In my own work as a writer, I too, like Chejfec, feel no need for linear narration. But still I tend to go towards what I see as the centre of things. Whereas for Chejfec, there is no centre; a centre, even if it exists, is provisional. His work throws mine off its axis, questions its assumptions. In the end, of course, the tendency of any writer, if it is true, is the tendency of her own consciousness, despite herself. But only a writer of great profundity can throw into question the practice of another.
In Notes Toward a Pamphlet, translated by Whitney DeVos, we encounter the consciousness of Samich, a poet who publishes very little.
He didn’t consider publication essential and sometimes writing either. From his point of view, the poet operated on the surrounding environment by irradiation . . .Writing was only a probable suffix related to the circumstances of the writer, who could himself produce non-textual, or even non-verbal discursivities, and thus create a work based on dynamic links and constellations, contrary to all that which is derived from the fixation of words.Bits of Samich’s consciousness, whether claimed or unclaimed, are surely wedged inside the being of every writer—or at least any writer worth anything.
The text, bookended by a brief introduction and a coda, is comprised of a set of numbered notes, each one forming a separate paragraph. They create a space which Samich appears to secrete from his being and also includes things that approach or impinge on it. Two words that occur several times in the work are “alveolar” and “irradiation”, either as descriptions of Samich’s life or of his work. They are two very different ideas, one being corporeal and visceral, the other almost immaterial.
“This alveolar structure is important, because it permits a movement away from capillary or rhizomatic logic,” Chejfec said in an interview, while talking about another one of his works, The Incompletes. The numbered paragraphs, that is, the notes, are in fact like alveoli, which may grow in any direction, the “irradiation” a consequence of such growth.
Significantly, both these ideas have to do with space rather than time, and like much of Chejfec’s work, Notes achieves a suspension of time’s forward movement. It is as if everything here is on the same temporal plane, and the paragraphs, separated numerically, create a flatness on which things are suspended all at once, each with their own attributes.
“Digression” and “slippage” are another pair of words that appear often in the Notes.
9.4.1. Two complementary, if sometimes contradictory, logics in Samich. The slippery and digressive tendency; and the paradigm of the alveolar, enemy of the linear, which grows in all directions.
and
2.2. He comes back again and again to the theme of digression. It appears as a stone encrusted within the depths of his mineral character and his mysterious beliefs. Samich considers different hypotheses. He thinks digression is porous. On other occasions, he thinks digression is not only porous, but also alveolar. Each thing is somehow related to everything else, nothing is at a remove from another thing. Nothing is linear.
There is no need then for the inevitable forward movement, or the powerful centre and the weakened periphery. Perhaps only someone with “a way of being in the world that privileges discretion over protagonism”, like Samich, can recognize this in its full force. And in Notes Toward a Pamphlet, a world of endless digressions is the real discovery, a space where unknown perceptions and experiences can take place. This understanding of the alveolar, the digressive and the non-linear, I believe, is not separate from the cultural history and space that Chejfec came from, one where perhaps the fixity of the linear and its hierarchies have created unending anguish.
In the phrase “each thing is somehow related to everything else” lies a description of Chejfec’s gaze.
“If there is beauty in the world, Delia and I thought, if something moves us to the point we are unable to breathe; if something presses our recollections to the very limits of memory, so they can never be as they were, that something lives in darkness and rarely makes itself known,” Chejfec’s narrator writes in The Dark.
In all his works, the biographical and the non-biographical are equal in Chejfec’s sight, without a sense of foreground or background, without a sense of hierarchy: “A characteristic moribund glow covers the pages like a cloak. That light is a key ingredient in this situation, because contained within it are the solitude and silence, which, on that particular night of the universe, Samich feels, reveals his own sidereal dimensions.”
A singular achievement of Chejfec’s work is its tone, something which no writer can actually control, something that is despite itself and the writer’s intentions. In Notes, thought and reflection can be elliptical, sentences are contradicted by the ones that follow. Chejfec’s language is capable of recording the smallest oscillations in people and things, tremblings, disturbances and receptivities. But it is as if his vision is telescopic, and all the small things he sees clearly are viewed from a great distance. Yet even these elements are part of what makes a writer’s tone. One can only tentatively approach what makes up the rest. Perhaps the tone comes also from a consciousness that knows it cannot be one with things in the world because everything else is as much in movement as consciousness itself.
Much work—in the English language at least—that has turned its back on narrative seem obvious in that rejection. And what comes about in this rejection is only that; an experimentation that has no individual core or a relatedness to the human, only a world of words looking at itself. In Chejfec, one is suspended, even floating at times, but it is a world in which gravity always exists.
19.1. He adheres to everyday melancholy without strength, with the detachment of someone who’s lost something before ever having had it. He starts thinking about the existence of a parallel time. Parallel time has the virtue of creating, also, a parallel space. This comforts him.
19.1.1. He feels the weight of the earth on his head.
If the pamphlet form has an extreme range—it can be declarative and significant, or slight and unimportant—Chejfec has combined both those elements with his characteristic brilliance.
As things hurtle forward in the world, Notes Toward a Pamphlet seems to have a different direction, a centripetal force. As the narrator says of Baroni’s sculptural creations in Baroni, A Journey, these Notes may be “meaningful and mute at once, eloquent and inexpressive”. Chejfec was a writer who held himself at a distance so he could see the limits of things. That is also precisely what gives him an empathy for the provisional, the contradictory, the fluctuating, the absent.
