What Happens When Literary Passion Leads to Physical Illness?

I am often challenged about what sort of canon I am engaged in the creation of, about what the totality of the books I work on means together, what translating Vladimir Sorokin plus Michael Lentz plus Antonio Moresco plus Constance Debré plus Louis-Ferdinand Céline plus Hans Henny Jahnn plus Alberto Laiseca plus Jonathan Littell plus writing myself signifies. I am interrogated about the political meaning of the work I do, bothered by the non-notion of “brodernism,” with the very figure of the Book Bro, who looms so large with his batch-brew coffee and small-press pints, his dog-eared copies of G.R. and JR under the armpits…

But what these books have in common has nothing to do with the gender or ethnicity of their scribes. What these books represent is the protracted and obstinate attempt to go out as far from shore as their writers can manage. There is great risk inherent to this pursuit. As Antonio Moresco wrote to me over email regarding his own modus operandi, “I’ve often said how it makes no sense that a race car driver, a motorcyclist, or a boxer has to risk their life for their profession, yet a writer doesn’t. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who was a doctor, said the same thing: writing in a certain way wrecks your coronary arteries.”

What these books represent is the protracted and obstinate attempt to go out as far from shore as their writers can manage.

Here is a different way of conceiving of willfully long books: not as phallic prostheses, but as attempts to abnegate the world and to immerse the reader in that abnegation, just as the writer comes to inhabit it as their native element. In a sense, it seems, the notion of a national literature has become too quaint for our wrecked and fractalized era. The writers I work on remind me of monks at monasteries very distant from one another. The monk named Lentz sends out his dispatch inked onto vellum and a pigeon carries that text in its beak for several thousand miles. The dispatch reaches the monk named Moresco and he pores over the thing, not to glean from it any insights about Germany or Germanness, but because it is a transmission from another being who is no longer on this planet, another being who has taken off and found himself in uncharted reaches of wherever it is he is…

We do not live in an era of national literatures jockeying for universality and/or “universal readers” (the readers of the Anglosphere, alas, being the only ones who are ever really afforded that mantle), but one of duelling gnosticisms. My contention, to the extent that I have one, is that the most substantial works of literature being written today exist in that gnostic mode: highly personalized transmissions from a non-sublated brain, one that denies itself no single shred of interiority or even mysticism. Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid is, of course, another exemplar of this idiom, one in which the decrepit city of Bucharest comes to seem like a vast psychedelic experiment executed under the supervision of Terrence McKenna. This is not because Cărtărescu is making an actual contention about the psychedelic nature of Communist Bucharest. He is merely showing the reader how he sees the city in highly personalized fashion.

Karl Ove Knausgård’s first novel Out of the World, yet to be published in English, also exists in this mode: the autofictional first half of the book gives way to the science fiction of the second, in which Knausgård’s fictional alter ego inhabits a steam-punk, alternate-history iteration of the Norwegian city of Kristiansand, where, eventually, he comes to work on a sort of pillar in the middle of the ocean. The novel moves from the more-or-less genuine details of autobiography, then out of the world, into something else.

I like Céline’s notion that writing in a certain way destroys the coronary arteries, but perhaps we can sublate Céline’s notion into something that smacks less of medieval physiology: writing in a way that so totally abnegates the world, that is unconcerned with its rhythms, its realities, writing so gnostically, so inwardly, must sooner or later take its toll on the body.

As I was working on Songs of Chaos, the second volume in his Games of Eternity trilogy, Moresco also wrote to me about the blood-pressure crises he was subject to during its composition: “When I started writing Songs of Chaos, I fell ill; I began to feel sharp stabs of pain in my heart. Then, after about a hundred pages, when the pain and stabbing sensations grew more intense, I was forced to go to the nearest emergency room. At the end of the examination, the doctor told me: ‘I don’t know you, and I don’t know what you do for a living, but whatever it is, stop it immediately, for a month!’” Antonio’s blood pressure was simply too high and he had to take a break from his masterpiece.

The most substantial works of literature being written today exist in that gnostic mode: highly personalized transmissions from a non-sublated brain.

Though it was an illness of a lesser magnitude, my body also failed me in the final stages of drafting the translation of that very same book. One night, after a long day of working on the novel’s agrammatical third section, I noticed some discomfort when urinating. This discomfort quickly progressed to a fever, chills, and much greater pain. After an uneasy night of sleep, going pee at least 15 times, I headed to a nearby urgent-care center in a typical Valley strip mall.

“You’re a young guy,” the doctor said to me after taking the warm cup of urine to be cultured out of my hand, agreeing with me that I probably had a case of acute bacterial prostatitis, “why do you think you might have gotten this infection?”

“Well…my dad had this a few times when he wasn’t much older than me…plus I’m a writer, a translator…I’ve been spending a lot of time sitting down…working on this thousand-page book.”

The doctor nodded:

“You’re gonna have to stop that. Stop it immediately. Stop it for maybe a month.”

I smirked. Nodded. The doctor shook my hand. Said the antibiotics would be ready at the neighboring CVS within 30 minutes. I should drink a lot of water for the next few days. Drink cranberry juice with no added sugar too. All fine by me.

I take my first dose of Bactrim in the car before taking off, then head home. It’s morning, but I make myself a cup of chamomile tea instead of coffee, then sit down at my desk and get back to work, elbow to elbow with this canon of fools who believe that they can move out of the world, that they can allow themselves to be swept out to sea, convinced that there will be no earthly punishment meted out for this.

They (we) are wrong.

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The Beginnings by Antonio Moresco, translated by Max Lawton, is available from Deep Vellum Publishing.