(no subject)

[proximoception]

Not to mention his allusions to works as yet uncreated (spoiler alert):


A. Quain: Toward the end of 1939, he published Statements, perhaps the most original and certainly the least praised or known of his books. Quain had taken to arguing that readers were an extinct species. 'Every European', he declared, 'is either potentially or actually a writer.' He also held that of the various pleasures writing can provide, the greatest was inventiveness. Since few of these would-be writers had any capacity for invention, most would have to make do with mimicry. For these 'deficient writers', whose name was legion, Quain wrote the eight stories in Statements. Each foreshadows or promises a good plot, which the author then deliberately sabotages. One or two - not the best - hint at two plots. The reader, carried away by vanity, thinks he has invented them.

The imaginatively capacious, peerlessly undeficient Calvino was to mimic the book itself forty years later. I'm not sure which of the If on a winter's night a traveler semi-stories could be said to have two plots--several do end with a couple different suspected murderers, kidnappers, spies, sisters. The book itself has something of a hidden plot. Marana, the villain, is never seen onstage but keeps providing self-sabotaging stories in response to the heroine's stated tastes of the moment. To have heard them, he must be nearby.


B. The central conceit of Quain's 'Secret Mirror' anticipates Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.


C. Tlön's northern hemisphere's nouns anticipate Deleuze's rhizomes--just one example of that story's heavy, pervasive influence on theory. Ironically pervasive, given Borges' undermining of the ideas he's presenting, and especially the association of these games and fascism in the Postscript.


D. Another example of that, also from Tlön, though less certain; these lines remind me of the culminating moment in De Man's (to me) infinitely enraging misreading of Shelley's "Triumph of Life":

To explain or assess a fact is to link it to another one. In Tlön, this linkage is a later state of the fact, which cannot affect or illuminate its earlier state. Every mental state is irreducible and the mere fact of naming it - that is, of classifying it - implies a falsification.

The De Man passage: 'The Triumph of Life' warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence.

Borges' preemptive satire of this view, in Tlön: The sight of a puff of smoke on the horizon and then of a burning field and then of a half-stubbed-out cigar that produced the blaze is deemed an example of the association of the ideas.

You can guess what ideas about De Man this leads me to associate. But never mind.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I can indeed.