Literature clumps: citational praxis=curation? and/or arms or fingers or tree roots

Awhile back, Phil showed me some poems of Thomas Hardy, whom I'd not realized was so wonderful. I was reading Hardy in collision with Willie Lin's book, and I saw the two plain as day in conjunction. Or: in conjunction, plain as day: so far as he had got / sitting lower than oneself

Now I'm reading the Hardy novel The Woodlanders, and it is so lovely and so aware of labor and class and its own era (and the endings of certain ways of living) and thus: perfect for now. Take poor sweet Marty South, whose timber laborer dad just died in their little upstairs bedroom and has left her with a terrifyingly unknowable future, Marty South who cut off her beautiful hair to sell it as a wig to a rich lady who owns the land on which Marty labors and lives, and Marty South watches this rich lady ride by in her bespoke carriage and Marty South is standing next to a less rich but much more bourgeois peer of hers when this carriage goes by, and the bougee girl comments on the rich lady's exceptionally exquisite hair as the window-framed face rolls by them, and Marty South says nothing at all.

When Marty is working in the woods, helping to clear trees of branches and thus to make them into more efficient commodities in the lumber market, she is "adept at peeling the upper parts [and stands] . . . encaged above the mass of twigs and buds like a great bird, running her ripping-tool into the smallest branches" and is faster than any of the masc counterparts working around her, and another wealthy person--this time a doctor with philosophical aspirations who has a crush on the bougee girl--says, "You seem to have a better instrument than they, Marty" and she says, "No . . . 'tis only that they've less patience with the twigs, because their time is worth more than mine."

Because their time is worth more than that of poor Marty South.

Because certain forms of labor disappear in the tectonic shifts of time. Because she sold her hair and has to watch someone else be admired while wearing it.

In my other current book, Kate Briggs' This Little Art, there is such tender attention to Literature as a communal praxis that infects the individual. The project of Literature is about shared labor.

She's translating, sometimes, in the text. I mean: while writing this book and as the writing of this book, she's translating. In particular, she's translating Barthes' lectures from right before he died. 

I haven't read these lectures, but I'm pretty sure that this is the book that Briggs is translating/WRITING (this is part of her idea, of course): The Preparation of the Novel | Columbia University Press. (Also, btw, I have been meaning for so long to read this Dorothy book--Kate Briggs’s The Long Form – Dorothy, which Briggs discusses here: Kate Briggs : The Long Form - Tin House.)

And I have always been very into Barthes' loose feeling, the abrasions of things upon other things as textual/theoretical encounters, as occasions for thinking. It's a way of operating that I have relied on since the deepest non-knowing of youth and never seek to shed or complicate. I am devoted to juxtaposition.

Briggs, writing about her Barthes work:

"Tutor texts--or textes d'appui--as he calls them [are] [s]upporting texts: the texts that brace us, the ones we lean on, testing them to see if they'll support our weight; the texts we always seem to be in conversation with, whether directly or indirectly; the texts that enable us to say or write anything at all. Every discourse, says Barthes, is generated and sustained by its own more or less idiosyncratic, imperfect selection. This is not so much a comment as a principle."

"'There is an age at which we teach what we know . . . 'Then comes another age at which we teach what we do not know; this is called research.'"

"[T]he practice [is to never to be] exhaustive, or systematic . . . Instead: to set down a fantasy. And then to induce from the fantasy, a research project."

"Something like solitude . . . with regular interruptions."

Briggs says that Barthes says his lecture-praxis is like setting a table and choosing the seating arrangements that might yield interesting conjunctions. Briggs uses the entire utopian notion of the "lecture"/learning/shared inquiry/information-sharing/Literature as a way to think about her translating work, which is, of course, writing itself.

(Briggs herself admits to focusing on primarily the concerns of prose translation, and I think that some of her ideas are genre-less and some are only about prose. Some poet-pride in me bristles in both directions: to make distinctions between genre and medium is bougee but to throw poetry into the giant body of Literature without recognizing its special infectiousness is callous! Though I detest the bias that Literature is always in sentences, as I have aged, and, I think, have become more expert at certain gestures, sentences themselves appeal to me in a brand new way.)

Briggs embraces Barthes' notions about juxtapositions and--as far as I can tell from my lazy and inexpert position--further develops this juxtapositional praxis into an embrace of coincidence and chance rubbings-together (I'm certain that I stole this simple construction--rubbed-together language--from Eric Baus, but skimming that piece right now I don't know for sure! Another chance encounter!) and all the elements that go into an experience of a text. (She quotes one Derrick Attridge on this point.) 

She can see from her window, in her apartment block in Paris, boys doing parkour over a gap across the two edges of a concrete staircase. They do this easily, loosely. She notes the softness of both their landings and their clothes. She sees this leaping gesture as a comment on, a juxtapositional text with, her work to translate a single digressive moment in a Barthes sentence:

"I sense and would like to venture some connection between the outdoor leaping (and fathoming out how to land) and my own anxiety over where and how to set this vous permettez in English."

Moments later she's puzzling out the impulse to write, the impulse to translate, the impulse to depict/to capture, the way that reading some singular moment gives you a feeling--"What kind of feeling? Can't you describe it more closely?" And she quotes a sentence from Iris Murdoch (here we go with the kind of sentence as a sentence that makes me certain that there is no need for poet-tribalism and genre distinctions and that all writing is all writing):

"'The coming day had thrust a long arm into the night.'"

"So here is the dawn, I remember thinking to myself, as I marked down the page. Here is the dawn in a sentence. Here is the dawn as I have never seen it before. But as I recognize it nonetheless (with the new knowledge that the line seems to be somehow inaugurating in me). Here is the dawn, as I now wish to have made it appear. Here is the dawn as I now might have wished to write it."

The new knowledge that the line inaugurates in me.

That is the place I'm often going to. I think. When reading. When writing.

Well! And then throw in an enormous sense of the Minor and the ephemeral AS the information.

A little feeling comes over you.

And the sense that one's labor could also be, simply, collection, curation. The clump. (I took this idea from Amina Cain's description of a Goya sketch, and I wanted to ask students to write something that valued "the clump" over a hierarchical notion of information, of Literature, of Art.)

For years I have been trying to clean up a manuscript about what I called Time Genre. Every time I read something good, I know that I know nothing at all! 

Here's Hardy, from the novel, deep in the woods: 

"trunks with spreading roots, whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves"!

Omg. 

Like hands wearing green gloves. 

I could sit on that pleasure and its attendant inaugurations all goddamn day.