The Residue of Achievement
Notes Without a Text
by Roberto Bazlen, edited and introduced by Roberto Calasso
tr. Alex Andriesse
(Dalkey Archive Press, Nov. 2019)
Review by Daniel Green
Since I came to Notes Without a Text unfamiliar with its author, Roberto Bazlan—like, presumably, most readers of this book, which marks the first translation of his writing into English—I first sought out what information I could about Bazlen (known to his friends and colleagues, I discovered, as “Bobi”). Little criticism of his writing exists—at least not in English—but that is unsurprising, since not only have Bazlen’s writings long remained untranslated, but were in fact never published at all during his lifetime. Bazlen didn’t merely choose to keep his work out of circulation (a version of Kafka, say), but actually left almost no tangible work at all. Indeed, Bazlen seems to have approached his one major creative effort, a novel called The Sea Captain, in a way that deliberately ensured it could not be completed. “It is,” writes Roberto Calasso in his introduction to Notes Without a Text, “a part—and a decisive part—of Bazlen’s work not to have produced any work.”
To be fair, Bazlen, also a translator and an advisor to Italian publishers who was instrumental in bringing many important modern writers to the attention of Italian readers, did not simply harbor some sort of self-destructive impulse: his refusal to publish was largely the material manifestation of his philosophical orientation to literature. Calasso explains further that “the work as a transformation of material is never supposed to find a final and stable form; the work as a projection…is no longer active, remains entrusted to the singular ‘I,’ emancipated and miserable, the most dreadful trap.” Bazlen saw writing as an adjunct to life, and valuable as a realization of life itself, which literature can only approximate if relegated simply to “representation.” Since Bazlen regarded life as indefinite, always in flux, so too would his writing necessarily remain subject to revision, his “work” unfinished.
It might be possible then to speak of Bazlen’s “achievement” (excluding his work as translator and consultant), even though by conventional measures there is really no palpable achievement at all, only its residue as offered in these now published fragments. It is as if complete silence in its way implied a kind of aesthetic finality that Bazlen could not accept, and so instead he pursued a writing project that precluded such finality. If this makes it difficult for us to assess the project as literature, for Bazlen, the pursuit itself substitutes for the work as literary object, playing its part in Bazlen’s performance of the role of man of letters (at which he was by all accounts very successful if his influence and inspiration are the criteria of judgment), even if to most observers the fruits of this activity remain invisible.
But is it still possible to assess the visible remnants of the project—primarily the extant pieces of The Sea Captain, but also the other samplings collected in Notes Without a Text—as a literary endeavor, beyond simply noting its fragmentary nature and perhaps speculating on what might have been? If we grant Bobi Bazlen the integrity of his idiosyncratic principles, can we say that their manifestation in this book finally does provide us with an aesthetically integrated reading experience? If not, does that matter? If we say, for example, that the relatively complete portions of The Sea Captain stand on their own rather well, that individual sections have a kind of stark narrative power, is this merely to grant them a certain minor significance, of the sort we might assign to any promising works that were never finished, or would that actually trivialize Bazlen’s intentions, since to produce a “major” work of conventional literary art was evidently not his ambition in the first place? Would any kind of customary critical judgment really be relevant to the “work” Bazlen left as his legacy, if something so manifestly defined by an essential absence can be perceived as a legacy?
In the three standalone chapters of The Sea Captain presented in the book, and in the additional fragments and notes taken from Bazlen’s notebooks, it is possible to see some rough approximation of what the novel might have been like, although the fragments are various and even contradictory enough that the final version of the novel—if there could have such a thing—must remain hazy supposition. Still, even this apparitional facsimile is a fascinating creation, and to some extent the indeterminate status of the text only makes The Sea Captain more resonant with implications, all of which are equally evocative, albeit also equally superfluous, since the text in which they might signify is destined to be endlessly provisional. Perhaps this is less the case with most unfinished works, but here it isn’t so much that the text’s ultimate consummation is left to the reader’s imagination, but that Bazlen left so much for his own imagination to assimilate.
The “finished” sections of The Sea Captain acquaint us with the captain and his wife, their estrangement evoked very briskly in the first few pages. A turning point of sorts is reached when, during one of the husband’s increasingly infrequent homecomings after a prolonged period at sea, the wife presents her husband with a pair of red trousers she has sewn for him, a seemingly thoughtful if quotidian gesture that nevertheless seems to crystallize the marital differences that have grown between them. “What am I to do with red trousers?” the captain wonders. “Why should I sew?” the wife asks herself, each concluding the other, after all this time, simply no longer understands. The captain spends ever longer time away on his ship, while in the meantime his wife back home starts spending her time at the Tavern, along with a group of men known only as Craterface, the One-Eyed Man, and Peg-leg. She has received news her husband has died in a shipwreck, and her subsequent behavior seems like some combination of revenge, liberation and a kind of despair over the wreckage of her marriage.
The second completed section, “Voyage,” returns to the captain and the voyage on which he had reportedly died. Eventually we learn, however, that in fact the captain survived the shipwreck, and in “Whale,” he tells of being swallowed by a whale. In “Shipwreck” we get a more detailed account of the captain swimming to a coral atoll, from which he is ultimately rescued. “Shipwreck” is itself fragmentary, and is supplemented with often cursory notes further developing the captain’s journey from ship to island. Included in the notes is an inserted one from Bazlen to himself, in which he ponders the difficulties of realizing the storytelling form he has chosen:
Here—the first difficulty for the narrator—because there’s a man swimming in the water, and what has to be said in such circumstances—that he becomes more and more tired, and what thoughts he has, and at what point his lovely plasticity is going to arrive at its end—and his thoughts are only fragments, splinters.
A few lines later, Bazlen reluctantly acknowledges that “between the shipwreck and the island, there must be a certain number of pages.” It seems likely it is this recognition—that writing a work of fiction might involve working out certain laborious requirements, that it is not a process of perpetual inspiration—that led Bazlen to the serial “reductions” of his manuscript, a refusal to settle for the merely efficient, resulting in the severely reduced textual remainder he has left us.
A substantial number of pages in Notes Without a Text (about twice the number taken up by the extant version of The Sea Captain) is devoted to the further notes regarding the novel left in several notebooks (found in a suitcase) and recovered following Bazlen’s death in 1965. These pages generally show Bazlen’s intent to structure The Sea Captain as a pastiche of sorts of Homer’s Odyssey. It shows the captain going on adventures to “The Land of the Fishermen” and the “Gray City,” meeting such figures as “The Girl in the Woods” and “The Burgomaster’s Daughter.” There are also sections on the captain’s return home to his wife. The notebooks thus seem to tell us that Bazlen indeed had a synoptic view of what his novel might become, so that his inability to complete it was not a failure of conceptual imagination but something closer to an impatience with the seemingly perfunctory elaborations required in the execution of a long work of fiction.
Also included in Notes Without a Text is a selection of notebook entries specifically designated “Notes Without a Text,” as well as a series of “Editorial Letters” Bazlen exchanged with publishers, making recommendations about the worthiness of books being proposed for publication in Italy. The former are a species of philosophical contemplation more than literary criticism, ranging in length from sentence-long aphorisms to a paragraph or two of more extended thoughts. The notes take on a wide variety of subjects, from art and literature to reflections on religion, death, and national character. Some of these entries are pithy and insightful—“The theater requires you to look within. Cinema forces you to look”—but it must be said that others seem to reflect Bazlen’s idiosyncratic interests and obsessions, and are of less interest to readers not looking to Bazlen as a source of enlightenment. (This is especially true of Bazlen’s takes on the characteristics of various nationalities—English, Italian, German—which mostly seem gratuitous and often offensive.)
One section surely of interest to anyone reading The Sea Captain is the final entry in Notebook “E,” entitled “Anti-Odysseus.” Here Bazlen ponders the implications of the Odysseus story, implying that in his own novel he was writing an “anti-Odysseus,” updated for the modern world. It is, of course, tempting to look for clues here to what Bazlen might have been up to in The Sea Captain. Certainly, this passage appears to suggest a fully-formed idea of what such an update might consist:
He who, out of fidelity to a woman, is constantly getting caught up in adventures, and doesn’t take notice of what he encounters on his adventures, eventually, untransformed, finds the woman again, untransformed as well—the creative life comes to an end and the Christian family begins.
The remaining pages in Notes Without a Text reproduce Bazlen’s editorial letters. Here again it is tempting to look for indications in his literary opinions of the sort of fiction to which he was partial, thereby elucidating what he might have been trying to accomplish in The Sea Captain, but unfortunately the message we can take from the letters is decidedly mixed. One of the most substantial of the letters is the first presented, a discussion of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Bazlen recognizes the literary quality of the novel (“it remains one of the biggest of all the great non-conformist narrative experiments undertaken since the First World War”), but also warns the publisher of the commercial risks involved in publishing such a long and forbidding work. In general, Bazlen is quite opinionated about the books he considers, and this comes across least convincingly in his abrupt dismissals of Alain Robbe-Grillet and William Gaddis. About Maurice Blanchot, Bazlen expresses some reluctant respect, but recommends publishing L’espace littéraire based solely on Blanchot’s chapter on the Orpheus myth, which Bazlen considers exemplary. On the other hand, Bazlen expresses unreserved admiration for Knut Hamsun (“one of the last great European novelists”), which would seem to suggest an affinity for early European modernism.
The Sea Captain certainly invokes the “mythic method” employed by modernists such as Joyce, but in its use of a kind of hallucinatory fabulation, it also exhibits traits associated with some variants of postmodernism. It is perhaps this potential intersection between the modern and the postmodern that makes the unfinished state of Bazlen’s novel most regrettable. Such a work (somewhat reminiscent of, say, Italo Calvino) might have been a worthy contribution to postwar European fiction. Notes Without a Text accordingly provides a salutary service in making what remains of The Sea Captain available. Arguably completeness justifies publishing the “Notes Without a Text” and the editorial letters along with it as well, giving us everything Bazlen chose to preserve, but they don’t substantially alter the legacy Bazlen is likely to leave as a writer who most resolutely tested the proposition that writing is an activity, not a product.
Daniel Green is a literary critic whose essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, both online and in print. He maintains the literary blog, The Reading Experience, and is the author of Beyond the Blurb: On Critics and Criticism (Cow Eye Press).
Banner: Roberto Bazlen (left) with Roberto Calasso (right). Image subject to copyright.