Index Card 5: Body and Writing.

Walter Benjamin on Proust:

"The doctors were powerless in the face of his malady; not so the writer, who very systematically placed it in his service. To begin with the most external aspect, he was a perfect stage director of his sickness.. Even as a writer of letters he extracted the most singular effects from his malady. 'The wheezing of my breath is drowning out the sorrow of my pen..' But that is not all, nor is it the fact that his sickness removed him from fashionable living. This asthma became part of his art - if indeed his art did not create it. Proust's syntax rhythmically and step by step reproduces the fear of suffocating. And his ironic, philosophical, didactic reflections invariably are the deep breath with which he shakes off the weight of memories. On a larger scale, however, the threatening suffocating crisis was death, which he was constantly aware of, even when writing. A physiology of style would take us into the innermost core of his creativeness."

Barthes on Michelet:

'Michelet's disease is the migraine, that mixture of vertigo and nausea.. Michelet organises his physical weakness as a parasite would do, i.e., he burrows into the heart of historical substance, feeds on it, grows in it, and existing only by its means triumphantly invades it. Work, in other words being a nutritive habit in which every weakness is certain of being a value, migraines are here transferred, i.e., rescued, endowed with signification.."

Re Proust, then: it is not as a disguised referent that asthma enters his work ('ha, here we see a veiled mention of his illness'), but something like the very rhythm of asthma, which underwrites his sentences and gives to them a singularity of cadence. Asthma is carried over into the prose 'metaphorically': just as metaphor refunctions the familiar within the unfamiliar (or vice versa), so the rhythm of asthma is transmuted within the unfamiliar terrain of writing. The work does not refer to asthma but incorporates it, uses and tranforms it. Compare this with WB's own heart condition, the periodic palpitations, which he 'reintroduced' into his writing. Just as his body had periodically to pause, so it is with his prose. Benjamin's insight into Proust is thus simultaneously a mirror held up to his self.

This is what Barthes will name 'style', the revelation and resurrection within the work of the writer's body -

'Whatever is distinctive in a text is bodily, it is where the writer's desire shows through: whatever is styleless is so because it is disembodied."