As failures go, attempting to account for the the spell under which an author lives while involved with a book is like trying to revive a powerful attraction. It is not difficult to give the external reasons for the endeavor — this thrilling structure, that clandestine thought — but the fascination is long gone, and with it, one’s ability to impart the bewildering sensation of not being even prudently in control of one’s ardor. It may still be champagne, oh sure, but the spunk and sparkle have vanished.
      Permit me, therefore, to begin flatly, with a quotation. It will be the only academic one I shall provide, but as such, it may better convey the peculiar notion by which I was once captivated than any belated account of late-night activities and early-morning embarrassments. It concerns the relation between theory and practice, that hobby horse of yore, and no doubt you will consider it a peculiar phenomenon on which to cling. Yet it is true, such was my infatuation, and I need serious philosophical help to prevent you from smiling at the ride on which my enchantment once took me.
      “With this distinction between the empirical and the essential,” Jacques Derrida remarks in his study of Paul Celan’s poetry:

I imagine that the account of this experience — as literary as it is philosophical, at least if we follow Derrida, and always made under the aegis of a peculiar indecision — is what we commonly refer to as an “essay.” At any rate, that is the formal designation by which I ended up labeling my enchantment. More searching than systematic, more interrogating than assertive, more descriptive and performing than illustrative and explanating, the essay tends to constitute an anti-genre.2 As such, it vouches for a poetics of longing, to redeploy Lukács’s handsome phrase, where the border between thought and experience, word and act, is challenged, and fact and fiction have learned to live in each other’s vicinity.
      If the essayist sails under a particular flag, it can only be the gray one of indeterminacy. At the very least, the mast with the aid of which he sets sail must be the pencil, displaying itself as a fragile and finite straw against an otherwise bleak horizon. In the cranky vessel of an essay, familiar with the tricky tides of existence and sudden fluxes of time, the author travels across surfaces harboring just as many cunning depths as dangerous shallows. In the final analysis, his or her only compass is the inner one of idiosyncrasy.
      To this peculiar compound of thought and experience — let me to refer to it as “essayism” — belongs the ability to persevere in the absence of definite answers and dependable weather. It is hardly surprising, then, that an intended perspectivism is usually suggested as method — or better: attitude — for the essayist. “It was,” Robert Musil remarks,

Despite its avowed plurality of perspectives, despite its precise openness, and despite its exact sort of vagueness, an essay cannot be reduced to a gathering of lose threads or slack-handed attempt to draw the contours of life in writing — that is, the particular form of intelligibility that a certain sequence of observations, a certain row of reflections may constitute once these have become alphabetical. “The translation of the word ‘essay’ as ‘attempt,’” continues Musil,

In the following, I would like to investigate what such “decisive thought” might imply. Evidently, it marks a critical moment with consequences also for how to conducts one’s life. The “unique and unalterable form” invoked by Musil seems to contain a moral. To make my point, I shall take recourse to The Gray Book,5 but before I commit the blunder of speaking roughly in my own name, I would like to bring the essay, considered as an anti-genre, in connection with an aesthetic category with which it seems to have little in common, but which it, on closer inspection, hardly can do without: the work. What interests me in particular is the relationship between the essay’s claim to openness and the supposed closure of the work (be it one of literature or of art) — or put differently: the curious relation between process and progeny. For it is somewhere here, I suspect, in the gray zone between becoming and being, that the essay is most at home.

As the natural medium of inquiry, the essay has a distinctive preference for what has been discarded, left, and abandoned, or at the very least been neglected by intelligibility’s virtuous bore, systematic thought. Yet if the shreddings of pencils and dirty grain produced by impatient erasers would divulge about the completed work even a fraction of what garbage may reveal about our lives, there would be reason to believe in justice. Regrettably, such eloquence is confined to that “casual Elysium” of which Nabokov once spoke, and there “pencil points do not snap.”6 Placed in a situation decidedly less paradisical, the author must accept that his or her labor only results in a “work” when the endeavors no longer can be sighted and studied, seen and scrutinized. Even an ode to the caoutchouc or a pean to the pencil sharpener — and who has not once dreamt of preserving such dithyrambs on paper? — are forced to disguise toil behind style, exertion behind art. We argue that a work bearing the traces of labor has not yet been “completed,” is still “unfinished” — lacking that sole, redeeming “finish” and last blessed “touch.” Why does the literary work demand these sacrifices from its author, travails which sometimes are noted, rarely praised, and never reciprocated? Why does it seem to be only boredom, wavering hope, and resignation . . . in the rare instance perhaps a sudden surge of courage, but usually ambivalence and one or another form of idiocy . . . desperation . . . and vanity, of course . . . that make us act as if the deal were closed, as the saying goes, when the only thing we are likely to be able to deal with is life seemingly without work?
      Fatal. In order for the literary work to come into being, it must forget the life of its author — even if the text consists of nothing but personal reminiscences, private anecdotes, and inner experiences . . . and even talks as “I” about “me” without the slighest embarrassment or hesitation, not batting a varicolored eyelid. We have learned to keep bios apart from grafe, roughly in the manner in which we separate knives from forks in a kitchen drawer, but are we able to distinguish as clearly between process and product? Such categories do not separate as easily as oil and water poured into the same vessel, but have a tendency to mingle with the bewildering facility of salt and sugar. We do not notice the difference until we place a few grains in our mouth, testing them with our hesitant tongue and grudging dentures — and how many readers are willing to do that when what has been prepared for them rarely seems tasty?
      It may be that the critical commentary — whether evaluative or scientific, despondently subjective or blandly matter-of-fact — once devoted itself to studying discarded pieces of prose and dejected chips of thought in the same way that coffee grinds are still being read. The idea was that these obscure remains constituted the dregs of a work, a sort of nutritious psychotope which, like any molecular sequence, contained the promise of what the work would eventually become.7 At times, I wonder if our knowledge of literature really has distanced us so very far from the positivistic model and genetic view of history which here emerge and whose premises a French thinker once tested when he discussed, with malicious elegance, the epistemic worth of Nietzsche’s laundry receipts and memoranda. A work does not emerge out of nothing, those connoisseurs remark, who do not shun such extra-textual evidence; rather it is marked and influenced, they maintain, by the threefold t of the originary situation: time, tone, and temperament. (Add to this tendency, and before long, these custodians of literature will have acquired the fourth musketeer needed to defend the honor of the work.) And of course, this may well be the case. Even Mallarmé’s absolute book, the innermost wish of which must have been to free itself from the silly fetters of contingency, carries traces of its conditions as clearly as dice their eyes.
      Still, I am willing to believe that it is part of the secret wish of most authors to keep those of his or her readers, whose discriminating eyes always go for the seams of a text, from discovering an underlying, more original patchwork. To manufacture literature with paper, pencil, and eraser, or keyboard, screen, and delete button, is a thankless task. Not only does the material, so cumbersomely gathered, sprawl in at least a dozen different directions — somewhat like a game of pick-up-sticks, in fact, newly begun — but in addition, its organization also demands what, in essence, amounts to divine patience. (Thus it is hardly surprising that literary works more often are interrupted than completed.) Despite the cunning measures taken by the author to finish the work, exterior conditions will be lodged within it like empty spaces in the game of pick-up-sticks. But even if the work finally released by the author still contains a joyless abundance of loose threads, of diverging length and tenacity, differing texture and varying tinge, once it has emancipated itself from the author’s clutches, it must create the impression that it has been leaked like a big solitary blot from the single shake of a pen.
      Among many other matters, this implies that the literary work must forget its origin without therefore becoming oblivious to its provenance. Perhaps it would be possible to say that the work must take leave of the hand that created it, even if it bears its fingerprints as clearly as most skins their blush. (In some sense, each oeuvre is also a désoeuvrement — each play, if you wish, a dis-play.) This means that works of literature have both beginnings and endings. Even those that subvert parergonal conventions need these two polar opposites — if only, slyly and stealthily, to ironize them. If a work claims to manage without such categories, too, the institution or market will soon see to it that they are re-attributed. The trajectory a literary work describes in order to come into being is thus never infinite, even if the author rarely can say when the first inklings were registered or tell when it would be most prudent to take leave of the work, as one does with a child, nurtured and sheltered, but who now, it transpires, has had time to develop not only a will of its own, but also tastes, habits, and — worst of all — visions.
      Phrased thus, the finite character of the work is rather uninteresting. It becomes more enticing to the mind, I believe, if instead of considering its beginning and ending as bios and grafe, or for that matter as source and offspring, we read the trajectory or that thinly pleated thread that connects the two poles while illuminating them as the story of a style — a sort of Bildungsgang of literary language itself, where the beginning in no way needs to be hidden in the very first word and where development, at any rate, is more reminiscent of a multilayered onion than a regularly wound spool of thread.8 Here, the work approaches what we mean when we refer to the essay as an “attempt.” We would then be dealing with a work — in no manner confined to one title, two dustjackets, and some hundred or so pages — the rows of letters and punctuation markers which tell us a different story: the one about the search among the words written for those yet to come.9
      It may be considered one of the few truly compelling characteristics of such a thread or trajectory — perhaps it is the author’s sole straw — that it reveals the work’s inner infinity. This interior expansion no longer points to an evolution, I would like to suggest, at least not of positivistic nature, but indicates rather an involution. There is little development here, either of subject matter, stylistic vices, or discursive virtues, but rather — in those happy moments authors tend to attribute to grace, but for which they merely have syllables and phrases to thank — an im-plication of literature. This interior opening, pleated and manifold, is that famous “world within the words,” of which speak certain authors of flesh and blood, 10 and which an invented poet such as John Shade termed an “involute abode” in his poem “Pale Fire.”11 Only the possibility of such lingual life form may be raison enough for the work’s être. Without further ado, I would like to air the belief that this is no microcosmic version of the universe, which is all-too-often assumed even by those who ought to know better. Granted, the universe may be mirrored in a puddle of water, but what kind of galaxy may be discerned by those intense-looking savants who attempt to scrutinize a lonely blot of ink?
      To the curiosities of such inner infinity belongs the fact that this expansion is not secured through the literary worth an author may claim through his or her management of a certain thematic capital. The ink stain to which I am referring may be as thin as night-old ice, blossom like a flower, and shrivel like a liver, at times it is taut and persevering as weed, at others ungainly as running egg yolk, but in neither case does its effect upon us depend on anything but the author’s sense of silence, structure, and idiosyncrasy, rhythm, complication, and surprise . . . and of course, the limitless belief in splendid insincerity. The only (necessary but not sufficient) guarantee that a work will open itself inward in this manner is the way in which syllables are joined to each other, the distance between words tightened, phrases tied up, and paragraphs subsequently locked into one another, one after the other, until everything has become a suspended texture of nuances which not even the lowest stab or meanest form of objection may unravel — because now everything consists of a transparent film of relations. But no, in order to remove at least that misunderstanding: this is not an image of the “text,” that supposed vindicator of the work which has been so celebrated in recent years, but of the net that every work casts across life and fiction, making these categories, viewed through the yarn of relationality, blurry in aspect. “This / Was the real point,” Shade emphasizes in his poem,” the contrapuntal theme”:

Only when the author weaves his or her correlated pattern with the “plexed artistry” that will yield a literary work may the reader’s thoughts tumble into that richly textured, elastic nothingness the way we all shall one day. Pattern, not pathos, is what keeps our attention. In short: the inner infinity of a work does not depend on what the signs used may mean by chance, but on the (sometimes chancy) manner in which they do so. Perhaps this is the reason why the essay — as anti-genre par excellence, and thus, at least on first appearance, least of all a “work” — is privy to such strict formal requirements.
      That the peculiar fall into the transparent world within words is repeated anew every time we read — and only thus does Shade’s “involute abode” remain so wide and accomodating — belongs to the work’s miracles. Such is the always-revisitable now created by every sensibly correlated pattern. And hence to write must be the same as to walk on water. In another book, entitled Transparent Things, Nabokov puts it succinctly:

What happens when you break that tension film is, I believe, what takes place in The Gray Book. But instead of forming that lonely blot of ink through which the reader may sink in satiated calm — one which I have mentioned two or three times by now, but yet have to admit has been borrowed from a text by William Gass 14 - my particular blotch turned into a cloud of pencil dust in which both dint and direction soon were lost.
      The idea had been to take one of the more worn clichés of literary history — that moment of death during which erratic memories from one’s life, dressed up in visual drag, are supposed to put in their last appearance — and extract from it some sort of vigor. In a sense, this was my version of the “decisive thought” of which Musil spoke. I wished to write an essay about the premises of an essay. That which would make it formally “unique” and “unalterable,” I thought, would be the attempt to take an essay’s manner of signifying as the starting point of my inquiry. Form, thus my creed, should be treated as content. It goes without saying that this ambition offered some problems, since meta-essays, too, tend to have to answer to demands of formal nature. But out of the possible discrepancy between saying and doing, that very gray region, I hoped that the suppositions of essayism would emerge with greater clarity.
      I found my first sample in Rilke, in a passage at the beginning of his novel about Malte Laurids Brigge. “How came that little gray woman”, it is there stated,

For me, the work on The Gray Book began there, in Rilke’s tableau vivant, in which a gray little woman enigmatically pushes a yellow (I guessed) pencil from her clenched fist. A signal, that was all, but one “that the outcasts know,” which yielded an uncertain zone between gesture and gist, movement and meaning, under the sign . . . yes, that too . . . of destruction. This was the signal of my gray spell.
      I then proceeded to search for elective affinities to the kind of precise vagueness which Rilke’s pencil intimated. In an exact manner it appeared to concern nothing in particular. My attention had been caught, that is, by the way in which vagueness signifies. Thus, I began to collect what Benjamin, in his essay on Kafka, once termed “cloudy spots.” 16 From the vocabulary of librarians, I borrowed the technical term “gray literature” — I needed an organizing magnet for my erratic chips of mental metal — in the hope that it would cover, or at least indicate, the nebulous region with which I believed I had made my first acquaintance. Conventionally, the term designates materials of limited edition, distributed outside habitual channels: business reports, specifications of technical nature, conference proceedings, diplomatic dispatches, and the like — texts, that is, which are instrumental in character and thus lack the kind of surplus significance we usually ascribe to literature. In a handbook I found, “gray literature,” however, was also characterized as an “indicator of uncertainty, vagueness, and imprecision”17 — a description which to me identified very well what had happened in the scene between Malte and the old woman in front of a Parisian shop window. At any rate, this pointer or “indicator” — this extended index, as it were — made it possible for me to re-function the term and have it refer to the ungraspable and vanishing character of a certain form of literature — for disappearance, I knew, was the curious sun around which my world revolved.
      You may wonder what this account has to do with more thoughtful considerations concerning what I have termed essayism. Not much, I am afraid. In particular not since destruction may well be some sort of Beatrice, at least if we put faith in Mallarmé’s notorious letter to his friend Léfebure,18 but disappearance will hardly guide a single author to paradise. Yet permit me to return to Nabokov and a book in which he weaves with great skill and daring an entire story around a vanishing moment — hardly bigger than the point of a pencil, yet more accomodating than the most voluminous bag. In the opening pages of Invitation to a Beheading, he tells us of poor Cincinnatus C., sentenced to death, who “dreamed that he walked on water” and only has one chance to outlive himself:

In many respects, this is a remarkable passage, not least because it appears at the beginning of the book but speaks of a conclusion. Nabokov’s novel starts, that is, by ending. What occurs in this oeuvre is a form of désoeuvrement. Cincinnatus’s only chance for survival is to make use of the pencil resting on the table in front of him. As long as he writes he cannot be dead. A more “decisive thought” would be hard to imagine. Here is not the occasion to engage in the manner in which Nabokov enlarges this moment to encompass an entire life. Suffice it to say that he does it in a way which ultimately makes it seem as if the work’s interior contains its exterior — and that, I believe, in the final analysis, is every author’s dream. As readers, we peep into the book as into the cell in which Cincinnatus sits, through a hole which is “like a leak in a boat,” and it should come as no surprise that the hero is forced to concede

The Gray Book attempted to mark that peephole, thanks to which the external world leaks into the work’s interior, by placing on its flyleaf the initial of Cincinnatus’s name, albeit on its back, almost as if it had already given up the hope of a continuation, and then wrote the succeeding point of abbreviation in its open interior: . Thus the medieval typographical sign for “those places where a hard and obscure question cannot be opened up or solved,”21 the so-called cryphia, became the figure in whose sign the book desired to be read. If this turned-around letter stood for the work’s external aspect, an exterior that was now gradually closing — thus completing — itself, then the dot in its middle represented its internal aspect, that tiny, palpitating heart which most immediately indicated the hovering, infinitesimal center of Cincinnatus’s existence. 22
      Inveterate authors. What complications. Is this not vanity and caprice? Recall Shade’s appeal to plexed artistry and then listen to Cincinnatus again:

With some good will, I hoped it would be possible to read the abstruse figure on the flyleaf of my book as the point of a pencil seen frontally, and then, I imagined, it might offer an indication of the sole salvation available to authors who try to stay both afloat and alive. This yellow implement, out of which the involuted story of one’s style emerges, might be the last and only straw for a writer. To clutch it, however, is possible only if he or she is also willing to concede that the writing that will ensue must amount to a “process of gradual divestment.” Such is the moral, if you will. Call it essayism — or the vain yet infinite attempt to survive.

Versions of this essay have been presented at the universities in Berkeley, Stockholm, and Århus. A Danish translation, made by John Bang Larsen, appeared as “Noget om et halmstrå,” in Passage 28-29 (1998), 165-71.