One might argue that the reason for literary
criticism being outside the mess and stuff (what Forster might call muddle) of
life is partly to do with an aping of science. It is to do with it not being a specific I who
writes, but an I who writes who could be You or Anyone who had the language and
thought to write it. It is positing an
objectivity. It commands the authority
of the objective. It is the passive observer
making observations and noting down these observations for all to read, and by all,
the observer means one’s peers: other observers who speak the same jargon-laden
language. The critic has left the
building and the machine, this machine named One or The Observer might be left
to perform the exact measurements, and detect the patterns needed to generate
the thesis, to process it, and print it out to send to the right journal (so it
might fulfil its REF obligations), and so be read by other machines.
Do you see?
One of the earliest texts (in a way) that resembles
what you describe is Rene Descartes’ Meditations – that series of
reflections and self-experiments that foreground his thinking about his own
thinking. Indeed, he believes to affirm
his knowledge of his own existence upon this thinking: Cogito ergo sum
and additional jazz. But I submit that
you are overemphasising the word thought in your designation of what you
call the thinkerly text. One
doesn’t want (perhaps) it to be like a maths problem, in which one has simply
filled the box marked ‘Show your Working’, but rather as something that also
shows the force and the emotional intensity that motivates, and is part of,
their thought.*
Don’t you feel?
Because this is how the writer truly steps through,
smashes the experimental glass that might separate her from her life, her from
us. Or, indeed, him. Because let us be specific here. One essayist possibly of interest to you is
Thomas Glave – I have his collection Among the Bloodpeople (swing by and
I’ll lend it to you) – and his writing is frequently visceral, intensely
personal. He has style and knows how to
use it. He has total command of the
interiority that modernism gifted us in the last century. He smashes the glass and through the
spiderwebbed chaos and shards come thoughts and feelings: on the murder of
queer Jamaican men, on joy and writing, on James Baldwin. But to steer it from essays alone and over to
fiction: David Markson in his Wittgenstein’s Mistress shows in
accumulating fragments the thoughts and feelings of a woman who appears to be
the last person living on Earth. The
same applies to what Tyler Malone calls Markson’s Notecard Quartet of
novels: Reader’s Block, This is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point and The
Last Novel, all of which
sift through the detritus of world culture (largely anecdotes and facts about
major writers and other figures), and foreground the making of themselves in
ways that are strangely moving. I would
also include Lydia Davis’ The End of the Story, her only novel to date, which
both shows the creation of the novel, and the thought and feeling that
assembles it, with her characteristic attention to the process that a mind goes
though. Her novel, like Dept of
Speculation, is about a break up. (Maybe in shrugging off linearity you
have invited circularity?) A lot of the
suggestions that are coming up do seem to be about brokenness, endings,
disappearances. What you seem to be
asking for is both for the writer to there, present, but also to be uncertain,
to be restless and questing, perhaps without ever finding what they set out to
find. Put overly poetically,
anyway.
But – to draw you too through the glass (do be
careful where you step) – why? Not that
I disagree, per se. But what is it about
uncertainty that appeals? Why – one might say – do you ask of this thinkerly
text a tentativeness? Even, maybe
(though this perhaps comes from me rather than you), a brokenness?
Ask I.
*You do use the word ‘living, breathing, feeling
human being’, but I wanted to make a point about emphasis. Nor do I want to deny the thrill that the
cerebral has, but the word ‘thought’ alone doesn’t convey this, I don’t feel.
P.S.
I didn't know this – and oh, the cover of that
collection is wonderful.
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