Available Surfaces: Essays on Poesis

Dead Writer, “Extinct” Form, The Power of the Small

89 Dead Writer, “Extinct” Form, The Power of the Small In the February 11, 2009, issue of The Nation, Alexander Provan observes: To write aphorisms is to partake of “a minor art of the intellectual asthma,” Austrian author Thomas Bernhard once wrote, “from which certain people, above all in France, have lived and still live, so-­ called half philosophers for nurses’ night tables . . . whose sayings eventually find their way onto the walls of every dentist’s waiting room.” The most common complaint among revisionist biographers and doting critics of Franz Kafka is that, in the eighty-­ odd years since his death, the deification of the writer has reduced his work to the level of the aphorism. If Kafka has not yet found his way onto the walls of every dentist’s waiting room, the photograph of his stony countenance and doleful eyes, so frequently invoked as a stand-­ in for his vision of the world, sometimes seems to be everywhere else. . . . http://www.thenation .com/doc/ 20090302/provan One’s acceptance of Provan’s opinion of the state of Kafka’s reputation is made to depend on one’s acceptance of Bernhard’s judgment of the aphorism, which he regards as worthy only for cross-­ stitch. While anything that has ossified into cliché is worthy of suspicion, I see no reason to vilify either the aphorism as such, or for that matter samplers as such. Friends of mind used to have a sampler depicting cute mice and cats dancing around a slogan from Chairman Mao: “Reactionaries must be punished.” Regardless how one may feel about Mao on the one hand or dancing mice on the other, the juxtaposition was bracing. The opinion of the Austrian writer Bernhard about the status of the aphorism seems to me positively American in character . Europe has a long tradition of aphorists; America as far 90 as I know has produced practically none, and there is indeed something about the aphorism that strikes me as fundamentally non-­ American (I don’t want to say “unAmerican”). Americans seem to have little use for a short form of assertion that carries such authority as it can muster on its own back like a snail carries its shell. Authority is a weighty matter for Americans; each of us wants his or her own portable authority, but does not want to accede to the snail shell of anyone else. For the reader of aphorisms, the form generally demands a willing suspension not of disbelief but of personal authority. Someone says something provocative, and if we are to pay any heed to it at all, we must grant them their right to assert in a mode that carries no citation , stands in no range of experiment, and is in that sense entirely free-­ floating. So, when E. M. Cioran says something like “Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh”—­ an utterance that, like so many others in Cioran’s corpus, stands entirely alone—­ if we are to read him at all, we have to grant him, at least for a moment, the right to speak so: categorically; aggressively, as this statement is in a very real sense an assault on my own sense of being; and nakedly, without an array of proofs and arguments. Doubts about this sort of experience stand in the way, for American audiences and probably for others, of a full appreciation of the possibilities of the aphorism. Our tradition of radical individualism stands, rather hypocritically, in opposition to the nature of the aphorism’s claim to, and its toying with, authority. We claim the right to our own authority, but let another claim a similar right, and there’s trouble in River City. I am convinced that there are subjects, and historical situations , even American ones, that require the acid of the most incisive aphorism: moments when all uses of authority have become so mangled or so filthy with disuse that they need to be cauterized, stripped bare, or even obliterated (Cioran, living with the embarrassment of his own fascist youth, understood this very well). The potent aphorism is a revolution wrapped inside a sentence. It is highly portable, and extremely volatile, and yet its volatility is entirely mental. The aphorism is an excellent analog to, and perhaps the truest antidote for, the suicide bomb. “A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself,” Cio- 91...