve spent the last twenty years here at this desk doing what I’m doing right now. By remaining true to my calling and not becoming discouraged (or not letting being discouraged become a deterrent), I’ve created a vast body of work. Perhaps it is “a vast but private literature” but it is (even if minor) a literature. And this private minor literature penetrates, has seeped into the interstices of my library — I am a librarian too! Being a writer, curator, and reader creates the necessary conditions for experiences such as the one I’m about to describe.

Before me, open on my writing desk are two books. I could open a third, but that third book is on a shelf on the opposite side of the room, still I know it’s there and I know what’s inside of it. The two books I have open on my desk, side by side, are The Mystery of Majorana by Leonardo Sciascia and Birthday by César Aira. The first time I read these books was 2017 & 2019 respectively. The other book, the one still across the room on the shelf is Vertigo by W.G. Sebald, and I read that for the first time in 2009 (plus or minus). The reason I have The Mystery of Majorana and Birthday open on my desk is this : yesterday, I decided that I wanted to include some kind of reference to the disappearance of Ettore Majorana in the chapter I’m writing for my current work-in-progress. It’s been long enough since I read Sciascia’s account of that historical event that I thought it would be wise to brush up on the details so that I don’t get the facts wrong. So last night, as the temperature plunged below freezing for the second night in a row, I sat in my rocking chair in front of a broiling fire (toes and feet comfortably wrapped up in wool socks knitted by my mother) immersed in Sciascia’s account of the search for a lost Italian physicist. But Sciascia, being a decent writer and not just a historian or journalist, expands the Majorana’s tale to include the whole world of art, literature, and mathematics. In describing Ettore Majorana’s genius, Sciascia writes, “...life has an insuperable dimension — a dimension of time, of achievement. A pre-ordained, indefeasible dimension. At the precise moment when the work’s accomplishment and perfection are achieved; at the precise moment when a secret is completely unveiled, a mystery revealed — in the sphere of knowledge or of beauty for the scientist, the writer, the artist — at that moment all that remains is death.” While this sounds dramatic and maybe says more about the mania that drives a person to undertake “the great work” than it does about the actual proportions of things — I mean, Leonardo Davinci didn’t kill himself after painting La Joconde, but the requirement that the great lifework of a genius remain unfinished is certainly a cliché. It likely isn’t the fear of death that led Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, and Laurence Sterne to die before finishing their masterpieces. And it isn’t a coincidence that Don Quixote, Ulysses, and Moby-Dick read as if they are unfinished. (From now on, I will leave all my works unfinished!!)

In the face of being called to Great Work (the composition of the Magnum Opus), a writer responds in one of two ways: (1) infinite delay, or (2) infinite digression. Both are aspects of the method of exhaustion.

The reason that these two books by Sciascia and Aira are open on my desk right now has to do with a young man named Évariste Galois. As far as I know (and I only know this from deduction), the first time I encountered Évariste Galois’ name was in Sciascia’s little book about Ettore Majorana. The reference Sciascia makes to Galois is so brief that you can excuse me (I hope) for not committing Galois’ name to memory back in 2017. Sciascia invokes Galois (after a lengthier discussion of Stendhal) as another example of a time waster, a genius who practices infinite delay to get out of the requirement of doing the great work. Sciascia writes, “...Galois, at the age of twenty, spends the night before the duel he knows will be fatal, in feverish anticipation, summing up in a letter to his friend Chevallier his life’s work, the work which cannot fail to be ‘at one’ with his life — the theory of operational groups.” Indeed, the morning after concisely writing out his mathematical theory (and a few other hastily written documents), Galois is mortally wounded and succumbs to death on the third day : a kind of antiresurrection.

When I read that sentence I thought, wait a minute! I’ve read that … well, obviously I read it before here in this book which I’m reading again tonight, but I’ve also read about Évariste Galois somewhere else because I could hear in my mind’s ear the following words ringing out as if hammered out on a gong: “But you can’t write a novel the night before you die!” Along with those words, I remembered (from somewhere) that “algebraic notation makes it possible to write a mathematical theory concisely, but there is no concise literary notation in which to express a novel in brief.” One might write a poem or even a cycle of poems quickly, the way Rilke wrote his Sonnets to Orpheus in just a few days, but with a novel, such a feat is impossible. A novel, even a short one, requires days and days.

All this about math and literary notation and the accumulation of days necessary to make a novel was coming from somewhere … it was all stored in my memory, but what was the source? I was certain that the source was César Aira because in the sentence in Sciascia’s book preceding the one about Évariste Galois contains the phrase “a musical mind” which is almost the title of a collection of César Aira’s stories, The Musical Brain. Was the source a story in The Musical Brain? I didn’t solve the problem until early this morning when I did a text search in my documents folder on my computer for “Évariste Galois” and technology served up a diary entry I’d written on Friday, 1 June 2018 where I’d translated a passage from the French edition of César Aira’s book, Anniversaire (later translated in full by Chris Andrews for New Directions as Birthday), which contained a reference to “Évariste Galois”. Sure enough, there he is! In Chapter IX of Anniversaire or Birthday. But it was Chapter X that most interested me when I read Birthday.

“You can’t write a novel the night before dying. Not even one of the very short novels that I write.” That’s how César Aira begins Chapter X of Birthday. Like Aira, I’ve been writing very short books for many years. I wrote my first very short novel in March of 1996 during a week that I was traveling. I’d driven all night from Baton Rouge to St Louis where I checked into a hotel exhausted. I was one year away from completing my Ph.D. in physics and I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I knew what I didn’t want to do: I didn’t want to teach physics to undergraduates. I might have been really good at teaching, but we’ll never know. What I wanted to do was to write books. But what sort of books should I write? I had no idea. By 1996, I’d written three books each one an example of a genre of literature that I’d enjoyed reading: fantasy and science fiction and the third book could be categorized as “popular science” or a “popularization of science”, a book about science written for readers who were not themselves scientists. What I’d learned from writing these three books was that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life writing fantasy, science fiction, or popular science. But I still wanted to write books. But what other kinds of books was a writer allowed to write? So over the course of a week in St Louis, in my hotel room, in bars, in cafés, on park benches, in museums, in the convention center, wherever I could find a semiquiet spot, I worked on a text that now bears the title No More I Love Yous. It was too short to be a book, it was only about 7500 words. I didn’t think it was a short story since I’d never read a short story like No More I Love Yous before. So, what I decided was that No More I Love Yous was a failure, an attempt at something that didn’t quite come off.

I won’t repeat the whole history of what became my series of March Madness novelettes since I’ve already done that in The Art of the Novelette … and I’m running out of time this morning … and I want to repeat something that César Aira already wrote: To discover a style is to realize it, in a complete and finished form, and after that there’s nothing left to do except to go on producing. Since artists generally reach this point while they’re still young, they spend the rest of their lives in an atmosphere of futility and disquiet, if not outright anxiety in the face of what seems a colossal task, which would require ten lifetimes to complete, and even then would yield very meager fruit: compressing the spring another fraction of an inch, taking one more step after leaping a thousand leagues…

If I had more than one minute left, I might attempt something approximating an erudite exegesis, but I won’t. You are … at least this time … saved by the bell.