That Question of Passion, Part I

Passion.
Literature.

One assumes a physical body: a rectangular formation of wood pulp, branded with birthmarks. It slides easily into a knapsack; absorbs stains; burns; yellows and becomes crumbly with age. It has been cloned since the 15th century. It accumulates into villages, miles of apartment buildings ten shelves high, and assembles into clans that stand staunchly together in neat, silent rows. Silent: as a cemetery, bearing, like Pompeii, the imprint of life once lived. When libraries close for the night, their holdings blur into anonymous rectangles, an accumulation of things, trash, holding hostage a warm haven--while people without homes wander the cold streets in search of a cranny in which to sleep.

Mornings: a solitary individual winds her way among the shelves. The rows of rectangles mean nothing to her--only a code of letters and numbers that she has scrawled onto a scrap of paper. She combs code. She locates the match to what is written on her paper. And then: her hand reaches forward. Her fingers close around the rectangular spine. Suddenly, what was a relic, a historic site, a fossil, transforms into an essence that is warm and robust, gargantuan and nimble with aliveness. This silent rectangle loses itself; it streaks and flashes like a comet, and bobs and caresses like a warm sea. When the solitary individual approached the shelves, a breath accompanied her like a spirit, a shadow, a breath that is always-already exhaled into the world, that coursed through her fingers and located its likeness in the spine of the book, clasping that likeness in a chaste but lust-laden embrace that stirred what lives beneath language the way the waves stir what lives on the floor of the sea.

Filaments of text and reader intermingle, and passion, wordlessly, comes to recognize itself.

This visualization continues the second posting of Academy of Readers, and begins my response to Anonymous, who posted a comment. The second posting ended with the question: “Is it because it is too difficult, it requires too much and is too risky, that we don’t interact through our passion more than we do?” Anonymous responded:

A text begins with a sentence. But before that, a text begins with a word. But
before that, a text begins with a letter. But before that, a text begins with a
blank, a void, the anticipation of a letter, a text begins with desire. How many
words, or how few, does a text have to spin to structure a passion?

What most strikes me about this response is the phrase, “structure a passion,” as well as the idea that a text exists before the word, on that threshold between the necessity of utterance and the actual utterance itself. “Structure a passion” offers a fresh line of thought in response to the question of how passion relates to literature. The second posting considered passion as a tool for liberating into life, into discourse, the ‘meat’ of a literary work. It attempted to articulate why one must read with passion and speak with passion about what he or she read, otherwise the potential for a literary work to saturate the present moment is never achieved, and something in the literary work, or in the reading of it, dies, silently--and no one might ever notice this tragedy, only gradually the ranks of readers begin to dwindle and everyone wonders, “What happened?” The phrase “structure a passion,” however, and Anonymous’ comment as a whole, suggests that passion is not merely a key to the text, or an emotive substance that dwells within the text or lives through it, but that passion is synonymous with the text. Thus to read a text is to behold the architecture of passion; a text is, therefore, what it seeks to express. Anonymous’ comment implies that a text anticipates itself--not once but twice: first when it resides on that threshold between being required to be uttered and actually being uttered, and second when, in its completion of having been uttered, it orients its utterance towards the refinding of itself, i.e., towards interpretation (if we assume here an ideal reader who conducts an ideal interpretation by having consciously read with passion). Thus, Anonymous suggests that the relation between passion and literature is this, a tautology: passion is an instance of literature, and literature is an instance of passion. At the same time, however, Anonymous suggests something further: he or she does not speak of passion universally, but rather as a specific instance of passion, a unique passion: “structure a passion.” Thus, each text is its own passion. We don’t always speak of emotions as individual occurrences, and certainly not individual things. An anger. A sadness. An excitement. An anxiety. We don’t use articles with these words. But: a joy (meaning a source of joy), a depression (meaning a state of depression), a rage (it becomes its own thing, so irrational it is). “A passion” implies something more than a mere manifestation of passion, an expression of an emotional state--the state occurring elsewhere than in the expression itself. It implies, rather, a site of passion, in which passion generates itself and is not generated by something or someone who is passionate. “A passion” is a like a fire consuming itself, but since a fire grows by what it consumes, it replenishes itself through its own consumption, perpetuating a cycle of consumption and renewal all the while it appears to be static, an inanimate thing. Thus passion and literature are related by a tautology, but passion is its own tautology, a self-contained paradox.

Perhaps, then, to answer Anonymous’ question, from passion’s point of view it does not require a text, and merely treats the text as kindling, a mode of passing from the necessity (not its own necessity) of utterance to refinding itself beyond utterance, in interpretation. Passion rides on the back of the text, in other words--and in other, more familiar words, now to be taken literally, the text conveys passion. The text--and here I mean the physical text, the uttered words--is negligible, from the point of view of passion. (And when I say “passion” I mean both a specific passion--your passion is different from my passion--as well as passion in the universal sense--your passion may be different from my passion, but it is a fact that we both have passion, and it exists in all of us for the same reasons, and is put to the same purpose.) Passion, or the text, spins words to placate the anxiety of the speaker. How many words are required to structure a passion depends on the extent of the speaker’s anxiety--the anxiety over whether passion will refind itself. Where the words are many, the anxiety of the speaker is high.

I’m afraid, Anonymous, that I haven’t done a good enough job of responding to your comment. Your comment is so interesting, and has tumbled around in my mind all week, and I have much more to say. Lacan is working in the back of my mind as I think through this relation between passion and literature. But I’m trying to hold theorists at bay so as to invent my own answers to my questions, without feeling like I’m not being “correct” in relation to some theoretical text. I am going to return to this subject, though--I know we've only just scratched the surface. Thanks, Anonymous, for posting a comment, and such a rich, thought-provoking one at that.