Page (Rectangle)

Golub, Spencer

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-31889-5_1

Spencer Golub²

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ABSTRACT

Here, I offer instances of lightness, darkness, and striation, the progressive action of digression, self-interruption so as purposely to block and frustrate the linear process of thought, to press against the limiting agency of written language, to live inside the thickness of the line. To perform an object ontology that slips the bonds of epistemological hinge beliefs. To identify the Project that exceeds the Book, as is the case in Heidegger and Roubaud. Flipped and missing pages, black and marbled pages. Stage presence and temporal presencing—the “now” versus the “always already” (in Heidegger). Close readings of particular pages in Sterne, Robbe-Grillet, and Roubaud in keeping with the Heideggerian theme of unconcealment, of things organically coming into presence rather than merely being revealed.

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Notes

1.
Lee Braver, Heidegger: Thinking of Being (Malden: Polity Press, 2016), 49.
2.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), C§23:105, 102–3, C§23:110, 106–7, C§24:110, 107, C§24:111, 107–8, C§24:112, 109, C§24:113, 110–11.
3.
Ibid., C§22:103–4, 100–1.
4.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The Blue Book,” in The Blue and Brown Books, trans. Rush Rhees (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 2.
5.
Heidegger, Being and Time, §42, 41 and 42; Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University, 2000), §111, 153.
6.
I am borrowing “enduring” and “holds sway” from Heidegger’s discussion of how enframing does and does not enable revealing/unconcealing in “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013).
7.
Harry Mathews, Selected Declarations of Dependence (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1996), 58. All citations in the body of the writing refer to this edition of the work.
8.
Gertrude Stein, “Saving the Sentence,” in How to Write (New York: Dover Publications, 1975), 19.
9.
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, §101, 141.
10.
Ibid., §100, 139.
11.
Ibid., §122, 170. “Heidegger claims that techne is not ‘making’, or the art of making, but the Wissen (knowing) that guides our dealings with phusis.” Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I: The Will to Power as Art, trans. D.F. Krell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 80f, cited and paraphrased in Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 209.
12.
William H. Gass, “The Aesthetic of the Sentence,” in Life Sentences (McLean, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2015), 327.
13.
Ibid., 331.
14.
Ibid., 332–33.
15.
Braver, Heidegger, 84.
16.
Ibid., 85 and 86; Heidegger, Being and Time, §58:284–86, 273–74, and §60:284–87, 297–300.
17.
Jacques Roubaud, The Great Fire of London: A Story with Interpolations and Bifurcations, trans. Dominic di Bernardi (Victoria, TX: Dalkey Archive Press, 2017), 26 and 27.
18.
Gass removes the parentheses that generally frame the words “tomorrow morning” in the quoted passage from Sterne’s text. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. III, Chapt. XXXVIII, 168; Gass, 326, 330, and 335.
19.
Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. III, Chapt. XXIV, 151.
20.
Roubaud, The Great Fire of London, §80, 155 and §81 (95), 157.
21.
Heidegger, Being and Time, B§36:170–73, 164–66, B§36:173, 170.
22.
Ibid., B§38:179, 172.
23.
Roubaud, The Great Fire of London, §111 (§32), 213.
24.
Ibid., §111 (§:32), 213 and 214.
25.
Ibid., §34:169–70, 163–64.
26.
Ibid., §100:1, 196.
27.
Ibid., §82, 158 and §84, 164.
28.
Ibid., §88, 172.
29.
Ibid., §48, 66.
30.
Ibid., §24, 58 and §25, 62
31.
Ibid., 83:158 and 160, 110 (§25), 213; Heidegger, Being and Time, §63:314, 300–1.
32.
Roubaud, The Great Fire of London, 62:130.
33.
Heidegger, Being and Time, §63:312–13, 298–99.
34.
Heidegger, Being and Time, §63:312, 298.
35.
Roubaud, The Great Fire of London, 51:110, 52:112, 53:114, 54:116, 57:121, 58:122, 133 (§51), 242 and 243; Peter Szendy, Of Stigmatology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 25; Spencer Golub, A Philosophical Autofiction: Dolor’s Youth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Jacques Roubaud, Mathematics, trans. Ian Monk (Urbana–Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012), 3.
36.
“Absence” is a word Roubaud ascribes to himself to capture his “passion for solitude” in the section of the book he entitles, “Portrait of the Absent Artist.” Roubaud, The Great Fire of London, 12, 13, 32, 78, 82, and 107.
37.
Alain Robbe Grillet, “Jealousy,” in Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 72. All page references are to this edition of the text.
38.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 370.
39.
Roland Barthes, “Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet,” in Two Novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet, 14.
40.
Heidegger, Being and Time, §§14:64 and 65, 64–65.
41.
Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hostadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 143.
42.
Ibid., 146 and 147.
43.
Peter Brook, The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre (New York: Touchstone, 1995; orig. pub. 1968), 9; Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 166, 167, and 168.
44.
Roubaud, The Great Fire of London., 1, 2, §99, 195.
45.
Ibid., 1.
46.
Heidegger’s self-titled projects in Being and Time include the project of existence, of being-in-the-world, of authentic being-towards-death, of anticipation, of resoluteness, of understanding, of possibilities, of a potentiality-of-being, of a meaning of being in general, of relevance, of a world, of nature, of the primary “then,” of historicality, of the idea of historiography.
47.
Roubaud, §99, 195.
48.
Heidegger, Being and Time, §31:145, 141.
49.
Ibid., §31:145, 141.
50.
Ibid., §26:118, 115; Roubaud, The Great Fire of London, §99, 195 and 196.
51.
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 12.
52.
Ibid. “Alêtheia does not mean ‘truth,’ if by that one means the validity of assertions in the form of propositions.” “It is an ontological presupposition of truth, but not the other way around.” I have borrowed the term “reader’s block” from David Markson’s book of that name, which I will discuss in Chapter 2. Martin Heidegger, Seminare, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1986, 15:403, cited in Mark A. Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6; Klosterman, 6.
53.
Lovitt, “Introduction,” in Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, xix, xx, xxiii, and xxiv.
54.
Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 164 and 167.
55.
http://blackpage73.blogspot.com.
56.
James Kim, “‘Good Cursed, Bouncing Losses’: Masculinity, Sentimental Irony, and Exuberance,” in Tristram Shandy, The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 48:1 (2007), 3.
57.
The Laurence Sterne Trust, Black Page Catalogue, https://www.laurencesternetrust.org.uk/shop-item.php?id=65.
58.
Kim, 3.
59.
Lovitt, “Introduction,” xxi and xxii.
60.
“Sterne tells the reader that the next marbled page is the ‘motley emblem of my work’—the page communicating visually that his work is endlessly variable, endlessly open to chance.” It encapsulates the spirit of the pioneering book as a whole, and gets at the good old—or, in Sterne’s case, not yet invented—theme of the reader’s personal subjectivity. Daniel Fromson, quoting the Sterne Trust in, “The 250 Birthday of English Literature’s Most Famous Page,” The Atlantic (June 13, 2011).
61.
Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. VI, Chapt. XXXVIII.
62.
Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 13.
63.
Anne Carson, “Introduction to Agamemnon,” in An Oresteia, trans. Anne Carson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 3 and 4.
64.
Anne Carson, “Introduction to Orestes,” in An Oresteia, 175 and 176.
65.
Ibid., 12. Only later do I realize that there is no such backward leap between pages 70 and 26. My mind must have skipped, prompted no doubt by my reading back and forth through the author’s interpolations and bifurcations--almost like I was in sync with his stratagem to the extent that I lost the continuity of his pagination. I had given myself over to the writer’s stratagem—Roubaud’s and my own.
66.
Ibid., 7–8 and 10.

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Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
Spencer Golub

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Golub, S. (2019). Page (Rectangle). In: Heidegger and Future Presencing (The Black Pages). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31889-5_1

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31889-5_1
Published: 19 October 2019
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