Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Theology of the Imagination

Bartleby & Co. is a survey of the negative literature of the last two centuries - what hasn’t been written and why - with interludes of fiction. It is fascinating, informative and wonderfully inspiring. The book promotes the adoption of silence as the preferred aesthetic response in a whole range of circumstances; but also encourages positive expression because “Only from the negative impulse, from the labyrinth of the No, can the writing of the future appear.” What Vila-Matas has created, in his own estimation, is less than a book, but obviously more than silence. He calls it “footnotes commenting on a text that is invisible,” that is to say, the book he didn’t write.

“The literature of the No,” as Vila-Matas calls this genre he invented by giving it a name, is typified by Herman Melville’s story of Bartleby the Scrivener, the writer who never writes, in fact he never leaves his business office, “not even on Sunday.” Bartleby is Everyman, or at least that 99% of the human population who don’t write and don’t regret not writing. But it also includes a large proportion of writers who indefinitely defer, temporarily abandon, or abort their writing entirely. It is all these for whom “Their soul emerges through their pores. What soul? God.” They are, in short, untold stories, but nonetheless stories and these stories are in some sense divine.

So Vila-Matas has an underlying theme of a popular theology, popular not in the sense of simplistic or even simplified but in the sense that it concerns everyone not just God-professionals like theologians, clerics and religious enthusiasts. In a very particular way these non-writers, failed writers and former writers are God-like: “It is well known that God keeps quiet, is a master of silence, ... is a consummate writer of the No.” Vila-Matas quotes approvingly from an invented philosopher: “I could not agree more with Marius Ambrosinus, who said, “In my opinion, God is an exceptional person.” And every writer of the No is exceptional.

What is most exceptional about God, of course, is his hiddenness, his transcendence, his inaccessibility to human thought. He is the Other masked in his own subjectivity. God is literally no-thing. He is alien, a void, just like another human being into which we pour meaning out of our own subjectivity. And this nothing exercises enormous power within the human mind through “the negative impulse or attraction towards nothingness.” The serious consideration of this condition is something ancient called negative theology, the study of what God is not.

The origins of negative theology are Greek. The philosophical incomprehensibility of the Divine was imported into Christianity and, at least in the Eastern Orthodox Church, acted as a sort of brake on the doctrinal ambitions of the ecclesiastical establishment (one reason for the relative emphasis on liturgy in the Eastern Church). But the Western Church, with its doctrinal focus (and consequent dependence) on language, had a real problem squaring the Christian claims of revelatory access to divine secrets with the simultaneous recognition of the ineffability of God.

It was the 13th century Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, who devised a solution. His theory was that revelation of the transcendent was facilitated by analogy, what he called the analogia entis, or analogy of being. God, Thomas said, was not a being like created things. God’s nature of being was entirely different, completely alien to that of human existence; but, he claims, it is possible to make analogies between the two kinds of being. So ‘God is love’, ‘God is Trinitarian’, etc. are not definitions, nor even metaphors, they are purported inferences or translations from one mode of being to another.

The analogia entis, however, is obvious theological double-speak. If the being of God is beyond human understanding, human language is fundamentally inadequate as a foundation for the transfer of meaning from one kind of being to another. Language is just as transcendent, just as ineffable, just as incomprehensible in its being as God is in his. The 20th century theologian, Karl Barth, spent most of his professional life trashing the analogia entis as an invention of the Catholic Church, the purpose of which was to avoid what he believed were the authentic implications of Christian faith. By presuming that language was within human control, the analogia entis avoided confronting the very close analogy between language and God.

Vila-Matas presents an entirely new (that is to say ancient) version of negative theology in his book, and a very serviceable theory of how it complements revelation (or in more modern terms: imagination). Implicitly he bases this theory on what might be called the analogia novae rei, the analogy of new things, or perhaps more simply, the analogy of creativity. And quite appropriately he presents this theory as literary rather than theological. Nonetheless, it is patently both, which is its most exciting aspect: “Literature, as much as we delight in denying it, allows us to recall from oblivion all that which the contemporary eye, more immoral every day, endeavours to pass over with absolute indifference.”

The analogy of creativity translates between writing and reading. Writing is expressive, persuasive, and active; it is art. But silence, hiddeness, reticence, inaction are also creative. To put it another way, reading is the negative or apophatic twin of writing. They are equally creative positions in the world. Reading and writing are not, however, complementary activities; they are in fact antithetical ways of considering that which is transcendent and beyond our control and comprehension, namely language.

Reading is not merely not-writing; it is an attack on writing. Whatever meaning or intention went into writing is subverted by the reader through an interpretation over which the writer has no control. The only thing that reading and writing have in common is language. Not the language of a particular writer’s text but the infinite potential of language in general. The non-writer is the arbiter of the written word. The reader is a constraint not a person, or better “a tendency that asks the question, ‘What is writing and where is it?’”

Reading, like its counterpart of mysticism in religion, shows “the vanity of all initiative, the vanity of life itself.” Reading shows writing to be a transient thing, something of arbitrary and passing fashion. It creates for the writer “an aesthetics of bewilderment” by demonstrating “the antiquity of the new.” Just as even negative theology says something positive about God - namely his incomprehensibility - so reading makes the meaning of any text infinitely variable and thus impossible to pin down definitively.

Writing may be vain but it is not insignificant. It points to an effectively divine ideal that is beyond human capability to achieve. Vila-Matas quotes a writer who ceased to write, “I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem.” To merge with the infinity of language is what a writer wants to do. It is an essential aspect of pataphysics, the process of imagination. Reading, as a sort of counter-imagination, both encourages and frustrates writerly ambition. Vila-Matas also quotes the 19th century French moralist and essayist, Joseph Joubert: “One must resemble art without resembling a single work.” This union with language can only be achieved by reading, not writing.

Joubert was also the one who “wondered how to look in the right place when one does not even know what one is looking for.” And so it was Joubert who “spent his life searching for a book he never wrote, though, when all is considered, he wrote it without realising, thinking of writing it.” This is the ultimate creativity implied by reading - the permanent search which prevents writing from becoming a literally doctrinaire occupation. There is no final say, no definitive interpretation. The creativity of reading both limits and promotes the creativity of writing. This is the analogy of creativity. Reading and writing are incommensurate with each other except by the analogia novae rei.

Christianity, particularly Western Christianity, has misconceived language, and therefore literature, especially its own literature. It has claimed divine status for itself. By pretending to be superior to language, it divinizes itself and asserts the right to dominate not just writing, which is something perhaps tolerable in a religion of the Book, but also reading, that is, interpretation. This is, in its own terms, idolatry. God and language are indistinguishable in their transcendent power, their universal presence, and their unlimited potential for knowing. Neither God nor language can be constrained with impunity. By sterilizing negative theology, and persistently censuring the literature of the No (what it calls mysticism), Christianity has stopped the search for its own goal; it has become purposeless.

So Karl Barth was correct: the analogia entis is a ruse. But his fideistic response to that ruse is also self-defeating because it requires quite literally a deus ex machina that grabs people by the emotional throat and demands irrational intellectual assent and blind belief. What Vila-Matas provides is an alternative connection between God and man, between the infinitely powerful universe and the struggling individual. This connection is not through being but through creativity, not just the ability to make new and interesting interpretations of one’s existence, but also the necessity to do this continuously and permanently. The ability to read as well as write is a kind of grace that comes as a gift from elsewhere.

This is the biblical ‘image of God’ which demands not faith but only readerly hope to achieve. It also helps in understanding the seriousness of Oscar Wilde’s allusion to religion: “It is to do nothing that the elect exist.” Salvation is not achieved but is received by reading, by doing nothing. Reading demands not blind faith but rather blind hope that there is something to be found by simply absorbing what is there, the content of which is entirely unknown. The negative theology of reading cannot help but make a positive statement. This is a theology of the imagination in which “Everything remains, but changes; the everlasting is repeated mortally in the new, which is gone in a flash.”

View all my reviews