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Isn't it AMAZING?? This is the bit that I thought simultaneously justified both of us (long, long quote) - seems to account for both a readerly & a writerly perspective and do justice to the complexity of each side, and their interrelation:
[S]tarting from the book, an author exists and merges with his book. When Kafka chances to write the sentence "He was looking out the window', he is - as he says - in a state of inspiration such that the sentence is already perfect. The point is that he is the author of it - or rather that, because of it, he is an author: it is the source of his existence, he has made it and it makes him, it is himself and he is completely what it is. This is the reason for his joy, his pure and perfect joy. Whatever he might write, 'the sentence is already perfect'. This is the strange and profound certainty which art makes into a goal for itself. What is written is neither well nor badly written, neither important nor frivolous, memorable nor forgettable: it is the perfect act through which what was nothing when it was inside emerges into the monumental reality of the outside as something which is necessarily true, as a translation which is necessarily faithful, since the person it translates exists only through it and in it... But what is the result of this? The writer who is completely gathered up and enclosed in the sentence 'He was looking out the window' apparently cannot be asked to justify this sentence, since for him nothing else exists. But at least the sentence exists, and if it really exists to the point of making the person who wrote it a writer, this is because it is not just his sentence, but a sentence that belongs to other people, people who can read it - it is a universal sentence.
At this point, a disconcerting ordeal begins. The author sees other people taking an interest in his work, but the interest they take in it is different from the interest that made it a pure expression of himself, and that different interest changes the work, transforms it into something different, something in which he does not recognize the original perfection. For him the work has disappeared, it has become a work belonging to other people, a work which includes them and does not include him, a book which derives its value form other books, which is original if it does not resemble them, which is understood because it is a reflection of them. Now the writer cannot disregard this new stage. As we have seen, he exists only in his work, but the work exists only when it has become this public, alien reality, made and unmade by colliding with other realities. |
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