Of Making Many Books

200 Pages·1990·19.676 MB·English

by  Michael Edwards (auth.)

OF MAKING MANY BOOKS
Also by Michael Edwards
COLLECTED POEMS: 1964-1988
(forthcoming)
LA TRAGEDIE RACINIENNE
TOWARDS A CHRISTIAN POETICS
POETRY AND POSSIBILITY
Of Making Many
Books
Michael Edwards
Professor of English
University of Warwick
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-21036-7 ISBN 978-1-349-21034-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21034-3
© Michael Edwards 1990
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-48911-6
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1990
ISBN 978-0-312-04485-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Edwards, Michael, 1938-
0f making many books I Michael Edwards.
P· em.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-312-04485-5
I. Title.
PR9619.3.E3035 1990
809---dc20 89-77793
CIP
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
1 Of Making Many Books 1
2 Likeness 20
3 Dream 43
4 Romanticism and After 59
5 Pierre Reverdy 70
6 Pierre Emmanuel 83
7 Tomlinson 93
8 Not I 101
9 History 125
10 Re-writing The Waste Land 147
11 The World Could Not Contain the Books 169
Notes 186
Index 188
v
Preface
Of making many books there is no end. The more one meditates this
'admonition' from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, the
more contemporary it becomes. It descends into all the anxieties
one associates with writing. There is the familiar burden of the
past, and the sense that whenever one writes it is late; the world
has grown old with watching, and one is in danger of merely
aggravating the problem, of the huge and unknowable accumu
lation of times and of texts. There is also the burden of the future.
The endlessness of books stretches beyond the writer, and gathers
him into its onward inertia. It threatens to consume his intention,
to void his act of making. Borges takes to an appalling extreme
this blanking of the individual and of futurity in 'The Library of
Babel', in Fictions, with its witty suggestion that the Library, which
some call the universe, is total, and contains (already) all that it is
possible to express.
If only one could simply write. And why is it that one cannot?
As soon as one begins one encounters the even deeper anxieties
which the Preacher's words give on to: the lack of a beginning,
the inadequacy of the T, the equivocation of the 'you', of the
reality which writing desires. The manyness of books is a function
of the manyness of history, of self, of the world. We write so as to
understand these things, and we have to keep on writing, restlessly,
because we never find rest in them.
The making of many books, the Preacher implies, is a necessary
fact of the human condition. But no facts are there merely to be
undergone, and one needs to take a second look at the vanity of
writing. The power of the phrase, in causing one to ask, so many
hundreds of years later, why we make books and under what
necessity we go on making them, is to defy one to reverse the
sign, and to praise books as well as blame. One continues trying
to write and failing to write the one poem, maybe, or the single,
short, philosophical essay, which would achieve all that is required,
but one learns on the way the deeps of language, the virtue of
words to call to a world, to change it over and again, and to make
it, however impermanently, our habitation. One learns that part
of the endlessness of books is their endless possibility.
So I begin with a chapter on Montaigne and Eliot, in their
vii
viii Preface
respective times, because they engaged with the issue directly. I
explore the negative energies set loose in the Essais and The Waste
Land by distress at the plethora of past writing and of the past
itself. The ensuing chapters continue to sound the question, in
terms of the loss of origin and of the consequently perplexed
relation between writing and reality, but they also research the
ways of answering that loss and re-creating that relation. The focus
is mainly on poetry and poets, from Shakespeare to the present
day. I have also wanted, however, to come to a fresh understanding
of writing in general, as of the nature of self, the experience of
history, the use of memory and of the imagination. The Preacher's
dictum, remote in time and foreign in culture, meets but also
upsets our present modes of thinking, and enables one to reflect
anew on these matters, about which we are in some disarray, and
to respond in ways which are of now but not merely of now.
The end of the book returns to its own beginning, for a study of
Eliot's own reversal of sign in his re-writing of The Waste Land, and
of Ecclesiastes, in Four Quartets. A final chapter on StJohn's Gospel
concludes the book's several readings of biblical narratives with
the examination of an unexpected New Testament response: a
recuperation, a redemption, of the very idea of the making of
many books.
Leamington Spa M.E.
Acknowledgements
'Of Making Many Books': the original version, 'Ecrire des livres
n' aura jamais de fin', was given as a lecture at the College de
France on the invitation of Yves Bonnefoy. It was published in the
review Corps E.crit (issue 23, La critique aujourd'hui, 1987), edited by
Beatrice Didier. The English version was given as a guest lecture
at the University of Warwick.
'Likeness': a shorter version with the title 'The Magic of
Verisimilitude' was an Inaugural Lecture at the University of
Warwick.
'Dream': the original version, 'Dialectique du reve et du reel',
was read at a Colloque de Loches on Poesie et verite, on the invitation
of Gilbert Gadoffre. It was published in Bulletin 86 of the Institut
Collegial Europeen, 1986, and subsequently in verite poetique et
verite scientifique, edited by Yves Bonnefoy, Andre Lichnerowicz
and M.-P. Schiitzenberger (Presses Universitaires de France, 1989).
'Romanticism and After' began as a paper called 'Writing and
Redemption' delivered at a conference on Writing the Future
organised by the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature
at the University of Warwick. This was published in Writing the
Future, edited by David Wood (Routledge, 1989).
'Pierre Reverdy': the original was read, in a shorter form and
under the title 'Reverdy et le pourquoi de Ia poesie', at a centenary
conference, Reverdy Aujourd'hui, organised by Michel Collot and
Jean-Claude Mathieu and held at the Ecole Normale Superieure in
Paris.
'Pierre Emmanuel': the original was read, in a shorter form
and with the title 'Sur une poetique de Pierre Emmanuel', at a
conference, Poesie 1945-1960: les mots, la voix, organised by Marie
Claire Bancquart and held at the Sorbonne. It was published in
Poesie 1945-1960: les mots, la voix (Presses de l'Universite de Paris
Sorbonne, 1989).
'Tomlinson' is the expansion of a review article published in the
Times Literary Supplement for 21 March 1986.
'Not I' was read in a shorter form at the British Comparative
Literature Association Congress on Literary Representations of the
Self, held at the University of Leicester, on the invitation of Arthur
Terry.
ix
Acknowledgements
X
'History': an earlier version, 'La Iegende arthurienne et Ia lecture
mythique de l'histoire', was read at a Colloque de Loches on
L'Imaginaire historique, and published in the review Storia della
storiografia (Milan, issue 14, 1988).
'Re-writing The Waste Land' was delivered, in a shortened version,
at a Conference on Literature and Religion, Where the Wasteland
Ends, held at the University of Durham. This was published in
Ends of Time, edited by Colin Crowder and David Jasper (Macmillan,
1990).
'The World Could Not Contain the Books' was read at a
conference on The Bible as Rhetoric organised by the Centre for
Research in Philosophy and Literature of the University of Warwick,
and was published in The Bible as Rhetoric, edited by Martin Warner
(Routledge, 1989).
Acknowledgements and thanks are due to Faber & Faber Ltd,
London, and to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., for permission to
quote from Collected Poems 1909-1962, Murder in the Cathedral and
The Family Reunion, all by T. S. Eliot; to Oxford University Press
for permission to quote from Collected Poems (1987) by Charles
Tomlinson; and to Editions Flammarion, Paris, for the extracts
from Plupart du temps by Pierre Reverdy.