WAYS Of WRIT I NG ABOUT ONESELF 77
were describ ing the autobiographical material. Now, in the second part
of your statement, you are emphasizing the rhetorical phenomenon, and
you are saying that that in itself has a kind of magnificence. Is that it?
Andre Aciman :
Yes.
Leonard Michaels:
And the magnificence of the rhetorical phenomenon,
insofar as you can separate it from what you might call the personal,
can be said
to
be the achievement, as it were. The value of the piece lies
in that, and the beauty of the music, of the arrangement, the structure,
and all of these things. You know, it's like when I heard someone talk–
ing about
War and Peace,
and he said that-I'll move you to a much
larger, grosser form if you like-he said there is all this historical theo–
rizing in
War and Peace,
he says they are faults, but the book wouldn't
be what it is without it. The book achieves its magnificence against this
other thing, this form of history, this idea of passage, and so on. Is that
something like an answer? That there is a tension between the two?
Andre Aciman :
Yes, I think there is, and thank you. It's an impossible
question. This was not a trick question, but it was because it baffled me,
because what I will remember in two weeks was
YOLl,
standing there and
doing this thing, which you kind of pooh-poohed.
Leonard Michaels:
Well, you said it was a form, and I want to stick with
what you said.
Geoffrey Hartman :
Let me intervene. I want to ask Lenny about this, "I
did not say" or "I do not say that." I understood it, and it was very
moving. But you gave us an example where personal essence and
expressive form, these are your two terms, came together, and I think
they did come together. Could you really have conveyed what you said
you did not say in any other way? The suggestion was that perhaps your
diary entry could have said much more in the form of the more objecti–
fying? But as you said it, not on ly was this a rhetorical form I recognize
as
lnaeteritio,
the technical name you give to the rhetorical form you
used-that's not so very important-but I was moved by what you did
not say, and also did not say
to
the girl you lost. That is, there was a
sense of the limits of speech, or the kind of aphasia that entered into
your very recital, which could have gone on a long time, so that the neg–
ativity of the form was part of the form. It had something to do with the
record of an absence.
