Blake’s statement was delivered on Friday, against the advice of both Nicole Poussier, who was flabbergasted, and Robert Sterling, who called Blake on Thursday evening after Alison had alerted Elizabeth to the fact that Blake was upstairs typing like mad, surrounded by his books and saying he mustn’t be disturbed.
‘Don’t be an idiot, Blake!’ Robert said. ‘You can’t win this by lecturing the jury and quoting Sartre!’
But Blake had heard enough about his own pretentiousness in the last few days and wanted to reply to this in the only way he knew how – through earnest, intellectual discourse.
‘There’ll be no Sartre,’ he replied.
His address, which did raise some interesting questions for the jury to think about, was nevertheless part self-defence, part philosophical treatise. He pointed to flaws in the arguments raised thus far – in the lack of actual physical evidence against him; in the inconsistencies of Birna Aronsdóttir’s claims about his character; in the question of why he would write a crime and commit it; in the likelihood of Michel Genet’s copyart and its raunchy subject matter attracting other, real and dangerous criminals to his realm of existence, not just Australian writers who sensed things intuitively, without sinister motive. Then he got started on his actual thesis: the notion of plagiarism and the complex act of creating a work of fiction.
He quoted from Umberto Eco’s essay “Borges and My Anxiety of Influence“ to explain how coincidence could work in such a case. ‘The relationship between A and B can take place in different ways… B refers to X and only later discovers X was already in the work of A’. X is ‘culture, the chain of previous influences…’ In other words, a writer and a killer can come to similar conclusions without conspiring – words and actions, phrases and deeds, occurring simultaneously in response to zeitgeist, culture, and an interesting but flawed artist.
From Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, he took the notion of the writer being caught up, and caught out, by the process of representation. He quoted one of the semiotic free-plays that characterise the book, paraphrasing, adding connotations of his own. The writer in a blind spot; a card rather than a player; innocent of all but his desire to taste the manna of words, however perverse…
It didn’t help that Blake left the foreign words hanging (“Zen mushotoku“), untranslated as much of the obtuse logic itself. Perhaps Blake thought to endear himself to the French by following up his discussion of Barthes with words taken from Marcel Proust, quoted and arranged by Milan Kundera, a near-Frenchman himself these days. His argument was that writing, even for a newcomer such as himself, simply provided the means by which others can gain understanding – a both humble and profound claim for the art of writing: ‘The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.’ The point here was a bit vague and should possibly have been edited out, but Blake was arguing for the role of fiction in reflecting and not necessarily directing the course of events.
There were many passages Blake wished to quote from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, but he chose to focus on the question of narrative and certainty, which was the thing he was trying to articulate in comparing the murderer and the writer on the fateful night of 27 June in the memoir extract that had been shown to the court. He could equally have compared the role of the detective and the writer; Calvino’s chapter on “Multiplicity“ cites extensively from Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose (anti) detective novel ‘is left without a solution’. Calvino writes – and isn’t this relevant as we look at these so-called facts – ‘all [Gadda’s] novels are unfinished or left as fragments, like the ruins of ambitious projects that nevertheless retain traces of the splendour and meticulous care with which they were conceived.’ In other words, Inspecteur Sauveur and his team had done a fine job in constructing a narrative, but it was, in reality, a fragmented thing and not a whole narrative as the prosecution might have you believe.’
Finally, Blake ended with an overview of the last chapter of his favourite book, Man is the Measure, and the ‘quintessentially human’ nature of creativity: ‘The artist corrects, erases, changes; he does not give expression to whatever first comes into his head. The artist criticises his work as he creates it… It is not as if he were solving a puzzle which has only one solution. The creative may be opposed to the academic, to the imitative, to the derivative, to the repetitive, to doing things by rules, or by accident, or according to a plan, or as a means to an end’.
Blake paused significantly on the key phrases as if they very much explained everything that needed to be said. His own fiction writing was opposed to the imitative, to the directive, to the planned end. For a few moments, he was part-actor, part-writer, and part-teacher; he had the attention of the whole court, even as his words were translated back, like a calm echo to his intense speculations.
He sat down to total silence.
Then he heard someone stifle a laugh, before the président said simply, ‘Merci, Monsieur Knox. No one can say you haven’t been given your day in court.’