Raven Like A Writing Desk

In 1840 – the year Louis Visconti grew vigorous in his diagrams, striking his heel upon the stone in Les Invalides, a full two decades before his countrymen could feed their dead emperor'due south corpse to the porphyry maw – in May, a new essay past a writer meliorate known for his tales of adventure and terror appeared in the back pages of a Philadelphia-based monthly. In "The Philosophy of Furniture," readers encountered a curious and trigger-happy proposal for a theory of "internal decoration," the first of its kind in America. Its 30-ane-yr-onetime author, Edgar Allan Poe, sat astride the masthead of Burton'southward Gentleman'south Magazine as an acquaintance editor. He had just seen the publication of his first volume of prose fiction, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. It did not sell well.

An extremely small-scale slice in the body of Poe's work, located somewhere between fiction and criticism, the essay'due south narrow reputation rests almost exclusively upon its final paragraph – a forceful (if not entirely convincing) description of what amounts to an platonic room, "a small and not ostentatious sleeping accommodation with whose decorations no fault can be found."

In the course of that paragraph's 785 words, baffled Americans ran upwardly against a wall of artful assertions so thoroughly cocky-assured as to threaten the liberties of unsophistication. In all likelihood, Poe'due south sentences would decline to register any local significance until the burgeoning click of photographers could catch up to their technology's ambitions – commercial ones – and ply their trade in the illustration of magazine pages. For the fourth dimension being the autonomous mind could make neither head nor tail of what Poe had to say. And all the same identical concerns were otherwise discernible in, and indeed dominated, the national conversation apropos the literary arts. Just as the American author felt himself beset by the unshakable influence of English and continental antecedents, and so Poe'south haughty enumerations of loftier mode grew from a confidence that Americans must decorate differently than their Erstwhile World counterparts. After all, it was Rimbaud'south Frenchness that would permit him to write a poem about a closet and accord information technology the qualities of the elderly, an human action impossible to consider in a country every bit immature as America. (And so new was the nation that a center-aged Nathaniel Hawthorne could project his distress on the characters of Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale, who hatch a programme to abscond those tottering colonies.) But what is most conspicuous nigh Poe'due south imaginary space, reckoned irreproachable, is its dearth of actual piece of furniture. This makes Poe the outset American minimalist, a cockeyed grade of the tradition still being skilful today, in which the nearly essential components are the ones always getting subtracted. "No mirror is visible — nor chairs," he declares, a little sadistically. "Ii large sofas, of rose-wood and cerise silk, form the but seats. An octagonal table, formed entirely of the richest gilt-threaded marble, is placed near one of the sofas."

By this schema, we have a sofa, some other, and a table. Plus some fine art on the walls, a couple of flooring-length windows with mantle he mentions, and so forth. But no armchair – no footstool, cafe, or corner cabinet. No chest of drawers, no half-moon of a folded card tabular array. And most resolutely: no desk-bound.

Somehow anticipating Lewis Caroll's Hatter, 20-five years later, asking Alice why a raven is like a writing desk, Poe envisaged a room and thought it somehow perfect in distinctly failing to afford himself a place to sit down and work. Not even a depression, difficult bench squats abreast the ungainly 8-sided table. And so for whom, if not its own writer, could this room exist considered ideal?

Guy Davenport, who rarely missed the run a risk to remind his readers that a stanza is quite literally a room, looked at this one and read an easy rotation of Poe'southward major metaphors. A careful accounting of the point features of the grotesque, the arabesque, and the classical makes sense of the room as a fellow member of a defined order, and not dissonant. But even a critic equally perceptive equally Davenport ("The astonishing thing is that Poe emphasizes lightness and grace, colour and clarity") didn't endeavour to accost the room's most blatant lack. This is as well surprising, since Davenport was as much a connoisseur of desks every bit his name would suggest.

In the annals of furniture, we tin can track the development of the davenport and its metamorphosis through a translation from Uk in the eighteenth century to America in the nineteenth: start as a kind of no-nonsense writing desk-bound, then as a species of the genus Sofa (as we discover information technology in Poe). At kickoff, the shift seems sudden, reckless even, and certainly confounding. Let's wait to a more modern fiction for a inkling to its solving.

In Frederick Exley's 1968 novel, A Fan'south Notes, the downwardly-and-out narrator, "Fred Exley," allocates an inordinate number of his younger days to lounging catatonically upon a continuum of, aye, davenports. Citing a failure to launch, ongoing mental health issues, and a worsening dependence on booze, we tin put two and 2 together to create a visual pun of the defeated writer curled up, non on mother'south couch, but his ain fruitless desk. Possibly information technology was in just this manner that the fire of Poe's heed subconsciously confounded the ii pieces of furniture. (Daniel Hoffman, in his landmark study of Poe, titled Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe: "How can we tell the reality from its mirror, the world from its picture in a piece of work of art, the epitome from the image of the image? Poe himself sees that all of our passions, intuitions, thoughts, are susceptible of inversion, may get their opposites.") It's as though, having glimpsed an example of spatial perfection, and startled by its brilliance, he bungled the report: "ii large sofas," rather than i sofa and one writing desk. Or was information technology two davenports?

In pursuing such a serendipitous concatenation it isn't long earlier one finds at the helm of Guy Davenport's own prose pieces – the almost representative among them: essays that feel like fictions, fictions that experience like essays – writers seated at (if non upon) their desks.

From a story in Tatlin!: "The Dutch philosopher Adriaan Floris van Hovendaal was arranging the objects on his table, a pinecone to remind him of Fibonacci, a snail's trounce to remind him of Ruskin, a drachma to remind him of Crete."

an essay in The Geography of the Imagination: "A hundred years earlier the death of Ezra Pound, a week short of the very solar day, John Ruskin sat downward in his cherry-red room at Brantwood, among his geological specimens and Scott manuscripts, to instruct the English working man in the significant of labyrinths, the craftsman Daedalus, and the hero Theseus."

a story-essay in A Table of Dark-green Fields: "At his small sanded white pine tabular array in his cabin at Walden Pond on which he kept an arrowhead, an oak leaf, and an Iliad in Greek, Henry David Thoreau worked on 2 books at once."

and in two collaborations with his friend, the critic Hugh Kenner – The Counterfeiters and The Stoic Comedians, for which Davenport supplied exacting cartoons – we see Abraham Cowley counterfeiting odes at a tiny desk-bound and Samuel Beckett composing Molloy upon the surface of a bare wall in an empty room.

Mr. van Hovendaal, who thought he could slip by in beingness kickoff on the list, is less a fictitious entity than a Dutch transfiguration of Davenport himself. He is Davenport juiced upwardly on a blend of Fourier, Wittgenstein, and that other philosophical figure distinguished by his indistinctness: Kierkegaard. Of whom, in actual fact, the several pseudonymous authors, editors, diarists, and poets whose bogus names appeared on the title pages of his books outnumber those in which they didn't. If we're to believe the human being who claimed editorship of the Dane's most famous piece of work, one Victor Eremita, and so the bundle of assorted texts that make up Either/Or really was discovered by accident in the underground compartment of a well-worn writing desk, answering to the exigencies of a testy coachman, and the blow of a hatchet.

It may seem odd that neither Davenport nor Kenner, who read everything and constantly marshaled their insights onto the page, e'er mentioned either van Hovendaal or Kierkegaard in their messages. Probably information technology is no less odd that the closest they came was an allusion (Kenner's) to Ernest van den Haag, the Dutch sociologist who dared to sneer in the National Review about the economic theories of Ezra Pound. It was Pound, edifice his own furniture wherever he went – canvas-backed chairs; large, roughshod, hand-planed tables; a triangular writing desk that slid neatly into the corner of a small room – that formed the vortex that caused these ii bearers of the torch of high modernism to share an orbit in the first place, remaining at their almost deeply fraternal when they could play at the game of exuberant cryptography The Cantos demanded.

Over the span of long and energetic careers, Kenner and Davenport penned hundreds of essays, articles, and reviews for a slew of newspapers, magazines, literary journals, and academic periodicals. One of Kenner's pieces from 1986, "The Untidy Desk-bound and the Larger Order of Things," provoked a response (not a take-downwards, simply the rare reverent summation of some other'southward public thinking) in the Washington Post: "In Discover mag Hugh Kenner, professor of English at Johns Hopkins and a confirmed abet of anarchy, final year wrote a spirited defense of the messy desk-bound. Kenner considers tidiness not only evidence of an unattractive character ('make clean-deskers measure their vermouth with an eyedropper, walk their dogs by the clock, succor their spouses past the calendar'), merely likewise a practice invalidated by the fourscore-20 rule, a.k.a. Zipf'southward Law."

So it went that in bookish circles it was Kenner, more than mathematical than most of his peers, who sallied forth with the good news. Literary scientists had conducted groundbreaking textual analyses of the distribution of words every bit they occur in works of sufficient scale. The product of their efforts was zero less than the statistical revelation of a tantalizing rule: in a text similar Joyce's Ulysses, some choice 40 words – words like the, and, and to – tend to do a full 40 percentage of the work. Though this implied a freeing upwardly of the rarer ones – like parallax and unlooped – for more than singularly memorable roles, the upshot was a renewed appreciation for the rubble of what is most handy. In Kenner'south analogy, the desk that appears a mess of seemingly unrelated items ranged in seemingly random piles can in fact incorporate an agile model of a system guided in its efficiency past the same law: the ashtray and the encyclopedia; that book on word origins; disparate volumes of cursory lives conducted by Vasari, Aubrey, and Johnson; a carbon copy of the letter merely typed and the sealed envelope of a letter just in…. If "use always tends to draw what is used in close," equally Kenner put it, then the well-numbered universe will prevail in prescribing that we labor alongside, and not against, the sometimes crude groping of our intuition. That then that nosotros can practice more than of the work of piece of work, allowing the pieces to fall into identify.

Georges Perec, a Parisian Euclid of messages, of whom it is likely an understatement to describe as obsessed with pieces and their places, in one case wrote an essay all about his desk-bound:

There are many objects on the table at which I work. The oldest is probably my pen; the newest is a small circular ashtray I bought last week. […] I spend many hours sitting at my desk every day. Sometimes I would similar it to be every bit clear of objects as possible. But unremarkably I like it to be cluttered, almost to excess. The tabletop consists of a sheet of glass 140 centimeters long and 70 centimeters wide lying on metal trestles. It is non completely stable, and it is, in fact, not a bad thought for it to exist loaded, or even overloaded, since the weight of objects helps to keep information technology from wobbling.

For Perec, objects are meant to exist found, granted membership to an unseen order, and distributed as a kind of sacred anchor (imagine Newton happily pinned beneath his apple). Describing the process of immigration his desk-bound to clean its surface, he seems on the verge of chanting – "I wipe the glass tiptop with a cloth (that I sometimes dip in a special liquid)" – proceeding to repopulate its territories with the aforementioned objects and new objects, in the same places and new places. "Broadly speaking," he elaborates, "I could say that the objects on my desk are there considering I want them to be there. This is non connected solely to their role, nor solely to my carelessness."

As emblematic as his hair (Einsteinian), Perec'southward "Notes on the Objects to Be Establish on My Desk" can be read every bit a primer on his conception of a tenderly piloted universe. The essay also happens to stand as a helpful signpost on the path to his virtually infrequent structure, Life: A User'due south Manual. Long, variously peopled and thinged, assuming a circuitous structure, the novel is maybe all-time understood in light of a story by Jorge Luis Borges.

In "The Secret Miracle," a Czech playwright, taken for a Jew, finds himself standing before a Nazi firing squad. Less concerned for the sake of his beating heart, the playwright bemoans the elementary fact that such an untimely death volition go on him from writing his masterpiece. Thankfully, the Borgesian God is a patron of the arts. Preventing the human'due south expiry by fixing him in a state of endogenous cosmos (the hail of bullets frozen in their flying), an entire yr finds its style into the space of a single second – the one that will exist his last. Perched thus upon his cerebrum (the seat of consciousness, which comes with a desk-bound, pencils, paper), the playwright gets to enjoy the uninterrupted completion of his piece of work, if but in his mind. This, Borges' unthinkable deus ex machina, represents zilch less than a kind of holy dispensation in bounty of the fourth dimension artists lose to repressive regimes.

We know that Borges was well up on Zeno – that the great philosopher of paradoxes had himself suffered at the easily of tyrannical forces. When we recognize that Borges intended for his story to demonstrate Zeno, and that Perec could connect the dots, only and then does the basis of Life brainstorm to cohere. Otherwise, how could anyone give ascent to such a richly imagined world, only to return all move impossible? Retained in this stasis of grace, the bulk of Perec's novel bristles with adjectives and nouns, fanatically detailed descriptions of an entire apartment building of platonic rooms, the ameliorate to observe when totally withal. Life is to Poe's "Philosophy of Furniture" as the United states of america of America is to Plato's Republic. It isn't a theory, simply a daring hodgepodge of pieces in places: escritoires and treasure chests in studios and belvederes decked out in wallpapers and tapestries: people in Paris, Acapulco, and Kyoto.

For all of Perec's profusion, for all his exhaustive noticing, commentators accept often yielded to the temptation to call him postmodern. But if Perec was postmodern, then so was his honey (and decisively pre-mod) Sei Shōnagon. A courtroom lady of Japan in the eleventh century, Shōnagon's Pillow Book – the diary she wrote at a short-legged table, seated upon a cushion on the floor – remains lively reading in large function for its ingenious lists. By turns colloquial and poetic ("Alarming-looking things," "Things that make yous experience nostalgic"), the imaginative range of Shōnagon's meditations-on-the-ordinary spoke directly to Perec's thingish sensibility. Roland Barthes, touring Nippon the aforementioned year Foucault published The Order of Things, came abroad from that island nation sensing that "every object, every gesture, fifty-fifty the most free, the most mobile, seems framed."

Nine centuries later, Yukichi Fukuzawa – a figure whose influence in the invention of modern Japan is roughly analogous to that of Benjamin Franklin in the founding of the The states – sat downward at his schoolmaster'due south desk at the academy he established in nowadays-day Minato Metropolis, not far from Tokyo Bay. As a boyfriend, Fukuzawa had numbered among the first few of his countrymen to journey over the painted waves to the West. He learned Dutch, studying the "books published in Holland with letters printed sideways." Then came English and the works of Emerson. Past the time he reached America and its people, prepared for their words if non their means, he could sit for a photograph in San Francisco, dine with President Buchanan at the White Business firm, and on a New York avenue catch the eyes, in passing, of Walt Whitman. Dorsum home, he would go along to invigorate his mother tongue with the publication of an English-Japanese dictionary, disseminate his cultural findings in a popular series of reference works (simply titled Things Western), and writer some of Japan's first modern educational textbooks.

In his Autobiography, Fukuzawa recounts the arduous procedure of cutting out and replacing individual sections of shoji (those lattice-piece of work doors of woods and paper) that had been scribbled upon by his pupils. In the same breath, he recalls the stern prohibition, instituted unavailingly, on the scratching of notes and cartoons into the wooden surfaces of his students' desks.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the writer of Rashomon and a notable benefactor of Fukuzawan progress, did not accept to fix out to learn Dutch in Nagasaki. He read English at home in Tokyo, at the Majestic University, defended a dissertation on William Morris, and completed the outset translations of Yeats into Japanese. Borges in one case said of him: "To strictly differentiate the Eastern and Western elements in Akutagawa's work is perhaps incommunicable."

In 1918, nine years before his suicide past overdose (taking the aforementioned poison Stefan Zweig would), he published a Gogolesque story set in the tardily Heian – a period of Japanese history encompassing the production of both The Pillow Book and The Tale of Genji. Titled "Hell Screen," Akutagawa's renovated folktale records the exploits of an creative person who has been ordered to paint, for the gratification of the Grand Lord of Horikawa, a picture of Hell. He commences his work with a series of studies and sketches of his apprentices, who are obliged, for the sake of penitential realism, to exist bound in bondage or bedeviled by an enormous horned owl. In the form of these trials, every bit a blank screen awaits the creative person's inspired brushstrokes, his studio gradually assumes the aspect of the very inferno he ways to draw. Per his apprentices, terrified out of their heads, "Sometimes on his desk were placed human being skulls, and at other times silver bowls or lacquered tableware. The surprising things he set out on his desk-bound varied according to what he was painting."

A little more than a decade ago, members of the small farming community of Inakadate in Northeast Nihon took a shine to an unlikely figure. Straddling a white steed and glorious in his bicorne lid, local artists commemorated Napoleon Bonaparte on the vast sail of a rice paddy. Hither was the Little Corporal i last time, the last effigy for whom artists the world over had clamored to capture in paintings rather than photographs, let lonely liquid expanses of grain. According to Akutagawa, amazingly, "When Napoleon was only a student, he had written on the last page of his geographical notebook: Saint Helena, a pocket-size isle." One doesn't have to wonder what kind of furniture stood upon that damp and desolate stone, in the gloom of the black room at Longwood, where the exiled emperor slowly expired in his own private picture of Hell. There are several lithographs from the period.

Eric Bies is a high school English instructor in California. His work has appeared inEssay Daily, and his verse form, "I Cannot Save My Own Pare," won the 2022 Aquarium of the Pacific Poetry Competition.