The origins of the aphorism
are both elevated and abject, as fits a literary form of sublime ambition that
is at present in a kind of disgrace. The English word, which seems first to
have been used in the sixteenth century, to describe certain medical writings,
derives from the French aphorisme and the Latin aphorismus, whose Greek
original denotes a definition or distinction, a setting apart. The term appears
at the head of writings on medicine and the good life attributed to
Hippocrates. There are over seventy of these texts, and the first is among the
most well-rehearsed gobbets of wisdom in literary history: “Life is short, and
Art long.” The second fragment or thesis treats of “disorders of the bowels,”
which suggests already that the aphorist is a costive sort, disgorging small
verities with considerable effort. The aphorism is defined by its monadic
quality, its obtuse resistance to being teased or elaborated. It is related to
the essay, though the essay may also contain aphorisms. These go by other names
too: maxim, apothegm, dictum, epigram, gnome, and sentence. I am not quite sure
they are the same as saws, adages, and proverbs—the aphorism is an oblique sort
of statement.
The modern aphorism may be
modelled on the classical, but it adds to the form a degree of
self-consciousness about its own power, motion, drive. Above all, the aphorism
is a sharp or pointed thing, violently deployed—though this action can never be
definitive, but must be repeated time and again. Like the fragment of which it
is a version, the aphorism is mostly to be found among others of its type; it
manifests in multiple, even though its internal workings are all geared toward
the unique verbal thrust or parry. (The contradiction is neatly expressed in a
remark by James Boswell about Horace Walpole: “I am told that Horace, Earl of
Orford, has a collection of bon-mots by persons who never said but one.”) In
the seventeenth century, this combination of economy and violence was given
various names. In Spain, the Jesuit writer Baltasar Gracián, in “The Art of
Worldly Wisdom,” perfected what he called agudeza: a kind of wit in which the
maximum of meaning is compacted into the minimum of form or style. In the same
century, in Poland, the poet and aesthetician Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, also
a Jesuit, elaborated a theory of the acutum: a Mannerist knife-thrust, a
stylistic stiletto. It has never gone away, this pert or pointed metaphor for
the action of the aphorism. Here is Maurice Blanchot in “The Writing of the
Disaster”: “Writing is per se already (it is still) violence: the rupture there
is in each fragment, the break, the splitting, the tearing of the shred—acute
singularity, steely point.” And E. M. Cioran, on the virtues of economy and
obliquity: “Is there a better sign of ‘civilization’ than laconism? To stress,
to explain, to prove—so many forms of vulgarity.” Finally, Barthes on the
pointedness of the aphorism, and the performance that goes with it: “Point is a
form of rupture: it always tends to close thought on a flourish, on that
fragile moment when the word is stilled, touching on both silence and
applause.”
The aphorism, then, is
singular and separated—or at least separable, when discovered in the midst of
other aphorisms, or embedded in some more discursive text. It is sharp, also
hard: in an essay on the polished maxims of La Rochefoucauld, Barthes compares
the form to the brittle casing of an insect’s thorax—the aphorism not as weapon
but as suit of armor. The aphorism would like us to believe in its tightly
furled autonomy, but we can still discern its secret anatomy. It has a
well-defined structure, which at its simplest is composed of symmetries and
parallels. The aphorist imagines a rhetorical algebra; everything is structured
like an equation. The genre has a curious affinity with the verb to be; in the
aphorism, x is y. Or better, according to the writer’s need to surprise the
reader: x is actually y. Still more effectively: x is, after all, only y. Thus
La Rochefoucauld, in his “Maxims,” as related by Barthes: “The clemency of
princes is often only a policy to gain the affection of the people . . . . The
sage’s constancy is only the art of keeping his agitation shut up within his
heart.”
As Barthes remarks of La
Rochefoucauld’s somewhat glib and static phrases, the subjects of the aphorism
appear to be solid and stable, to exist eternally. Aphorisms contain such
sturdy, ahistorical abstractions as love, passion, pride, deceit, and so on;
with its brute insistence that x is (however complexly) really y, the genre
sometimes looks like a field of immovable prose monuments. But there are more
complex, oblique structures available. In a gymnastic mode, the author may
attempt a daring backflip between the parallel bars of a slightly more baroque
formulation: a is to b as x is to y. And, in an embrace of the structure and
practice of thought called chiasmus, of which Pascal in his “Pensées” was
master, the terms may be reversed. At times, Pascal’s structures are
straightforward, as in his reflection on inconsistency of character and morals:
“Contradictions. Man is naturally credulous, incredulous, timid, bold.” Here
the parallel form and antithetical content raise no further problems: the
aphorism still feels self-contained. In other cases, the terms are flagrantly
reversed, so that when considering moral contradictions we are left to wonder
at the seeming labyrinth, with no reputable way out, in which humanity exists:
We are so presumptuous that we should like to
be known all over the world, even by people who will only come when we are no
more. Such is our vanity that the good opinion of half a dozen of the people
around us gives us pleasure and satisfaction.
Wit is the art of bringing
unlikely things or ideas together, in such a way that the scandal or shock of
their proximity arrives alongside a conviction that they have always belonged
together. In the aesthetic theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
wit is opposed to judgment, which is the skill of making fine distinctions,
prising things apart. Perhaps the aphorism is made of equal parts wit and
judgment, its success depending on its making a sufficiently daring detour in
thought, while at the same time maintaining formal integrity, poise, and
precision. In his “Waste Books”—a supposedly casual repository for passing
reflections and notes—the German scientist and essayist Georg Christoph
Lichtenberg remarks of an unnamed individual: “He was so witty that any thing
served him as an intermediate term for comparing any pair of other things with
one another.” There is a good case for saying that the essence of the aphorism
is not merely the economical expression of contradiction, but the condensed
presentation of pure paradox. (Which has been present at
least since Pascal—hence Cioran’s quip: “Pascal, excessive in everything, was
excessive in his common sense as well.”) At the furthest remove in this
direction, the aphorism risks becoming only paradox, in an escalating contest
to trump logic, realism, and ethics alike. Oscar Wilde’s is the epitome of the paradoxical style; each of his
bon-mots, whether embedded in a play or story, or discretely proffered as part
of a list, is designed to expose this or that cliché from the store of
Victorian piety and hypocrisy. A single example should suffice to remind us:
“In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all
important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.”
In this sort of aphorism,
assertion is all: in place of argument or proof, the implacable “is.” But isn’t
there something insufferable about this tyranny of the verb to be, and the
rhetorical recourse, always, to reversal or paradox? It starts to sound like a
species of intellectual and stylistic kitsch, a preciousness that is the
preserve today mostly of pseudo-spiritual treatises and vacant self-help
volumes. Maybe this is what Nietzsche meant when he complained that the
aphorism was no longer taken seriously enough; it was about to be appropriated
by purveyors of aching banalities of the following order: “By teaching others
you will learn yourself ” (G. I. Gurdjieff). There is the tendency also to
extract seemingly plain aphoristic nostrums from essays or works of fiction
with manifestly ironical intent. Consider for example the fate of the opening
sentence in Joan Didion’s “The White Album”—“We tell ourselves stories in order
to live.” What sump of literal-mindedness must subtend a sensibility so obtuse
as to miss the fact, even on the first page of this essay about the curdling of
nineteen-sixties counterculture, that the telling doesn’t work? But the impulse
to read such statements literally, as if they were autonomous examples of
timeless wisdom, is not entirely disreputable; sententiousness is one of the
aspects of essayism, and we may find it all over the landscape of the genre, solid
and informing, like a series of altitude markers on an upland trail.
The Sharp Force and
Disgraceful State of the Modern Aphorism. By Brian Dillon. The New Yorker. September 10, 2018
What is your favourite aphorism?
Brian Dillon : “I’m not sure I
have anything as precious as a favourite, but I can’t help admiring how well
put together this line is that I just discovered in a short story by Susan
Sontag, who’s channelling Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and EM Cioran all at once –
‘We would be glad of the world, if we were flying to it for refuge.’ It’s
simple but beautifully made: nicely balanced, the alliteration not overdone.
And it says something profound, tragic and ridiculous: because where else can
we fly to?”
Is there a future for essayism in a world where
political debate is being conducted in 140 characters?
Brian Dillon: “If by ‘essayism’ we mean telling hard,
complex truths with elegance and precision and some daring, then I’d say the
art is as hale as it’s ever been, just harder to find in the old places. Yes,
politics is mediated – or, as you say, actually carried out – in grim and
childish registers. (Though I’d argue good thought and expression could survive
140 or 280 character counts: what else are aphorisms?)
“I’m modestly encouraged by how many readers nowadays
pay attention to voices – Rebecca Solnit, Maggie Nelson, Olivia Laing – you
would have to call essayistic. It turns out that readers are still well able to
engage with works of nonfiction that address the world urgently and at the same
time try to reimagine what this venerable form, the essay, may be capable of
doing in artistic terms.”
A thought that struck me reading the book is that
it’s really about the meaning of life, or rather the meanings we give to our
lives. Of the essay-writing life, you ask: “What’s it all for, exactly?” Have
you come closer to finding an answer?
Brian Dillon : “Not at
all, but predictably an answer of a sort might be in the search. Essayists,
including essayistic philosophers, such as Michel de Montaigne, Friedrich
Nietzsche or EM Cioran, seem allergic to those large questions and answers. My
ambitions are smaller than theirs in turn.
“As I say in the book, the very act of writing many
essays over many years feels like a way of structuring your life: being
interested in all manner of stories, places, individuals, works of art and
literature, and then turning that attraction into something else – a way of
making things and putting them modestly (or presumptuously?) into the world.
“Like most writers in any genre, I tend to call the
things I publish ‘pieces’, and I like the idea of a life in pieces. If you
write enough of them, and pay enough attention, the time seems to go slower.”
What future has the essay in a
social media age? Interview with Brian
Dillon by Joe Humphreys. The Irish Times , October 31, 2017.
Reviews on his book Essayism :
On Form, Feeling, and Non-Fiction. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017.
The Irish Times
The Guardian
The New Statesman
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