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Return to Equinoxes, Issue 3 : Printemps/Eté 2004
Article ©2004, Adele Parker

« L'écrivain sur l'écriture, l'artiste sur l'art »

Adele Parker

These remarks were delivered by Adele Parker of Brown University on March 12, 2004 to open Equinoxes, the 12th Annual Graduate Conference of the Department of French Studies.

One of the questions we originally asked when generating possible topics for this conference call was: "Why write?" Many authors have answered that question in writing. I offer you a few of those responses:

Bataille : la crainte de devenir fou
Butor : pour obtenir une unité dans ma vie
Renard : pour être aimé
Saint-John Perse : pour mieux vivre
Valéry : par faiblesse
Soupault : parce que cela m'amuse
Cendrars : parce que
Beckett : bon qu'à ça

We are often curious to know, regarding the writers who interest us, not only why they write, but how, where, when, or under the influence of what substances, for example. Of course we all know by now that Proust wrote in bed, barely propped up on his sweaters, using his knees as a desk. Sarraute took to her bed also, at the end of her life, having, for many years, upheld the tradition of writing in cafés. Hugo often wrote standing at a lectern, while Ponge liked to write with his feet up on the table, so as not to feel too much like a child at school. When Gide could not write, he would seize a book and open it at random to find the words that would inspire him again. When Jean Echenoz cannot write, he waters his plants or washes the dishes. Rimbaud wrote late at night, Valéry in the early morning hours, Butor in the afternoon.

Balzac's caffeine habit, and the motor it provided his feverish writing, is well known. Baudelaire was far more devoted to laudanum and brandy than to hashish, as is commonly thought. Opium permitted Cocteau to give shape to the shapeless, although, alas, it made it impossible for him to communicate this privilege to others. Maupassant wrote entire books while on ether. Sartre produced Critique de la raison dialectique on a steady diet of amphetamines. Michaux had his experiments with mescaline, Artaud with peyote.

We are gathered here ostensibly to consider more elevated issues, rather than to gossip about the proclivities and habits of individual writers. But my point is how present and how alive the writers we read are to us, present in the meanings they hold for us in present time and present in the space of the text. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the author's death have been grossly exaggerated. We've all read the nécrologie. The author is but a concept, an indexing category for the cataloging of quotations.

But if the writing subject is endlessly disappearing into language, then the writing subject is always appearing as well. We gather there, eager for a glimpse.

This doesn't mean that we must return to the earlier extreme of an all-knowing, unified creator. There is an inbetween state of the author or the artist, that can perhaps nowhere be better seen than in the creator's self-inscription in his or her own creation.

Today and tomorrow we will hear about many different relations between the writer and his text, the artist and her art: autofiction, where the self is imagined through literature; autobiography, where history is brought into the private realm; necrography; becoming-writing; and other texts where passing remarks on the creative process proliferate, or that consist in deeper meditations on the conditions of artistic creation.

What these modes of self-reflexive writing have in common, what this double présence of the writerly text brings to us, is a breaching of the boundaries between writer and work, reality and literature, nature and art. The writer as subject and object, narrator and player, creator and creation, is in the realm of the undecidable. I think we will see this notion of undecidability again over the next two days, in different guises, under other names.

What writers have written has been printed and in that sense remains fixed, forever still. But our readings continually revive and recreate meaning. Though we did not come here to discuss the role of the reader, how can we not, in turn, become objects of our own discussion. If writing is self-alienation, then reading is the highest task of understanding. The important relation, however, is not about the reader and the author, but about "sharing in what the text shares with us." Our meanings are social as much as individual, and everyone who can read has an equal share in bringing forth what has been fixed in writing. As readers, and in turn, writers, it is up to us to provide a future for the texts that we live by.