Digression: Montano's Malady

I've been reading Enrique Vila-Matas's Montano's Malady, and it struck me that the Spanish writer belongs in the lineage of Robert Burton, even if he might never cite him directly (although he probably does, somewhere). The protagonist of Montano's Malady is a writer suffering from a literary disease:

Perhaps this is what literature is, the invention of another life that could well be your own, the invention of a double. Ricardo Piglia says that to recall with a memory that is not your own is a variant of the double, but it is also a perfect metaphor for literary experience. Having quoted Piglia, I observe that I live surrounded by quotations from books and authors. I am literature-sick. If I carry on like this, literature could end up swallowing me, like a doll in a whirlpool, causing me to lose my bearings in its limitless regions. I find literature more and more stifling; at the age of fifty it frightens me to think that my destiny is to turn into a walking dictionary of quotations. (p. 4)

He is incapable of living his life, living "in the moment," as they say, because, instead, he sees his life as intertwined with literature: "To speak in book means to read the world as if it were the continuation of a never-ending text" (p. 33). Much has to do with prodigious memory: a face in the crowd, a situation, a snippet of a conversation put him in the mind of some literary text or remind him of a biographical fact from another writer's life. He is besieged by anxiety, and every attempt at cure thrusts him back into it again, this anxiety being, in fact, a form of melancholy: "because I did not allow myself to think about anything referring to literature, the days were empty and devoid of meaning and I ended up thinking about death, which is precisely what literature talks about most" (pp.22–3).

The book teems with citations and evocations of writers: Thomas Browne, W.G. Sebald (and his Rings of Saturn, a melancholy, meandering book), Danilo Kiš, Musil, Gide, Pessoa, Gombrowicz... The narrator is most interested in writers' diaries and how they formulate their relationship to literature. In the second part of the book, he proceeds to compile a dictionary of writers important to him, mostly those who left behind literary diaries. 

There are several interesting thing happening in the book, or several different ways of expressing this literatosis – which, as the narrator informs us, "is how [Juan Carlos] Onetti terms the obsession for the world of books" (p. 40) – through citation.

Speaking of Walter Benjamin in Prisms, Adorno wrote: "His magnum opus, the crowning of his antisubjectivism, was to consist entirely of citations" (p. 239, cited by Rolf Tiedeman in "Dialectics at a Standstill" in The Arcades Project, p. 930 n.6). 

Vila-Matas's narrative enterprise, while ostensibly focused on the subjectivity of a semi-autobiographic narrator, constantly undermines the veracity of the biographical element by exposing his own fictions. And the narrator is not just obsessed with literature, quoting literary works at every step; writers, and not just their writings, seem to make incursions into this narrated life. Dead Baudelaire appears to him in Valparaiso; an exaggerated tip of the hat made by a friend, Filipe Tongoy (a literary incarnation of the actor Daniel Emilfork Berenstein, a native of San Felipe, Chile, known as the "ugliest man in the world"), bears resemblance to the "reverential gestures" with which mad Hölderlin greeted customers of the carpenter Zimmer whose house he shared. In addition to the named literary references, the text is also riddled with veiled allusions and hidden quotes. This brings to mind Walter Benjamin, who said of his Arcades Project, "this work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotations marks" [N 1, 10]. 

"The text is a forest in which the reader is a hunter," Benjamin says in another convolute. "Rustling in the underbrush – the idea, the skittish prey, the citation – another piece 'in the bag'." [m2a, 1] Reading Vila-Matas or, on a different scale, Robert Burton, is very much like being a hunter. We are tracking the double enterprise of the book: following the argument or the narrative, and taking part in a hunt, which sometimes feels like a scavenger hunt, for scraps of literature which, reassembled through some Kabbalistic operation might perhaps reconstitute the body of literature, which, the narrator in Montano's Malady tells us, is endangered. 

The idea of a writer as a walking library is awfully attractive. Finding oneself in the company of someone like Burton -- or any of his erudite contemporaries, or near-contemporaries, now most long gone from the mainstream (Scaliger, father and son; Justus Lipsius; Guillaume Budé; or the more exotic Busbequius, aka Ogier Ghislin de Busbecq) -- the reader is awed by the voluminous contents of their minds. Their ability to recall at will entire works of literature might be -- if only slightly -- overestimated. Walter Benjamin wasn't the first to conceive of a book composed of quotations. Desiderus Erasmus authored several volumes of Adages, which must have been piled on Burton's nightstand: composed in Latin, they contained thousands of literary quotations, maxims, adages, mainly from the Roman and Greek corpus, accompanied by a paragraph on their provenance and meaning. Joachim Camerarius published in 1605 a book of Symbols and Emblems, which is also a compilation of citations from various classical sources.

Joachim Camerarius, Symbolorum & emblematum (Noribergae: Johannis Hofmanni & Huberti Camoxij, 1605), title page.

Athanaeus's Deipnosophists, a third-century exemplar of what Vila-Matas might call "vampiric literature," must have been another well-worn volume in Burton's library: written in the form of a banquet, it stages a series of dialogs between learned guests, historical and fictional philosophers, who, through the art of dinner-table conversation, deploy their erudition, quoting at length from Greek literature and philosophy. 

Books like these, of which Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is a pale shadow, were literary gardens, in which the reader would find the wisdom of the ages in an abridged form. I like to think of these books also as memory palaces for lifelong readers, like Burton, who would have actually read any extant volumes cited, and visit the more concise anthologies as an aide-mémoire rather than seek out the original volumes.