speaking in your place

A thought in relation to the three quotes below: The subject is not first of all a free subject but one shackled by the Symbolic – by language and by convention. Already franked propositions and pre-set grammars of response are clamped into the soul. But freedom happens when this subject, first of all entrapped and tangled in the Symbolic, is forced to make space outside these received significances - or forced to recognise and name the specificity of his/her singular relation to these pre-given significances. And without the ‘concentration’ (under pressure of an arbitrary decree or law) that Proust speaks of you’ll find these pre-given grammars and utterances speaking in your place. Another thought would be that much of Beckett’s prose is about the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of this ‘freedom’.

But my train of thought led me yet further. If reality were indeed a sort of waste product of experience, more or less the same for each of us, since when we speak of bad weather, a war, a taxi rank, a brightly lit restaurant, a garden full of flowers, everybody knows what we mean, if reality were no more than this, no doubt a sort of cinematograph film of these things would be sufficient and the ‘style’, the ‘literature’ that departed from the simple date that they provide would be superfluous and artificial. But was it true that reality was no more than this? If I tried to understand what actually happens at the moment when a thing makes some particular impression upon one – on the day, for instance, when as I crossed the bridge over the Vivonne the shadow of a cloud upon the water made me cry: “Gosh!” and jump for joy; or the occasion when, hearing a phrase of Bergotte’s, all that I had disengaged from my impression was the not especially relevant remark: “How splendid!”; or the words I had once heard Bloch use in exasperation at some piece of bad behaviour, words quite inappropriate to a very commonplace incident: “I must say that that sort of conduct seems to me absolutely fantastic!”; or that evening when, flattered at the politeness which the Guarmantes had shown to me as their guest and also a little intoxicated by the wines which I had drunk in their house, I could not help saying to myself half aloud as I came away alone: “They really are delightful people and I should be happy to see them everyday of my life” – I realised that the words in each case were a long way removed from the impressions that I or Bloch had in fact received. So that the essential, the only true book, though in the ordinary sense of the word does not have to be “invented” by a great writer – for it exists already in each one of us – has to be translated by him. The function and the task of the writer are those of a translator.