Notes towards a Preface
to the Preface my next Books
For more than twenty years, I have been developing for myself a way of
writing books in a way that, for all my care and attention to details, and with
gradual building up of layers of text inside and above one another, as well as
increasingly lengthening footnotes that integrate a variety of generic
discourses as well as modes of argumentation and levels of reality, annoys
other people, reader who become confused, frustrated and bored, for all the
good it does me to gain control over my central topics and thus to understand
people, ideas, events and psychological states of being. In prefaces, introductions, inter-chapters
and, of course, more footnotes, I have attempted to explain what I am doing and
why. Unfortunately for me, very
readers—and, alas, there have never been more than a few readers
altogether—have the patience to look closely at these guides and hints. That is not the way most people approach
books or essays these days.
But already many years ago I gave up the idea of writing clearly, simply
and on topics that would be popular. I
do not even write for future, idealized audiences. Posthumous fame does not interest me. The books I have written for the past few
decades and am writing now are ways of organizing, focusing and encapsulating
whatever seems to me (as I approach my 75th year) worthy of
preservation: some kind of insurance against the ineluctable and inevitable
breakdown of civilization itself. Yet it
would be too vain of me to pretend that what is put into these books is of
greater value than many—yes, many—important, insightful scholarly studies,
philosophical discussions and fictional experiences. To that extent I write for myself—and, let me own up to, to a small
group of friends scattered around the world.
Milton’s faithful few and Pope’s fit audience.
My views are pessimistic enough that it seems inevitable that we are
entering a catastrophic decline in literacy, that sociological thinking and its
concomitants of political correctness and post-modernism have overtaken the
humanities, the arts and the literary imagination, and that the sound-bites and
“graphic images” of the digital age are in the ascendant, very soon to eclipse
and block out entirely print culture, and therefore the kind of reading and
thinking—and writing—that require long periods of meditation, concentration and
analysis. We are approaching the end not
so much of history as of memory, of creative memory in particular, and therefore I need, for my own conscience’s sake, to write about the
topics I do and in the method being developed for the last many years.
It is a method that sometimes approaches the rabbinical, the way of midrash, in the sense of a poetic
expansion, enhancement and witty recreation of existing texts by way of
explication, a method, too, that sometimes seems more poetic than scholarly,
that seeks some of the same effects of shock and awe sought by the so-called
metaphysical writers of the seventeenth century in western Europe—the making of
conceits out of incongruous images, the ingenious weaving together of arguments
drawn from otherwise incompatible discourses, the surprising emergence of
characters and events in times and places where they could not have been
possibly have been and yet which once seen there are felt to be right—and
illuminating.
Why use works of fiction or personal memoires or dramatic texts or other
non-official documents to understand the people, events and ideas of the
past? I use novels and plays, poems and
essays, book reviews and a variety of other historical and contemporary texts,
not indiscriminately, as some critics would have it, but in a careful and
considered—and strategic—manner: to weave together the textures of the various
mentalities that constitute a period, a process of being in the world. For we are not looking for positive facts,
with their specific dates, places and furniture, but for the feelings, the
dreams, the misapprehensions, the mangled memories, the illusions, the
delusions, the desperate hopes, the childish fears and the professional doodles
of boredom, annoyance and moments of reverie.
Strange as it may seem, there are short stories, plays and poems which,
with no tangential relationship to historical events, nevertheless either set
forth the scenario and script of what is barely given in formal sketches in the
press, in Hansard or courtroom notes ; and sometimes in an uncanny way, without
any obvious intention, parody, burlesque or imitate what happened a few months
or years or before, and in such a way—through the filter of fantastic fiction
or the lens of rhetorical tropes—as to focus on details that were overlooked or
trivialized and yet, when taken into more urgent account, prove to be the
lynchpins and driving force of those historical moments.
What I also have come to like to do—for the sheer pleasure perhaps, but
more likely for the breath-taking revelations of insight thus provided—is to
place in footnotes long citations from texts now in the process of being
written to deal with urgent and dangerous news threatening our own world; and
so, often seemingly attached at first only by a conjunction of random words or
images, a commentary on the past that shows it to be part of the same continuum
we are living through. Counter to
intuition and insulting to common sense, these intersections of the past and
the present begin to break apart the notions of chronological sequence, causal
determination of effects, logical coherence, even delayed consequences. We seem to enter a world of myth and hallucination,
or at least of midrash and poetry.
