Spotlight on … Enrique Vila-Matas Bartleby & Co. (2000) *

* (restored)

 

‘In these seemingly anti-literary times, authors tend to do all they can to support literature; Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas is the first I’ve seen to treat it like a disease. That’s not to say, however, that he isn’t supporting the literary in his own way. Rather, it’s just that Vila-Matas’s way of pushing the medium forward is by contemplating whether or not we’re going though a period of literary parasitism because mostly everything Western literature has to utter has been said. If Vila-Matas’s discourse suggests that we might benefit by pushing the current edifice right off a cliff, then consider it tough love.

‘Befitting an author who entertains the notion that contemporary literature amounts to scribbling in the margins of the great works, Vila-Matas seems to be pioneering a strange new genre: the literary essay as novel. The first two of his books to appear in English, Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady, are fine examples. Both translated by Jonathan Dunne and recently published in paperback by New Directions, these books, as any well-written essay might be, are positively saturated with quotes, references, glosses, and other signs of deep research; what’s more, the obvious scrupulousness (even exhaustiveness) with which Vila-Matas has looked into his subject matter seems more appropriate to a critical work than a novel. At a time when more and more novels are including lists of sources and footnotes, Vila-Matas’s books stand out both for their rigor and for making their sources an integral part of the text.

‘In Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady Vila-Matas is grappling with the act of literary creation, and in the process he obsessively stares up at the works of his predecessors. The most important aspect of these two novels is how they are very consciously written from under the shadow of literature; these are books that are not only aware of the debts they owe to great authors—Kafka, Musil, Beckett, Gide, and Robert Walser among them—but that seem to be written desperately, as if the great works make their own existence virtually impossible. Each is trying to understand where the words come from—an author’s life? her imagination? dictated by the divine?—and each is based on the fear that after 2,000 years there may not be that much left to say.

‘Appropriately, the tone taken by the barely named first-person narrators of each novel rests somewhere between droll and depressed, treading a fine line between sarcasm and grief. Usually it’s impossible to tell on which side the narrator stands. When, for instance, the narrator of Montano’s Malady delivers a lecture in which he spontaneously chooses to discuss an affair he suspects is going on between his wife and his best friend (both present), it’s uncertain whether we should laugh along at the elaborate joke or worry that a) it’s true, or b) it isn’t, but this delusional man believes it. It’s similarly difficult to know how to interpret it when the narrator of Bartleby & Co., who is working on a book that consists only of footnotes about writers who didn’t write, informs us that a letter he sent requesting help from the author Robert Derain was never answered, so he has written his own reply and added it in as footnote 20.

‘Though the narrator’s lives revolve around books, they view literature with much ambivalence. Yes, they both read with an austere, at times awe-struck respect, and they clearly wouldn’t trade their reading for anything so transitory as material success or happiness, yet they are all too aware that such a deep love of books is also a burden. Literature is quite baldly linked to a Svevo-esque conception of sickness, and one gets the sense that the narrators have paid a sizable amount for their lifelong intimacy with the written word. They have paid it in terms of obsession, loneliness, and alienation, and perhaps they are living with the dreadful suspicion that they would be better off without books.

‘The narrator of Bartleby & Co. hasn’t written a thing in 25 years. That was when he published his first novel, but his father, angrily believing that the son cribbed from his parents’ troubled marriage, dictated an inscription dedicated to his mother. That was enough to spark 25 years of silence. Now he has decided to write again by penning footnotes to a book not yet written. Is the narrator writing a “real” book? Has Vila-Matas? This is one of the questions that this quietly beguiling novel swirls around.

‘One of the noticeable things about a Vila-Matas novel is how quickly symbols grow obese and references dizzyingly stack up. Watch how fast debris collects around the question “What is writing and where is it?” found on page 3. Two paragraphs down, the narrator tells us of his intention to explore this question what writing is by, ironically, writing an anti-book. On page 4 he links literary anti-creation to transcription by referencing Walser, who couldn’t write because he worked as a copyist. In the next paragraph, this is linked to Melville’s famous “scrivener” Bartleby (thus tying into the title), and then scarcely three sentences later Vila-Matas quotes the critic Roberto Calasso who equates Bartleby and Walser as copyists who “transcribe texts that pass through them like a transparent sheet.” From here the next paragraph tells the story of the narrator’s exit from writing (and the beginning of his life as a copyist) when his father made him transcribe the dedication. The author then discusses Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo, who told everyone that his books were transcribed from stories told him by “Uncle Celerino.” And finally we travel on to the implication that authors are merely the vessels for inspiration, or rather, copyists for the divine. We are on page 7.

‘With all the links and references that there are to keep track of, a novel with as much self-referentiality as Bartleby might easily become suffocating, but Vila-Matas avoids this by making each footnote its own absorbing preserve. It’s quite easy to get caught up in each note as an object in and of itself, and this way each is buffered from the others. You may choose to dive into the rabbit hole of referentiality, but to enjoy this book you certainly don’t have to.

‘Another thing that keeps Bartleby & Co. from gaining oppressive weight is the lightness with which Vila-Matas presents the material. Many of the footnotes read as beautifully crafted, 1,000-word flash stories, and they’re usually shortened or juxtaposed versions of longer pieces. In these, Vila-Matas knows how to give just enough information to make a story meaningful without deflating it—in his artful condescension he often makes something new out of his source material. A wonderful side-benefit of this is that he makes you want to read all the books that he writes about, even (or especially) the nonexistent ones.

‘To see his method in action, take footnote 32, which is essentially a summary of a review written by Borges. Vila-Matas first presents the title of the review, “Enrique Banchs Celebrates Twenty-Five Years of Marriage to Silence,” letting us puzzle over that as he fills in some important background info. After quoting Borges’s definition of poetry at us (“the vehement and solitary practice of combining words that startle whoever hears them”), Vila-Matas is finally ready to return to the title, letting Borges explain that it refers to Enrique Banchs, an extraordinary poet who hasn’t written for 25 years. Then Vila-Matas quotes Borges at length, giving us both a taste of the poet and the critic’s evaluation of him, and finally leaves with this quotation as a conclusion: “His own dexterity may cause him to spurn literature as a game that is too easy.” Vila-Matas has done little more than crib from and reframe the review, yet this has made all the difference—Borges’s review is now Vila-Matas’s story of a poet who quit because the “practice of combining words” was too easy.

‘Virtually all the footnotes in Bartleby and Co. are equally successful postmodern manipulations of literary source material, and in the end this may be what separates this book from a literary essay. Essentially there are no characters worth mentioning in Bartleby and Co., there are no scenes to be set, and there is no real plot—rather than evolve forward in terms of drama, this book evolves forward as an essay might, by increasing elaboration of a central idea. The book is so devoid of the kinds of things typically found in fiction that it all but provokes us to wonder why it is fiction. Beyond a preference for mystery (as opposed to explanation), the only other reason I can imagine for writing this as fiction is the narrator’s tone, which would a require a brave, perhaps depressed author were it to be used in a work of nonfiction. It’s not hard to see why Vila-Matas would want to be distanced from this narrator who is a lonesome, friendless person, a civil servant who occasionally makes deprecating references to the hump on his back and is eventually fired for cutting out on his job to write. At one point he writes about a headache he has just had: “Having recovered from it, I think about my past pain and tell myself that it is a very pleasant sensation when the ache goes away, since then one re-experiences the day when, for the first time, we felt alive, we were conscious of being human, born to die, but at that instant alive.”

‘Being human then is to ache productively. So is to write: “Elizondo proposes that the pain [of a headache] transforms our mind into a theatre and suggests that what seems a catastrophe is in fact a dance . . . a mystery that can only be solved with the help of the dictionary of sensations.” In a similar way the narrator evokes literature as a burden that he could never be separate from and that at times offers him transcendent moments, “a dance out of which new constructions of sensibility may already be arising.”

‘Viewing literature as a monumental headache might be the best answer for a book that asks why writers give up writing, and perhaps Vila-Matas would have had a difficult time making such a point without the help of a narrator. Nonetheless, all the research and creativity that has been brought to bear in making this book probably could have gone into a fine, book-length essay investigating the writers of No. I do believe, however, that even if Vila-Matas himself had written an essay in place of this fiction, he could scarcely have written something more well-built and delightful than this carefully enigmatic work.’ — Scott Esposito

 

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Further

Enrique Vila-Matas Website
Enrique Vila-Matas @ New Directions
EV-M interviewed @ BOMB
‘Enrique Vila-Matas: A Spanish Literary Phenomenon’
Enrique Vila-Matas @ La Femelle du Requin
‘The Triumphant Humiliation of Enrique Vila-Matas’
‘ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS TAKES A WALK’
‘Things Fall Apart: A Spanish master’s quizzical unravellings.’
‘Welcome to Literature’s Duchamp Moment’
‘Géographies du vertige dans l’oeuvre d’Enrique Vila-Matas’
‘A fictional history unfolds with Borges-like literary machinations’
‘Enrique Vila-Matas’s citadel of the self’
‘Irishness is for other people’
‘ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS: THE LAST WRITER’
‘What He Says about “the Cat”: Enrique Vila-Matas on Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain”’
Buy ‘Bartleby & Co.’

 

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Extras

Enrique Vila-Matas and Paul Auster in Conversation

Enrique Vila-Matas re: Proust

Enrique Vila-Matas vous présente son ouvrage “Marienbad électrique, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster”

Vila-Matas sobre Robert Walser

Vila-Matas parla de Bolaño

 

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Interview

 

In your novels you frequently include real writers as characters. How did you land on this idea?

I read a novel by Peter Handke called Short Letter, Long Farewell [1972] and the protagonist was a young man who visits [film director] John Ford at the end of the story. John Ford gives him some advice and talks to him about the past. When I read this novel 30 years ago, I realized you could include real-life people like Hemingway and Kafka, who could at the same time be fictional characters in a book.

In the past you have collaborated with French artist Sophie Calle, another expert in mixing reality and invention. Do you think contemporary art is fulfilling a need that much modern literature no longer does?

I wouldn’t know how to answer that. However it has been very important for me to open up to contemporary art. In Kassel during [the contemporary art exhibition] Documenta, I saw some things that I did not understand and that got me really interested. Because if I don’t understand something, there’s a door that opens. I like this idea of the spectator creating the work they are seeing.

You’ve said that when you started out as a novelist you didn’t read novels but poetry. How did that affect your writing?

I think it was good for me to have only read poetry, because only writers who are connected with poetry can write good novels. I myself decided to quit writing poetry because I didn’t think I was able to compose a perfect poem. I believe the novel is the literary genre that readers find the most accessible, so I’ve done my best to adapt to what publishers require. However, I believe I’ve never written a conventional novel. The closest I’ve come is Dublinesque [2010].

As a journalist in the 1960s you made up interviews. What was going on?

I did what I did because I needed it. The first interview I had to translate [from English into Spanish] was with Marlon Brando. I was 18 and had just joined a newspaper. If I’d confessed to my boss that I couldn’t speak English, I would have been fired.

The next interview I made up was with Nureyev, because the night before I was supposed to interview him I bumped into him at a bar where we had an argument. If I’d have gone to his hotel the next day to interview him, he would have recognized me.

The third was with Anthony Burgess. I didn’t have the time to carry out the interview and to type it and to send it to the Vanguardia newspaper and have it published the next day. That is why I decided to have my own interview already done before.

The fourth one was with Patricia Highsmith. As always in her interviews, she said nothing of interest. So I decided just to make the whole thing up. It was like being a murderer. Once you’ve killed for the first time, it’s easy to kill again. However, let me just say that in this particular case I did it without being aware that what I was doing was that wrong.

When the interview with Marlon Brando was published I was the only one who knew that I had made it up. But I overheard a conversation in a cafe where a Catalan writer I knew told someone else: “Did you read those idiotic things that Marlon Brando said in the newspaper?” I actually got offended. I had to shut up, but I was offended because I believed that was my text which was being criticized, my creation.

Why did you stop?

I stopped but not because I felt sorry about it. I just started to write fiction instead. In France they believe that was the origin of my literary vocation, but I don’t think that’s the case.

You’ve written about Odradeks, the word coined by Kafka for strange, spool-like creatures with mysterious powers. Do you have one of your own?

A friend gave me a real one done with little threads. It’s at home on the floor in my hallway. The lady who comes to clean my apartment is from Bolivia and when I told her about this object that I like to have conversations with she smiled as though she was thrilled by the idea. Then she said: “At last, something normal in this house.”

Do you think art requires certain compromises with reality?

Which reality? If you mean the conventional “consumerist reality” that rules the book market and has become the preferred milieu for fiction, this doesn’t interest me at all. What really interests me much more than reality is truth. I believe that fiction is the only thing that brings me closer to the truth that reality obscures. There remains to be written a great book, a book that would be the missing chapter in the development of the epic. This chapter would include all of those—from Cervantes through Kafka and Musil—who struggle with a colossal strength against all forms of fakery and pretense. Their struggle has always had an obvious touch of paradox, since those who so struggled were writers that were up to their ears in fiction. They searched for truth through fiction. And out of this stylistic tension have emerged marvelous semblances of the truth, as well as the best pages of modern literature.

This sentiment is very similar to something you’ve written — “where there is a mirage there is life” — and it reminds me of something I heard you say in an interview: that for the modernists the quest is rectilinear, in contrast to that of Ulysses, whose quest was a circle. In your books, what inspires this search?

In a movie by Wim Wenders, Nicholas Ray says “you can’t go home again.” Sometimes I think about this phrase, and in order to calm down I imagine myself as a Chinese who came home. “I’m just a Chinese who returned home,” wrote Kafka in a letter. Sometimes I wish I were this Chinese, but only sometimes. Because the truth is that what I write frequently brings me to a descent, a fall, a journey within, an excursion to the end of the night, the complete opposite of a return to Ithaca. In short, I long to journey endlessly, always in search of something new. Always alert.

Your books are very different from Hemingway’s, and your influences—Borges, Kafka, Musil, for instance—didn’t write like Hemingway either. Why did you originally set out to emulate him when you went to Paris, and what do you think of him now?

I continue to admire him as a storyteller and as a great sculptor of language. But the truth is that Hemingway isn’t among my favorite writers. Be that as it may, I read A Moveable Feast at fifteen years of age in what was then a very provincial Barcelona, and it instilled in me a grandiose desire to go to Paris and live the “life of a writer,” just like Hemingway. Some four years later I in fact succeeded in living this writer’s life in the garret that I rented from Marguerite Duras. And now, if Hemingway (as he affirmed in A Moveable Feast) could say that in Paris he was “poor and very happy,” I, on the contrary, can only say that at the end of my experience I was poor and very unhappy. Still, after much time and the writing of Never Any End to Paris my unhappiness has become a true moveable feast—in this case of my memory and my imagination.

What role has anxiety played in the creation of your works?

When it grows dark we always need someone. This thought, the product of anxiety, only comes to me in the evenings, just when I’m about to end my writerly explorations. By contrast, the day is completely different. As I write I control my anxiety and anguish thanks to the invaluable aid of irony and humor. But every night I am subdued by an anxiety that knows no irony, and I must wait until the next day to rediscover the blend of anguish and humor that characterizes my writing and that generates my style. “The style of happiness,” as some critics have called it.

To finish up, given that your books frequently deal with other writers, I’d like to ask you about your friendship with Roberto Bolaño, who, as you know, has become a very popular writer in the United States. Did the friendship leave traces in your literature?

Meeting Bolaño in 1996 meant that I no longer felt alone as a writer. In that Spain, which was trapped in a provincialism and an antiquated realism, finding myself with someone who from the very first moment felt like a literary brother helped me to feel free and not consider myself as strange as some of my colleagues would have me believe. Or maybe it was the opposite: I was stranger still. We laughed together very much. We wrote letters to imbeciles and we talked of a beauty that was short-lived and whose end would be disastrous.

 

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Book

Enrique Vila-Matas Bartleby & Co.
New Directions

‘In Bartleby & Co., an enormously enjoyable novel, Enrique Vila-Matas tackles the theme of silence in literature: the writers and non-writers who, like the scrivener Bartleby of the Herman Melville story, in answer to any question or demand, replies: “I would prefer not to.” Addressing such “artists of refusal” as Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, Herman Melville, and J. D. Salinger, Bartleby & Co. could be described as a meditation: a walking tour through the annals of literature. Written as a series of footnotes (a non-work itself), Bartleby embarks on such questions as why do we write, why do we exist? The answer lies in the novel itself: told from the point of view of a hermetic hunchback who has no luck with women, and is himself unable to write, Bartleby is utterly engaging, a work of profound and philosophical beauty.’ — New Directions

 

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Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** JM, So many thanks again to you, Josiah. It meant really a lot. xo. ** David Ehrenstein, Thanks for the good words to JM. Renaud Camus: Yes, ‘Tricks’ is terrific, I agree. He had a kind of heyday as an author in France around the time of ‘Tricks’. The heyday faded, and he continued to publish novels and books — he and I shared POL as a publisher until, I think, they stopped working with him — that had readers but not a lot of attention. There was always racism going on in him and his stuff to varying degrees. Recent-ish-ly, he began to be more vocal about his politics, writing pieces in the newspapers and magazines here, which got him much more attention, albeit mostly negative, than he’d had in decades, and now he’s a very controversial figure here, known far more for his xenophobic op eds than for his fiction. He is a strange case indeed. ** Sypha, Thanks for the good words to Josiah. ** Gp, Hi there, Gp. It’s a pleasure. It’s really great what you wrote to JM. I, on my end, really appreciate it too. Thank you. I look forward to seeing you the next time, hopefully sooner than later. ** Steve Erickson, Thank you for what you said to Josiah. I think the film script might in fact be finished now at long last! Thank you! ** KeatonSucksDeehzInHell, And no doubt you will, ha ha. Or sans ha-ha? The ice cube tray from the post I want the most is the macaron one. I don’t know why. Struck my fancy. Absolutely about caffeine. And tortillas. Love back. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks for the good thoughts. Oh, okay, but you sound good with how the class finished. Great! Yes, indeed, ‘PGL’ will be showing at Glasgow CCA on May 2nd! And I think I’m doing a reading too? And, yes, Zac and I will be there. Pretty exciting! Do you think you can come? ** liquoredgoat, Thanks for speaking to Josiah, buddy. I started Alfred Doblin’s brick at one point, but I don’t think I finished it, for no reason having to do with it or its compelling nature. The Fassbinder adaptation is really great. I’m obviously glad you liked ‘Period’, thank you. I’m good. You sound good. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Oh, right, Dollar Stores. We don’t have such things here. Well, low price places but not that low. That laptop salvation would be pretty heavenly, man. When will you know, and when would that start? Fingers stranglingly crossed. ** Nik, Hi. I think we’ve finished the film script! So now I have to find a translator today. And have a quick breather before the fucking TV script work resumes tomorrow. Very cool if the gif novels facilitated your reading in a progressive way. Good old ‘Maldoror’. I should dip back into that. I am flummoxed at being a stranger to East River Pipe, especially if he was on Merge. Anyway, I’m going to check him out starting with your album suggestion today or in the morning. Very curious. This weekend: find translator, meet with Gisele about the TV script and restart that, get interviewed by someone, work on gif novel, go to concerts on Saturday and Sunday nights. This one and this one. Those are the planned bits anyway. And your weekend? Anything you’re aching (or dreading) to do? ** Right. I decided to restore this spotlight on Enrique Vila-Matas’ excellent novel. Float its boat please. See you tomorrow.