Why why why, p.9
Why, Why, Why?,
p.9
Fifty years ago when the scholar decided to devote his life to writing his Great Work, he was already well aware he would have to dispense with any activity that might consume even a tiny fraction of his time, remain celibate, and live without a television. The Great Work would be really so Great he wouldn’t be able to waste a moment on anything else. Indeed there could be nothing else but the Great Work. That was why he decided not to waste precious minutes looking for a publisher. The future would find one. He was so convinced of the value of what he was setting out to do, that, of necessity, when somebody discovered the volumes of the Great Work, unpublished, side by side, on the book case in the hallway in his house, the first publisher to discover it (whoever that might be) would immediately recognize the importance of what was before him. But, if letters are now fading, whatever will remain of his Great Work?
The degeneration is relentless. Just when he has re-worked the first three pages, he finds that the letters on pages 4, 5, and 6 are also fading. When he has re-worked the letters on pages 4, 5, and 6, he discovers those on 7, 8, 9, and 10 have been erased completely. When he has re-worked 7, 8, 9, and 10, he finds those on page 11 to 27 have vanished.
He can’t waste time trying to deduce why the letters are being erased. He concentrates on re-working the first volume (the first volumes: he soon sees the second and third volumes are also deteriorating) and realizes that the time spent doing that won’t allow him to finish the concluding volumes. Without the colophon that should give the volumes he has already written their true meaning, his fifty years of dedication will have been for naught. The initial volumes are simply the necessary, though not essential, groundwork to situate things in the space where he must set out his genuinely innovative findings: namely, the final volumes. Without the latter, the Great Work will never be that. Hence his doubt: shouldn’t he perhaps let the early volumes continue to fade and not waste time restoring them? Wouldn’t it be better to focus on his struggle against time to finish once and for all the final volumes (exactly how many are there: six, or seven?) so he can bring the Work to its climax, even at the risk of the first volumes fading away forever? Of the seventy-two he has written so far, he can certainly afford to lose the first seven or eight; even though they enabled him to gather a head of steam, they don’t contribute anything substantially new. However, then another doubt strikes him: when he has written the final full stop, will only the first seven or eight volumes have faded? Determined not to waste one minute more, he buckles down to it. Then immediately stops. How come he hasn’t realized until now that, if he dies, and that person fated to discover the Great Work and take it to a publisher dilly-dallies in making the discovery, the afflicted volumes won’t be seven or eight but the whole lot? What should he do: stop writing and start seeking out a publisher right now, to avoid that risk, even though, without the concluding volumes, it will be impossible to demonstrate that his project is genuinely ground-breaking? However, if he devotes time and effort to looking for a publisher, he won’t be able to dedicate the necessary time to re-working the volumes as they keep wasting away, nor will he be able to write the final volumes. What should he do? He becomes a nervous wreck. Could a life of endless toil have been in vain? Yes, it could. What was the point of so much effort, single-minded devotion, celibacy, and sacrifice? He thinks it has been one huge practical joke. He feels hatred growing within himself: hatred toward himself for a life misspent. And his inability to recover the time he has wasted doesn’t panic him as much as being certain that at this juncture it will be too late to decide how to make the most of the time that remains.
THE STORY
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON THE MAN SITS AT HIS DESK, takes a sheet of paper, sticks it in his typewriter, and starts writing. The first sentence comes to him immediately. The second too. Between the second and the third he hesitates for a few seconds.
He fills a page, extracts the sheet from the carriage, and puts it to one side, blank side up. He adds another sheet to the first, then another. Now and then he rereads what he writes, crosses out words, changes the word order within sentences, eliminates paragraphs, throws entire pages into the trash. He suddenly pushes his typewriter back, grabs the heap of completed pages, puts it in front of him, and with a ballpoint crosses out, changes, adds, eliminates. He places the heap of corrected sheets to his right, returns to the typewriter, and rewrites the story from top to bottom. Finally, he corrects it manually again and rewrites on the typewriter. Well into the night he reads it for the nth time. It’s a story. He really likes it. So much so he weeps tears of joy. He is happy. It may be the best story he has ever written. He finds it to be nigh on perfect. Nigh on, because it lacks a title. When he finds a suitable title, it will be the best story possible. He wonders what to put. One comes to mind. He writes it on a sheet of paper, to see what he thinks. It doesn’t entirely work. Indeed, it doesn’t work at all. He crosses it out. He thinks up another. When he rereads it, he crosses it out too.
All the titles that occur to him ruin his story: either they are obvious or else give the story a surrealist edge that destroys its simplicity. Or else they are crass and spoil it. For a moment, he thinks of putting Untitled, but that appalls him even more. He also seriously contemplates the possibility of not giving it a title, and leaving the space he’s left for it blank. But that solution is the worst possible: perhaps the odd story doesn’t need a title, but not that one; it needs just the right one: the title that would mean it ceased to be an almost perfect story to become the altogether perfect story: the best that has ever been written.
By dawn he gives up: there is no title that is sufficiently perfect for that story that’s so perfect, no title good enough, which prevents it from being altogether perfect. Resigned (and knowing it is all he can do) he takes the sheets where he has written the story, rips them down the middle, rips those halves down the middle; and continues ripping until he has reduced them to shreds.
QUIM MONZÓ was born in Barcelona in 1952. He has been awarded the National Award, the City of Barcelona Award, the Prudenci Bertrana Prize, the El Temps Award, the Lletra d’Or Prize for the best book of the year, and the Catalan Writers’ Award, and he has been awarded Serra d’Or magazine’s prestigious Critics’ Award four times. He has also translated numerous authors into Catalan, including Truman Capote, J. D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway.
PETER BUSH is an award-winning translator from Catalan, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. His translations from the Catalan include Juan Goytisolo’s Níjar Country, Teresa Solana’s A Shortcut to Paradise, Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love, and Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook.
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Quim Monzó, Why, Why, Why?
