The painting out of self helps. The ‘I’ is a fiction, a construct — imagined in part by culture and history and theology. It is, however, also a necessity of consciousness as point of passage for observations. And again, the ‘ways’ of seeing will be defined in part by culture, history. . Ah yes, the ‘I’ is the dark glass through which we look.
The less ‘I,’ Picaro proposes, the more neutrality, the less self-indulgence, the less we are obsessed by our ‘right’ to happiness and to ‘private space,’ the less we think of ourselves as ‘victims,’ the less infantile we are in our needs for ‘understanding’ and for ‘healing,’ the less judgmental and moralistic we are — the more there is room for things and events to ‘speak for themselves.’ The authority of the narrative will be enhanced by obscuring or obliterating authorship. (He knows he may be whistling in the dark here, but refrains from saying so.) “Mehr Licht!” These were Goethe’s dying words.
But don’t get hung up on the importance of the self, even negatively, he advises. (Here, Picaro reminds his students, you will remember that Reader objected vigorously and vociferously to the drift of his argument. She said: “You may be right, sir, and put that way it sounds attractive even if it may not mean much. For writing grows out of a self that takes itself — or at least its own questions and vision of the world — seriously; a self that opts to talk rather than listen, at least momentarily. And one depends on the other, of course. . Is writing or voicing the self a symptom of insecurity or a path toward clarity? Isn’t thinking enough? Are words necessary bricks of, or toward, original thought, or do they limit it, since they are created, borrowed, worn out by others? How can we invent a private language that can communicate to others? Is that what love is? Private and shared emotion or vision or experience beyond words? Do words break its unspoken power or allow it another dimension? What do silence and inner calm reveal? Strength, death, inhibition, fear, implosion, wonder, honesty, patience, faith, deception, all, nothing? Are true silence and peace possible, or are they horizons?”)
These were a whole bushel of questions. Picaro knows he did not respond in adequate depth, although he appreciated her talking back. He did admonish Reader, and the others as well, not to reify individual words. Words are like ants and will ruthlessly climb over one another to get at the food, but they only really make sense when they are subsumed by the whole, by the anthill. Sense or ‘meaning’ is a labyrinth in the apparition of an anthill.
As regards Self, it is only one of a pair. God or Void (to give the Unknown a name) begins wherever the I stops. Whatever you cannot conceive of is God. (Again Reader interrupted: “But isn’t it possible for our conceptions to embrace the Void — the ineffable — the untouchable? Horizons without lines, the rise/drift/erosion of an intuition, silence in a minor key. . And there must be a few things we can’t articulate that aren’t godlike.”)
The two of you are separate, contingent, perhaps interacting agencies. In any event, dependent on one another. It may be said that you (the I) are God’s imagination, its dog, since you will begin where his I-ness stops. The void is bound to imagine /inhale substance. This ‘cannibalism’ and confusion may well have been the intimate and ultimately alienated relationship between the narrator Sebald and his protagonist Austerlitz, where, according to Picaro’s reading, we have a take-over of the one by the other, a displacement or perhaps a confiscation of voice. Who flows into whom? Who barks? “Shut up! Have you ever heard me bark?” the blind man asked his dog who was barking at strange passers-by.
“The self is an imitation of the imagination of self” (On the Art of Meeting Strangers, Picaro Wordfool). He feels it legitimate to bring himself into the text, especially because he likes the sound of the formula.
Michael Fried in his Courbet’s Realism writes about the phenomenon of narcissism that may arise, and then quotes from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Aesthetics: “The universal and absolute need from which art. . springs has its origin in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, i.e., that man draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and whatever else is. . This consciousness of himself man acquires in a two-fold way: first, theoretically, in so far as inwardly he must bring himself into his own consciousness, along with whatever moves, stirs, and presses in the human breast; and in general he must see himself, represent himself to himself, fix before himself what thinking finds as his essence, and recognize himself alone alike in what is summoned out of himself and in what is accepted from without. Secondly, man brings himself before himself by practical activity, since he has the impulse, in whatever is directly given to him, in what is present to him externally, to produce himself and therein equally to recognize himself. This aim he achieves by altering external things whereon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics. Man does this in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself. Even a child’s first impulse involves this practical alteration of external things; a boy throws stones into the river and now marvels at the circles drawn in the water as an effect in which he gains an intuition of something that is his own doing. This need runs through the most diversi-form phenomena up to that mode of self-production in external things which is present in the work of art.”
Fried argues that for Hegel artistic production is at bottom a form of self-representation — or self-production, a notion that would be developed by Marx and enthusiastically endorsed by Picaro. “The effacement of the very conditions of resemblance (the breaking of the mirror-surface of the river) also means that the boy’s relation to the spreading circles in the water might be described in Flaubertian language as one in which he is ‘present everywhere but visible nowhere.’” (Picaro likes being part of the chain quoting a recognized thinker like Hegel. He hopes the proximity may bestow some weight of reflection.)
When you conceptualize a subject you define a space between the recognized and the environment, and that tension between ‘full’ and ‘empty’ gives rise to movement. The space may be duplicitous: it may be nothing more than the clearing where the shaman moves between shadow and substance.
Then Picaro proceeds to what he considers to be the practical application of his thoughts. Stylistically, he says, it will help if there’s willingness to let language come into its own, through rhythm and texture: you will promote textual ‘space,’ he says — and no creativity without space, and no hope for ‘conscience’ without the creativeness of awareness.
The surface of fiction will bring about its own ‘non-fiction’: by focusing on the materiality of the means the illusion of veracity, which is mirrored by fiction will be destroyed. An experience of corporeality — the act of writing — will suspend the demarcation between ‘subject’ and ‘material world’ (in this instance, words). Writing — the production or clarification of consciousness, Picaro claims — is the mediating movement between fact and fiction.