D. W. White

‘No art is mad,’ Roland Barthes says in Camera Lucida (or something like it; apologia to our readers for my only consulting the English), because it is tame. When we perceive the representation of the thing, qua representation, and not the thing itself—this is art, and it is not madness. This, it seems to me, is dubious. There could be no art without madness, for it requires of its creator some special torment through which the world is refracted and wants out. The ordinary manner of seeing life is to not turn it into art; it is instead to live it, or approximate what it might look like to do so. If the world were composed solely of artists, they would have nothing to create.

In Issue Three of our mad little journal, L’Esprit has continued to evolve, or at any rate carry on, in very exciting ways. We have perhaps our most eclectic assemblage of work in this issue, from autotheory to critical work to our staple sustenance of powerful short fiction. We have an essay from the preeminent theorist Violeta Sotirova, whose Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics, which she edited, I happily devoured earlier this year. Alongside we have an enlightening essay shedding linguistic light on learning second languages and a perspicacious study of a certain notable word in Mrs Dalloway. Much to our delight, we lack not for critical work.

Fiction, naturally, is of no less account in this number, with several elegant and risk-adept pieces that imbue our spirit of revolutionary writing. We’re thrilled to have work from Christopher Linforth, who published with Otis Books, and from Sarah Haufrect, who worked with him on the editorial side—a connection about which I did not know (honestly!), despite being at Otis when they worked together, before the reading last month. Yet more proof of the strange smallness of the literary world.

And we continue to be well-represented across timezones, which continues to present scintillating logistical troubles for organizing our readings. As always, we feature work from the UK and Europe, and our ANZAC streak continues with an excerpt and interview from our Issue Three Featured Writer Ella Baxter. Her pieces are fascinating explorations of the borderline between auto/fiction, and we’re thrilled to be able to present them in the journal.

As L’Esprit continues, slowly but surely, to grow, we’re looking forward to 2024, with much to come. Editor Jessica Denzer will be engaging in a singular study of gender, art, and the marketplace that only she could manage: How Not To Write: On Creative Morality, Artistic Instruction, and the Female Narrative. I am only partially in on the planning, but knowing the author I anticipate a rather elegant immolation of the status quo. Look for this treatise in installments, in true Dickensian fashion, across all four Quarterlies next year. As it has been an aspect of the journal since its Parisian inception to challenge and interrogate the literary world not only through what we publish but what we say, I personally am quite excited for this effort and to see where Jessica takes it. 

Our other major announcement, as we have mentioned in a few places so far, is that L’Esprit will be at AWP in February. While we are far too disruptive of institutional convention (read: broke) to actually attend the book fair, we will be hosting an off-site reading. Please join us at Big Mood Wines in Kansas City on Friday, February 9th. We have readers signed up already and have the space for a few more past contributors who would like to attend. We will have more details and announcements as we get closer.

As the weather changes, that is. This Fall Quarterly (released while it still can cling to such a moniker) also includes an Editorial Meditation, previewed below, on death, change, and, bien sûr, ghosts. Hamlet, that most proficient madman, sees one, or says he does, which perhaps comes to the same thing in the end. The desideratum of art can be found in Wittgenstein’s inexpressibility of truth. If we can not look to language for meaning, we must rely on something else, at once more elemental and more enigmatic. In writing, that most chimeric of art forms, truth is found not in language but in words, in the way a thing is articulated. Barthes, it seems, has it wrong; art is the thing, it is the world. And the world, as is apparent, is madness. This we know but cannot say, and so we look to the artists, to the mad, to lend us for a moment a sense of reason.

Consciously, 

L’Esprit

D. W. White, 22 November 2023