D. W. White

What does it mean, to delay? It is an unpopular word these days, if the lexicographers are to be believed: two hundred year lows in usage, for delay. This coheres—if there’s anything the modern world is sure about, we want it now. Two hundred years is also about the time scholars have been preoccupying themselves with the “central question” in Hamlet, re: that delay. Before that, it seems, playgoers were more concerned with the theatrical devices taking up space in the middle of the plot, rather than the vicissitudes of our black prince himself. Apparently if not suitably entertained, Elizabethan audiences were prone to grow restless and impatient, demanding that something interesting happen already. What was it again, that Marx said about history?

Our patient friend comes to us from the Old French, délayer. Today, délayer is a French verb, meaning to thin, to dilute, to mix. It makes sense, after a moment. To delay is to mix the future in with the present, to dilute the now, to thin out a moment until it becomes elongated, stretching back defiantly into the past. Descartes insists that we posit our existence anew at every moment; this becomes somewhat easier with a bit of temporal mélanger.

This recursive, darting approach to memory is found in the writings of our two literary ancestors, Joyce and Woolf. As L’Esprit celebrates their birthdays this week, and prepares to mark our own, I’m thinking about memory, and that delaying action against oblivion Modernism makes through technique. Clarissa Dalloway refuses to forget Sally Seton, as Molly Bloom cannot forget Gibraltar, due to the vivid omnipresence of their memories. In their minds, which in turn create the composition of the works in which they appear, the past and the future mix in together with the present, and the seemingly simple narrative is delayed, through narration, into something beyond.

In Kansas City in two weeks L’Esprit will turn two years old, marked by a live reading with a few amis of the journal. It is very exciting to reach this milestone, and Jessica and I are looking forward to being able to do so in person with contributors and friends. Something we have tried to do from the beginning is find work of the highest artistic merit we can, no mean feat in the current literary world, which can oftentimes require patience. We take our role as mediators of art seriously, and spend time thinking and discussing the pieces we accept, and the ones we do not. As we start to see our reputation grow, and continue to put together issues we can be proud of, the method begins to show through the madness, the délayer tree bears fruit. It seems this Hamlet character might have been onto something after all. 

We use anniversaries to mark time, to return to those places in the past we know but cannot say. It is fundamentally human, this urge to return, but there is something dark in it too, time as the euphemism for death. Woolf and Joyce were born 142 years ago this week, in the heyday of delay, when modern life was speeding up beyond all reason or proportion, society as it had been known soon to be crumbling from its very center. The world, of course, was not ending; time kept moving on. It’s hard to stop that which does not truly exist. For all our feats of memory, that’s an easy one to forget. However cataclysmic the moment, it’s but one, and will be soon succeeded by another. In fact, by the time it’s been realized, it already has.

I think Hamlet wasn’t really delaying at all. Like Molly and Clarissa, Lily Briscoe and Leopold Bloom, Hamlet was both creation and progenitor of a narration attuned to the power of time. Truth is only realized in the way the story is told, not in the things that are said themselves. Much like Camus’ Meursault, Hamlet spends his time with us moving from death to death, possessed of a knowledge that cannot be said. Once he understands he begins, following that ancient workshop dictum to show and not tell. He conduct is not one of delay but rather délayer, mixing the past with the present into the future, mixing unsayable truth with expressible act. His play is thus a peroration, an extended action—as Wittgenstein puts it, words are deeds.

And what better thought indeed for a literary journal. A sincere merci beaucoup to our ancestors, our readers, and our contributors over the last two years. We look from our past into our future, and take heart in having much more time yet to wait. 

Consciously, 

L’Esprit
 

D. W. White, 25 January / 2 February 2024