May 15, 2011

28. Unconscious intertextuality

In a fragment from The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa describes the functions of grammar in the creation of prose and, stating that grammar should merely be a tool and not a law, tries to illustrate the legitimacy of its use. He writes:

For example, it [grammar] divides verbs into transitive and intransitive; however, someone who understands what is involved in speaking, often has to make a transitive verb intransitive, or vice versa, if he is to convey exactly what he feels, and not, like most human animals, merely to glimpse it obscurely. (Translated by Margaret Jull Costa; the Serpent's Tail's 2002 edition, fragment 231, p. 231).
 
Instinctively, I began to look for a verb that would exemplify Pessoa's discourse before going on to a real example of his. "To write" that was the first word that occurred to me. 

Why that verb? Because writing is what I daily do, or at least want to do, and thus it forms an important part of my being? Or is it rather that my unconscious created a link between these words and an essay by Barthes ("To Write: An Intransitive Verb?") before I was even able to notice it?