An essay that has stirred me lately is Blanchot's on the importance of Henry James' notebooks in relation to his development as a writer and in particular to his story
The Turn of the Screw; "As the years pass", Blanchot writes, "and as James moves in a more deliberate way toward himself, he discovers the true significance of this preliminary work that is precisely not a work."
Endlessly, he speaks of these hours of preparation as "blessed hours," "wonderful, ineffable, secret, pathetic, tragic" instants, or even as a "sacred" time, when his pen exercises "an enchanted pressure," becomes the "deciphering" pen, the magic needle in movement, whose turns and detours give him a premonition of the innumerable paths that are not yet traced.
Blanchot asks: "Why this joy, this passion, this feeling of a wonderful life, which [James] cannot evoke without tears, to the point that his notebooks, "the patient, passionate little notebook becomes ... the essential part of my life"?".
This question and Blanchot's answer stirs me because I have noticed with surprise how much enjoyment I take in making notes; how much more, that is, than in the actual production of a work. Against initial assumptions, I sensed it is too easy to dismiss this as an eternal delay of
the real thing or as the unobtainable carrot of perfection, but have never really appreciated why. We all know about Bruce Chatwin's attachment to his Moleskine notebooks, and how he offered a reward to anyone who could return one lost, but this reliance on the information contained within is something other than that addressed by Blanchot. The essay is so rich that it is difficult not to quote from every page, so this will be the betrayal of even a potted summary. In mitigation, the essay itself offers a good summary of the essence of Blanchot's form of engaged reading; a reading that does not lead to or from any theory.
The beginning of the essay looks at possible subjects of
The Turn of the Screw before concluding, after various detours, that the subject remains a secret. However, it is not a secret to be found outside the story, in biographical anecdote or in speculation, but at the very centre of the story: its words, or, better, its writing. The subject, Blanchot says, "is – simply – James's art, the way he has of always circling round a secret that, in so many of his books, some anecdote sets in operation, and that is not only a real secret – some fact, some thought or truth that can be revealed – that is not even a detour of the mind, but one that escapes all revelation, for it belongs to a region that is not that of light." The anecdote – which may on the surface be the subject of a traditional reading – appears then only as a means to produce the experience "not of the narrative that he must write but of its reverse, from the other side of the work, the one that the movement of writing necessarily hides and about which [James] is anxious".
This then is why notes produce an enchanted pressure. The other side of the work, the secret centre, is written
and not written.
What can then be called the passionate paradox of the plan with James is that it represents, for him, the security of a composition determined in advance, but also the opposite: the joys of creation, which coincide with the pure indeterminacy of the work, which put it to the test, but without reducing it, without depriving it of all the possibilities that it contains (and such is perhaps the essence of James's art: each instant to produce the entire work present and, even behind the constructed and limited work that he shapes, to make other forms felt, the infinite and light space of the narrative as it could have been, as it is before any beginning).
How difficult that is, to subject a narrative
in each instant to the pressure of its secret centre! Perhaps the ability to do this – perhaps rather
to let it occur, involving both guile of craft and stubborn resistance to the easy gifts of craft – is the secret of great writing.
All this may seem typically cranky. Oh yes, here we go, Blanchot is turning a famous ghost story into metafiction. Except Blanchot ends with a remark piece of evidence. What, he asks, does James call "this pressure to which he submits the work, not to limit it but on the contrary to make it speak completely, without reserve in its nonetheless reserved secret, this firm and gentle pressure, this pressing solicitude ... ?". The answer is to be found in the notebooks themselves. James calls it "the very name he chose as title for his ghost story:
The Turn of the Screw. 'What can my case of K. B. [a novel that he will not finish] give, once submitted to the pressure and to the
turn of the screw?' " "Revealing allusion" Blanchot says:
It confirms to us that James is certainly not unaware of what the "subject" of his story is: this pressure that the governess makes the children undergo in order to tear their secret from them and that they also perhaps experience on the part of the invisible, but that is essentially the pressure of the narration itself, the wonderful and terrible movement that the deed of writing exercises on truth, torment, torture, violence that finally lead to death, in which everything seems to be revealed, in which everything, however, falls back again into the doubt and void of the shadows. "We are working in darkness – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion, our task. The rest is the madness of art."
An amusing irony for me is that this essay is one that has produced not one note in my Moleskine. Re-reading only a few sentences begins to close down the everyday busyness of thought and instead demand a renewed attention to the region that is not that of light, that escapes all revelation. Indeed, having read Blanchot with a patience one can gain only through reading Blanchot again and again, one begins to see this region illuminated both in every creative work and in one's own work to come. More prosaic, shorthanded, ideological, historical or psychological readings, readings of which this blog is inevitably and apologetically one, no matter how convincing they are in their own way, rarely casts the reader so far and so deeply into the sovereign realm of writing.
Note: all quotations are from
The Book to Come.
SEVGİLİ 
MANDALİNA SUYU İLE TAZE FASULYE
MALZEMELER
More theoretical satellite books for children! Project Vanguard had a strict timetable for the IGY so several authors created these books as being of topical interest. The events of early October, 1957 makes these books look quaint. 
KIYMALI KEREVİZ DOLMASI
MALZEMELER
Happy 52nd (and 15 days) anniversary of the lunch of Sputnik 1! OK I just was trying to come up with one for today and thought about satellites. With the US joining into the IGY, there were a number of books in 1957 issue (pre-sputnik) to talk about this new science. So while the adults were out of the loop, children knew satellites were coming. I will try to show off some of the pre-and post Sputnik books during the next couple of days.
Lewellen, John. Illustrated by Scheib, Ida. The Earth Satellite: Man's First True Space Adventure. New York: Alfred A Knopf. (59 p.) 22 cm.
Dilek,Betül,Semra ,Yasemin
MALZEMELER
Just a quick one today. "Space travel and guided missiles" from the World Book Encyclopedia. Encyclopedias (remember those?) sometimes would gather a couple of their articles and print them as a separate pamphlet. Sometimes this was advertising to get you to buy the encyclopedia and sometimes it was meant for schools to supplement the curriculum. Something fun and colorful for a grey morning.
İRMİKSİZ REVANİ
HAZIR YUFKADAN BÜZME TATLISI (2 TEPSİ OLUYOR) bu markadan çok memnunum tavsiye ederim A 1001 MAĞAZALARINDA BULABİLİRSİNİZ
KURU İNCİR DOLMASI
Just got in an upgraded copy of this. I love this cool cover.
