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Reading the Remove of Literature is
unlike any book I've looked at. I've read it too but the looking at it is the
first essential. With all but a few books one reads without consciousness of seeing. Nick
Thurston's book demands that one look at it constantly and never detach the
seeing from the reading - and yet it is only marginally what we generally describe
as a 'visual text'.
The first words of Craig Dworkin's introduction set the scene: 'The book you
are holding is an edition of Maurice Blanchot's L'Espace littˇraire,
although not a word of Blanchot's text remains. Every page of this book has
been assiduously erased by Nick Thurston. At the same time, Thurston has
preserved his own marginalia, reset in the face and fonts of the original
text.' To be yet more precise: it is an edition (if it is
an edition - this is one of Thurston's challenges) of a translation of
Blanchot's book by Ann Smock published by the University of Nebraska Press in
1982. Of course I'm being pedantic but not without point: the act of
translation has already made one 'remove' from Blanchot's text and this is
the locus of Thurston's entirely more radical remove. It needs saying too
that Thurston has not erased every detail of his source. He
preserves the section-, chapter- & sub-headings which therefore serve as
landmarks in the general erasure and take on additional, sometimes eerie
significance. The italic subheading 'The Young Kafka' for example floats
alone as if in zero gravity in the white void of page 66. Thurston also
preserves two details which belong to the design of his source rather than to
Blanchot's text, the page numbers and running headers - so that above the
void surrounding 'The Young Kafka' we read '66 The Work's Space and its
Demand'. But these residua aren't usually so telling; they are mostly simply there,
sometimes crowded by marginalia which refer not to them but to deleted text.
Without them the reader would be lost. Thurston has been very careful in this
regard as in many others. He knows about readers because he is
self-confessedly 'the reader', as much as author, himself. And he needs 'the
reader' in order to raise his questions not only about Blanchot and L'Espace
littˇraire but about the conventions and transgressions of the
codex.
And so, faced with Reading the Remove of Literature, what
should 'the reader' do? The principal options are mutually exclusive. One is
to read it alongside the Nebraska edition and relate Thurston's annotations
to their source text. The other is to read it exactly as presented, without
outside reference. The first option will be in effect to regard it as a
commentary, the second to see it wholeheartedly as an edition. I
choose the second option, believing that to take the first would obscure what
Thurston has done. I last read Blanchot twenty years ago; I remember the
thrust of his work but little detail. The reader who knows nothing of
Blanchot will be in a different position although Dworkin's introduction will
help. Among several quotations from Blanchot he offers 'to write is to
produce the absence of the work'. This one statement will do. With it in mind
anyone will wonder whether Thurston hasn't produced a 'mere' jeu d'esprit, a
kind of visual pun on the word 'absence' extended over 287 pages. I'd be
quite happy myself to regard it as such but I think he achieves more than
that.
The phrase 'the space of literature' offers several meanings but let's take
it in its most mundane sense, as the space in which literature literally
appears, usually the pages of a printed book and in particular the area its
margins enclose. This latter space in Thurston's book is sometimes wholly or largely
blank but more commonly occupied by areas of horizontal lines. Were these
once underlinings? Probably, although they now underline blank space. But for
all the reader knows they may be cancel lines, now cancelling the same blank
space. If they are underlinings we assume that Thurston as reader has marked
passages he regards as particularly significant, perhaps agrees or disagrees
with. And yet he may have been cancelling sentiments he thinks had been
better not expressed. In either case these apparently unmeaning horizontal
lines constantly remind us of the gesture which made them and we recognise in
them the dedicated passion of a reader now as palpably absent as the text he
has erased.
It is a different case with the marginalia which more forcibly assert an
intervening presence at the same time as they remind us they are former
interventions, penned into what were once the only free
spaces of the book - margins and interlinear spaces - and now transcribed and
typeset; interventions of a former presence and imperfect too, for many of
these remarks have been cropped at the page edges so that some whole words
together with the ends of many more and odd fragments of their letters have
disappeared into as it were the outer space of literature, where perhaps
there is no literature, or literature specifically does not belong - and yet
in most cases we can 'read' these missing words and know very well what they
say and mean: as it turns out literature is very capable of such travelling
in outer space, whether we mean by 'literature' the finer arts of writing or
words written down for some other purpose or sheer fun. The term 'marginalia'
is entirely neutral in this respect although it is surely not to Nick
Thurston's purpose to offer his annotations as literature in the grander
sense. Reading the Remove of Literature will be largely regarded in
the genre of the 'artist's book' and yet a display of its artistry would be
self-defeating.
The reviewer's difficulty is that Thurston's marginalia are of such specific
shape and placement that they will be significantly altered if lifted for
quotation. Thurston has already refused such alteration, choosing to
reproduce them as they were originally recorded - they are squeezed on the
pages at erratic and awkward angles, they disappear off the page or into the
gutter, they are sometimes written around the textual residua with pleasant
confusion; they overlap and are juxtaposed, their significance enlarged by
contiguity; arrows are drawn to connect one with another, creating an
indefinable syntax as they navigate the page, and sometimes the arrows point
to drawn circular or oval rings which have transmuted into tiny empty speech
bubbles. The remarks vary from stray reflections and queries (ranging from
'Q: writer + reader relate differently to this absence?' to the imponderable
'Q: What defo?') to densely-argued comments which in the context, or lack of
it, sometimes seem maddeningly indeterminate; they ghost the deleted text as
a perpetual reminder that this is an edition, of sorts, of an absent writing
which proposes absence as the condition of its composition - in the face of
which they delight in their own irregular presence. But they cannot be
abstracted without damage from the pages they belong to: they demand to be seen
in only that place in which they are visually embedded and embodied. If the
textual angularities are sometimes reminiscent of the crafted poems of Susan
Howe the resemblance is superficial. Thurston's text is unmediated by
aesthetic or editorial decision - the typography approximates as best it can
the impatience and imprecisions of the note-making hand and we feel its
urgency, its sprawl and scrawl. A remark on page 242 reflects 'The work
cannot be aestheticised - it is not principally aesthetic in it's (sense of)
self'. There are words which are occasionally misspelt ('abssence' loses its
double 's' after its first appearance), some regularly ('nihlistic',
'shaddows'), some gloriously ('voiceferous', 'invisbible'); some are clearly
momentary slips of the pen happily preserved, such as 'death must over come me + I must be
billing to enable that song'.
There's no doubting Thurston wrote these remarks on a particular copy
of a book and fitted them where he could: now they are documented in that
fitting and the writer/reader is no longer present.
So that we the readers are left to read his reading. To view these full and
empty pages. To smile or to fear or to puzzle. To turn this book around in
our hands (since it cannot be read from one fixed angle) and consider what
kind of codex it is which so announces absence in its physical presence. To
look at its speckled fore-edge, the telltale traces of a text breaking out of
its prison. We no more know what Thurston thinks about his marginalia than we
know the extent to which we are reading or 'reading' Blanchot. Any of these
pages may be seen as a figure of the unstable 'I' in relation to a world as
indifferent to its real or imagined existence as to its written and unwritten
reflections. How much is 'subjectivity mine to decide'? Sometimes Thurston
clearly paraphrases and elaborates but he also likes to quarrel with his
source. In one place 'then logically, so is falsehood', in another 'could
still live in absolute despair'. For some reason I particularly enjoy the
little bent arrow on page 38 pointing to the words 'surely it couldn't'.
The book has its temptations. Sometimes I want to draw all over these erased
pages, maybe stick in some bits of collage. Or, in response to the
marginalia, fill it all in with new text - and then, having erased the
marginalia, publish this as a reprint. But suppose I then finally look at the
Nebraska edition - and let's not
forget Borges' man who wrote Don Quixote - I may discover I'm the
author of L'Espace littˇraire.
© Alan Halsey
2007
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