The Unawareness of Literature
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Years ago, Patrick Süskind published an article in which he converted an old intellectual
disease, hitherto suffered by many in silence, into a new form of literary fiction which he
called 'amnesia in litteris'. He described how he once received a questionnaire asking him which book had influenced him most or had had the greatest impact on him in his whole life. He had gone to his library, surveyed the hundreds of volumes lined up there and had taken down one at random which he felt had been important in his formation as a writer only to find that he could hardly remember a single word of what it said. He thought he must surely have made a mistake and so he repeated the activity with other books, but the same thing happened: as he attempted to recreate the contents of each book, these slipped through his fingers like sand on the beach. He opened books which were full of words he himself had underlined, with his own sharp comments written in the margins and he read them all as if they belonged to someone else. He looked at the bindings and saw name after name of authors who seemed vaguely familiar to him but with whom he could associate no title, no literary movement, no themes. He started to get dizzy and, trying to recall the last book he had read, only hours before, realised that he couldn't remember anything; he had read everything and forgotten everything. He was back at the very beginning where he had started. There are those never-ending afternoons (or nights or mornings) from which there is no escape; when the air around us seems strange, like that which surrounds a flame trapped under a bell-jar; when the room seems to get smaller and smaller and our own shadow weighs on us. And it is at these times that the writer finds literature increasingly meaningless and his own creations even more insignificant. On those afternoons, he looks around and feels that the piles of books and files on his bedside table and on his desk are suffocating him. He feels intimidated by the double row of books lining the deep shelves of his bookcase and disheartened by the thousands of pages, the millions of words sitting there condemned to silence, maybe for ever. What is the point of it all? Why, why read and why then bother to write, to continue ones work? Let's be honest with ourselves, thinks the writer. We read in order to forget, in order to try and fill a black well whose depths no-one can ever know; like children who empty more and more bucketfuls of sea-water into the moat surrounding the sandcastle they have built, just where the waves break. After all, how much do we really remember of all that we have read over the years? A few titles, a funny anecdote, the colour of a book cover, a character or a room described just as we had imagined them, a familiar adjective, a line of a poem, a sentence which we recall but don't know where from? Where has the rest gone -- each emotion, each surprise, each intimate satisfaction at a specific dramatic point, a dialogue or a chapter which we thought were 'memorable'? And if we fear that we read for no purpose, then why on earth do we go on writing? All those hours, ambitions, hopes and all that desperation finally end up, after years have passed, condemned to futility, to being just one more waste of space (beside the wasted space of our ancestors, of course) in a library which undoubtedly will need to be extended time and time again, if it hasn't been burnt down by then. Why doesn't the writer just give up? Which other profession requires so much lack of awareness? Medicine maybe. Or singing? We write for nothing; for the moment; to be forgotten. People write, nowadays and always, as if it were an ancient faith and as if a strange subterranean force dragged each author beyond reason, laziness, anguish and those never-ending afternoons from which there is no escape. As if we were writing for some purpose, as if amnesia -- the real amnesia in litteris -- was not a disease that makes us forget what we have read but one that affects those creators who suspect that everything is useless and yet go on creating. Because the truth is that writers do not give up. They always go back, as stubborn as mules, as blind as lovers; they go back to ploughing an endless field which produces crops, as fields always have done, simply because the crops will die and the seeds will have to be sown again. Translated from Catalan by Pauline Ernest |
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