Aris Fioretos

The Gray Book

Essay
Translated from the revised Swedish by the author
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, 151 pages
Cover Art: Alberto Giacometti, “Gray Figure” (1957)
ISBN: 0-8047-3537-9 (cloth), 0-8047-3538-7 (paper)

Generally considered the least lively and most bleak of casts, gray is the taint of vagueness and uncertainty. Marking the threshold region where luminous life seems suspended but death has not yet darkened the horizon, gray belongs to an evasive and evanescent world, carrying the tint of smoke, fog, ashes, and dust. As the ambiguous space of thought and remembrance where things blend and blur, it measures the difference between distance and proximity, shading into tinges of hesitation, hues of taciturnity, tones of time past and lost. Thus gray may also be the spectral medium of literature itself- that grainy gas of language.
Written with a lead pencil akin to those found in Nabokov, Rilke, Svevo, Poe, and Dickinson, The Gray Book chronicles the vicissitudes of such equivocal articulation- registering the graphite traces it leaves behind, but also recording the dwindling span of its life. The book situates itself in a region beyond criticism but this side of literature, characterized by forgetting and finitude, and investigates important yet seemingly inaccessible “gray areas” in texts as old as those of Homer, as recent as those of Beckett.
Loosely arranging these literary finds according to a revision of the four elements, The Gray Book departs from tradition and treats not water but tears, not fire but vapor, not earth but grain, not air but clouds. The narrative thus construed, proceeding in the meandering movements of volatile thought rather than in the prim steps of a treatise, appears gradually affected by its subject. Themes and facts previously confined to the realm of quoted texts leak into the narrative itself. The border between fiction and fact slowly dissolves as the book approaches the curious void that the author locates at the heart of “gray literature.” Shaped by an omnipresent though increasingly unreliable narrator, The Gray Book may thus ultimately yield a poetics cast in the form of a ghost story.