Writing on the Landscape:
“Like drawing a picture in the air with your finger …” [1]
The first time I saw Jacques Derrida (it must have been in 1962) he was walking fast and sure along a mountain’s crest, from left to right, I was at Arachon, I was reading (it must have been Force et signification), from where I was i could see him clearly advancing black on the clear sky, feet on a tightrope, the crest was terribly sharp, he was walking along the peak, from far away I saw it, his hike along the line between mountain and sky which were melting into each other, he had to travel a path no wider than a pencil stroke.
He wasn’t running, fast, he was making his way all the way along the crests. Going from left to right, according to the (incarnate) pace of writing. Landscape without any border other than, at each instant, displacing him from his pace. Before him, nothing but the great standing air. I had never seen someone from our century write like this, on the world’s cutting edge, the air had the air of a transparent door, so entirely open one had to search for the stiles [...] [2]
Writing as walking, landscape as language. Topography and text intertwine constantly, such that the metaphorical loops carry the reader through a terrain that is at once a wor[l]d of its own. Terry Eagleton once suggested that texts have “‘backgrounds’ and ‘foregrounds’, different narrative viewpoints, alternative layers of meaning which we are constantly moving.”[3]
In Paul Auster’s City of Glass, the character Stillman walks the streets of Manhattan making no physical change to the landscape. However, Quinn surreptitiously records his walking….
For Stillman had not left his message anywhere. True, he had created the letters by the movement of his steps, but that had not been written down. It was like drawing a picture in the air with your finger. The image vanishes as you are making it. There is no result, no trace to mark what you have done.[4]
Auster touches on the threshold between the desire to discern writing in the landscape, and the nagging sense that such interpretations are just in our minds. Auster’s Quinn worried that he had “imagined the whole thing. The letters were not letters at all. He had seen them only because he had wanted to see them.”[5] Ego, desire and wild awful need ….
To write with one’s feet? Pied-á-terre.
Environmental artist Jacques Simon used his footsteps to scrawl in the snow at the base of the Eiffel Tower:
And David Lodge’s character Persse, in Small World, writes the name of his beloved Angelica in the snow with his footsteps. [6]
[1] Paul Auster (1987) The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. London: Faber & Faber Limited. p. 71
[2] Hélène Cixous (1998) What is it o’clock? or The door (we never enter). In Hélène Cixous Stigmata: Surviving texts. London: Routledge. p. 57.
[3] Terry Eagleton (1983) Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, pp.77-78.
[4] Auster, op cit, p. 71
[5] ibid.
[6] David Lodge (1984) Small World. New York: Penguin Books.
