Into the maelstrom (part 2)

Vagrants 1929 by August Sander 1876-1964

 

I have little faith that I will manage to get beyond part 2 in this set; the thread will break and I will be off somewhere else. Somewhere else is likely to be Florence. And who knows I might see you there.

Discoveries of books (and other things, I guess), books that I think I should already know about are generally something of a shock, perhaps even a sense of failure: how come I didn’t know about this. No matter how many times I remind myself to be aware, I find that once again that I have been travelling with my eyes wide and unseeing; filtering out the stuff that I should be seeing. The latest example is my recent discovery of Aleksander Hemon as editor of Best European Fiction 2013. And it is several years into an annual production. Ah me!

John Banville in his preface writes: ‘The proble , as any translator will ruefully remind us, is that in the original text meaning is not fixed, but is always more or less ambiguous. This is so not only in verse, but can be true of the most seemingly limpid passages of prose. You sit down to write a letter to your lover, or your bank manager, thinking you know exactly what you have to say, yet when you finish and read over what you have written you notice that the sense is not quite as you intended. Who speaks here, you wonder? The answer is, language itself, wilful, subtle, coercive. We think we speak, but really it is we who are spoken.’

Okay, fair enough, you say except who the hell writes to bank managers these days. But he goes on a little later:

‘ . . . fiction is a kind of dream-metaphor, a moulded and mannered traducing of ‘what really happened’.’

Aleksander Hemon in his introduction continues along these lines of thought:

‘Europe is nothing if not an intricate entanglement of languages, histories, borders, and varieties of human experience. It is not only complicated – culturally, intellectually, geographically – but is ever in the process of becoming increasingly more so.’

Here is a second quotation from Hemon (and then there will be a third):

‘One should read European fiction not so much for the purposes of understanding it, but rather just to keep up with its accelerating history and to see how literature reinvents itself in trying to keep up with it. The understanding might have to wait.’

Now for the final quotation and this is important:

‘It is in the continuous search for the right word that we find meaning; it is in the failing to find the exact word that new interhuman spaces open.’

There you have it!

The search carries the potential of discovering meaning. The agony of it is probably necessary. And the failure to find the right word opens a door into a new country.


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