Wednesday, the 26th of October
Dear Daniel,
You’ve commanded much of my attention lately – commanded, because I’ve been hard pressed to think of anything else. Especially while reading your diaries from the 1960s, not published until the mid-80s. The fact that I can read them, without being polished into self-mythologising monuments to the great writer, makes them especially dear to me. They brim with the hopes and anguishes, both banal and tragic, of a then still unpublished writer’s life, who would only later go on to publish the cult classics like Aankomen in Avignon (Arriving in Avignon: A Record) and Praag schrijven (Writing Prague). Much more than private diaries, they are a form of total writing, or as you call it, ‘a single integral, continual daybook and book of everything.’
There are many ways to read them: as diaries proper, a daily account of life as it is lived; as intellectual journals, an introduction to matters of literary composition and narrative technique; as an oblique chronicle of a turbulent period of history – oblique because of the eccentric position you, Daniël Robberechts, had chosen as a self-professed country writer in a provincial part of Belgium.
For me, they have been a veritable éducation sentimentale. If Flaubert’s novel of sentiments is about the lack of adequate forms left to us by the failure of the 1848 revolution, leaving us with a ‘world of things but not enough forms’ (all the while contributing, in a brilliant way, precisely such a form able to demonstrate the pathologies of an impoverished, alienated, thingified present), then your diaries offer us a way to reconstruct the search, during the both liberatory and lacking decade of the 1960s, for just such adequate forms. For Flaubert, this was impossible. His books paint an unsparing, bitter picture of the world, robbed of all illusions. You are less doubtful. It’s writing that stands out for the uncompromising way it wants to recover an unalienated way of living through a radical subjectivism. If the unexamined life is not worth living, as Adorno maintained, here we have a life that is thoroughly examined.
And that includes sex. One of the texts documented in your diaries, especially in Dagboek ’66–’68 (Diary ’66–’68), sparingly called ‘Sex’ (to my knowledge, it was never published – may I ask why?) was intended as a personal, subjective phenomenology. The core question in your words: why does sex, equated not with marital, ‘just-bodily’ sexuality, continue to fascinate me even though I know I don’t stand to gain anything by it? Meaning that by then you were committed to a life of monogamy, and all acts outside of those norms were relegated to the realm of fantasy. And to writing. This, to me, seems a split running through your work: your mode of life writing, or what you call ‘the compromising writing,’ relates to transgression but it is committed to a life that is thoroughly encased in bourgeois forms – the married coupled with child. So I have the continuing sense that there is an examined life here, but an unlived life: there runs an unrest, an urge through these diaries, often sexual but obsessive in any case – and I wonder if these two, the obsessive examination and the sexual transgression, are not a mirror of each other? Is writing a way to dispel this urge, this unrest?
I wonder if I ask this question because of my own restlessness, and that’s why I feel attracted to your unflinching commitment to writing. Do I want to settle down into a similar life? A question and a letter for another day.
Regards,
Frank
PS
Here’s another thing I noticed – usually I read your diaries in bed. And when I read in bed, it’s my body that reads, and my mind is – well, not switched off entirely, but not fully in control. In my petrol-blue chair, it’s my head that is idealised as the pure receptacle. And it’s the matters of literary composition and narration that command attention; lying down, the sensual aspects of reading come to the fore, and the cerebral, so to speak, settles down, and other avenues for communication open up, and the existential aspects of your work, its rueful humanity, start to speak to me.
Perhaps especially now, as I have a nasty cold enveloping my mind in a thick mist. I don’t know where to leave my body or go with it, let alone listen to my body or get in touch with my body, or any of the admonitions usually waved, including by the voice in my head. You would probably nap and/or masturbate. I’ll crawl under my blanket and read a few snippets from your diary. I’ll write again soon.
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Thursday, the 27th of October
Dear Daniel,
Why do I feel such urgency to write to you? Of course it’s because your writing opens so many new possibilities for me for writing. (Less in life perhaps, although I envy the uncompromising attitude towards it.) What to respond to? (The difficulty of any letter.)
Your problems are akin to mine (not all of them: I have no fantasies to do a ménage à trois, but that’s a minor detail). But I share the preoccupation with a new sexuality, as a facet of unalienated, integrated life. ‘What would not happen if all vulgarity, ugliness and clandestinity was expurgated from sex,’ you wonder, referring, I presume, to the fact that the split which in conventional descriptions of the 1960s as an era of unprecedented sexual liberation seems to have been overcome, simply persists under in new guises. And perhaps the erotic is complicit in this? Making a distinction yourself between erotic writing and pornography, you write that ‘for the erotic the what is important (for example Pauline Réage) while for porn the how is important.’ After which you ask yourself, between brackets, if the latter should always be porn. Perhaps your writing tries to bring in the description of the how in a non-pornographic way?
In any case, your attention seems mostly to have been towards pornography. I think I know why, since at that very moment you are working on the book that would later be called Tegen het personage (Against the Character), in which you break with the rules of the literary game we know as ‘the novel,’ which centres on characters with thoughts which conventionally have to be interesting. But usually those characters who are having all these lively experiences and thoughts have no body. Whole swaths of visceral reality are removed from view. Pornography, like the writing you were painstakingly trying to bring into the world, bids farewell to characters. What we see is pure meat. This farewell to the character coincides with the rediscovery of the body, simply by forming its flipside, the underbelly which is so familiar to us in all its day-to-day functions but which we hardly get to see in literature.
Hypothesis: you want to bring the body back into writing by detailing the how. Hence the consistency, in a book like TXT (published posthumously in 1994) of setting side by side the minutiae of a car ride through the countryside, sex scenes, a fit of diarrhoea, waiting in line at the local post office. Efforts in description, pointing towards the unconventionally inter-esting, the unsuspectedly interesting.
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Friday, the 28th of October
Dear Daniel,
Diaries and letters have a lot in common: both are not public genres, but have often been used to publicise things that were intimately conveyed, but publicly shunned. I think this is key to the intimacy that literature can provide. And I think your writing has been revelatory for precisely this reason. Both the diaristic and the epistolary register the breakdown of the classical norms and the advent of realism and eventually the breakthrough of those bodily sensations and experiences in representation.
It was a very fond moment when you mentioned reading Henry James. ‘Fond,’ a word both Henry James and I love, for it has an unmistakable erotic charge, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has shown. It points to the relationship between sensuality and textuality. His novels are notorious for their convoluted syntax, but they seduce at the same time by their exquisite game of hide and seek, of putting us both in the know and keeping us out of knowledge. I remember parsing out the words and double entendres as I was reading him, obsessively, over a few months, back in 2015 and 2016. I remember very few events and things distinctively, but what I do remember is how everything became shrouded in clouds of consciousness, in which knowing and unknowing were hard to separate. For many readers this signalled the disintegration of consciousness, but could it not be the other way around? As in, a way to return the self to its relational web. The stirrings of decentralised consciousness.
This is where life, my life and the life of others, and writing, intersect for me.
Regards,
Frank