just beginning
How can one add anything to that dazzling absolutization of the contingent?
—Julio Cortázar, A Certain Lucas1
Julio was both very tough and very generous with literary critics. In personal correspondence and in interviews, he acknowledges, with gratitude, that he often learned a great deal from critics about the possible forces at work in his writing. On the other hand, he repeatedly satirizes the narcissistic technical jargon and obsessive preoccupation with trivia that characterizes much literary criticism. At times, he even seems to see critics as vampires sustaining a pseudo-life by siphoning off the vitality of creative writing. All of this puts me and this writing under the microscope. What sort of writing is this? Creative? Critical? Criticism of the good or the bad sort? What if I were having this conversation with Julio? What would I say to him? Imagine.
“I’ve written a few poems, but never thought enough of them to publish them or even read them publicly outside a safe circle of friends (and even less the half-dozen stories I wrote in college). So I don’t think of myself as a poet or even as a creative writer—not in that sense, anyway. So then, am I a critic?
Professionally, conventionally, that would be the right label. But I try to elude the role of critic, which I equate with judgment. Even, or especially, in what I am writing inspired by your life and writing, Julio, I want to elude criticism-as-judgment and instead put forth criticism-as-invention. I’ve already shown you what I love about the idea of an improvising-criticism-as-invention. Now, look at this.”
Here Julio begins to laugh: good-natured suspicion.
“This,” I say, “sums up my reservations about criticism-as-judgment. It comes from an essay by Gilles Deleuze called ‘To Have Done With Judgment.’ ‘What disturbed us,’ Deleuze begins –” I interrupt myself. “– ‘Us’ might be literary critics as members of a professional organization and with vested interests in a certain institutional arrangement.”
“‘What disturbed us,’” I continue reading from Deleuze, “‘was that in renouncing judgment we had the impression of depriving ourselves of any means of distinguishing between existing beings, between modes of existence, as if everything were now of equal value. But is it not rather judgment that presupposes preexisting criteria (higher values), criteria that preexist for all time (to the infinity of time), so that it can neither apprehend what is new in existing beings, nor even sense the creation of a new mode of existence?’”
“In Zen,” I connect excitedly, “we might put this in terms of a lapse in mindfulness brought on by attachment to our point of view — isn’t this how the contingent gets absolutized?”
I put the open book face down on table, and quickly grab another from the bookcase behind me. Flipping the pages, I say to Julio, “John Dewey says something similar in Art as Experience: ‘The very meaning of an important new movement in any art is that it expresses something new in human experience, some new mode of interaction of the live creature with his surroundings and hence the release of powers previously cramped or inert. The manifestations of the movement therefore cannot be judged but only misjudged when form is identified with a familiar technique ’”2
Then I go back to Deleuze. “‘Such a [new] mode [of existence] is created vitally, through combat in the insomnia of sleep, and not without a certain cruelty toward itself: nothing of all this is the result of judgment. Judgment prevents –’” I have to interrupt my reading again to interject, “Like the mind of the expert in Suzuki, the expert for whom there are few possibilities. Now Deleuze says the same thing in his own vocabulary: ‘– Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence. For the latter creates itself through its own forces, that is, through the forces it is able to harness, and is valid in and of itself inasmuch as it brings the new combination into existence.’”
“See, this is all I’ve been – you’ve been – saying of invention. Just one more bit of Deleuze,” I tell him, half begging. “‘Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come? It is not a question of judging other existing beings, but of sensing whether they agree or disagree with us, that is, whether they bring forces to us, or whether they return us to the miseries of war, to the poverty of the dream, to the rigors of organization. . . . This is not subjectivism, since to pose the problem in terms of force, and not in other terms, already surpasses all subjectivity.’”3
I close the book and look up at him. He waits for me. I don’t know what he thinks. I am afraid he thinks I am way off base, or bookish, or pedantic. I don’t know. But he’s there in front of me and since he’s come back from the dead just to have this conversation I’m not going to let the opportunity go to waste.
“Where I work, Julio, as a literature professor in the USA in the year 2005, this isn’t the way things are done; isn’t what it is thought that a person with my job title ought to do. Instead, I’m supposed to find the worm. I’m supposed to find the worm in the work of the “admissions applicant – graduate student – job applicant – tenure candidate – colleague” who uses too much theory, or not enough, who pays too much attention to the political dimensions of literature or not enough, who uses too many specialized words or not enough. All, obviously, in the service of judgment.
But what if we thought this way instead.” I flip to another page of Dewey’s Art as Experience and begin to read aloud: “‘We lay hold of the full import of a work of art only as we go through in our own vital processes the processes the artist went through in producing the work. It is the critic’s privilege to share in the promotion of this active process.’4 If I can think of what I do, of what I’ve done in my writing on your writing, in these terms, then I’m doing what I love best.”
“Because you see Julio, what I love is to share toys, to bring friends together, especially friends of mine who don’t yet know each other, but also even old friends who might discover something new about each other because of the encounter I’ve set up – this Tom Waits or Emmylou Harris or Bob Dylan, this wine served in plastic Disney cups, this bonfire in the backyard, this light coming through the trees, this cous-cous, or these tapas, or this blueberry pie, these kids and cats running around, this crowded, tilting old apartment with art and colors and soot from the time we tried to make french fries staining the walls. I love to stand in the window, to pause as I chop or pour or wash (‘cause I never have had enough dishes and glasses) or discuss logistics, to stand there and pause and watch those friends relax, shed cares, grow exuberant interests in the others, grow joyful affirmations of themselves, meet and make and remake friendships. This is what I’m trying to do – not a poet, not a critic, but simply a person who loves passionately to read and think and talk and write about what he has read and its relation to the world he lives so imperfectly in – in this writing, in my teaching, in my work, in my life.
Your writing has been a friend to me, aand I want to say thank you—and to pass it on to other friends. Not so they’ll nod in agreement, feeling it all exactly as I have, or be convinced by some argument about what your writing means (because there isn’t an argument anyway), not for this, but rather so that the spiral will keep ascending.
The leaf will do another somersault borne on a new gust of wind before resting tenuously on the branch of a different tree, these friends of mine will take this friend that you’ve become and bring, as you have done, as I hope to be doing, a new combination into existence. They’ll lead you off then, at the end of the evening, while I smile and wave from the front porch, to get some drinks somewhere else, or to go dancing and your night together will be just beginning.”
I wait for Julio to say something – the blue smoke just curls away from his cigarette into the air…
1 Julio Cortázar, “Texturologies,” A Certain Lucas, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 73. In Spanish: “Texturologías,” Un tal Lucas [1979] Cuentos Completos/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 268.
2 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 1980), p. 304.
3 Gilles Deleuze, “To Have Done With Judgment,” Essays: Critical and Clinical, Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 134-135.
4 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 1980), p. 325.