D. W. White

High above Zurich is a zoo. Next to this zoo is a cemetery, kept in immaculate Swiss condition and left open at all hours. During my flight back from Paris last week, with a twelve hour, overnight layover, I stopped by this cemetery to see Joyce’s grave. It felt like something I might have done a decade ago, although this time I got a hotel. I only slept for four hours, but then I wasn’t planning to fly the plane. Anyone who has a chance to go see this cemetery, should. Go in the morning, preferably in mid-June, when the sunrise comes right through a gap in the trees running along the ridge falling back from Joyce’s tomb. Afterward, walk along the park nearby and watch the fog burn off from the hills as it makes its way down towards Zurich, huddled around the lake in the shadows of the snow white Alps. It’s a moment.

Joyce was famously a bit peripatetic, and picked up languages along the way. I suspect, as I come slowly to speaking ever-more-adept French, that this had something to do with his prose. I don’t mean, so much, in the obvious sense; the multi-lingual neologisms or runs of foreign words, but in a more fundamental, compositional one: it seems that Joyce, at play with all these languages, grew to understand the inherent impossibility of using any of them to completely get at lived experience. His fiction works in this way, relying more on aesthetic than mimetic meaning, comfortable and making peace with the duality of words: they can be used to express just about anything, except the deepest, most obvious truth.

At L’Esprit, as we may have mentioned, we’re fans of this sensibility, which we might call Modernist. It’s an orientation towards the intersection of language and reality that strikes me as at once more ambitious and more pragmatic than a more typical approach. As we move into our third year of existence, we’ve found a great number of writers who are interested in similar ideas, and have been happy to share some of that work. This Quarterly sees another landmark for the journal, in the publication of our (two) inaugural book reviews. It is a form that allows for play with the use of language in fiction, digging up some semblance of the meaning therein. We hope to feature more of these in the future, following Eamon McGrath’s review of Ivana Bodrožić’s Sons, Daughters and our own Jessica Denzer’s coverage of Diane Josefowicz’s L’Air du Temps (1985).

It being summer, (or Summer), we also have new fiction: two playful, elusive pieces which play with form and style by Allison Whittenberg and Jon Doughboy, and then a story from Ami de L’Esprit Michael Nath, our first-ever Featured Writer, back in the Quarterly for the first time in a while. Find extracts of all the below, and read them in full on the Notes and Errata section of the site.

We also have a number of past contributor publication announcements and an Editorial Meditation in the guise of a photojournalistic essay, complete with decidedly non-professional pictures. There is quite a bit to look forward to in the coming months, as well. Issue Five is shaping up nicely (although we’ve still space available), with some exciting pieces forthcoming, we’re planning a reading in Manhattan next month, and we’re already talking about AWP25, back in Los Angeles. Hopefully, by the next Quarterly, we’ll be able to announce some happenings with a bit more specificity.

The growth of the journal has been a great ride thus far, and much fun to be a part of and, mostly, to watch. As with writing itself, the development of a literary journal in so many ways takes on a life of its own. Something I’ve learned, perhaps the best thing (à mon avis) to learn, in the type of High Modernist writing that we take as our inspiration here at L’Esprit, is that it is the act, the gesture, the movement towards truth, far more than any (ultimately ill-fated) arrival, that constitutes meaning. It is not a didactic, internally-complete expression, that lends a thing significance. It is not any sort of mapping experience onto language, but rather the experience of language. Words qua words. It is the moment on the hillside in the sun.

Consciously, 

L’Esprit
 

D. W. White, 30 June 2024