I decided to transform this paper into an on-going blog in order to let it continue indefinitely, and I began to consider my reading plans for the summer. Today I returned to the work of Bruno Schulz, which for some reason continues to be incredibly resonant. To me, it feels like he embroiders wonderful things directly upon the face of reality, creating possibilities that never existed before, grafting new rooms onto old, familiar buildings, making the familiar infinitely strange. His topics are not the heroic, epic stories of conventional literature – like Wolf, he is concerned with the everyday lives of people. He is also preoccupied with the specter of death, and tries to prolong death by transforming the dying into smaller and smaller versions of themselves – his father, the looming figure in both of his books, recedes into a sanatorium and finally re-emerges as a spindly-legged crab, before disappearing altogether. Schulz also grapples with the feeling of failure – the search for The Book is an expression of longing for an ultimate literature which seems forever just beyond his grasp, which he is forever failing to write.
I can’t deny that these two writers are having a profound impact on what I’m writing, on this text called, tentatively, blight. I’m welding together an idea from Wolf – the formation of a web, zigzagging back and forth from past to present, avoiding the future – with a style heavily infected by Schulz – the blooming of possibilities beyond the ‘real,’ the longing for an ideal text (or the idea that these bits are excerpts from a grander, greater piece of writing), and the indefinite postponement of death by transforming the dying into smaller and more remote forms.
I also want to interact with and use something from our current historical moment: the threat of imminent environmental catastrophe. blight, I am finding, takes place in the midst of a terrible storm, a hurricane which floods the city. People tell bits of their stories as they escape on boats, as everything they know is covered slowly in water. Telling the story becomes a way to prolong their possible destruction, another mode of survival.
Just as Wolf revivifies the character of Cassandra as a part of the process of seeking meaning, I am also interested in creating a text that gives a reader a place to also do her work, to have agency. How does the potential use of the internet allow for that reader agency? The Institute for the Future of the Book[1] is now creating networked novels, and books which allow readers to submit comments which are part of the text. If this text I am creating is composed of a series of fragments of survivors floating in the wreckage of a city (some of which I found ‘floating in the wreckage’ of the Internet), it is conceivable that infinite fragments could be added by others, by readers, as a part of the amplification of the novel. This amplification, it seems to me, further enhances the ‘manifoldness of phenomena,’ reinforcing the narrative network that Wolf argues must emerge from the wreckage of patriarchal literary aesthetics. If failure was the only option Wolf could see, she would not have written, would not continue to write. Writing about a failure is not the same thing as a ‘failed’ text. I think that Wolf was grasping through the remnants of the past towards a future which may look very much like the present we now find ourselves in.
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