Bartleby & Co.

Hoy es ya un mal endémico de las literaturas contemporáneas esta pulsión negativa o atracción por la nada que hace que ciertos autores literarios no lleguen, en apariencia, a serlo nunca.

-Enrique Vila-Matas

Book-giving is an art form. You may give the right book to the right person by sheer luck, but only those who know the other can give the perfect book to the right person.

My friend Jon, kind Benjaminian bibliophile, gave me Bartleby y Compañía on my birthday.

It’s a book my parents read when it came out 8 years ago. It’s a book I saw on the family dining table for months. I was attracted to its title, but it was until now that I have started reading it, thanks to Jon’s generosity and wisdom.

Jon knows me, and that is why this is the perfect book for me.

I have written before, here and elsewhere, about all the books I have not written and the books I have written but have not published. I have written extensively about being unable to write. I have declared my love for Walser, Bernhard, Rulfo, Kafka, Salinger, Monterroso, Rimbaud, Hofmannstahl, Gide, Beckett…

Vila-Matas writes a novel about the impossibility and necessity of writing (in a similar way than Derrida wrote about the impossibility and necessity of translation and saw his books translated to different languages). He quotes Jean de La Bruyère, knowing that the merit of some men is in writing well, the merit of other men is not writing at all. Vila Matas writes a novel like a copyist; his narrator is a copyist himself, a Bartleby, an amateur literary critic whose only love in life is reading and copying the words of others.

I read this book and I think of my friends and colleagues, Argel Corpus, Rafael Toriz, Sigifredo Marín, Jorge Kuri (Q.E.P.D.) Brenda Ríos, Noé Morales, Ira Franco… they all write from a “negative pulsion”. I think we all belong, in one way to another, to the same constellation.

I am a copyist. I quote others, I find pleasure in reading their words and in repeating them, aloud and in writing, here and elsewhere.

Yo también soy Bartleby: mi patria está en los libros de otros. No quiero Obras Completas, no busco pertenecer a los cánones ni las colecciones oficiales. Me seduce el laberitno del No. La mía es, literalmente, esa pulsión negativa por escribir la imposibilidad de la escritura. Quizá de eso hablaba también Benjamin cuando hablaba de la tradición de los oprimidos. No me seducen las narrativas de los victoriosos. Escribo poesía pero no me siento parte de los que se llaman, sin recato, “poetas”. Detesto la grandilocuencia y la arrogancia de los que se llaman a sí mismos “literatos”. La literatura de la pérdida, del silencio, del polvo y del olvido, la escritura de lo que se queda sin escribir, de la conciencia de nuestra pequeñez: esa es la que me interesa.

Thanks, Jon.