The substance of all writing lives

To read Brian Castro's piece in the Sydney Review of Books on W. G. Sebald's A Place in the Country is to be filled with a rapt anxiety, as if you've just been given what turns out to be a nestled series of semi-transparent boxes that you have to hold onto with your fingertips in case, just by trying to keep the pieces from falling out, the whole thing breaks in your hands. Of course, I will have to read the essay again. I imagine it was the lepidopterist in Nabokov that understood rereading to be the only way to keep such shells from getting crushed. It is enough that Castro's prose is as shaped by the slow-developing beauties of 'scribal-ambulism' that he identifies in Sebald, Walser, Rousseau (the boxes could well be infinite):

Sebald’s beginnings have a sinuous resistance to beginning. After all, if writing is such a compulsive burden, then at least walking exercises a different compulsive faculty that exorcises thought. Scribal-ambulism then, may have a curative effect on melancholia, but one that Rousseau found was, in the end, untenable. The clarity of the world, for which this ultimate autobiographer yearned, the transparency he sought, could not be sustained. As Jean Starobinski asserts, the inner life and external reality cannot be compatible. Interiority is essentially a failure in relating to reality, and this is the substance of all writing lives.

That is why the beginning of each ‘walk’ taken by Sebald, by Walser, by Rousseau, embodies anxiety. It is a preparation for meeting the shock of the real and its resistance to being possessed by the mind. Anyone aware of sensible seeing would understand the furtive nature of writing, its opposition to clarity and transparency, its irrational refusal to speak for its author, its invention of a negative dialectic. There is a lot of fiddling about in order to get into a place, and that ‘place’ is ultimately a place in the language which will not yield to a universal historiography – Starobinski, for example, avoids dates in his study of Rousseau.

I will ask: is it possible to (re)read and walk at the same time? I would like to do that.

So now I am alone in the world

'So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own.' Thus begins Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker and for pages we walk with him -- so close that we could be inside his head as he rambles along the unimaginable country lanes stretching then out of Paris and looks out at the child who has been convinced not to come near him any more, or the elderly veterans whose natural affability has been poisoned, as he claims, by evil reports which he is powerless to prevent -- and so it comes as a huge surprise when, as he describes in the Second Walk, after being knocked unconscious by a runaway Great Dane, which sets him falling down a slope and injuring his jaw and the left side of his body:

My wife's cries when she saw me made me realise I was in a worse state than I had thought. (p. 40)

The mention of this wife, or woman, was enough to change my reading of the rest of the book: how to read about solitude and the agonies and comforts of such solitude, when all along there has been a woman intimate to him whose company is so assumed, so invisible, that it rates almost as nothing at all? Much as I loved the rhythm of the writing and the elongated meditations, even rants, it was also spoilt by an imagined Pythonesque version of the book that begins:

'So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own.'

'No you're not.'

'Shut up.'