RIVER DOWN RIVER

Ideas on reading and
literary creation

Ángela Cuartas Villalobos

ES

IIn certain of his reflections on style and literary creation, José Saramago suggests that with his writing he aspires to achieve an identification between life and artistic act. “Writing is pushing back death, it is dilating the space of life”[1], he determined at one time. However, in a subsequent interview, he states that he is aware of the technical impossibility of his aspiration and this becomes more an ethical stance in relation to writing than a stylistic principle:

“The roots of my written discourse are in everyday speech, in the need I feel to convey a sense of integrative totality in which dialogue is only one element of the space in which it takes place. I am aware that this totality is impossible to achieve, but that does not mean that I do not try on every page I write”[2].

The need to transmit an integrative totality and to expand life through the recreation of its mechanisms is realized in certain acts of writing that, however insufficient, are necessary. Residing silently in this declaration of principles is a specific notion of the term act, as well as ideas on life and death. It is possible, then, to ask: Does this radical impossibility reside in the creative act? What is, essentially, an act? It may seem inappropriate to associate this term with artistic creation or life; in everyday language we imagine an act to be a completed gesture or, when in process, an action that presupposes and establishes at least two identities: that of the creator and of the work. Thus, if we understand the act as a configuring action that determines the unification and separation of the continuous and formless flow of life, an activity constantly confronted by its own limitations when attempting to represent or recreate a totality or simultaneity, it is possible to understand the sensation of "want" –inherent in the work– to which Saramago alerts us.

The origin of the word, in several of its Latin meanings, in fact refers to a condition of uniqueness: actus can be a unit of length; a road upon which only a single vehicle could pass; the act as we more or less understand it today, which denotes anything done, or that can be done, or, in scholastic philosophy, actus purus, or the absolute perfection of God. In both the Latin definition of actus and the Spanish definition of acto the term derives from a tension between realization and potentiality. The Diccionario de la lengua española (2014) begins by defining acto as action, understood, in the first acceptation of the word, as an exercise in the possibility of doing, and in the second, as the result of an action. Other meanings refer to rhetoric (each of the parts into which a literary piece is divided) and philosophy (what is real, a determination of potentiality). Both in the exercise of possibility and in the perfection of potentiality –actus purus, or pure actuality, in English–, realization does not exhaust the underlying potentiality, which is sometimes realized or manifested in a perfect or determined way. In other words, the term act can be understood as both the action and its possibility, and both the doing and the result of doing, depending on the way we, the readers of the world and its manifestations, look at it. In that more radical sense, which distances itself from the common and everyday understanding of the term, the creative act would not constitute the paradox that Saramago seems to project in his caveat regarding the aspirations of his writing.

Perhaps this explains why the first quote, which sees writing as a way of pushing back death —and not necessarily fighting or avoiding it— is more fertile than the second. Because, from this point of view, writing does not nullify its opposite or attempt to recreate a “pure” life, but rather invites life to dance with death. The image calls to mind a Buddhist teaching according to which knowledge is like a circle surrounded by ignorance: the more we expand knowledge, the more the radius of ignorance expands as well. Similarly, from the perspective of life and death, of light and shadow, or of act and potentiality, the more determined and precise the creative action, the more present and suggestive the underlying potentiality in the work. In Spanish, when using colloquial language to say that a work is powerful, that it touches our emotions or our intellect in an accurate way, we say that it is potente, (potent or powerful, in English). In this case, the word refers to power; something is powerful because it has power, strength, and, sometimes, a certain ability. But the word power also comes from potential, the possibility of doing something with a special command or ownership, without necessarily doing it. 

Wherein, then, lies the strength of powerful works, of powerful speeches? What is the relationship between action and inaction in these cases?

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Several of Giorgio Agamben's reflections in The Fire and the Tale [3] are useful when considering this matter. Based on them, I'd also like to think about the role of reading in the act of writing, understanding the latter as it is outlined in the previous paragraphs, that is, as an event in which action and potentiality coexist, as well as the spoken and the unspoken, the impulse toward life and the impulse toward death.

“Opus alchymicum” [Alchemical Work] is the title that Agamben gives to one of the essays in his collection, The Fire and the Tale, a book born of series of conferences he gave between 2010 and 2013. In this text, and throughout the book, he explores the idea of literary creation or, in other words, the relationship between world and language, between the being and the work, but here the focus is on the creative act as the artist's self-work. I begin by citing the last essay in the book because, in it, the fundamental objective of Agamben's thinking –the subject, in its ethical and political dimension– gains a central space, mainly near the end, when he refers back to several issues that Foucault investigated towards the end of his life and attempts a new reading based on the concept of potentiality and a study of the cases of several artists who claimed to have accomplished self-work through the realization of their works. For example, the “care of the self”, which was about investigating practices and devices, such as examinations of conscience and ascetic practices, with the intention of cultivating not only self-knowledge, but also self-government, and self-work. The issue of the care of the self is linked to the idea of the constitution of the subject and with something that Foucault mentioned only fleetingly, without delving deeply: that of an "aesthetics of existence", of the self and of life, understood as a work of art[4]. 

To support his thesis, Agamben defends a non-aesthetic reading of these aspects of Foucault's thinking based on the vision that Foucault himself presented in certain texts and interviews. However, the problem of the subject's relationship with himself, or the notion of the ethical subject (with ethos understood literally as "seity," the way each person experiences their own being), leads to a contradiction, because the self with which one has a relationship is nothing more than the relationship itself. "In other words, there is no subject prior to the relationship with the self: the subject is this relationship and not one of its terms"[5]. Due to the aporia intrinsic to the work on oneself, Foucault would have resorted, according to Agamben, to the idea of oneself and of life as a work of art, then, since the subject is not given in advance (there is no previous self that maintains a relationship with itself through its work), but instead must be built, the way an artist builds his work, and this, Foucault seems to suggest in an interview, is possible through a creative activity, such as writing. 

After having affirmed [Foucault] that he felt obliged to write because writing brings a kind of absolution to existence, indispensable for happiness, he specifies: 

‘It’s not the writing that’s happy, it’s the joy of existing that’s attached to writing, which is slightly different.’  Happiness —the ethical task par excellence, at which every work on oneself aims— is ‘attached’ to writing, that is, becomes possible only through a creative practice. The care of the self necessarily passes through an opus; it inextricably implies an alchemy.[7]

Agamben's thesis in “Opus alchymicum” argues that the condition of possibility inherent in the work on oneself through a work is precisely that the subject relates to itself during the creative act, as with a potentiality. This concept, which he rescues from the Aristotelian tradition and develops in "What is the act of creation?"[8], is a key piece in support of his thesis. Simply put, in this initial essay, Agamben takes up the idea of resistance in the creative act, which Deleuze defines not as opposition, but as the release of an imprisoned potentiality[9]. Agamben goes further and examines the relationship between resistance and creation, or potentiality and act, in a different way; potentiality to him is a force residing inside the act itself. Mastery, says Agamben, recalling the Aristotelian concept of hexis[10], consists in the integration of a potentiality-not-to in the creative act.

“To resist,” which comes from the Latin sisto, etymologically means “to stop, to hold down,” or “to stop oneself.” This power [potere] that withholds and stops potentiality  [potenza] in its movement toward the act is impotentiality [impotenza], the potentiality-not-to [potenza-di-non]. That is, potentiality is an ambiguous being that not only is both capable of something and of its opposite, but contains in itself an intimate and irreducible resistance.[11]

The act of creation is therefore defined as a force field stretched between potentiality and impotentiality, the ability to act and the ability to not act and resist. The artist's mastery does not consist in mastery over power-to, but over power-not-to. The important thing about this idea is, on the one hand, that mastery reveals, in the act, the potentiality-not-to, the balance, so to speak, between ability, which denies the potentiality-not-to, and talent, which can only do. In other words, the master creates with the potentiality-not-to; she is the only one who can not not do and create with her potentiality-not-to create. And, on the other hand, this creating with the potentiality-not-to, the critical instance that stops blind potentiality on its way to the act, prevents potentiality from being exhausted in the act and the realization of the work from diluting the energy invested in the act. 

For Agamben, herein lies the risk of an imprudent approach between artistic practice and work on oneself. This approach exhausts the subject and the work on oneself in the realization of the work, and does not integrate the potentiality-not-to into the creation. This, he says, can lead to the suppression of the work and to the primacy of the artist, as occurs in certain artistic avant-gardes. Agamben cites the radical example of Yves Klein, who defined his paintings as the ashes of his art and said that the fact of existing as a painter would be, in the future, "the most formidable pictorial work of all time" and uses this example to demonstrate how the abolition of the work also causes work on oneself to disappear. "The artist, who has dismissed the artistic work in order to focus on the transformation of the self, is now absolutely unable to produce anything other than an ironic mask, or he simply exhibits his living body without restraint."[12]

This imprudence in the approach between ascetic spiritual practice and artistic practice can have, in Agamben's opinion, other undesirable consequences, besides the abandonment of the work and the ascetic practice. Recall, for example, the archetypal case of alchemical work, which originally consisted in the simultaneous transformation of metals, and of the subject, who was in search of the philosopher's stone. In this case, textual production, the alchemical books written to exhort philosophers to seek science, often ended up being bland, intricate residues of an extratextual practice. The abandonment of the artwork and the work itself, the incommunicability of the artwork outside the context of creation, and the risk of wasting the effort put into the work itself on an internal game –a narcissistic exercise– that communicates nothing and leads to no form-of-life are among the risks of experiencing the work on oneself in alliance with the creative act while failing to assume the act as a unresolved tension (since the potentiality to create does not nullify that of not creating). 

What Agamben calls form-of-life is the point at which the work on an artwork and the work on oneself coincide perfectly. The poetic life is one that finds peace in the contemplation of the inoperativity of language, vision, or the body, that contemplates itself also as pure potentiality: “A living being can never be defined by its opus but only by its inoperativity, that is, by the way in which, maintaining itself, in an opus, in relation with pure potentiality, it constitutes itself as form- of-life, in which what is at stake is no longer either life or opus but happiness.”[13]

The aesthetic existence, therefore, would be one in which the subject assumes full responsibility for its potential to be or not to be. Recurrent –but not always explicitly stated– in this essay is the idea that the reformulation of the subject/object relationship in the creative act or in the act of thought is indispensable. In the creative act, as understood by Agamben, the artist is not the lord and master of the work of art, but instead a living being who contemplates the potentiality of life and language in his work of art as a result of this work, and in the very act of creating it. 

It is therefore necessary that—through the relation with the work on oneself—the creative practice itself undergo a transformation. The relation with an external practice (the opus) makes possible the work on oneself only to the extent that it is constituted as a relation to a potentiality. A subject who tried to define and shape himself only through his own opus would be doomed to incessantly exchanging his life and reality with his own opus. The real alchemist is rather the one who—in the opus and through the opus— contemplates only the potentiality that produced it. For this, Rimbaud called ‘vision’ the transformation of the poetic subject he had tried to reach by all possible means. What the poet, who has become a ‘seer’, contemplates is language—that is, not the written opus but the potentiality of writing. And given that, in Spinoza’s words, potentiality is nothing other than the essence or nature of every being, inasmuch as it has the capacity of doing something, contemplating this potentiality is also the only possible access to the ethos and the ‘seity’.[14]

Perhaps it is this freedom to which Saramago refers so adamantly when he describes his work method and his creative search. Not because he can be thought of as a writer who combines the work on oneself with the creation of his artwork, but because he seems to feel the need to contemplate language, the potentiality of language –and of life– in his creative act. However, in his conception of the act of writing novels, he emphatically denies the existence of the narrator category, except as a later invention of criticism. For Saramago, the identification between author and narrator is an essential element in the definition of his work method: “I am the narrator, I am the characters, in the sense that I am the lord of that universe. And if I am successful, the reader reads not the novel, but the novelist. And deep down, that's the interesting thing: who is the man who wrote that?”[15]

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It is striking that some writers, including Agamben in this same book, compare the pure potentiality of language with the flow of a river, and that the water symbol is also an archetype of the human psyche that usually appears in dreams and represents the being in its pure hidden potentiality, its possibility of regeneration, purification, as an underlying fertilizing source, present in each act. At the same time, one's attitude toward this flow, one's idea of the subject's relationship with it, of the way it is manifested, which is language and the act of literary creation, can serve as a key to reading an author's conception of taste and technique.

In the essay, “From the Book to the Screen: The Before and the After of the Book”[16], Agamben defends the necessity today of reformulating the theological paradigm of creation out of nothing. He rethinks the creative act based on the image of the origin as a spiral, taken from Benjamin. He develops this idea in another essay, “Vortexes”,[17] saying that the work of art, the subject and the name –modes of substance– are akin to the vortex that forms in a river when the current encounters a dam, a resistance to its free flow. When water stagnates, a vortex forms at some point, which allows the flow of water to continue its course. The interesting thing about the vortex is that, despite being a separate form of water flow, autonomous and closed in itself, and obeying its own laws, “It is strictly connected, however, with the whole in which it is immersed, made of the same matter that is continuously exchanged with the liquid mass that surrounds it. It is an independent being, yet there is no drop that separately belongs to it, and its identity is absolutely immaterial."[18] The poet is he who takes up the hidden meaning of words, the potentiality of language, which is found only by submerging through the vortex, the blind spot of the name, to enter the flow in which everything disappears and then reappears transformed. 

Both Agamben and Saramago imagine language as a current that follows its course or does not, but the effect of the image is different for each of them. For Agamben, the vortex, the name, the work, the subject, are modes of substance, of water, which have an organic relationship with it. To reformulate the paradigm of creation out of nothing, Agamben recalls that, according to Platonic tradition, God had in mind at all times all the things he would create: nothing was never nothing. He also recalls that Kabbalah interprets the myth of creation out of nothing with the understanding that "nothing" is the matter with which God made creation. Likewise, the creative subject, seen from the perspective of this paradigm, is no longer the master of the work, but part of the progression of the flow; he also needs to enter the vortex to be able to renew the matter used to create, to submit to the river's impetuous course. Therefore, he needs to renounce sovereignty and a claim to totality; he does not need it in the finished work, because it is already recognized as part and totality at the same time, as in Benjamin's writing, with its fragmented and circular way of striving for greater unity. 

Saramago, despite conceiving it as a flow, says that language is like a thread interrupted by knots, given the graphic punctuation marks that in a way interrupt the original cadence of the Portuguese language he hopes to rescue, at least with regard to certain mechanisms that make possible its comparison with a body of water that slides along, weighted, brightly, and rhythmically. He, unlike Benjamin, in his search for totality, wants to "imitate" in a certain way the freedom of the flow of oral language and the continuity of the life he intends to recreate. To do so, he must allow himself to wander, spread out, free from fundamental exercises in criticism.

Benjamin also seems to be the origin of Agamben's idea about avoiding superfluous movement, that is, of not allowing the potentiality of the act to flow freely, without restrictions, without the presence of the potentiality-to-not do, which, ultimately, brings mastery to the work. In one of his selected writings on Hemmingway,[19] Benjamin states that the good writer says nothing more than what he thinks. Saying is more than the expression of thought: it is its realization. Hence the importance of training, to avoid oscillating, tiring movements. This does not mean, however, that the writer must soberly say what he thinks, but that he must possess the necessary discipline and practice to, as a trained athlete would, achieve the goal with precision and power: “His prose presents us with the great drama of an education in right thinking through correct writing. He does not say more than he thinks, and hence the whole power of his writing redounds to the benefit of what he really thinks.”[20]

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Following Benjamin's line of thinking, according to which writing is the act of realization of thought and not its expression, and that of Agamben, according to which the subject is a vortex in the flow of substance and, in that sense, does not create out of nothing, but recreates and is a vehicle for the realization of substance through the work and the subject’s own body, we can also consider the act of writing as a continuum in which substance, in various ways, becomes "subjective", aware of itself, and once again becomes unified in a ceaseless movement. In this process of subjectivation, thinking, reading, and writing, rereading and thinking based on rereading (in short, all the antecedents and effects related to the apparently separate and unique act of writing) are all considered part of a continuous flow, and even of an indivisible simultaneity, and categories such as writing, reading, thinking, and the act are merely names, vortexes that allow for flow and renewal of substance. In Agamben's words, the subject would no longer exist prior to the relationship with itself; the subject is the relationship. Likewise, there can be no subject prior to its relationship with the world; this subject would be the relationship, and writing would be a vestige, like books, which are the result of reading the world, oneself, and other books. If the subject does not exist, in the way it is usually understood in modernity, there is also no real division between the acts of writing and reading; they are ways in which the subject relates to the world and apprehends it in its various manifestations, including its own unconscious and the collective unconscious. 

The creation of the subject depends on the act of reading. Even before consciously expressing itself, it must learn to read the gestures, forms, and physical sensations that come from the world and from its own body. And both things, the reading and the expression or realization of the gesture, are part of a continuum. Etymologically, reading means collecting, selecting. In this sense, the process of construction of the subject depends on the act of reading. Dreams may possibly be the experience in which reading and writing are most obviously seen for what they truly are. Dreams are the spontaneous manifestation of what we are beyond the illusion of the subject separated from the world; like writing, they are a realization of thought, of the unconscious that latently contains the material from personal and collective readings, even before we are born. 

In her beautiful essay, "Running and Writing", Joyce Carol Oates says that there must be an analogy between running and dreaming. The possibilities of the dreamer's mind resemble, in Oates' opinion, those of the runner experiencing the expansion of consciousness that makes her feel throughout her entire body an extension of the self capable of imagining. Thus, she says, when she runs, this expansion allows her to "see" what she is writing, as if it were a movie or a dream. In a way, what she does when writing is read the images, atmospheres, and characters that appear more clearly in lucid moments similar to dreams. She also compares writing with a river that flows evenly and speaks of dreams as temporary journeys to madness that keep us from true madness. "So too the twin activities of running/writing keep the writer reasonably sane, and with the hope, however illusory and temporary, of control."[21]

If Saramago needs to “hear” the internal voice to be able to write in life's chaotic and continuous manner, Oates needs to “see” as clearly as possible what is already in her unconscious or her memory. Thus, in the process of writing, reading actively intervenes in at least two ways: as the phantasmagoric presence of what the writer has already read and lived, made present through the ear, vision, or the automatic gesture of imitation. And in the form of potentiality, of resistance to the free and excessive act of writing: the imaginary reader for whom we write and who we try to please, who in a way is more responsible for what is not said than for what is. In the act of writing, even in free and spontaneous writing, there is a process of selection, of intrinsic reading, which seems to be guided by certain previous readings incorporated as if by "osmosis". Saramago expresses this clearly when referring to his influences: “I do not feel, however, that this literature [that of Latin America] has any influence. Perhaps the only thing I may have picked up (colhido, in Saramago’s original text) from it is a certain expansive way of breathing.”[22]  

The use of the word colher takes us back to the Latin legere, meaning to read, pick out, or retain –not always consciously– often indefinable aspects or gestures, such as a rhythm, an emphasis, a tone, or a vice. And reading is inseparable from writing, perhaps like the automatic movements learned by the athlete in practice sessions. Hence the importance of the potentiality-not-to, because it is precisely in these cases, of automatic tendencies, of patterns learned and forgotten in the river of the unconscious, or passed from generation to generation without any reflection, when the possibility of realization of thought escapes us, along with an authenticity or, if you will, a truth that has to do with the attempt to allow what needs to be said, heard, felt, and seen to be realized in keeping with its own unique power, or essence. 

Reading and writing are inseparable, two manifestations of an underlying continuum. It is, however, interesting to think of reading as a fundamental and creative act, transversal to writing. To think of reading as merely an act prior to or after writing and, in any case, separate from it and limited to reading books covering a certain area of knowledge, configures a belief that impoverishes human experience and diminishes creative possibilities and the possibility of appropriating the act of constituting the subject. Concentrating on the creative act of a work of fiction could lead one to think that reading is an essential part of the act throughout the process. Reading exists before writing, in the potential period of the work, during preparation, in drafts, annotations, sketches, conversations, observations, and reading of other works. It exists during writing, as the phantasmagoric presence that manifests itself in the text without having been invited, and as the potentiality-not-to “space” in every work that allows for reception, future fertile reading, and even the author's reading while writing. It exists after writing, in the form of the author's rereading and reviewing, and as what finally completes the work, which is the reading by others, by a certain audience.

The concepts of potentiality and potentiality-not-to, intrinsic to the notion of the act, allow for a reflection on literary creation with openings that make it possible to think of art in relation to its internal particularities, to the rules that it establishes as an autonomous space within a historical and ontological continuum –as a vortex– and as an ethical and political act. In Agamben’s own words: “What poetry accomplishes for the potentiality to say, politics and philosophy must accomplish for the potentiality to act. Rendering inoperative economic and social operations, they show what the human body is capable of; they open it to a new possible use.”[23]

At the same time, these concepts and the inclusion of the critical instance (of reading), that is, the inclusion of the force of intrinsic resistance to the act (and to being) in the understanding of the creative act and of the creative act as a tool for self-knowledge, allow one to think of and practice the alliance of these two areas without falling into the narcissistic or suppressing dangers of the work that Agamben observes in his essay.

It is also liberating to think about the very nature of the creative act and the aesthetic existence of the subject including the potentiality-not-to, as it pulls back the veil on the air of almost clinical rarity often surrounding the process of artistic creation. Many of the actions or inactions contained in the act of writing and of being, of being alive, are understood, in our world, as inadequate or unhealthy. Inadequate in the eyes of a certain society: Foucault's disciplinary society that configures a violent constitution of the subject, a capturing of the being, insofar as the subject is prohibited from hearing, seeing, listening to or touching its hidden side, the river's renewing bottom, and therefore from exploring "new possible uses" for the human body.