footnotes, inflated until they become volumes:

Enrique Vila-Matas Bartleby y compaa and the literature of the No

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

(Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades)

The poet is he who hears a language which makes nothing heard.

(Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature)

For a writer, writing can be not only an arduous, often frustrating occupation, but also a

matter of life and death. It is an activity founded on and confounded by paradox. This

essay, which explores the question of writing and its possibility or impossibility, is also

mired in paradox. It begins with two questions that have opposite but not necessarily

opposing concerns. The first: why do writers write? What compels a writer to pick up his

pen knowing full well that the literary profession is fraught with uncertainty and doubt,

anxiety and dread? The writer works in solitude with no guarantee that the risks he must

take in pursuit of his vocation will ever be compensated for by just reward. Many of the

greatest writers in history only received acclaim for their work posthumously. One need

only think of Kafka, Melville, and Emily Dickinson among others to realize that disparity

between literary accomplishment and real-life success is a recurring theme in the history

of letters. Such are the perils inherent in the pursuit of literary achievement that dignified

suffering is one of the defining features of our collective notion of the writer or the artist

as a tormented romantic genius. And then there is the abiding suspicion that literary

endeavor has exhausted itself, that contemporary literature is written in the margins of the
great works of the past and amounts to no more than footnotes, inflated until they

become volumes (Bobi Bazlen qtd. in Vila-Matas, 23). The corollary of this view is that

the author has become an inconsequential figure, an historical artifact of the literary

process. Despite this morbid state of affairs, writers continue to answer their calling as if

it were a categorical imperative.

The second question is: why do writers stop writing? Given the conditions that

provoke the first question, one might think that the former answers the latter. Why

wouldnt a writer stop writing? But the writer persists in his task with an awareness of its

impossibility. Enrique Vila-Matas novel, Bartleby y compaa (2000), addresses the

second question explicitly but in doing so cannot help but confront the first also. Vila-

Matas novel is ostensibly the account of a failed writers return to letters inspired by the

attraction towards nothingness that means that certain creators (...) never manage to

write (2). The narrator, Marcelo, a hunchbacked and depressed office clerk, identifies

the negative impulse or attraction towards nothingness that has limited the output of so

many writers as a disease, an illness (Bartlebys syndrome), but he concludes

nonetheless that only from the negative impulse, from the labyrinth of the No, can the

writing of the future appear (2-3). When a colleague at work demands what form this

writing of the future will take, the narrator replies shortly that if he knew, he would write

it himself. However, his colleagues challenge prompts him to begin writing a book of

footnotes that comment on an invisible text, in a bid to imagine the literature of the

future. Vila-Matas narrator compiles a list of writers who, like Melvilles famously

unproductive scrivener, abandon their craft and say no to the exigencies of literary

creation, and many of the usual suspects appear as part of Bartlebys company: Rimbaud,
Valery, Musil and Kafka among others. They are the writers of the No (4) and an

appreciation of their struggles not only inspires the narrator to begin writing again, but

also suggests to him the paths still open to literary creation in the future.

Bartleby is part of a trilogy of meta-literary texts1 on the pathologies of writing

which exemplify Vila-Matas concerns about the stagnation of literary creativity and the

need to reinvent ossified literary traditions. In a career spanning nearly five decades, the

prolific Catalan author has used (and fused) a variety of literary forms in order to

interrogate literature itself, and collapse the distance between subject and form, creativity

and reportage, story and history. In his breakthrough novel, Historia abreviada de la

literatura porttil (1985), he describes the adventures of a secret society of writers and

artists, the Shandies, champions and practitioners of portable literature, whose

members include Duchamp, Tzara, Walter Benjamin, Witold Gombrowicz, and many

others. Although the precise nature of portable literature is left unresolved, the

Shandies are shown to appreciate works that are brief and playful, works that therefore

stand in sharp contrast to the deeply serious, monumental tomes characteristic of literary

modernism. In its use of quotations and footnotes, its playful amalgamation of fact and

fiction, and its fascination with literary failure and erasure, this early work is very much

prototypical of the late-stage output of Vila-Matas career. El mal de Montano (2002)

features a narrator who studies the diaries of great writers as works of literature and who

struggles with literature sickness, an illness marked by the inability to distinguish

between literature and real life and a desire for the distinction to subside. The unnamed

narrator of Doctor Pasavento (2005) laments the difficulty of not being anybody2 as he

ruminates on the idea of disappearance while (unsuccessfully) planning his own. Already
we have an idea of some of the common threads that run through Vila-Matas unique

body of work.

Despite its singular flavor and its obvious correlation with many of the concerns

that animate literary studies, Vila-Matas work has received fairly little attention from

academic circles, especially in the English speaking world.3 This article, which will look

closely at Bartleby y compaa, hopes to help remedy this neglect. It will proceed in three

sections. In the first, I will look at a few representative examples from Vila-Matas book

to try to understand the causes and symptoms of Bartlebys syndrome. To this end, I

will draw heavily on Maurice Blanchots writings on the nature of literature and literary

language. Blanchot is a recurring if somewhat peripheral member of Vila-Matas cast of

characters, but maintains a strong inter-textual presence throughout, and his thoughts on

the role of silence in literary creation will prove invaluable to the explication of Vila-

Matas disquisition. In the second section, I will continue to develop the implications of

Blanchots understanding of literature, paying particular attention to his thoughts on the

future of literature and art. Since, Vila-Matas links the future of literary writing to the

literature of the No, I will try to explain how the crisis of literary expression experienced

by writers since at least the beginning of the twentieth century is in fact a necessary

condition for the continued possibility of literary activity. And in the final section, I will

try to determine what the literature of the future will resemble according to the clues

provided by Vila-Matas and his narrator, while also asking if Bartleby provides a model

for this future literature rather than merely a map with which we might seek it.

I
 Bartleby y compaa has been described by Antonio Tabucchi as the the work of

comparative literature par excellence. It brings together literatures spanning several

languages, nations and cultures with an inclusionary zeal that is remarkable. While the

focus, inevitably, is on Western writers of literary modernity, considerations of

chronology or geography do not influence the books catalogue of the literature of the

No. The first footnote (of 86) establishes the template for the rest of the book. It begins

with reference to Robert Walsers work as a copyist linking him to Melvilles Bartleby4

and Kafka before moving on by association to the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo and the

Honduran Augusto Monterosso, who both worked as copyists in Mexico City. In this

freewheeling report on the scriveners section of the writers of the No, reference is also

made to Flauberts Bouvard and Pecuchet, and the fictitious novel Institute Pierre

Menard written by one Roberto Moretti, a parody of Walsers Jakob von Gunten (1909)

in which pupils are taught to say no (Vila-Matas, 3-10). Rulfos account of the

composition of his influential novel Pedro Pramo (1955) reveals, according to the

narrator, his human condition as copyist. Rulfo claimed that he had no knowledge of

the origins of the novel, and wrote it as if someone dictated it to (him) (Vila-Matas 6).

Rulfos only other work, the collection of stories El llano en llamas (1953), was followed

by a thirty-year silence which the author justified with a most original excuse: the stories

which made him famous were actually told to him by his uncle Celerino and he had

merely transcribed them, and his uncles death therefore brought his literary output to a

sudden halt. Thus, in the space of a few pages, we are made aware of the universality of

Bartlebys syndrome and the narrator, in his digressive and free-associative style,

broaches several distinct aspects of the problem. Beginning with the question, What is
writing? he quickly introduces further lines of inquiry: How can transcription be both

writing and not writing? What is the source of literary inspiration? If writing is

transcription who dictates in the absence of a literal uncle Celerino? Rulfos uncle

Celerino may have been a real figure, but we know him only as the origin of some of

Rulfos stories and also as an excuse for his subsequent silence. Rulfo himself only

becomes the interface between his uncle Celerino and his readers, even his silence is not

his own. Although the origins of Pedro Pramo hew more closely to conventional ideas

about literary inspiration, in both cases the writer is reduced to simply transcribing texts

that pass through them like a transparent sheet (Vila-Matas 4). The writer must

disappear in order for the words to appear. This is why Bartleby occupies such a

prominent position in Vila-Matas literary constellation. As Agamben points out,

Bartleby represents a figure a pure potentiality. He writes, As a scribe who has stopped

writing, Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives,

and at the same time, he constitutes the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as

pure, absolute potentiality. The scrivener has become the writing tablet; he is now

nothing other than his white sheet (253-54).

Is this notion peculiar to contemporary times, simply a hangover from the

twentieth century? Surely writers have been grappling with these questions for centuries,

but modern literature is marked by the degree to which it obsesses over the question of its

own possibility (or impossibility). As Bartlebys narrator points out, the twentieth

century opens with Hofmannsthals paradigmatic text (the Letter of Lord Chandos

dates from 1902) in which is described its authors crisis of language5. The titular Lord

Chandos is a fictitious young nobleman who writes to Sir Francis Bacon, the founder of
English empiricism, to explain his complete abandonment of literary activity

(Hofmannsthal 117). In the letter, Chandos describes his gradual loss of faith in the

efficacy of language. Before the onset of the crisis, Chandos experienced a youth marked

by prolific artistic productivity and reveled in a vision of all of existence as one great

unity (120). However, Chandos goes on to describe how his grasp on language

deteriorated and left him alienated from both his craft and his daily life, having

completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything at all (121). In

this fallen state, the only link to the fullness of his past life comes to him in the form of

fleeting flashes of ineffable ecstasy which reveal to him the resistance of the world to

human efforts to apprehend it. The paradox that Lord Chandos confession of his aphasia

is composed in extremely eloquent fashion is a critical commonplace, but it shows us that

Lord Chandos has not merely lost his facility with words, he has lost faith in the symbolic

unity that language once conveyed for him.

In his pre-crisis days, Chandos describes being in communion with nature: I felt

nature in all of it [] And in all of nature I felt myself (120). He was able to perceive

nature as a symbolic order, the world was suffused with meaning, and he felt able to

decipher all its mysteries and ciphers. Such was his confidence in his own virtuosity that

at the peak of his creative powers he planned to compose an encyclopedic work entitled

Nosce te ipsum [Know thyself] in which he wanted to collect beautiful classical and

Italian aphorisms and reflections with whatever else I had run across in the way of

intellectual baubles in books, manuscripts, and conversation, and also to include

particular beautiful festivals and pageants, strange crimes and cases of dementia,

descriptions of the greatest and oddest buildings in the Netherlands, France, and Italy,
and much more (119-20)6. In other words, he wanted to compose a book that would

capture the totality of the world with which he felt in union, and as its title suggests he

equated knowledge of the world with knowledge of the self. The contradiction in

Chandos great project is that he describes experiencing a cosmic unity with the world

but at the same time portrays himself as the subject that is able to give meaning to the

world, to crack its code. This view of the world and ones place in it is not far removed

from the viewpoint of the natural sciences, although in a scientistic age a writer is not

generally seen as a credible contributor to the project of acquiring knowledge. But it is

the realization of the folly of this approach that perhaps provokes Chandos crisis. In

addressing Bacons concerns about his literary silence, Chandos presents an implicit

critique of the formers view that the world is an orderly array of mental and physical

phenomena (127). Chandos realizes that the symbolic order that he had perceived was

man-made and arbitrary, that the unity he had felt with nature was in fact an illusion, and

no longer could he hope to master nature by reducing it to a symbolic language. In

modern parlance, the flaw in Chandos youthful ambition was that he had mistaken the

signified for the signifier. In trying to explain his crisis to Bacon, Chandos suggests the

inadequacies of the language of philosophical abstraction and conceptual thought favored

by the former, by drawing attention to the failure of his own pre-crisis aesthetic approach

to nature which was motivated by the same mania for knowledge and mastery as Bacons

scientific method.

Those epiphanic moments when Chandos experiences the presence of the

infinite in the quotidian objects he encounters are the highlight of his post-crisis

existence. These experiences remind us of his earlier experiences of cosmic unity with
the universe, but whereas he had earlier understood that unity in conceptual terms, he

now experiences it in an immediacy of experience that he no longer believes to be

available to human interpretation. Before and during his crisis, Chandos experiences the

world as pregnant with the potential for mystical revelation but a significant change

occurs in the writers relationship to the world.7 Instead of actively giving expression and

meaning to the world, the writer is now a passive recipient of the meaning revealed to

him through the language in which mute things speak (128). Unexpected things,

everyday objects, animals, people, buildings and any number of random forms can

suddenly become for the writer a source of an overwhelming rapture, which cannot

possibly be translated into words. In spite of his desire to reject it, the writer cannot

escape the symbolic order, as Hofmannsthals (and Chandos) rather articulate exposition

of the problem demonstrates. Chandos letter is not just an account of his crisis but also a

representation of the crisis in poetic language, an effort to describe by means of language

precisely that which is obscured by language. Blanchot describes Chandos crisis as the

state of suspense when inspiration has the same countenance as sterility (Space 182).

This is why while Chandos regrets the easy confidence of his earlier works and declares

that he wont write any more books either in English or in Latin in the coming year, the

year after that, or in all the years of this life of mine (Hofmannsthal 127), he leaves open

the possibility of finding a new language to express his experience. In the end, Chandos

concludes that he will only be able to speak in this language once he is dead, thus

alluding to the fact that his visions (which are often accompanied by images of death and

decay in the natural world) entail the collapse of the subject-object binary which

inevitably asserts itself in speech and writing. For this is what words do, they replace
things with concepts; language comes into being through a process of negation, the world

of things is made sensible to us at the expense of the immediacy of things. Chandos, for

whom language was once a tool that he used with the utmost felicity, now senses a

disquieting otherness in language, communication fails, words become unmoored from

any material reality and take the form of floating eyes that stared at [him] [] dizzying

whirlpools which spun around and around and led into the void (122). This evocative

image suggests the profound negativity that is at the heart of languages capacity for

signification.

Literature embodies this power of language as negation whereas everyday

communication conceals it. Literature does not communicate ideas, or rather, it is not

merely ideational, what it expresses first and foremost is the materiality of language that

cannot be reduced to the ideas it also refers to. This is what makes literature literary

according to Blanchot, for as he notes in reference to the Lord Chandos Letter, the

writer can only respond to inspiration by betraying it, because one only writes [books]

by silencing what inspires them (Space 84). Before we can turn to Blanchots reflections

on the nature of literature, we must first look at his thoughts on language, which are

derived from the works of Hegel and mediated by Mallarms scattered thoughts on

language and poetry. Blanchot remarks, with reference to Hlderlin and Mallarm, poets

whose theme is the essence of poetry (Work 322), on the awesome, unsettling power

inherent to the act of naming. Language signifies the object only through its

annihilation and thus language is intrinsically related to death:

When I say This woman,8 real death has been announced and is already present

in my language; my language means that this person, who is here right now, can
 be detached from herself, removed from her existence and her presence, and

suddenly plunged into a nothingness in which there is no existence or presence;

my language essentially signifies the possibility of this destruction; it is a

constant, bold allusion to such an event. (Work 323)

Death is the necessary condition for language to become a medium of universal

signification. Blanchot (and Mallarm) take this Hegelian conception of language as

negativity and push it much further than the philosopher, for they insist that in order to

wield the power of language the writer must negate his own existence. The writer can

only identify himself through language, as a grammatical person, thus even the word I

only acquires meaning by distancing the self it designates from the one who uses it:

When I speak, I negate the existence of what I say, but I also negate the existence of the

one who speaks (Work 324)9. So if language demands the negation of both the subject

who speaks and the object of which he or she speaks, then language can only begin with

the void (ibid.), and therefore it exists prior to any linguistic act, whether poetic or

otherwise. What can be said of this language which is anterior to all discourse? Nothing.

And this is why Blanchot suggests that literatures ideal has been to say nothing, to

speak in order to say nothing (ibid.). This approach stands in opposition to ordinary

languages assumption that the absence of the thing is redeemed by the presence of the

word as idea. Literary or poetic language preserves the fundamental negativity of

language and resists the certitude of conceptual knowledge. But literature finds itself in a

Catch-22: it becomes obsessed with the question of what was lost in order to gain

language, but it cannot ever hope to resolve this riddle since this dilemma which is itself

linguistic can only be formulated in the aftermath of languages negation of what

preceded it. Blanchot describes literatures impossible quest thus: The language of

literature is a search for this moment which precedes literature (Work 327).

At the beginning of Literature and the Right to Death Blanchot asks us to

suppose that literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question (Work

300)10. This question is not the writers self-questioning which accompanies the genesis

of his works, but rather a question literature addresses to itself about the possibility of

writing. The question is not asked by the writer but is a question that is addressed to him

as he writes, whether he knows it or not. Once the writers work is over, the question

subsequently presents itself to the reader, and finally, this question is addressed to

language, behind the person who is writing and the person who is reading, by language

which has become literature (Work 301). This silent question that is at the heart of

literature is distinct from philosophical speculation about the nature of art and literature;

the form of the philosophical question, the what is question11 assumes an essence for its

object, but this approach and the attitude implied fails to comprehend the literature

which is both poem and novel [and] seems to be the element of emptiness present in all

these serious things (Work 302), and thus literature which is indifferent to the

essentializing question comes into being as nothing but the question of its own

possibility. For Blanchot, the fundamental enduring quality of literature is its lack of

essence, its persistent resistance to any function or value imposed on it by politics,

religion, philosophy, or ideology:

[T]he essence of literature is precisely to escape any essential determination, any

assertion that stabilizes it or even realizes it: it is never already there, it always

has to be rediscovered or reinvented. [...] Whoever asserts literature in itself

 asserts nothing. Whoever looks for it looks for only what is concealed; whoever

finds it finds only what is on this side of literature or, what is worse, beyond it.

That is why, finally, it is non-literature that each book pursues as the essence of

what it loves and wants passionately to discover. (Book 201)

Bartlebys narrator cites this passage in response to an interlocutors query about

the essence of his literary diary about writers who give up writing. He takes consolation

from Blanchots assertion of literatures essential lack of essence as he works on his book

of footnotes, searching and inventing, doing without any rules of the game that exist in

literature (Vila-Matas 157). Later in the same footnote, he even includes the final

portion of the above passage without directly attributing it12 to Blanchot as if to suggest

the degree to which he has internalized those words, or perhaps that the expression of

literatures determined denial of definition belongs to literature itself. In the absence of

essence, literature reveals and revels in the paradoxes which sustain it. In another

footnote, the narrator refers to himself as AlmostWatt, in reference to the titular hero of

Becketts novel, and in a moment of crisis jettisons the barely-there veneer that Vila-

Matas has accorded him and declares that he is mere discursive flow (47). This is how

Vila-Matas plots his own disappearance, escaping into the gaps in discourse so that

literature may begin to speak for itself. If literature is allowed to exist free from the

demands of philosophical questioning, solely as the question of its own possibility,

isolated in a state of purity, then, Blanchot says, literature is endowed with an

extraordinary force, a marvellous force (Work 301). While a state of absolute purity

might indeed be impossible, Vila-Matas shows us how literature might be enabled to

manifest some of its latent power if the writer steps aside and lets language speak for
itself.

In the history of Bartlebys syndrome", Joseph Joubert stands out as an

exemplary figure who embodies many of the paradoxes of the literature of the No.

Author without a book, writer without writing13: Joubert is famous for not having

published a single book during his lifetime and his literary reputation is linked to this

silence as much as it is to the posthumous publication of his private journals and

notebooks which contained his reflections on a diversity of topics presented in an

aphoristic style. This is how Blanchot describes the enigma of Joseph Joubert:

He never wrote a book. He only prepared himself to write one, resolutely

seeking the right conditions that would allow him to write. Then he forgot even

this aim. [] He was thus one of the first entirely modern writers, preferring the

center over the sphere, sacrificing results for the discovery of their conditions,

not writing in order to add one book to another, but to make himself master of

the point whence all books seemed to come, which, once found, would exempt

him from writing them. (Book 50)

Joubert may not have published anything, but he still left behind ample evidence of a

resolutely singular approach to literature. He read extensively and much of his writing is

comprised of commentary on the authors he was reading, and he was therefore an active

(if hesitant) participant in the essential philosophical and artistic debates of his day14.

This vast amount of reading and reflection is at the heart of Jouberts fascination with

literary language and its ability to represent by absence [] the luminous heart of

invisibility and unreality from which everything comes, and where everything is

completed (Blanchot, Book 56). Blanchots Joubert is a precursor of Mallarm, deeply

distrustful of language, preferring a symbolist aesthetic to a mimetic one, and yet,

planning a work that aspires to be a literary microcosm of the universe, a work with no

beginning or ending, for it is the search for some past original whole the only trace of

which is to be found now among the ruins (fragments) of literature. Jouberts aesthetic

clearly privileges the creative process over the finished product. His Carnets [Notebooks]

delineate the rhythms of his reading habit, as well as dramatizing his creative process,

presenting what are in essence his preparatory notes in place of a complete work.

Blanchot seems to suggest that the fragmentary style of the Carnets is a necessary

consequence of Jouberts intellectual project, a marriage of form and content. However,

Joubert himself never intended for his notebooks to be published and so the decidedly

provisional nature of their contents is not purely an aesthetic choice. In any case,

Blanchots Joubert resonates in the context of literary modernity, precisely because his

descriptions of struggle speak so eloquently to literatures ongoing crisis of expression,

and because the indeterminate, incomplete nature of his Carnets make it the

quintessential open text.

In Joseph Jouberts aborted work Blanchot detects an attempt to imagine a kind of

ideal book in which everything would be said at once, without confusion, in a total,

peaceful, intimate, and finally uniform splendor (Book 60) which foreshadows the

idealist ambitions of the grand oeuvre that Mallarm worked on for nearly his entire

career and which he called simply Le Livre (The Book). Of course Mallarm never

realized his ideal Book, but his published works are fragments that gesture towards its

existence, suggesting the whole without actualizing it. In its inception, Mallarms book

was meant to stand for the collected output of the poets career, but this original
conception would give way to an image of the Book as the comprehensive literary

expression of mankind, the orphic explanation of the Earth (qtd. in Arnar 42).

Mallarms speculative notes for the Book were published posthumously as Le Livre

de Mallarm (1957). These manuscript notes contain fragments of poetry, diagrams and

mathematical formulae, and considerations of how the Book was to be printed, circulated

etc. While the reproduced manuscript should not be mistaken for the Book itself15, it does

disclose several important aspects of Mallarms evolving vision of the Book. The first is

a preoccupation with structure and symmetry that manifests itself in detailed notes on the

number of planned volumes and the number of pages within each volume along with

conjecture on the physical dimensions of the Book. The mathematical basis of

Mallarms designs gives us a means of establishing the parameters of the Book even

when it does not yet exist: it is proof of the potential work (Arnar 44). Another

important feature of Mallarms vision that can be gleaned from his notes is an insistence

on the performativity of the Book, a consequence of Mallarms deep engagement with

mass media. Mallarm conceives of the Book as a theatrical performance that solicits the

collective participation of an audience rather than a solitary reader. This desire for the

democratization of the reading process is also influenced by the growing prevalence of

the daily newspaper. Despite being skeptical of this burgeoning new medium and

resentful of the competition it provides to the medium of the book, Mallarm appreciates

the new reading strategies provoked by the non-linear arrangement of textual elements on

a newspaper page, strategies that require flexibility, visual acuity, and physical

endurance (Arnar 47) on the part of the reader.

Blanchot takes Mallarms projected grand oeuvre as the exemplary expression

of a tendency peculiar to modern literature, a tendency which goes beyond Mallarms

example and influence. As noted earlier, Blanchot derives from Mallarms reflections a

conception of language as the power of abstraction, it is what destroys the world to

make it be reborn in a state of meaning, of signified values (Work 37). Thus Mallarms

evocation of the ideal Book does not have to culminate in an actual book which literally

replaces the universe, but is instead realized as the absence of the world. Blanchot

explains:

When one has discovered an exceptional ability in language for absence and

questioning, one has the temptation to consider the very absence of language as

surrounded by its essence, and silence as the ultimate possibility of speech.

Everyone knows that this silence has haunted the poet. What we have sometimes

forgotten is that this silence no more marks the failure of his dreams than it

signifies an acquiescence to the ineffable, a betrayal of language, a whats the

use thrown to poetic resources too inferior to the ideal. Silence is undoubtedly

always present as the one demand that really matters. But, far from seeming the

opposite of words, it is, rather, implied by words and is almost their prejudice,

their secret intention, or, rather, the condition of speech, if speaking is to replace

a presence with an absence and to pursue a more and more sufficient absence

through more and more fragile presences. (Work 34)

The poetics that emerged from Mallarms lifelong rumination on the nature of Le

Livre is contextualized by Blanchot as the logical consequence of the poets

fundamental impulse: to give voice to silence. Blanchot asserts the impossibility of this

contradictory ambition; language gives it expression but also stands in the way of its
realization. This contradiction is rough, it tortures all poetic language, as it tormented

Mallarms speculations (Work 37). The question then is not about the actual possibility

of a pure literary work, but, rather, of what language expresses when it relieved of the

task of communicating meaning, of what is distinctive about literary language.

If for Blanchot, literature is engaged in a quest for its origin, for a language before

the determination of language, and writing involves a patient giving over of oneself to

this originary language that speaks as silence and absence, then Bartleby represents the

enigma of pure writing. Bartleby is a copyist, he copies and transcribes an

extraordinary quantity of writing (Melville, 2407). Blanchot takes this incessant copying

to be a form of pure writing since Bartlebys productivity, which consists merely of

reproductions disrupts the very notion of productivity. And Bartlebys self-abnegation as

expressed in the formula I would prefer not to is a refusal to refuse, the negation that

effaces preference and is effaced therein (Blanchot, Writing 145). In Bartleby, writing

passes imperceptibly and suddenly from ordinary passivity (reproduction), to the

beyond of all passiveness [] Language, perpetuating itself, keeps still (ibid.). Writing

is an activity that yearns for the impossible possibility of naming and giving expression to

that which is prior to language and is the origin of language. The neutrality of literature

derives from its capacity to negate the world in its totality and writing is thereby the

gesture by which the finite and infinite are conjoined. This is the nature of the profound

denial of the world (Vila-Matas 1) that characterizes Bartleby and those of his ilk.

II

Writing at the turn of the 21st century, the narrator of Bartleby y compaa seeks
an antidote to the grave, but highly stimulating, prognosis of literature at the end of the

millennium (3). The writers labeled as Bartlebys are all possessed of a very demanding

literary conscience (2) that hinders their creativity as much as foster it. Vila-Matas

narrator believes that an understanding of this negative impulse is crucial since it points

to the only path still open to genuine literary creation (3). The rationale for his

emphasis is that inherent to this tendency is an interrogation of the nature of literature and

the impossibility of reaching an unequivocal conclusion on this matter. How are we

supposed to interpret this hyperbolic claim? We can begin by comparing it with

Blanchots response to the question Where is literature going?: literature is going

toward itself, toward its essence, which is disappearance (Book 195). In many ways,

Bartleby y compaa can be described as a book length explication of the implications of

Blanchots declaration regarding the future of literature.

Blanchot observes that the prevailing preoccupation of modern art and literature is

the question of art (or literature). Beginning with Mallarm and Czanne, Blanchot

asserts that modern art and literature begins a process of self-interrogation through which

the work of art becomes the endless search for its own source, for the conditions of its

possibility: What attracts the writer, what moves the artist, is not directly the work; it is

the search, the impulse that leads to it, the approach of what makes the work possible: art,

literature, and what these two words conceal (Book 199). This quest begins by resisting

the subordination of art to any external measure of validity, whether it be religious,

ideological, or aesthetic. Literatures self-criticism coincides with its marginalization by

the project of accumulating historical knowledge in modern European thought. In the

period under discussion, the question of art and literature was addressed not only within
the limited sphere of literary and critical writing but also in the wider realm of cultural

and political discourse. For Blanchot, art and literature are essentially sites of

contestation, and what is important is not the various positions taken in relation to the

question of art but the fact that the question is unable to elicit any meaningful responses

and each time an answer is given, the question manages to be asked anew, as though it

were indifferent to these answers" (Space 211). It should be clarified that when Blanchot

talks about the question of art he is not referring to debates about the self-reflexivity of

modern art and literature, but instead to the peculiar relationship between the writer and

literature, the artist and art. Having rejected legitimation by history or culture, artistic

activity can only proceed in the dark, in radical uncertainty, for it cannot know in

advance whether art is what it is (Space 234).

In contemplating the future of art and literature, Blanchot is reminded of Hegels

famous dictum that art is a thing of the past16. Blanchot draws attention to the fact that

Hegels pronouncement was made when Goethe was still alive, and when across Europe

the arts had acquired renewed impetus thanks to Romanticism. Hegels comment was

therefore not a judgment on the art of his time, nor was it a prediction about the future of

art. Instead what Hegel was alluding to was the changing relationship of art to human

society. In the modern epoch, human reason has replaced the divine or the sovereign as

the source of our understanding of the self and the world, and thus art no longer serves

the same lofty purposes that it did for our predecessors. Blanchot explains,

Art is no longer capable of supporting the need for the absolute. What counts

absolutely is henceforth accomplishment in the world, the seriousness of action,

and the task of actual freedom. (Book 195, emphasis my own)

According to Hegel, the accomplishment of modernity consists of identifying the

absolute with free human rationality (spirit or Geist in Hegelian terminology), and the

need for the absolute is, in modernity, only satisfied by the realization of this freedom

and rationality by means of work in the objective and social world. Work became the

basic cultural value and principle of social life in the Western world and the role of art in

society was therefore necessarily limited. Indeed, preoccupation with artistic form and

technique signals that art no longer speaks to or for some sort of absolute knowledge of

being guaranteed by a transcendent principle. Without going into further detail on

Hegels philosophy of art and its place in his overall philosophical system17, it should be

noted that Blanchot subscribes to his view that in the modern epoch it is work and

objective accomplishment that take precedence and while the artist collaborates in the

overall work of humanity (Space 211) his efforts pale in significance in terms of

efficacy. To demonstrate the historical evolution of mankinds relation to art, Blanchot

devises a schema that resembles Hegels categorization of the particular forms of art18: in

the beginning, art was the language in which humans received the communication of the

divine, later it came to represent the divine rather than making it present to

consciousness, before finally being emancipated from its subservience to religion and

devoting itself instead to the affirmation of the human subject in what Blanchot calls arts

humanistic stage (Space 218). Humanistic art19 is the expression of the artists

individual subjective vision rather than a representation of objective reality and Blanchot

associates this tendency with the aggrandizement of the figure of the artist and the

emergence of the notion of the romantic genius. Blanchot notes a discrepancy in the

artists assumption of the creative powers once ascribed to the divine in that the artist
aspires to the power and glory of creative work, but at the same time takes refuge in

subjectivity and withdraws from the anonymity of collective tasks. The vanity of the

artist prevents him from recognizing the emptiness upon which art must close, which it

must in a certain way preserve as if this absence were its profound truth, the form in

which it is properly to present art itself as its own essence (Blanchot, Space 219).

By appropriating Hegels interpretation of the absolute as self-realizing free

historical subjectivity, as spirit (Geist), Blanchot places literature in relation to the

process by which modern rationality becomes aware of itself as the first historical

instance of a new mode of being. Blanchot observes that in response to the historical

moment in which the absolute tends to take the form of history, when the times have

concerns and interests no longer in harmony with the sovereignty of art modern art and

literature participate in another movement which draws all the arts toward themselves,

concentrates them upon the concern for their own essence, renders them present and

essential (Space 220). Blanchot contrasts this movement with the claims of artistic

autonomy and the originality and genius of the artist put forth by such figures as Novalis

and Eichendorf. As noted earlier, Mallarm and Czanne are representative of this new

tendency, but Blanchot also cites as exemplars Valry, Hofmannsthal, and Rilke. He

notes that in the case of the aforementioned poets, the poem is profundity opened onto

the experience that makes it possible, the strange impulse that goes from the work toward

the origin of the work (Book 198). Blanchot goes on to emphasize the historical compass

of this tendency, contending that Hlderlin, a century earlier, and Ren Char, a

generation later, attest to the same phenomenon. Blanchot is thus positing a continuity in

the works of these poets which transcends the immediate cultural and historical context in

which they were produced and defies the sort of categorization and classification typical
of literary studies. Blanchot refers to certain traits that characterize this transformation of

modern art and literature. Completed works of literature no longer constitute the telos of

literary activity, and instead only represent a step in the quest for the origin of the work.

The sketch or the fragment is privileged over the completed work since they lead the

writer to a certain point in his search at which the writer must abandon his efforts in order

to try to go beyond that point (Book 199). Another characteristic feature of literary

modernism that Blanchot highlights is the tendency to question and transgress traditional

distinctions made between the various genres and forms of literature and even

foundational distinctions such as those between poetry and prose, literary and

philosophical language. The question of literature and what that word dissimulates gains

traction as previous systems of classifying and understanding it collapse. At this stage,

Blanchot observes:

Only the book matters, such as it is, far from genres, outside of categories-prose,

poetry, novel, testimony-under which it refuses to be classed, and to which it

denies the ability to assign its place and determine its form. A book no longer

belongs to a genre; every book belongs to literature alone, as if literature

possessed beforehand, in their generality, the secrets and formulae that alone

allow what is written to assume the reality of a book. It seems as if genres have

vanished, and literature alone asserted itself, gleamed solitary in the mysterious

clarity that it propagates, and which each literary creation reflects by multiplying

it-as if there were, in short, an "essence" of literature. (Book 200-201, emphasis

mine)

This is what Blanchot means when he says that literature begins when it becomes a
question. The animating question at the heart of literature is not what it is, but what it

means that it is.

Elsewhere, Blanchot says that essays, novels, and poems seem to exist only in

order to allow the work of literature to continue (Infinite xi). In the writings of

Mallarm, and of Hlderlin and Ren Char, Blanchot discovers the expression of a

language of an impersonal character, a language which precedes both writer and reader

and which speaks only in its own voice, indifferent to the participation of either. That is

the condition of its authority, Blanchot says, The book is the symbol of this

autonomous subsistence, it surpasses us, we can do nothing beyond it, and we are

nothing, almost nothing, in what it is (Work 41-42). The idea of the work (loeuvre) of

literature in Blanchot is very different from what is traditionally understood by those

words20. According to Blanchot, the work literature is is neither finished nor unfinished:

it is. What it says is exclusively this: that it is and nothing more. Beyond this, it is

nothing (Space 22). The work exceeds both the writer and the reader, the condition of

the relation between the work and the writer or the reader is predicated on the origin of

the work itself, which is not to be found in the writers intentions nor the readers

interpretation but in that part of the work which expresses only that it is and nothing else.

In fact, when the literary work is perceived outside of any relation to a writer or reader, is

when according to Blanchot, it is closest to its true nature. When we know nothing at all

about the circumstances that contributed to its production, about the history of its creation

- when we do not even know the name of the person who made it possible - it is then that

the work comes closest to itself (Space 221). Blanchot is positing the idea of a literature

that is anterior to subjectivity, a literature that is foremost the expression of the being of
language (Space 181), which is the distance it preserves from everything it stands in

relation to, man, the world and itself. This is the solitude of the work (Space 21), a

solitude that becomes that of the writers and then the readers when they encounter the

work. The writer writes a book, but the book is not yet the work. There is a work only

when, through it, and with the violence of a beginning which is proper to it, the word

being is pronounced. This event occurs when the work becomes the intimacy between

someone who writes it and someone who reads it (Space 22-23). In Blanchots scheme

of things it is the writer and the reader that owe their existence to the work of literature

and not the other way around. In the work of literature worklessness [dsuvrement], as

its always decentered center, holds sway (Infinite 32), and the writer and the reader

encounter it as its own absence. Blanchot presents the work of literature as something in

which the writer participates, rather than something he creates or produces:

For the poet - the one who writes, the "creator" - could never derive the work

from the essential lack of work [dsuvrement]. Never could he, by himself,

cause the pure opening words to spring forth from what is at the origin. That is

why the work is a work only when it becomes the intimacy shared by someone

who writes it and someone who reads it, a space violently opened up by the

contest between the power to speak and the power to hear. (Space 37)

The writer is merely a mediator who comes into the proximity of the interminable and

incessant language of origin and who lets it speak by silencing it (ibid.). For Blanchot,

writing is not a process whereby the use of language is continually refined in order to

attain ever-higher powers of expressivity, an attempt to articulate the yet unsaid. Rather it

is the attempt to open up a space for the unsayable, for an indeterminate, neutral
language that speaks in silence and absence. This constitutes the essential irreducible

ambiguity of literature, on the basis of which Blanchot divides literature into two

slopes21. On the one side, there is the meaningful prose of realist fiction, which tries to

communicate something about the world from the writer to the reader by means of a

work of literature. This is literature as a cultural object that is disseminated and dissected

by the library, the academy and other cultural institutions. On the other side is what

Blanchot calls the work of literature, which does not belong to the world of discourse or

experience. The familiarity of the first slope of literature conceals the other side of

literature which is its origin. Literature on the first slope is merely a secondary use of

language whereby the world is represented to us in a more vivid manner. But as

mentioned earlier, according to Blanchot what is distinctive about literary language is

that it negates both the thing it refers to and the concept it puts in its place. It negates the

work of language understood conventionally as the transmission of information and

meaning and affirms only its own power of naming. This is literatures frivolousness

[dsuvrement] and it points toward the true origin of language. Literature reveals that if

language is traditionally understood to provide a mirror to reality, this reality is only

made possible by language and the distance it imposes between human subjectivity and

this reality. Literature, then,

is not beyond the world, but neither is it the world itself: it is the presence of

things before the world exists, their perseverance after the world has

disappeared, the stubbornness of what remains when everything vanishes and

the dumbfoundedness of what appears when nothing exists. (Work 328)

For Blanchot, the history of modern literature is the movement of literature ever
closer to its origin. He applies the Hegelian notion of negativity to literature to discover

the absence at its heart. In place of the Hegelian contradiction which initiates a dialectical

movement towards the resolution (synthesis) of opposing entities (thesis and antithesis),

Blanchot introduces a series of paradoxes which rehearse the dialectical process in order

to defeat it, to move outside of it. Speech is silence, work is the lack of work, inspiration

the lack of inspiration, essence the lack of essence, and so on. In these paradoxes, each of

the constituting terms becomes inseparable from their contrary. Instead of the synthesis

Hegel determines to be the result of the confrontation of opposites, Blanchot establishes

another movement in which contradiction is irresoluble and the work of literature begins

each time new and singular, as if it had no antecedents. Literatures search for its origin

seems to be pushing it to the point at which all that speaks is an impersonal neutrality

(Book 200). The paradoxes that give rise to and sustain literature do so precisely because

they are unsolvable and it is uncertain how literature depends on them. Dsuvrement is

essential to the writing process because to write is to produce the absence of the work

(worklessness, unworking [dsuvrement]) (Infinite 424). Blanchot conceives the work

of art as an open answer to the question of art and hence the work by itself can discover

only the absence of art (Space 234). Blanchots notion of dsuvrement suggests art as

impotential, as not yet, and it is in this sense that art is impossible. This same movement

appears over and over again in Blanchots essays on the writings of a number of

exemplary and singular figures of literary modernity, such as Sade, Char, Hlderlin,

Rimbaud, Kafka, and Rilke22. In his studies of individual writers, Blanchot points out

how the demand of the work leads these writers to producing a literature characterized

by the dissolution of forms and genres, the disavowal of conventions of plot, character
and setting, and ultimately the dissociation of literature from subjectivity. Elements of the

writers relation to their work, such as the imperative to write, the inability to finish, the

failures, the silences, and the suicides are not explained by recognizable modes of

interpretation such as the psychological, cultural, or historical but rather understood as a

consequence of the writers confrontation with the very possibility of literary creation.

Kafka, for example, perhaps without knowing it [] and, out of anxiety - fear of

impatience - and scrupulous attention to the work's demand, he most often denied himself

the leap which alone permits finishing, the insouciant and happy confidence by which

(momentarily) a limit is placed upon the interminable (Space 81). And in Rilkes

Orpheus sonnets, the figure of Orpheus points toward the origin, where not only secure

existence and the hope of truth and the gods are lacking, but also the poem; where the

power to speak and the power to hear, undergoing their own lack, endure their

impossibility (Space 157). And of course, Mallarm, who discovers the very center of

the Book by granting force and existence only to what is outside [] of the book

(Book 225). Blanchots account therefore substitutes Hegels final synthesis with

Mallarms endless postponement, and literature, having given up any foundational claim

to validity, becomes the embodiment of its endless capacity for contestation.

It has been suggested that Blanchot conflates literatures lack of a transhistorical

essence with literatures essential lack of essence23. The openness of the concept of

literature only seems paradoxical when one begins with the premise that it ought to be

static. In a manner, Blanchot seems to be attempting to rescue literature from its growing

obscurity and social irrelevance by shifting focus from literature in its particular instances

to literature as an unrealizable, universal concept. To better understand such a criticism of

Blanchots notion of literature it might be fruitful to return to the distinction he makes

between the work of literature and the book. Mallarms conception of a future work24,

which would be the telos of all literary activity, inspired Blanchots notion of

dsuvrement as the work of literature. Mallarms poetic activity is not disposed toward

the creation of individual works of literature; it is an ongoing research (Blanchot, Book

56), motivated by the realization that language is a system of infinitely complex spatial

relationships, whose originality neither ordinary geometric space nor the space of

practical life permits us to grasp (Book 235). Blanchot makes clear that the ideal evoked

by Mallarm does not have to correspond to a literal totality. Joyce is mentioned as a

novelist working under Mallarman principles (Faux Pas 171), Melvilles Moby Dick is

mentioned as another work in this vein (Faux Pas 239), but these comparisons are

qualified by the statement One has the same impression before the tales of Edgar Poe as

before Joyce's Ulysses, before Grard de Nerval's sonnets as before Lautramont's

Maldoror (Faux Pas 239-40). Despite describing his project in extremely idealist terms,

Mallarm himself confessed that he had no hope of producing the work in its entirety, but

only wanted to show a fragment of it completed, to make it shine in its glorious

authenticity, the remainder will be hinted at, for an entire lifetime would not suffice to

capture its totality (qtd. in Arnar 42). The participation of the writer in the literary work

is limited to the production of a book. In Mallarms case, his lifelong research

culminated in the creation of his masterpiece, Un Coup de Ds. In Un Coup de Ds,

Mallarm assumes the role of the designer, exploring a new understanding of the spatial

dimensions of the page by engaging with its negative space. The poem as book cannot be

read routinely, because the unusual layout of condensed, fragmented phrases scattered
across a sea of white space forces the reader to engage more actively with it, making

choices about how to read the poem sequentially and establishing links between words

and phrases to create meaning. No single reading of the text predominates, and additional

combinations occur to the reader when the fragments are considered within the context of

the entire poem, and typographical resemblance between dispersed parts suggest further

connections. The variegation of type size and weight also serve as visual signposts of the

different aural registers of the text. Mallarm envisages a very democratic reading for Un

Coup de Ds, the poem initiates a process of creativity which remains incomplete without

the participation of a reader. It disrupts the rhythms and routines of traditional reading

and challenges the reader to gain a sense of the text by actively reconciling its material

presentation with its abstract and fragmentary textual content. The metaphor of the dice

suggests that the reading process is governed by both chance and certainty, the game

cannot have an incontrovertible outcome, but the conventional form of dice dictates that

only a fixed number of possibilities exist. Arnar points out that even in his time the

critical reception of Mallarms works and ideas was highly suspicious if not outright

dismissive. The poet was accused of being a charlatan and an elitist who placed unwanted

and unreasonable demands on his readers. His critics were reacting not only to the

ambiguity of meaning in his writings but also to the plurality of meaning. The

democratization of the reading process envisioned by Mallarm was to his critics

positively anarchic in its disruptiveness. As one critic put it: As soon as words no longer

hold on to precise meaning, they suggest to each person so many different ideas or

images25. This, however, was precisely Mallarms aim. Based on his close study of

developments within mass media, as well as theatrical performance and dance, he sought
the means to assert the continued cultural relevance in the twentieth century and beyond

of the book, which due to its infinitely flexible structure, can adapt to and keep pace with

new media26. He understood that new media do not necessarily replace existing ones but

rather call for the reevaluation and transformation of older media. According to Blanchot,

Mallarms most profound contribution was that he opened literature onto a space with

many dimensions, and [which] cannot be understood except according to this spatial

profundity (Book 236). Similarly, in the introduction to his book, the narrator of

Bartleby describes his projected work as footnotes commenting on a text that is

invisible, which does not mean that it does not exist, since this phantom text could very

well end up held in suspension in the literature of the next millennium (3). The text that

we read is necessarily incomplete, however, it forms a bibliographic conduit between the

(un)written corpus of the writers of the No and an invisible text held in suspension in the

literature of the future. This phantom text definitely evokes Mallarms universal

Book, but what Vila-Matas and his narrator are able to produce is only a book comprised

of footnotes to other books, written and unwritten. So what then are the unique

characteristics of Vila-Matas book and what do these features suggest about the direction

in which literature is headed?

III

In a short review of Bartleby y compaa, Vila-Matas friend and colleague, the

late Roberto Bolao identifies the most conspicuous quality of the book:

Is the book we have before us a novel, a collection of literary or anti-literary

offerings, a miscellaneous volume that doesnt fit any category, a diary of the
 life of a writer, an interweaving of newspaper pieces? The answer, the only

answer that occurs to me just now, is that its something else, something that

might be a blend of all the preceding options, and we might have before us a

twenty-first-century novel, by which I mean a hybrid novel, a gathering together

of the best of fiction and journalism and history and memoir. (Bolao, 308)

As soon as one begins reading Bartleby, one is struck by this question: what am I

reading? This is not a question that is easily answered. Vila-Matas employs a polyphony

of discursive genres, and each of the books 86 footnotes can be read as discrete pieces of

writing in which a variety of literary styles and linguistic registers are deployed. Despite

the fragmentary nature of the text, it sticks very closely to its subject matter, which is

writers who stopped writing, compiling quite an extensive list of writers who preferred

not to write. The books unusual form is perhaps its most striking feature. The narrator

uses a few different names to describe this indeterminate form: this diary (1), a book

of footnotes commenting on an invisible text (1), these cherished notes on Bartlebys

syndrome (12), and also simply these notes without a text (35). Perhaps the best way

to describe the new genre pioneered by Vila-Matas would be the literary essay as

narrative27. By using the distancing effect of a first-person narrator who is not the same as

the author Vila-Matas grants the entire text an air of fictionality. The narrator is a writer,

although he has not written anything since the publication of his last and only novel, and

a bibliophile, and this is perhaps the defining aspect of his life that he shares with the

reader. Otherwise he is a rather reticent and reclusive character who reveals very little

about himself apart from the fact that he works in an office, has no living kin, and lives a

very isolated life perhaps due to shame of the hump on his back. His reliability as a
narrator is questionable but not really in question either. The narrator is consumed by the

solitude of the work of literature; he has few friends and shows no enthusiasm for

anything other than literature, and specifically, the literature of the No. He even takes an

indefinite sick leave from work to work on his book before eventually being let go. The

few friends and acquaintances he mentions are also connections forged in a shared

interest in literature. Most of the footnotes are not only commenting on an invisible text,

but also on the texts that the narrator is reading or has read. It is both a writers diary and

a readers. Strangely for a diary, few autobiographical revelations are forthcoming, the

narrators existence is inextricably linked to his bibliophilia, and even his name is

casually tossed off in a reported conversation with an acquaintance, divulged once and

once only. Thus Vila-Matas gives us a narrator who is strangely impersonal, whose

interiority is comprised almost entirely of literature, and yet speaks in the tortuous,

torturous tone of a melancholic Romantic poet. The playful contradiction in the narrative

voice sustains the other paradoxes at play in the work, the blurring of the boundaries

between fiction and non-fiction, narrative and essay, writing and not writing.

The book is the simultaneous unfolding of two narratives: one in which a motley

group of writers and artists fall into silence in relation to their art, and the other in which

the narrator decides to end his silence and start writing again. By expressly putting these

two narratives in juxtaposition, Vila-Matas flags the close interconnection of these two

seemingly incongruent impulses; writing begins and ends with silence, but silence also

infuses the entire process, and writing is of course literally a silent activity. As the

narrator points out in the case of the mysterious Italian writer without books Bobi

Bazlen: The fact that he never wrote a book forms part of his work (23). Roberto
Bobi Bazlen, who is also the source of this essays title28, is the subject of Daniele Del

Giudices novel Lo stadio di Wimbeldon (Wimbledon Stadium, 1983). Del Giudices

novel follows an unnamed narrators investigation of Bazlens silence. As Vila-Matas

puts Bartlebys refusal at the heart of his novel, Del Giudice builds his novel around

Bazlens. Bartleby and Bazlen (or Del Giudices Bazlen) are both figures of pure

potentiality, they represent the dsuvrement at the center of the literary work. Blanchot

says,

A book, even a fragmentary one, has a center which attracts it. This center is not

fixed, but is displaced by the pressure of the book and circumstances of its

composition. Yet it is also a fixed center which, if it is genuine, displaces itself,

while remaining the same and becoming always more central, more hidden,

more uncertain and more imperious. (Space v)

This is Bazlens role in Del Giudices novel, he is its absent center, which constantly

displaces itself, and becomes more hidden in the course of the narrators investigations.

The narrators quest to understand the nature of Bazlens refusal immediately puts him at

a distance from his subject, creating a mise en abyme, whereby the narrative of the novel

emerges from the abyss of Bazlens silence and becomes, as the narrator of Bartleby

observes, just the account of a decision, the decision to write (24). Of course, the

narrator of Lo stadio agonizes over this decision, he tries to minimize his presence in the

text by privileging the testimony of Bazlens old friends and acquaintances, but instead

his enquiry only seems to lead the narrator to a decision that is the reverse of Bazlens.

From Del Giudices novel, the narrator of Bartleby takes the following lesson:

Between the triviality of pure artistic creativity and the terror of negativity, perhaps
there is room for something different: the moral of form, the pleasure of a well-crafted

object (25)29. The morality of form is Del Giudices response to the impossibility of

writing. Like Lord Chandos Letter, Del Giudices novel acknowledges the crisis of

language and literature, but also leaves open the possibility of new forms of expression,

based on reinterpretation of the classical style. The tension between the writers

imperative to write and his realization of the impossibility of writing are resolved in the

very form of Del Giudices novel, which involves a fusion of critical with poetic or

fictional writing (Lombardi 94). The crisis which compels Bazlen to silence does not

offer itself to critical understanding, instead his refusal to write enacts a sort of critical

excess (ibid.) which deals with with the limits of language and its arbitrariness, the death

of the author, and the deconstruction of historical narratives. One of the footnotes in

Bartleby presents a fictional account of a writer whose wish to write is deterred by a close

familiarity with the sort of criticism that questions the possibility of literary activity.

Maria Lima Mendes, a former work colleague of the narrator, moves to Pariss Latin

Quarter to join the ranks of successive generations of Latin American writers who have

lived and worked in that famous district. First, under the influence of Alain Robbe-Grillet

and the nouveau roman, Maria Lima begins to write a novel, which, however, is quickly

derailed by her decision to eschew conventions of plot and story in favor of detailed

descriptions of quotidian objects. Later, inspired by the texts of Barthes, Sollers,

Kristeva, Pleynet et al she reads in Tel Quel30 magazine, she tries to write again with the

intention of uncovering new avenues of literary expression by the ruthless dismantling

of fiction. However, the more she tries to understand the ideas disseminated in the pages

of Tel Quel, the more she struggles to write because what they were saying, after all,
was that there was nothing else to write and there was nowhere even to begin saying that

it was impossible to write (Vila-Matas 42-43). Maria Limas dilemma is not solved by

the narrators mention of a book by Robbe-Grillet called Ghosts in the Mirror, in which

the author describes the ease with which he and Barthes discredited the notions of

author, narrative and reality, and refers to all that manouvering as the terrorist activities

of those years (44). In the end, Maria does not resume her writing career, but instead

simply changes her name to Violet Desvari31, a name she thinks sounds more like a

novelists. Unlike his old acquaintance, the narrator of Bartleby is not dissuaded by

critical thought that questions the possibility of literary creativity. He incorporates such

critical discourse into the fabric of his work. This strategy is not an innovation of Vila-

Matas. Indeed, Blanchot traces this tendency back to the German Romantics, Novalis and

Schlegel, in whose writings literature encounters its most dangerous meaning that of

interrogating itself in a declarative mode (Infinite 354)32. From his reading of the

German Romantics, Blanchot also develops a notion of fragmentary writing, a mode of

writing which goes beyond the genre of the romantic fragment, beyond the

criticism/fiction divide in an attempt to express the ineffable. Blanchot distinguishes his

notion of the fragmentary from the romantic fragment, which in his view cannot be

considered outside the context of the whole of which it is a part and is therefore still

susceptible to the totalizing impulse. Blanchot observes in the case of Schlegel, the

fragment often seems a means for complacently abandoning oneself to the self rather than

an attempt to elaborate a more rigorous mode of writing (Infinite 359). The kind of

fragmentary writing that Blanchot has in mind instead is one that has no pretense to

closure and would exceed the book as a limit concept. He thinks of the fragmentary as
something that remains open to the field that other fragments constitute along with it

and seeks to maintain the interval (wait or pause) that separates the fragments and makes

of this separation the rhythmic principle of the work at the structural level (ibid.). The

fragmentary imperative [l'exigence du fragmentaire] demands that the writer confront a

radical exteriority that is not divine or metaphysical, a space entirely in question, and

lacking the possibility of an answer.

Vila-Matas responds to the exigency of the fragmentary in exemplary fashion. His

book is comprised of a series of fragments which do not yearn for unrealized and perhaps

unrealizable totality but instead revels in its incompleteness, in its fragmentariness. What

is most charming about the book is the playfulness and levity with which Vila-Matas has

put it together. In stark contrast to Blanchots somber and hermetic style, Vila-Matas

combines an irreverent sense of humor with a casually worn erudition. The book can be

divided into three discursive levels: one is the essay in which the narrator shares his

notion of the literature of the No which is the thread that connects the discrete fragments

of the text, the second in which the same micro-narrative, in which an author resorts to

silence in the face of the impossibility of writing, is repeated over and over again as

elaboration of the narrators theme, and the third in which the narrator describes his own

writing of the text and relates autobiographical anecdotes relevant to his thesis. These

discursive modes do not function in isolation in the text, and often overlap and bleed into

each other. Borgesian precursors to the indeterminate form the narrator chooses for his

work, at once a diary and a collection of notes without a text, include Valerys Cahiers,

Jouberts Carnets, Kafkas Diaries and of course Bazlens Note senza testo. Bartleby

pays homage to these works, the posthumous publications of their authors private
writings. But where such fragmentary forms as the personal diary, the commonplace

book, the occasional essay, the working draft, have been traditionally associated with

confession and introspection, if this kind of impulse exists in Bartleby it has been

displaced from the writer to the work of literature itself. It is perhaps surprising that

Blanchot himself is very dismissive of the diary as a literary form, he sees it as a private

space that the writer recurs to in order to defer the dissolution of subjectivity and

measurable time that is implicit in the demand of writing, a safeguard against the danger

of writing (Book 185). Blanchot insists that since the writer can never know of his work,

the diary can never really log the work in progress33. In Bartleby the diary form is used

nominally, the narrator does not date every entry in his journal, but there is a sense of the

passage of chronological time in the background; nor does he engage in much

contemplation of his personal or public life, increasingly he seems to identify with the

being of the text he is writing, with the voice that throws out words which fragment by

fragment compose the long history of Bartlebys shadow over contemporary literature

(Vila-Matas 47). Thus the rigour of the books scholarship is tempered by its use of the

trivial form of the diary, and the diarys fidelity to the calendar and the presupposed

identity of the author are undermined by its use of fragments which constantly restages

the authors renunciation of his craft and also opens up the text to the discontinuous time

of writing, both in in its relation to an unwritten phantom text and in the profusion of

affinities between individual fragments. Despite his aversion for the diary form,

Blanchots opinion is a little more nuanced when it comes to the subject of Kafkas

diaries which contained numerous sketches and abandoned stories. He acknowledges that

Kafkas journals contain an interplay between Kafkas lived experience and his
experience of writing, but only insofar as [these fragments] do not have a visible

connection with the life from which they seem to come, nor with the work to which they

form the approach (Book 187). It is strange that Blanchot fails to see that these

fragments exist in a field of relation to not only the work that it fails to become but also

to other work, and other writing, past and to come. Instead he argues that this diary can

be written only by becoming imaginary and by immersing itself, like the one who writes

it, in the unreality of fiction (ibid.). Vila-Matas takes Blanchot at his word, and plunges

headfirst into the unreality of fiction.

In Bartleby, as noted earlier, there are three fundamental levels of discourse at

work together. The narrators report on the history of Bartlebys syndrome proceeds with

the logic of an essay, it circles around its central premise constant establishing new

perspectives from which to approach its topic. But Vila-Matas introduces an element of

fiction, of uncertainty even to this level, and invites a few figures of his own invention to

share the stage with the more celebrated personages of literary history. Of course, renown

is relative, and many of the authors included in the company of Bartleby will probably

elude the lay reader. This provides the scope for Vila-Matass fictional characters to

assimilate themselves into the structure of his book. For instance, take the case of the

author Robert Derain, author of the book clipses littraires, an anthology of short

stories written by authors who have all written a single book before renouncing literature.

All the authors and works compiled in this anthology are inventions of Derain. The

narrator of Bartleby writes to Derain to seek aid in his research but also perhaps to

assuage the guilt of subsuming his predecessor into his own narrative. When Derain does

not reply, the narrator informs us that he has written to himself as Derain. Later, the
narrator claims that Derain has really replied to his letter with some suggestions for texts

to include in his work, and yet again when the narrator has met Derains request for

money in exchange for his services. Robert Derain, the attentive reader might notice, is

an invention of Vila-Matas34, so the strange exchange described above, which motivates a

significant number of footnote entries, indicates how essay and fiction together in

Bartleby to evoke the ambiguity inherent in literature between something that is made

and something that merely is. The names of authors serve as a mise en abi me of literary

authority, suggesting the constructed nature of critical discourse as well as Vila-Matas

own narrative. An authors name acquires currency and significance as the result of

reading, re-reading, research and reflection. The names of authors function not simply as

markers of reality but as a set of questions about authors and their reception.

Thus we have gleaned a sense of how Vila-Matas Bartleby y compaa takes the

form of a question posed by literature to literature about literature. It invites its reader to

ask questions about the nature of literature in general but also about its own status as

literature. It recounts the history of the refusal of writers not to paint some kind of

pessimistic picture of the state of contemporary literary production but to suggest that the

crisis of literary expression creates the conditions for a reevaluation of the nature and the

possibilities of literary expression. Vila-Matas locates literatures potentiality in its

enigma and its perennial dissatisfaction with the forms and values with which it has been

understood. Bartleby y compaa does not resolve its formal ambiguity, nor does it

provide the reader with an unequivocal definition of the literature of the No, but the

continued possibility of literary innovation is affirmed by the books reflexive account of

its own creation ex nihilo. The following declaration by Blanchot becomes the formal
thesis of Vila-Matas book: Whoever devotes himself to the work [of literature] is drawn

by it toward the point where it undergoes impossibility (Space 163)35.

Ishan Dasgupta

University of Western Ontario

Notes
1
The other novels in this trilogy are El mal de Montano [Montanos Malady] and Doctor
Pasavento. Montano and Bartleby have both been published by New Directions in
English translations by Jonathan Dunne.
2
http://www.ndbooks.com/author/enrique-vila-matas/
3
Although a published author since 1973, and having significant cultural cache in Spain
and France, Vila-Matas was only translated into English for the first time in 2004. As of
this date, six of his novels (and a collection of short stories) have been translated into
English, all published by New Directions.
4
The critic Roberto Calasso is cited as claiming that Walsers affinity with Bartleby
reveals the similarity between silence and a certain decorative use of language (Qtd. in
Bartleby, 4).
5
Hofmannsthals Letter of Lord Chandos (Ein Brief) has become synonymous in
German literature (and beyond) with the linguistic turn that took shape both in literary
modernism and early twentieth century western philosophy. This idea has deep roots in
the German tradition, stretching back to the eighteenth century, initiated in the works of
such figures as Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Wilhelm von
Humboldt. See Cristina Lafont, The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy,
translated by Jos Medina (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
6
Morton draws a parallel between Chandos encyclopedic project and the intention of the
cartographers in Borges On Precision in the Sciences to design a Map of the Empire
that had the same dimensions as the Empire, and that coincided with it at every point.
Quoted in Michael Morton, Chandos and his Plans, 528. Comparison can also be made
with Mallarmes universal Book and several other works of modernist literature with
similarly totalizing, encyclopedic ambitions such as Joyces Ulysses, Walter Benjamins
Arcades Project etc.
7
Chandos loss of his previous certainty about the direct correspondence between
language and the world parallels Nietzsches critique of language in On Truth and Lies
in a Nonmoral Sense. Nietzsche points out that human beings are emboldened to believe
that they can distinguish truth from falsehood because they have lost sight of the
metaphorical nature of language. This notion of the non-identity between language and
world would be developed further in the twentieth century by such seminal figures as
Heidegger and Wittgenstein among others.
8
This is a reference to Mallarms remark: Je dis: une fleur! Et, hors de l'oubli o ma
voix relgue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d'autre que les calices sus,
musicalement se lve, ide mme et suave, l'absente de tous bouquets (Igitur 251).
Curiously, Blanchot substitutes Mallarms flower [fleur] with a woman [femme].
9
Compare this with Mallarms remark in Crise de vers that the pure work implies the
elocutionary disappearance of the poet.
10
For more detailed readings of Literature and the Right to Death see Rodolphe
Gasch, The Felicities of Paradox, in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, Ed.
Carolyn Bailey Gill, London, New York: Routledge, 1996; Christopher Fynsk, Crossing
the Threshhold: On Literature and the Right to Death, in Maurice Blanchot: The
Demand of Writing, Ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill, London, New York: Routledge, 1996; and
James Swenson, Revolutionary Sentences, in Yale French Studies, vol. 93, 1998, 11
28.
11
One of the philosophical texts that Blanchot responds to when he tackles the question
of literature is Sartres Quest-ce que la littrature (What is Literature?), published in
1948. Blanchot opposes Sartres proposal that it is the writers duty to engage in the
political struggles of his day.
12
Blanchot himself uses this strategy of indirection constantly. His literary essays are
engaged in a conversation with a number of modern philosophers, including but not
limited to Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre and Levinas, but he rarely mentions them directly.
Instead he alludes to them by responding to the language of their works, engaging with it
and working out its implications by testing its limits.
13
This is the title of the first subsection of Blanchots essay on Joubert: Joubert and
Space, The Book to Come, 49. The footnote in Bartleby concerning Joubert is basically a
paraphrase of Blanchots essay, with several passages reproduced verbatim without
citation. This technique of reframing literary source material to create something new is
one Vila-Matas employs frequently over the course of the book. I will return to it in the
final section where I discuss the formal and stylistic characteristics of the novel.
14
For more on the significance of Jouberts wide reading, see David Kinloch, Reading
and Writing in Jouberts Carnets, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 91, No. 2
(1996), pp. 342-54.
15
Robert Greer Cohn has argued that if any text should be considered as an embodiment
of Mallarms plans for Le Livre it should be his final work, the seminal Un Coup de
Ds. See Robert Greer Cohn, Mallarms Un Coup de ds: An Exegesis (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1949).
16
Blanchot cites this thesis from Hegels Aesthetics in two separate essays, The Future
and the Question of Art (SL 214) and The Disappearance of Literature (BC 195).
Hegels assertion has been called his thesis on the end of art, which is a bit of a
misnomer since Hegel does not deny the possibility of art being produced in the future,
only stating that its role is diminished in the modern ethos as compared to Ancient
Greece or in the Middle Ages. The statement in full reads: Art, considered in its highest
vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth
and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier
necessity in reality and occupying its higher place (Hegels Aesthetics 10).
17
For a more thorough study of Blanchots reading of literary modernity in relation to
Hegels philosophical system, see Mark Hewson, Blanchots Reading of Literary
Modernity, arcadia Vol. 39, No. 1, 2004, p.136-147.
18
Hegel posited three forms of art- symbolic, classical, and romantic- each of which
constitute a distinct stage in the history of art and indicate the changing relation between
the work of art and its mode of presentation. Blanchot does not reproduce the Hegelian
schema faithfully but instead evokes it in his description of the various historical
definitions given to art.
19
Romanticism is the obvious point of reference here, but Blanchot traces this tendency
even further back to the Renaissance.
20
Loeuvre is not the outcome of a process in the sense that labour is the means to an end.
This is evident in the original French text of The Space of Literature wherein Blanchot
uses le travail distinctly from loeuvre. Le travail denotes work or labour in terms of the
power and possibility of transforming something in the world. Ann Smock, in her
translator's introduction to The Space of Literature, comments that the difference, in
other words, between loeuvre and le travail is that while le travail is diametrically
opposed to inaction and passivity, loeuvre requires them (13). If loeuvre is to be
understood in terms of having potentiality, meaning that it can be or not be, then it cannot
be comprehended as a work in terms of le travail.
21
This distinction is of course based on the distinction Mallarm makes, in Crise de vers,
between la parole brute (ordinary language) and la parole essentielle (poetic or
literary language). Another binary that Blanchot evokes here is the distinction he himself
makes between the two sides of death. Speaking of the suicide, Blanchot states that the
error in their approach is that they think by making the decision to kill themselves they
have mastered death, but in doing so they have only made death an ideal and therefore
the reality of death has evaded them. Writers are like suicides in that while the latter takes
one death for another, the former takes a book for the work (SL 106). Perhaps this is why
Bartlebys narrator is wary of including suicide Bartlebys in his canon of the writers of
the No, since he also thinks that taking one's own life lacks the nuances, the subtle
inventions of other artists - the game, in short, which is always more imaginative than a
shot in the head - when called on to justify their silence (68). He does make exceptions
for Jacques Vach, Carlos Daz Dufoo, Chamfort, and the Baron of Tieve (one of
Pessoas semi-heteronyms).
22
Apart from Sade and Char, all of these writers are included by Vila-Matas in the
company of Bartleby.
23
For such a critique, see Stephen Adam Schwartz, Faux Pas: Blanchot on the Ontology
of Literature, SubStance 85, 1998. Schwartz argues that at the basis of Blanchots
understanding of literature is a false equivalence between the question of what literature
is and what literature ought to be. Thus, Schwartz states that Blanchot wants to make
literature necessary even if it means denying the status of literature to most of what,
contingently and historically, literature has been(39) and that he displaces onto the
whole of literature norms and aims- the aim to be absolute- that have historically only
concerned a small and recent group of works (40). While it is beyond the scope of this
article to thoroughly argue the merits of this criticism, it should be noted that Blanchot
does not ascribe to literature the aim to be absolute, but rather critiques such
aspirations. The significance, according to Blanchot, of Mallarms preparations for Le
Livre, is not to be found in the latters inclination toward totalization, but rather in the
failure of his grand project.
24
Mallarm also referred to his Book as the Work (L'Oeuvre) and the Great Work (le
Grand Oeuvre) in a letter to Henri Cazalis dated 14 May 1867.
25
Charles Audic, quoted in Arnar, 172-3.
26
The digitization of literature and technological developments such as Kindle and other
e-book readers attest to the resilience and adaptability of the book. Arnar even suggests
that the vast network of the World Wide Web is perhaps the most radical and
disembodied interpretation of [Mallarms] vision (Arnar, 291, 292-5).
27
Scott Esposito describes the genre of Bartleby as the literary essay as novel. I am
hesitant to call Bartleby a novel (even though the fundamental flexibility of the novel
form would perhaps allow such a classification even without qualifying adjectives such
as twenty-first-century or hybrid) and instead prefer the more open term narrative
since it does not sublate the tension between fictional and non-fictional elements in the
book. Esposito highlights the fact that Bartleby is positively saturated with quotes,
references, glosses, and other signs of deep research [] more appropriate to a critical
work than a novel (Esposito, The Fruits of Parasitism).
28
Bazlen is quoted in Bartleby as saying: I believe it is no longer possible to write
books. That is why I no longer write them. Virtually all books are no more than
footnotes, inflated until they become volumes. That is why I write only footnotes. (23).
Bazlen is one of the most odd and enigmatic figures of twentieth century Italian
literature. Bazlen cultivated friendships with seminal literary personalities such as James
Joyce and Eugenio Montale, and was himself very influential in his role as an editorial
consultant for several Italian publishers, but never deigned to publish a book in his
lifetime, preferring to intervene directly in peoples lives, as if writing the lives of others.
His Note senza testo (Notes Without a Text) was published posthumously.
29
The literary critic Patrizia Lombardo is the source of this observation. For Lombardos
reading of Del Giudices novel, see Trieste as Frontier: From Slataper to Bazlen and Del
Giudice.
30
Blanchot was a key figure in the critical constellation of the Tel Quel group, however,
their enthusiasm for Blanchot was tempered by a desire to recruit him to their own avant-
garde cause. For Sollers, Blanchot represented exactly the limit-point of idealist
conceptions of literature, which it is necessary for us to study in much the same way
relatively speaking as Lenin studied Hegel. He added, The work is already far
advanced that will consist not in overturning Blanchots work, but in integrating it
within a dialectical materialist analysis (Qtd. in Hill 119). Hill points out how Sollers
clearly (and perhaps willfully) misreads Blanchot, since the latter expressly argues that
literature is irreducible to the dialectic.
31
In Spanish, the verb desvariar means to rave or to talk nonsense.
32
Blanchots own quest for the origin of writing, of the work of art, led him to
experiment with variety of different literary modes and genres essays, novels, short
narratives [rcits], and fragmentary books. As John Gregg puts it in his book-length study
on Blanchot: If, in Blanchots writing, these traditionally distinct activities have
encroached on each others territory it is because their concerns are essentially the same:
whether in the guise of novelist or critic, he seeks to plumb the depth of the mysteries of
the origin of literature (Gregg 4).
33
As examples of this genre of books which strive in vain to tell the narrative of their
own origins, Blanchot also mentions Batailles LExprience intrieure and Le Coupable,
Rilkes The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Jouberts Carnets, and even Les Chants
de Maldoror, which Blanchot reads as the staging of Isidore Ducasses transformation
into le comte de Lautramont, enacting the passage from the personal Je to the
impersonal Il of writing.
34
Robert Derain has now made it into library catalogues due to the publication of an
interview of Vila-Matas that he conducted. See Robert Derain, Entrevue indite avec
Enrique Vila-Matas. In the interview Vila-Matas confesses that he feels like an
Imposter, I always end up temporarily adopting the personality of one or another of my
characters. [Translation my own]
 Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Bartleby, or On Contingency, Potentialities. Trans. Daniel Heller-

Roazen, Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 243-74.

Arnar, Anna Sigrdur. The book as instrument: Stphane Mallarm, the artist's book, and

the transformation of print culture. University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Book To Come. Trans. Charlotte Mandell, Stanford University

Press, 2003.

---. Faux Pas. Trans. Charlotte Mandell, Stanford University Press, 2001.

---. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson, University of Minnesota Press,

1993.

---. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

---. The Work of Fire. Trans. Charlotte Mandell, Stanford University Press, 1995.

---. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

Bolao, Roberto. Vila-Matass Latest Book, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles,

and Speeches 1998-2003. Trans. Natasha Wimmer, New Directions, 2011, pp. 308-10.

Derain, Robert. Entrevue indite avec Enrique Vila-Matas. Temps Zro: Revue d'tude

des critures Contemporaines, vol. 3, no. 3, 2010.

Esposito, Scott. The Fruits of Parasitism: Unraveling Enrique Vila-Matas Bartleby &

and Co. Montanos Malady. The Quarterly Conversation, April 2004,

http://quarterlyconversation.com/enrique-vila-matas-bartleby-c.

Gregg, John. Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression. Princeton University

Press, 1994.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegels Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. Translated

by T. M. Knox. Oxford; The Clarendon Press, 1975.

Hill, Leslie. The Disappearance of Literature: Blanchot, Surrealism, Futurity.

Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 50 No. 3, Autumn 2011, pp. 117-127.

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings. Trans. Joel

Rotenberg, New York Review of Books, 2005.

Lombardo, Patrizia. Trieste as Frontier: From Slataper to Bazlen and Del Giudice,

Cities, Words, Images: From Poe to Scorsese. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 80-95.

Mallarm, Stphane. Igitur - Divagations - Un Coup de ds. Gallimard, 1976.

Melville, Herman. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street. The Heath

Anthology of American Literature: Volume One. 3rd ed., edited by Paul Lauter and

Richard Yarborough, Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Morton, Michael. "Chandos and His Plans." Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fr

Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 62, no. 3, 1988, pp. 514-539.

Tabucchi, Antonio. Escribir, no escribir. Letras Libres, March 2003,

http://www.letraslibres.com/mexico/escribir-no-escribir.

Vila-Matas, Enrique. Bartleby y compaa. Anagrama, 2000.

---. Bartleby & Co. Trans. Jonathan Dunne, New Directions, 2004.