to be superfluous (no sample no cut up)

[Aliette Guibert]

INTRODUCTION to NIGHTWOOD
by T.S. Eliot

WHEN the question is raised, of writing an introduction to a book of a
creative order, I always feel that the few books worth introducing are
exactly those which it is an impertinence to introduce. I have already
committed two such impertinences; this is the third, and if it is not the
last no one will be more surprised than myself. I can justify this preface
only in the following way. One is liable to expect other people to see, on
their first reading of a book, all that one has come to perceive in the
course of a developing intimacy with it. I have read Nightwood a number of
times, in manuscript, in proof, and after publication. What one can do for
other readers - assuming that if you read this preface at all you will read
it first - is to trace the more significant phases of one's own appreciation
of it. For it took me, with this book, some time to come to an appreciation
of its meaning as a whole.
     In describing Nightwood for the purpose of attracting readers to the
English edition, I said that it would "appeal primarily to readers of
poetry." This is well enough for the brevity of advertisement, but I am glad
to take this opportunity to amplify it a little. I do not want to suggest
that the distinction of the book is primarily verbal, and still less that
the astonishing language covers a vacuity of content. Unless the term
"novel" has become too debased to apply, and if it means a book in which
living characters are created and shown in significant relationship, this
book is a novel. And I do not mean that Miss Barnes's style is "poetic
prose." But I do mean that most contemporary novels are not really
"written." They obtain what reality they have largely from an accurate
rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily
simple needs of communication; and what part of a novel is not composed of
these noises consists of a prose which is no more alive than that of a
competent newspaper writer or government official. A prose that is
altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary
novel-reader is not prepared to give. To say that Nightwood will appeal
primarily to readers of poetry does not mean that it is not a novel, but
that it is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can
wholly appre-ciate it. Miss Barnes's prose has the prose rhythm that is
prose style, and the musical pattern which is not that of verse. This prose
rhythm may be more or less complex or elaborate, according to the purposes
of the writer; but whether simple or complex, it is what raises the matter
to be communicated, to the first intensity.
     When I first read the book I found the opening movement rather slow and
dragging, until the appearance of the doctor. And throughout the first
reading, I was under the impression that it was the doctor alone who gave
the book its vitality; and I believed the final chapter to be superfluous. I
am now convinced that the final chapter is essential, both dramatically and
musically. It was notable, however, that as the other characters, on
repeated reading, became alive for me, and while the focus shifted, the
figure of the doctor was by no means diminished. On the contrary, he came to
take on a different and more profound importance when seen as a constituent
of a whole pattern. He ceased to be like the brilliant actor in an otherwise
unpersuasively performed play for whose re-entrance one impatiently waits.
However in actual life such a character might seem to engross conversa-tion,
quench reciprocity, and blanket less voluble people; in the book his role is
nothing of the kind. At first we only hear the doctor talking; we do not
understand why he talks. Gradually one comes to see that together with his
egotism and swagger -- Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Conner -- 
has also a desperate disinterestedness and a deep humility. His humility
does not often appear so centrally as in the prodigious scene in the empty
church, but it is what throughout gives him his helpless power among the
helpless. His monologues, brilliant and witty in themselves as they are, are
not dictated by an indifference to other human beings, but on the contrary
by a hypersensitive awareness of them. When Nora comes to visit him in the
night (Watchman, What of the Night?) he perceives at once that the only
thing he can do for her ("he was extremely put out, having expected someone
else") - the only way to "save the situation" - is to talk torrentially,
even though she hardly takes in anything he says, but reverts again and
again to her obsession. It is his revulsion against the strain of squeezing
himself dry for other people, and getting no sustenance in return, that
sends him raving at the end. The people in my life who have made my life
miserable, coming to me to learn of degradation and the night. But most of
the time he is talking to drown the still small wailing and whining of
humanity, to make more supportable its shame and less ignoble its misery.
     Indeed, such a character as Doctor O'Connor could not be real alone in
a gallery of dummies: such a character needs other real, if less conscious,
people in order to realize his own reality I cannot think of any character
in the book who has not gone on living in my mind. Felix and his child are
oppressively real. Sometimes in a phrase the characters spring to life so
suddenly that one is taken aback, as if one had touched a wax-work figure
and discovered that it was a live policeman. The doctor says to Nora, I was
doing well enough until you kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss
and eyes. Robin Vote (the most puzzling of all, because we find her quite
real without quite understanding the means by which the author has made her
so) is the vision of an eland com-ing down an azsle of trees, chapleted with
orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear; and
later she has temples like those of young beasts cutting horns, as if they
were sleeping eyes. Sometimes also a situation, which we had already
comprehended loosely, is concentrated into a horror of intensity by a
phrase, as when Nora suddenly thinks on seeing the doctor in bed, "God,
children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the
wolf in bed!"
     The book is not simply a collection of individual portraits; the
characters are all knotted together, as people are in real life, by what we
may call chance or destiny, rather than by deliberate choice of each other's
company: it is the whole pattern that they form, rather than any individual
constituent, that is the focus of interest. We come to know them through
their effect on each other, and by what they say to each other about the
others. And finally, it ought to be superfluous to observe - but perhaps to
anyone reading the book for the first time, it is not superfluous - that the
book is not a psychopathic study. The miseries that people suffer through
their particular abnormalities of temperament are visible on the surface:
the deeper design is that of the human misery and bondage which is
universal. In normal lives this misery is mostly concealed; often, what is
most wretched of all, concealed from the sufferer more effectively than from
the observer. The sick man does not know what is wrong with him; he partly
wants to know, and mostly wants to conceal the knowledge from himself. In
the Puritan morality that I remember, it was tacitly assumed that if one was
thrifty, enterprising, intelligent, practical and prudent in not violating
social conventions, one ought to have a happy and "successful" life. Failure
was due to some weakness or perversity peculiar to the individual; but the
decent man need have no nightmares. It is now rather more common to assume
that all individual misery is the fault of "society," and is remediable by
alterations from without. Fundamentally the two philosophies, however
different they may appear in opera-tion, are the same. It seems to me that
all of us, so far as we attach ourselves to created objects and surrender
our wills to temporal ends, are eaten by the same worm. Taken in this way,
Nightwood appears with profounder significance. To regard this group of
people as a horrid sideshow of freaks is not only to miss the point, but to
confirm our wills and harden our hearts in an inveterate sin of pride.
     I should have considered the foregoing paragraph impertinent, and
perhaps too pretentious for a preface meant to be a simple recommendation of
a book I greatly admire, were it not that one review (at least), intended in
praise of the book, has already appeared which would in effect induce the
reader to begin witb this mistaken attitude. Otherwise, generally, in trying
to anticipate a reader's misdirections, one is in danger of provoking him to
some other misunderstanding un-foreseen. This is a work of creative
imagination, not a philosophical treatise. As I said at the beginning, I am
conscious of impertinence in introducing the book at all; and to have read a
book a good many times does not necessarily put one in the right knowledge
of what to say to those who have not yet read it. What I would leave the
reader prepared to find is the great achievement of a style, the beauty of
phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of
horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.
T. S. ELIOT, 1937