“Moby Dick is not written as cryptography but as mystery.  The agitations of voice, the playfulness through which symbols emerge and then dissolve, the mixtures of incantatory, Biblical, polite, and vernacular language in this and other American books— these are what demand our attention altogether more than do ideas or themes extracted by critics in the interest of tidying up what is mysterious or confused.”  — Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere, p. 36

“Skepticism of this kind [the authors' regarding the symbolist tendencies of their central characters], however, need not and does not modify the grandeurs of description in which Melville and Lawrence like to indulge.  The admiration of the writers in both cases goes not to the possible accuracy of a symbolist perspective, but only to the heroic nobility of incentive behind it, its creative responsiveness to the things of this world.” – p. 43

Elsewhere, Poirier says that in the works he is discussing, the reader must ’submit to a discipline, imposed by the difficulties in the writing, that will develop in us a consciousness rarely called forth…,’ and that, ‘in Emerson’s view, writing is valuable for the stimulations offered locally, by particular moments of the reading experience, and not for any retrospective consideration of the whole.’

After watching Phillip Hoare’s BBC documentary, The Hunt for Moby-Dick, I wanted to read the book, and after reading Poirier, I actually took it down and began to do so.  It’s been slow going, but not because of any difficulty in maintaining interest, really.  I even found fascinating, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, the dreaded ‘Cetology’ chapter, which two friends had warned me was the First Test of Commitment.  No, I’ve been reading it slowly simply because there’s no rush.  Which is new to me.  I’m normally eager to get through a book so I can move on to the next one, or I’m worried that I’ll forget some crucial image or idea and something important will be lost on me in the latter sections of a book.  Proust may have been a remedy for that— it is impossible to remember it all, so you remember what you remember and forget what you forget, and its length seems to be intended to bring about that necessarily cherry-picked memory.  But I think Phillip Roth’s recent comment, that if you take more than two weeks you haven’t really read the novel, is illuminating here, because it strikes me as particularly inadequate.  In most books, there are pivotal scenes supported by groundwork: character background, establishment shots, tension-building, etc.  There is a lot of padding, necessary or not, and it can obscure the significant passages, images, and events, such that if you take more than two weeks you will probably have forgotten something crucial and had something unimportant emphasized by the recession of what surrounds it.  Moby Dick seems different.  That’s not to say Melville doesn’t engage in groundwork— the first sentence is famous, after all— but I feel as if I can wander in Moby Dick, that Melville isn’t trying to direct which moments will provide that ‘local stimulation,’ and is willing to let just about any provide it.  There isn’t the imperative to get it all in quickly, so the stimuli combine to the full effect.  (And on top of that, if you are reading for a culminating effect, you’ve several hundred pages of meticulous anti-climax to get through first.) I’ll read a few chapters, then not pick it up for a day or two, but I still find myself mulling over certain passages and scenes, particular images or phrases.

There is this highly amusing feint in Chapter 45: “So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.”  Or, in the chapter examining the mythological importance of whiteness, there is the assertion that “without imagination no man can follow another into these halls.”  And this marvelous paragraph, that in four sentences portrays the development of Ahab’s madness, and his own understanding’s limits and reasoning:

“Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.  Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long dissemble; in some sort, did still.  But that thing of his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate.  Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the terrible casualty which had overtaken him.”

One passage that I keep returning to, though, is this:

“And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders…  For the sea is his; he own its, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it.  Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself.  The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation.  There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.  He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks on the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climbs the Alps.  For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman.  With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”

What is striking in this description of the symbiotic relationship between the Nantucketer and the sea is what Poirier noted as the playfulness with which symbols emerge and dissolve.  Melville is adept at giving everything an equal allegorical weight; this seems to be that ‘mystery’ with which Poirier characterizes Moby Dick.  Set this passage next to the Cetology chapter, where the species of whales are classed by size into the categories of folio, octavo, and duodecimo, and then later to the passage discussing the ‘hieroglyphics’ on whales’ skin, and Melville appears to be hinting at a relationship between the use of language and the use of the sea, and positing that one can use it with or without integrity.  Against the identification of each type of seagoer with a metaphor, the Nantucketer is implicitly given that real quality, which the others explicitly lack, of relating to the ‘deep itself.’  His whaling is depicted as a natural progression following the push outward from catching crabs on the shore to catching cod from boats, a move, therefore, of growing necessity and increasing skill, not profit.

Melville establishes that, past this stage of cod-catching, there are those who treat the medium as a means to an end, and those who are willingly encompassed by it, who draw their living from it.  It is key, though, that each object in this passage is attached to a metaphorical counterpart— merchant ships and extension bridges, pirates and highwaymen, Nantucketers and landless gulls— but those attached to the Nantucketer refuse, or fail, to turn him into a pure metaphor. Even as we are being told that the Nantucketer is ‘with the landless gull, rocked to sleep between billows,’ we know he is not, because we have just been told that, at some point, “he comes to [land] at last.”  Even as he is defined by his relationship to the sea, he is called after the land from which he comes.  Merchant sailors and pirates, though defined by their business on the sea, yet use it disingenuously, as a means to move items from one land to another or to capture them without facing retribution.

Consequently, we can begin to see how a few of Poirier’s points play out: what he means when he describes the discipline to which a reader must submit in reading this type of book, the skepticism towards symbolism that yet admits the nobility of incentive behind it, and furthermore how the creative response to the things of this world, cultivated by a writer, is duplicated in the ‘local stimulation of the reading experience’ that occurs in the reader.  The book is too haphazard to say that Melville is linking language and the sea as a controlling metaphor, and the two’s ubiquity would make the whole book an overly complex allegory if he were.  In general, the form the above passage takes, of unwittingly inept metaphors for its primary subject, prompts a sort of creative recuperation— the hope that, even with failed metaphors, it has a larger point.  This is the certain extent to which one must submit to Melville’s program.

To attempt to ‘read’ this passage in predefined terms, and resist Melville’s rendering, would ultimately miss how the ’symbols’ in this passage pull their punches as a reflex of the most important symbol’s failure.  When Melville compares the Nantucketer to an Emperor, it is not too distant in intent from Thoreau’s pun, highlighted by Poirier, in saying that he “walked over each farmer’s premises,” because, as Emerson has it, no man owns the prospect, even if some own the land.  Thoreau simultaneously recognizes the farmer’s ownership while satirizing the idea of land-owning.  In a similar tactic, Melville ends so many of his encyclopedic chapters with boisterously drawn moralistic aphorisms.  But however excellently succinct or awfully flat the allegories seem, the subjects which are transformed into allegory by his closing sentences never become mere “hideous and intolerable allegory.”  Moby Dick, as far as Ishmael is concerned, is a real and terrible being, a terror he is aware of even as the quality of whiteness becomes pure, if self-contradictory symbol.  He gives us, in one instance, the factual account of the harpooneer Tashtego falling into a whale’s head while removing its oil, and in the next, a warning against the dangers of drowning in philosophy: “How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there?”  The fascination is not what the subject becomes a substitute for in the revealed allegory, but how exactly imagination allows one to “follow another into these halls” where Ishmael finds symbol upon symbol upon symbol, and where a whale’s head becomes Plato’s, or where I glimpse the sea as an inadequate yet fascinating allegorical substitute for language and how it is used.  Certainly, it will always be used to build bridges, necessarily and for good reason, and there will also be those who use it manipulatively, to get what they want without consideration of the results, but the Nantucketers, those are the ones to look for.

I suspect my fascination with etymologies is rooted in the two semesters of Latin I took in high school.  I don’t remember a lick of it, but I have remembered how to break words down and root out the bits that can (maybe) tell you something on their own, which might get you by if you find yourself in a jam (the jam, at the time, being standardized tests).  I am by no means a linguist; I’ve no formal experience with the inheritances of words.  They’re a playground, a rabbit hole.  I admittedly enjoy how irresponsibly I follow their transformations, considering how the parts of a word have made up that word, and how they mislead, how easily a word’s present form can overwrite its past and still arrive at the same understanding for all the wrong reasons, and how then each root word leads you to suspect it is the root of another.  Suffuse: suf-, alternate of sub-, meaning under, beneath, up to; but ‘fuse.’  I think: parallel to infusion, but, while infuse has pleasant connotations, suffuse casts a glance towards submission, willing or unwilling.  It walks a fine line between terror and bliss, between a hot shower after a hard day and waterboarding.  Of course, this is trumping things up quite a bit, akin to exploring the significance of two plus two equalling four by means of numerology.  ‘Suffuse’ means, simply, ‘to pour liquid over a surface,’ though pour is misleading.  One Established Dictionary says ‘overspread,’ instead of pour, even as it says the root Latin word is ‘to pour.’  (Unexpectedly, ‘fountain’ has nothing to do with fundere, the Latin root.)  Or: one would expect ’sect’ to follow from the root ‘to cut.’  A sect, one could assume, is a small group separated from— by an incision, a de-cision— but still part of a larger group.  But ’sect’ comes from ’secta’ for ‘following.’

‘Do your work, and I shall know you,’ [Emerson] says in ‘Self-Reliance’.  ‘Work’ is a way to confront the essential facts of existence and to discover in doing so the power of human desire which turns facts into mythologies and mythologies into facts.  – Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature, p. 94

Perhaps the most interesting aspect, the thing that keeps me going through Roubaud’s not always fun to read The Great Fire of London, is the dissonance of reading in the present tense.  We often consider grammatical tense and the effect it has on what is being narrated.  But rarely do we consider the tense of the activity of writing, except in such rare circumstances when it becomes so problematic, by the author’s intention or not, that we cannot help but notice it.  There is a bifurcation between experiencing self and writing self.  How an author handles such a dilemma, in an individual work or in their general method, I find to be one of the most interesting moves an author can make (can, because many do not).

There is a moment early in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, when something happens to Charles Arrowby as he is looking out over… well, the sea.  Terrified, and even as he feels compelled to write as a result of the event, he avoids writing about it explicitly because he cannot bear to describe it.  To us, it is only something that happened.  When the shock has worn off, he discusses it, but as a matter of course, a matter of record, for journaling is the activity he has chosen to pass the time.  He brushes the event off as impossible, and desperately explains it away: he used to do drugs.  As the origin of a need to write, it could not have happened actually.  Arrowby, despicable and self-serving as we see him to be throughout the rest of the book, must write in denial of writing.  He has nothing that will allow him to handle what he has seen.  I don’t remember enough about the rest of the book to extrapolate, and I haven’t read any more Murdoch, but for the moment I’m going to turn this into the counterexample.  Writing in the present tense is unbearably difficult for Arrowby, and the rest of the book is him recounting recent events, when the pace of events allows him the time to write down their description.  He treats language as a technology allowing him to dominate his experience, much the way his conception of a past love affair leads him to attempt to dominate his lover when she unexpectedly reappears.

Every present tense speaks (after the fact) with obviousness, with stupendous assurance.  Every speaking present is a violent tense.  But still other presents will appear in this prose (more insidious, the kind a person endeavors to nullify, conceal, dissolve in the process of rewriting, reworking, rethinking what has been written; and I forbid myself from doing so).  …  Narrative time, in this first branch, is true.  I present pages to you who are reading at this very moment (in accordance with your own present), pages exactly paralleling the successive order of their composition, and I also recount here how I am recounting what you are reading. … I guard against the coherence of a possible world. Roubaud, p. 30-31

What does it mean to ‘guard against the coherence of a possible world’?  Roubaud expands on this in the excerpt I quoted in the previous post, particularly when he says that ‘by immersing ourselves within [the world of the great novels] we gradually yield our consent to the fact—though with an inner conviction that we remain masters of this choice—that every life is on the whole improbable.’  Simplifying considerably, Roubaud is highlighting the fact that art depends on making what it describes seem improbable, and therefore interesting.  The point is more strongly, if more subtly made when, in discussing Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” Roubaud surreptitiously drops the ‘dis-.’  To ’suspend disbelief’ is, in practice, a suspension of belief.  “I believe X to be improbable, but in reading this work in which X occurs, I will suspend that belief.”  Roubaud achieves this effect not by the improbability of a story.  But, in writing out of the present, the perpetual present of composition, Roubaud puts a peculiar pressure on the reader to remember that even in those passages in which he describes past events, the present tense of composition— and consequently of our reading— is violently unsettling, however settled the past tense may make it seem.  We must suspend the belief that we are reading a settled and published work to accept the improbability of Roubaud writing daily without revision or premeditation, something that becomes unbearably implausible during the dense and convoluted ‘deduction’ of the work’s principles in Chapter 5.  Where Arrowby relies on language, on writing, to explain to himself what has occurred by relegating it explicitly to the past tense— and he cannot relegate the terrifying event because of its present effects— Roubaud is always gesturing to the present of composition and the violence it must perpetrate against experience.  The writing self cannot be the experiencing (or experienced) self, except when the experience in question is writing, and it is even then highly improbable. It is paradoxical in a superficial way, because the work that moves him forward— writing daily before sunrise, with all its attendant rituals— provides the reader with a cohering theme: the present of composition and of reading, which seems to belie the violence with which Roubaud is concerned (thought not necessarily to minimize that violence).  But this is the illusion of the stupendous assurance (after the fact) of the present tense.  It is an illusion which Roubaud, even if unsuccessfully, attempts to guard against, an illusion to which Arrowby would be oblivious, blithely unaware of the present tense of composition.

Literature, and those who care for it, ought to acknowledge, as the other media dare not do, that it does not and cannot reveal much of the history even of those it favors with attention.  Poirier, p. 122.

What I am suggesting is that Literature from some of its earliest and now classic instances seems always to have been nostalgic for something that has been lost. It was to meet such a logistical and logical gap that Literature introduced technology as a villain. p. 124.

Poirier makes the case that Literature, in its implicit nostalgia for that thing lost— an Adamic language— has substituted Technology as the thief and destroyer, as far back and further than Spenser’s Faerie Queene or Dante.  The emphasis Roubaud places on the present tense has the unexpected effect of grounding such a claim by attempting to avoid that very pitfall.  It prevents him from falling back on the myth that language, that Literature with a capital L, is the one true technology which will one day reopen the gates to that paradise from which we were expelled so long ago.  Neither our own history (‘our history’, here, being the history of literary language for those concerned with it), nor that of the oppressed, the defeated, or whomever is deemed worthy of being ‘rescued’ by representation in Literature, Film, or even the news media, will ever be recovered.  The interminable present of composition is also the interminable march forward of time, however much we look backwards.  I cannot find the quote at the moment, but Roubaud speaks of the work he is writing as an interminable delay into the future, and his claim to not revise or rework emphasizes the prominence of Roubaud’s desire to exactly not dominate the past— because it cannot, however easy that assuring illusion is to believe— even as writing about it ultimately defaces it beyond all recognition.  (This is the source of tension in the book, that the memory of writing becomes the writer’s memories.  We are indeed watching a writer dismantle, not build, his work.)

What originally prompted this line of thought, aside from the desire to synthesize what seemed to be a common thread in Roubaud and Poirier, were two things.  First, Andrew Seal’s thoughts on the phrase “This book changed my life,” prompted by the reactions to the recent mass-reading of Infinite Jest.  After considering several options, Andrew says:

But what about the last possibility: that a book alters what we think of as the bounds of fiction: what it can do or what it is. I think this possibility is more likely, but it may mean something different from what we habitually mean when we say it. Given that few readers—even few serious readers—have explicitly articulated conceptions of what fiction can do and what it is, I think we have to acknowledge that the reaction “this book changed my idea of what fiction can do/is” would be more accurately re-phrased as “I hadn’t thought of fiction as connected to that realm of experience.” When we say our idea of fiction has been changed, we mean that we find fiction standing suddenly between us and some aspect of the world that we were either unused to interacting with in the first place or were used to interacting with in a manner unmediated by fiction.

The other prompt was the comments raised by Steve Mitchelmore’s thoughts on how Wallace’s suicide altered the perception of his work, linked to in his recent post on the reactions to the new Nabokov work.  In two separate comments in response to others, Steve says,

I’m not sure the [the use of 'medical' or 'biographical' information] are fallacies. Perhaps items of evidence instead. I hoped I made it clear that I wasn’t stating something rather than speculating; wondering aloud.  What I was searching for was a way to highlight the space between the cold light of the book and the intangibility of experience (inc. the experience of the book). Bernhard wrote in that space. It doesn’t mean that he wrote *about* himself. Re-created himself perhaps. That’s why I find his work hopeful.

It’s not so much that I’m agnostic about the links between biography and work (its form as well as style), but that the debate misses what interests me most: the space opened by the work.    As biographical prurience/criticism tends to be practised by the least literary of literary types (I can name at least one in British arts coverage), the question has always been one way: how has a life influenced the work? Reverse the question and it might provide more interesting answers (particularly as we all share the work).”

Andrew’s supposition seems to rest on one of the difficulties I had with Poirier’s book.  Similar to being curious about how Andrew delimits ‘fiction,’ (without being pedantic, I hope; I am not pointing out a faulty argument, but attempting to locate what exactly struck me as interesting about it, because the question is important), I was curious about how Poirier delimits ‘Literature,’ and at the same time how it is that I feel comfortable calling Roubaud’s work Literature when what about it is fictional or non-fictional is exactly what is called into question.  Poirier, in discussing the Emersonian idea of genius, proposes that genius is not something inherent in a singular work so much as it is inheres in the work.  That is, not in the singularity of the noun, but in the activity it traces.  In Poirier’s reading, Emerson himself is not entirely comfortable with this idea, wishing to “evade, or at least not push further into, the remarkable suggestion that all cultural artifacts which achieve historical celebrity… are products not so much of the influx of God or Intellect or Omniscience or Soul as of the prior needs of what Hawthorne calls ‘artificial system.’”  For Emerson, and William James later, genius occurs when man “would speak ‘in the interest of no man & no party, but simply as a geometer of his forces.’” Genius appears not, then, in any  work itself, but in the actions, in the response that entailed the production of the work, as ‘the products… of prior needs.’  Capital-L Literature for Poirier then seems to be those works, specifically in the medium of language, usually written, in which a writer successfully responds by ‘troping’ the pre-existing ‘artificial system,’ accepting that successfulness is a quality granted by later readers to works that in some way escape that very artificial system which they trope— they seem to be sui generis.*  Thus, instead of “This book changed my life” denoting a shift in the boundaries of fiction, it is the inverse.  Instead of “I hadn’t thought of fiction as connected to that realm of experience,” it becomes “I hadn’t thought of experience as connected to that realm of fiction.”  Successful works are those which, even millennia later, still prompt us to say things, because we shoehorn them into our own experience.  Medical and biographical ‘items of evidence’ are thus indeed not fallacies, only, in practice, the least interesting aspect of a work.  What went into a work is less interesting that what a work went into.

In the time I’ve been working on this post, I’ve been struggling to figure out why an originally intentionless ramble on etymology led me to think about how this most fascinating aspect of Roubaud’s work related to Poirier’s book. Perhaps it is this:  I find etymology fascinating because, as much as it is the history of where they came from, it is the fossilization of what words once went into, of how they were worked.

There is more to consider, here.  I worked from Roubaud to Poirier, and it would be interesting to work the other way (I would say backwards, but…), not the least because Poirier’s book deserves consideration in its own right.  I cannot recommend it strongly enough.  And I’m not so sure I resolved why I found Andrew’s thoughts interesting as much as I created an unsolvable equation (Does Poirier’s ‘Literature,’ then, parallel Roubaud’s ‘fall’ of the riddle into mystery?  I have only just gotten to these terms in Roubaud, so I am probably getting ahead of myself.).  But needless to say 3000 words later, after a several month hiatus due to a number of reasons, I have not in fact disappeared, and with any luck I will be back here more regularly.

*This is doing a disservice to Poirier’s excellent book by making it seem as if that ‘artificial system’ to which a work responds is what we ought to investigate, in order to locate the valuable ‘human culture’ surrounding a work and thus understand its importance.  Poirier is explicitly arguing against the idea that literature’s value lies in its ability to grant us access to prior ‘human culture’ which we are impoverished for having lost  The ‘artificial system’ is lost as is the Adamic language.  Time marches inexorably forward.  In Roubaud’s work, for example, the ‘pre-existing need’ is perhaps the need to deal with his grief over the death of his wife, and the work’s success lies in having turned this need so thoroughly that we can recognize it only as a single point in the infinite field of the work.

§136 Something that would be a project (a future), a project for existence

In a project for existence— it doesn’t matter which— only a single, pragmatic answer exists to the overall “what’s-the-point?”: time passes.  Every project, particularly a formal project of writing, like mine today, which has outlived all its value (I ascribed the Project value, thus opposing it to the what’s-the-point), takes up time, structures it, erases its empty pockets.  Each hour determines another, pushes it along, consumes and nullifies it.

If I myself seek (and I don’t, really) some sort of organized answer to the overall what’s-the-point today, I only come up with skepticism; I declare myself a skeptic in the classical style of Sextus Empiricus; I seek an ataractic calm in reading and “suspended judgement.”

From a philosophical point of view, my skepticism is essentialy shallow; I don’t seek the philosophical possibility of living skeptically, but simply (a lid on the kettle of appalling thoughts) some kind of protection for an affirmation: belief in nothing so as to not have death be my only belief.

This is a voluntarist attitude, whose corollary is a strategy for life that I’ve practice spontaneously, unreflectively, and unsystematically for a long while; I’ll dub it avoidism.  I avoid time by means of tasks—counting; describing, and searching for sonnets in libraries; this work at hand, pushing along and then recopying these black lines.  I avoid the world and its remains: I don’t answer letters, nor the telephone; I walk, I keep to myself, I keep my activity to a minimum.

It is true that in all this I am neither really “consistent” nor absolute.  Perhaps such is not possible without rapidly falling into the conclusions of a total what’s-the-point, but along another path, through a sort of death by starvation.  But precisely in this probable inconsistency (I don’t really subject it to questioning) lies the possibility for my current skeptical existence.  I practice a modest skepticism; I don’t allow myself to be dragged into the pitfall of passionately denying my contradictions.

This “avoidist” version of skepticism (which I acknowledge can only prompt an irritated shrug from a philosopher…), my own version of skepticism is, finally, rather close to what Coleridge recommended to fiction readers in his famous expression: “willing suspension of disbelief.”  I find this position eminently skeptical: entering into the novel (and more generally, placing yourself before the poem, the work of art) in such a frame of mind means (and the use of the word suspension, as in the skeptic principle of “suspension of judgment,” seems characteristic) living out my reading in the same exact terms as I live my daily life: by willingly suspending my belief, by deciding momentarily, and for a limited time, to believe in nothing at all.  The skeptical world is a world of the incredible that can be entered only in brief fragments odf demarcated time, in which the impossibility of accepting that things and worlds exist will be suspended between parentheses.  And the world of a novel is penetrated similarly; the world of the great novels imposes its force of conviction, not in its capacity as an exact replica or the revelation of a world that might be our own, but because by immersing ourselves withini t we gradualy yield our consent to the fact—though with an inner conviction that we remain masters of this choice—that every life is on the whole improbable.

Part one and two. [Where major spoilers start in the following is noted.]

In a fascinating interview with Wired magazine, Kaufman and his interviewer discuss how conceits provide a framework for his movies. Adaptation has the recursive loop of the events on screen affecting the written screen-play of the events on screen; Eternal Sunshine requires the viewer to deduce, even in scenes not blatantly presented as such, that the majority of the movie is Joel’s memory. But Synecdoche, says Kaufman, “doesn’t turn out [to be] anything other than what you’re watching.” There is the conceit of the title, of course, but there is no resolution of the conceit to tie the story off or justify its peculiarities. Knowing I’d seen it, a friend asked when Hazel’s house was first shown, “Okay, that house is actually on fire, right?” Then later, “Her house is still on fire, right?

Synecdoche is a sly movie. To start, everything from the soundtrack to the color palette appears to be standard quirky indie-movie fare: it opens with a sort-of-lighthearted but faintly macabre catchy song, muted colors, and the story of an artist struggling to realize a great work. It lets you get comfortable with your expectations. The movie’s masterstroke is that the erosion of this comfort is so subtle. Suddenly, a house is perpetually on fire, but no one in the film has any major problems with this, and you are not quite sure if you should. It becomes harder and harder to tell how much time has passed: in the span of about one minute we go from a dentist recommending Caden continue flossing until his next checkup, to gum surgery by a specialist. When Hazel is goading Caden to get over his wife’s departure, she says “It’s been a year.” He retorts, “It’s been a week.” She responds, “I’m going to buy you a calendar.” Our only touchstone for time passing has been the dentist’s “I’ll see you in three months,” three months we assume have passed, because there’s a jump-cut to the second appointment between the first and the surgery, yet Caden’s subsequent assertion contradicts this. Our presumption to be following a normal story arc is continually encouraged and frustrated at the same time. Even if I can say with confidence that Caden is simply mistaken and more time than a week has passed, his mistake is a gesture towards the rhetoric of film that we take for granted. The second time watching, things appear even in the first ten minutes which were relegated on first-viewing to irrelevance, oddity, or mere cleverness: a cartoon figure on the TV show his daughter watches before school, or the man standing across the street when Caden checks the mailbox. These minor things are betrayed by our presumption to know what is already relevant to a story, and in noticing them again we are forced to acknowledge the effects of our desire for the story to be authentic, coherent, and believable

Two moments in particular emphasize this conflict between what occurs and what we must ignore to make sense of what occurs. [Spoilers follow]

Caden gets a phone call while he and Claire are in bed. The call is very brief, around 20 seconds, and when he puts down the phone he tells Claire, “My father died.” Then he launches into an elaborate description of his father’s death, beginning each further piece of information with “They said…” This description of what ‘they said’ goes on exponentially longer than the phone call lasted, and so much more information is relayed than could possibly have been shared in the duration of the phone call. We are not directed in how we ought to respond, whether with laughter or sympathy. Either way, Caden’s need—and our need— for death to be a meaningful event is highlighted. The monologue insinuates the pathological need to distort events until they are personally meaningful (‘They’ said “He asked for me just before he died” and “It was the longest and saddest death speech any of them had ever heard”) even as the shot of the miniature coffin, shown as the monologue ends with his father’s having wasted away, seems to validate the impossible-to-have-known story Caden has just told.

The second scene is even more painfully comic. Caden is summoned to the deathbed of his now grown daughter, who has been living in Germany with her mother and has forgotten how to speak English. Having been tattooed from head to toe with flowers, she tells him through a translating machine, “The flower tattoos have become infected and they’re dying. So I am as well. This is life.” She then says that she needs to forgive him before she can die, but she cannot do this until he asks forgiveness. A little bewildered by this, Caden protests that Adele left him and took her, he did not leave them, but she insists, and he eventually succumbs, asking forgiveness “for abandoning you to go have anal sex with my homosexual lover Eric.” This is patently ridiculous. We are nearing the end of a movie that revolves around Caden’s three failed relationships with women. But even when he denies being gay, Olive flatly responds, “Maria said you would deny it,” and Caden, in need of his daughter’s forgiveness for something he hasn’t even done, willingly submits to her version of the story. It is hard to laugh while one character on screen is dying and the other is sobbing, and yet it is hard to not laugh when a confession of such absurdity is blurted out with such conviction. Piling cruelty upon cruelty, she sobs “No!” refusing his apology, then immediately dies. The story she has concocted is more important to her than even a supposedly peaceful death or reconciliation with her father.  Again, whatever we feel the appropriate response to be, what is happening is clear: Olive’s art kills her as her conviction of her father’s guilt robs her of a peaceful death.  “This is life.”

Both of these scenes rely on a peculiar division of the poignant and absurd. It is our personal emphasis, giving weight to one or the other, which makes one reaction more appropriate than the other.  We can attempt to anneal these disparate and often senseless events into a conventional story: a man abandoned by his family and incapable of healthy relationships throws himself ever more resolutely into his increasingly uncontrollable and failing art. But this requires us to ignore a large part of the movie and results in a forced sympathy with a rather pathetic character who is incapable of recognizing the absurdity surrounding him, the very absurdity which we must ignore in order to sympathize. The pathos is overwhelming, and the more involved in this pathos we are, the more it emphasizes the exploitative nature of, not just cinema, but all stories.

Kaufman, for the majority of the movie, puts viewers in the position of having to make a choice between empathy and amusement. But unlike von Trier, Kaufman does not make the choices we have available readily apparent. We strive to wring coherence out of the story and when it does not appear, our empathy feels misplaced. The escape hatch out of our oppressively unmerited sympathy is a comedic reading, an explicit recasting of this incommensurable story into mere fabrication that, in virtue of being fabricated, can be safely laughed at. Caden deserves little more empathy than the citizens of Dogville. His need to replicate life becomes appalling as we witness it grow. But there is no massive retribution, no punishment exacted. Instead, he relinquishes control of his work.  An actor hired to play a cleaning lady offers to take over his role as director while he takes a break, and he continues, no longer as director, but as a character. Given this job after providing Caden with a summary of himself that he finds acceptable, Millicent dictates Caden’s every move while he goes about her former job of cleaning Adele’s house. He dies at her command, on a bench, in the arms of a stranger, a character he once saw on a TV commercial. Unimportant to him, even to us who would remember the TV commercial in which she appeared much earlier if we had paid attention, this character is Millicent’s mother in the stories she tells Caden about her own life as she directs him about the set. A secondary character, a character’s character, she is apparently the only person left, besides Caden, on the set he spent his life peopling, and he just barely remembers her. Do you laugh, or do you cry? In what way did you manipulate the story?

It is tempting to trumpet ‘everyone is the lead of their own story’ as the easy moral Kaufman is presenting. Several reviews have. It is easy to latch onto, an uplifting antidote to a weighty film, and it’s even said verbatim in the film. And in a way, it is what I’m making the movie out to be about, as this is, of course, my own personal manipulation of the movie into coherency— I am the lead in this story, this version of the movie. This is a self-serving interpretation, one that gives me the pleasure of having figured it out. It is exploitative, almost shameful. But this movie demands to be manipulated. Like life, manipulating this movie is a necessity. Kaufman has stated bluntly in interviews that the movie is about death. He’s also said it’s about whatever you want it to be about. But to make the movie about, say, respect for the originality of every individual as they concoct their own story, is dishonest in the very way that such a statement seeks to show up. It’s not that every single one of the six billion people living on Earth is the lead in their own story; that is Caden’s blindness, trying to choreograph or re-present every single one of those stories and never realizing the ultimate narcissism of that goal even as it overwhelms and relegates him to insignificant solitude. It’s that every single one of those six billion people is the lead in their own story, a story just as necessarily fabricated as Donald, Caden, Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive, Maria, Millicent, Sammy, Tammy, and all the other characters I don’t remember.

(Forewarning: spoilers for just about all of Kaufman’s movies follow, except Synecdoche.)

As I hinted at the end of the last post, the reason Kaufman’s movies appeals to me more than von Trier’s is their openness to both the fact that we manipulate the things about which we tell stories and the fact that we are in turn manipulated by them. von Trier focuses on the human relationship of manipulator and manipulated, and though he is obviously concerned with the repercussions (Dogville) or lack thereof (Dancer), he is only secondarily concerned with how that relationship originated or its reflexive properties. Hence, Grace simply moves from persecuted to persecutor like a chess piece moving spaces, a feat that succeeds due to the overtly allegorical tone of the film, with its historical names, bare set, and chapter titles.

Looking back, the theme of reflexive manipulation becomes apparent in nascent form through most of Kaufman’s movies. There’s the tragic version in Being John Malkovich, when Craig ends up trapped in his wife’s child after attempting to reenter Malkovich, and the comic version in Eternal Sunshine, when Joel and Clementine decide to pursue their relationship despite the knowledge that it hurt them both tremendously the first time around— an ending still potentially tragic, or at best bitter-sweetly comic. (Interestingly, neither were the original endings in the draft scripts, which Kaufman rewrote at the director’s request. The original script for Malkovich goes crazy in the end, revealing that Lester, through a pact with Satan, becomes the literal puppet overlord of the world by controlling Malkovich [and I do mean literally: the final shot pans up the filaments attached to Craig's arms as he tricks Lotte out of her Eden-like safe-haven from Lester's control]; Eternal Sunshine ended with Clementine returning as an old women to Merzwiak’s clinic, oblivious that this is her fifth erasure of Joel, an ending still hinted at in the loop over which the credits roll.)

In Adaptation, this theme gets its first full treatment, though it is still subordinate to Kaufman’s most prominent theme of the inextricability of reality and fiction from each other. Charlie is attempting to faithfully adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, but he is paralyzingly afraid of cliché and generic tropes. Talking to the agent who has enlisted him to adapt the book, he says he doesn’t want to ‘cram in’ “sex, or car chases, or guns.” He’d “rather let the movie exist than be artificially plot driven.” On the other hand, his out of work brother, Donald, decides to give screenwriting a shot, using what amounts to the cut and paste method of making a psychological thriller, hobbling together every cliché in the genre. His screenplay is the definition of the artificiality Charlie rails against. Early on, when Donald first tells Charlie that he’s going to write a screenplay about a serial killer, cop, and victim who are all really the same person with multiple personality disorder, Charlie berates him, saying that the only cliché more overused than serial killers is multiple personalities, and “on top of that you explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person. See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this.” Just before this, Charlie has told us his what a real writer does: “A writer should always have that goal [to do something new]. Writing is a journey into the unknown.”

As the movie progresses, we begin to see that this preconception of what ‘writing is’ has locked Charlie into writer’s block. In order to justify the conception of the story which he wants to present— that is, a story which isn’t ‘artificial’ and which just ‘exists’— he has to return to the beginning of the universe and work his way forward to himself, whom he inserts into the script, thereby shoehorning originality— the banal originality of himself and everything— into it. If there is a solipsistic narcissism in Kaufman’s movies, as the friend I mentioned in the previous post argued Caden exhibits, it is thoroughly lampooned here. Charlie the character is initially blind to his own egotism. But the title and theme of the movie begin their surreptitious movement to the foreground once Charlie hits rock bottom. At one point, Laroche and Orlean discuss evolution and adaptation:

Laroche: Adaptation’s a profound process. It means you figure out how to thrive in the world
Orlean: Yeah, but it’s easy for plants… they have no memory… they just move on to the next thing. For a person… it’s almost shameful.

And it is, both necessary to thrive and shameful. Charlie first, at his brother’s suggestion, begrudgingly goes to the screen-writing seminar which his brother attended, then, at his agent’s suggestion, calls on his brother to help him finish the script. Instantly (and hilariously), the script as we are seeing it presented in movie form is inundated with sex, guns, drugs, and car chases. Underlying this shift is Charlie’s freedom from his egotistic obsession with originality and honesty. Charlie’s own freedom from writer’s block and his ability to finish the script come with the release of his own idea of what he ‘knows’ about writing, thus allowing, paradoxically, his own ‘journey into the unknown’ via the generic and clichéd. Consequently, we as audience implicitly acknowledge that we enjoy being manipulated by such a ridiculously ‘generic’ action story as the last half of the movie becomes. If the movie lampoons writerly solipsism, it equally and preemptively lampoons those critics and viewers who will mock the last half of the movie for being ‘too clever’ or ‘too generic.’ Like Dancer in the Dark, the viewer must implicitly play along with the story’s author or remain outside to judge it as sexist and exploitative or overly clever and clichéd, a position where one is prey to the deeper criticisms both scripts level at themselves.

Adaptation comically examines the relationship between fiction and reality, be it as mundane as the effect sexual fantasies have on our encounter with those people about whom we fantasize or, to grander effect, the fact that Donald Kaufman is the only fictional person to ever get an Oscar nomination. But, like Dogville, Synecdoche forces this recognition on some explicitly conscious level. One cannot ‘just enjoy it’ as one does Adaptation, with only implicit complicity. To ‘enjoy’ it in that sense, to see the comedy in the solipsistic tragedy of an aging and ill artist pursuing his inevitable doom, one must explicitly engage it as fiction. One must manipulate it and be willingly manipulated by it, and recognize that doing such is both necessary and shameful for innumerable reasons.

Part 3, chock full of spoilers for Synecdoche, should be coming up quickly. See it if you haven’t and can.

Caden Cotard unintentionally upsets his daughter, while “just trying to explain plumbing,” when he says that it’s nothing to be afraid of, that’s it’s everywhere. She responds with a shocked, “Every single where?!” It’s a fear that seems to prevail in Synecdoche, NY, both in its main character, forever expanding his project, and its viewers, trying to keep track of everything. The movie is indeed monstrous in its scope. It takes you over. One friend commented that it’s one of the only movies he’s seen that puts you in the mood to watch it, whereas most movies you’re “in the mood for” before you decide to watch them. Another friend reacted negatively to such extreme manipulation, essentially criticizing it as not playing fair— it forces you to have an empathetic reaction to a character he felt to be so blind to his own absurdity and selfishness that he doesn’t merit empathy. Another thought it interesting but severely bloated, that Kaufman didn’t have a handle on what he was trying to do and so had to continually introduce new characters and subplots just to keep it afloat.

I spent a good deal of time talking the movie over with the friend who thought it meretricious, and trying to defend it against his criticisms greatly helped me in understanding why I personally find it so vital. Since his primary dislike was the extent to which he felt manipulated, I brought up von Trier, the incontestable master of manipulating his viewers. Manipulation included, I think the way von Trier develops from Dancer in the Dark to Dogville parallels Kaufman’s development from Adaptation to Synecdoche. When Dancer comes up in conversation, the general reactions are groans of anguish and avowals of von Trier’s skill. I’ve found that Dogville elicits the former much more often than the latter, and that’s always puzzled me, because it strikes me as a much, much stronger movie. The best justification for this reaction I can think of is that the empathy Dancer induces obviates criticism. It somehow feels that to dislike it would be to throw real salt on the fictional wound. Dogville’s ending, on the other hand, is guaranteed to produce a reaction, but the means by which it does so make the decision of which reaction the viewer feels comfortable with having a conspicuously conscious one. Political message aside, Dogville forces the viewer to ask the questions that Dancer begs. Of course you feel pain in reaction to the plight of Selma, and if you could exact just revenge on something or someone to make it better, of course you would. Who would stand idly by and let such a horrible thing happen? (This, I think, is the origin of the anger von Trier so often inspires; the answer is, “the filmmaker,” or, more commonly, “the male filmmaker.”) By highlighting through the musical numbers the escapist fantasy that the cinema provides for Selma, and thus setting off even more starkly the grainy, grim reality she faces daily, the movie forces the moral dilemmas of film’s escapism and pathos to the forefront. You’re just as guilty as von Trier, for sitting there for the duration of the film, for not doing anything, for taking some perverse pleasure in watching this poor woman suffer just as he must have taken some perverse pleasure in writing the story of her persecution, and unless you walked out, there’s nothing you can do about that.

(If you haven’t seen Dogville or Synecdoche, spoilers follow.)

But when Grace is given the chance to exact revenge at the end of Dogville, where the viewer’s sympathy ought to go is painfully confused. The only enclosed space in the entire movie, Grace’s mobster father’s car with its shielding curtains, is an astonishing prompt: step outside of this fiction, off the bare stage with its characters and plots and chalk lines, and figure out what you would do in this situation. The short step into the car is a step into something that feels almost like an alternate universe, a reality somehow detached from all the events that we have just seen occur, or related to them in a manner obliquely like our relation to them as viewer. The viewer is placed in a terrible predicament and cannot help but consider both possible options. Do you choose righteous identification with a character whose horrifying retaliation feels somehow justified, or do you choose empathetic identification with a group of despicable people who deserve better than they get for only the most basic, humanist reasons? Dogville demands a commitment from the viewer by forcing an explicit conflict between emotional and rational reactions that cannot be avoided. Dancer, on the other hand, comes dangerously close to such facile pathos porn as London to Brighton, rescuing itself by its masterfully orchestrated intensity of emotion and the implicitly posed question of empathy with a persecuted fictional character.

If there is a parallel between von Trier’s and Kaufman’s growth, it’s in the development from an implicit to an explicit concern with their main themes. von Trier is concerned (in these two films, at least) with manipulation, power, and how the medium of film itself can be used to viscerally relay the struggle between manipulator and manipulated, forcing, in Dogville, the crisis he presumes a viewer will be aware of in Dancer. Kaufman is concerned with storytelling itself, with how we engage ‘fiction’ and what effect seeing ‘reality’ turned into ‘fiction’ (or vice versa) has on us. While manipulation is thus more of a byproduct than the main concern, I think Kaufman’s particular draw, for me, is that he goes to such great lengths in this film to show how film as medium, humans as storytellers, and we as viewers manipulate the incommensurable into coherence, and not only that, but how our manipulation ultimately manipulates us.

(To be continued…)

Daily, I attach less value to the intellect. Daily, I realize more clearly that only away from it can the writer repossess something of our past impressions, that is attain to something of himself and to the one subject-matter of art. … Compared with the past, the intimate essence of ourselves, the truths of the intellect seem quite unreal. … But it is to the intellect we must look all the same to establish the inferiority of the intellect. The intellect may not deserve the supreme accolade, but it alone is capable of bestowing it. It may hold only second place in the hierarchy of virtues but only it is capable of proclaiming that instinct has to occupy the first.
-Preface to Contre Sainte-Beuve (pp. 1, 7, 8), Marcel Proust

But in art there are no initiators or precursors (at least in the scientific sense). Everything is in the individual, each individual starts the artistic or literary endeavour over again, on his own account; the works of his predecessors do not constitute, unlike in science, an acquired truth from which he who follows after may profit. A writer of genius today has everything to do. He is not much further advanced than Homer.
-’The Method of Saint-Beuve’ (p. 11)

If we want to try and understand this self, it is deep inside us, by trying to recreate it within us, that we may succeed. … It is a truth every bit of which we have to create…
- (p. 12)

… what one gives to the public is what one has written when alone, for oneself, it is very much the work of one’s self… And not having seen the gulf which separates the writer from the society man, not having understood that the writer’s self shows itself only in his books, that he only shows society men… a society man like themselves, [Sainte-Beuve] was to launch that famous method which… consists, in order to understand a poet or writer, in questioning avidly those who knew him,… who may be able to tell us how he behaved in the matter of women, etc., that is, on all those very points where the poet’s true self is not involved.
- (pp. 15, 16)

If we follow the guidelines given in this preliminary work, a puzzling combination of fiction and criticism, the first fitful attempts at a style which would eventually come to be the style of Proust’s epic, we are directed in how to approach the narrator(s), both the embryonic form it takes in Contre Sainte-Beuve and its full-fledged form in A la recherche... Even here, in a piece which is almost automatically assumed autobiographical, we cannot call our narrator Marcel Proust.

Three-fourths of the way (if memory serves— I do not have the first three volumes at hand) through the almost self-contained novella which relates Swann and Odette’s relationship in the first volume, a conspicuous ‘I’ interrupts the omniscient narration, the I of the Overture. The interruption immediately forces the reader to reconsider how exactly it is that so private a story can be narrated. The unfettered access which the narrator has to the minds of these characters becomes suddenly incongruent with the very fact of their being narrated, with the slow revealing of all the minute facts in the story of these two lovers, and what appeared to be so self-contained now breaks out, latching onto the self-conscious narrator of the rest of the book. How do we reconcile this self-conscious narrator who tells us, at one time, that he has made all this up— that he has given us, in all the hundreds of names in this book, only one name that is the real name of the family who inspired it, because their acts during the war were so noble as to deserve being recorded— with the narrator who tells us, at another time, outside the novella, that he has cobbled together the inner lives and secrets of these people from private conversations and gossip which he necessarily cannot recount without stretching into infinity this already perilously long book?

Similarly, at the same distance through the novel as a whole, a different voice breaks in, what I’ve previously called the fictive dare, where we read, “if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book…” Yet again, there is a puncture in the apparently self-contained narrative which makes up the whole novel. This parenthetical aside is not only neither the voice of the narrator nor the voice of the author, what it offers us is only conditional, an ‘if.’ You don’t have to, really, but for convenience’s sake, ‘we’ will call him Marcel. It seems undeniable that the discovery which Proust— the private Proust, the writer Proust— made when he punctured the novella has its parallel here, in the second discovery which could only come after the narrator had made the first one for himself. It is not that the narrator is unreliable (there is nothing to be reliable to— this is just a story!), but that we cannot even name this narrator, whose voice does not modulate even when it is apparently not itself. There is no outside narrator onto whom this pronouncement can latch. It is a ‘third,’ unnamed narrator which gives us a possible name, taken from the author, to give if we like to the narrator who has been recounting the whole novel, even that almost self-contained novella way back in the first volume.

Is this the true writerly self, the self that is so different from the social self, which the critic and narrator of Contre Sainte-Beuve describes? A few days ago, I stumbled across the notes I made after finishing the Overture. In them, I find a quote which I had forgotten, from the famous scene:

I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

An abyss of uncertainty. That, it seems, is what speaks in that brief aside, when the narration is overtaken by itself, and there is no other speaker to point to. It is both the seeker and the dark region through which ‘we’ must go seeking. But the narrator cannot merely point to it, he cannot merely describe it. It seems that his whole labor is towards this one moment which it is impossible to account for. It is not the true self, the writerly self, that appears here. It is, however, the ‘work of one’s self,’ that self which cannot be located through intellect. “It is a truth every bit of which we have to create.” In the manner of that peculiar inversion inscribed in the very heart of the novel, which appears to grant us a firm stance while instantly taking it from us, it is a truth, access to which the intellect must admit it lacks, which only the intellect can admit.

A footnote by the editors near the end of the novel attributes the constant time-shifting of the final volume, the discussion of soon-to-occur events before they occur, the accounts of asides given by characters which the narrator will not encounter in conversation for several dozen more pages, to an author who died too young, before having time to edit the final drafts of the last few volumes. It is almost certainly true— affirmed by the fact that some variant of the word “perspicacious” is used no less than a dozen times in about one hundred pages, a conspicuous over-usage which has been astonishingly avoided in the preceding several thousand pages. But what if? What if it is not accidental? What if ‘Marcel’ attributes the same description to both Legrandin and Saint-Loup without concern for the ‘impropriety’ of such a narrative failure? Is it any more or less egregious an error than feigning access to the innermost (carefully revealed) secrets of Odette and Swann? Or does this, like that abyss of uncertainty, merely reveal that this ‘truth’ is created?

In The Flesh of Words, Jacques Ranciére considers why exactly Proust would go to such great lengths to include in the final volume of his novel the war which interrupted its publication and granted him the chance to reconceive the work as a whole. He postulates that the war is placed there to highlight the various ‘truths’ which ‘Marcel’ has labored so long to discover. These are the truth of love, the truth of war, and the truth of fiction.

What the experience of love proved to the hero is that the beloved always lies to us, with a permanent lie that is not a characteristic trait but just the pocket change of the illusion objectified in the individuality of the beloved individual… [His] love for Albertine made the hero incapable of untangling truth from the lie” (p. 118)

Conversely,

Love for the fatherland makes [Marcel] incapable of mixing the idea of the fatherland with that of the lie, the idea of the enemy with that of truth… the ‘passionate’ war is a strange passion, a passion that is wholly truth… The truth of the war is the truth— the counter-truth— of the anti-literary lure of fusional communion (pp. 118, 120, 122)

The latter is an epic truth which Saint-Loup says is “so beautiful that you would think, as I do, that words could do no more.”

Maybe they can, though. Maybe they can grant the ability to carry one’s particular burden of reality, but only when that reality is looked at indirectly, when one looks at the indirection of a fiction and acknowledges it as such. Just as we must create the narrator who can narrate the narrator, Proust— the man, the author, the writer— had to create his own indirection. We should not believe that the fiction grants us access to him, though, or that knowledge of his behavior towards women will grant us access to the fiction. That would be to succumb to one of those counter-truths, to ignore that voice which is not the author’s or the narrator’s but can grant us the possibility— if we ignore that very voice— of ascribing the author’s name to the narrator. We must not ignore ‘the pocket change of the illusion’ left over when we assume to know that Proust in fact dipped toast into his tea, as the famous event is recounted in Contre Sainte-Beuve, and not a madeleine, nor attempt to recuperate this novel into a whole-truth, with ‘Marcel’ telling us a complete and orchestrated story; we must let the intellect discover that it is not the means by which we can approach this book.

Is this the truth which Beckett took from Proust? Only, instead of that surety which Proust seemed to discover (we will never know whether he did, or whether it eluded him until death robbed him of the possibility of finishing his work), Beckett presents to us the tragicomedy of Perseus striking his own shield, the tragicomedy of an unidentifiable narrator who hopes that, one day, he will have a hold on that true self when he finishes the unfinishable novel. That truth, for which one seeks in the abyss that opens up when one seeks, is still to be created, and we (that same ‘we’ which may or may not call the narrator Marcel, that ‘our’ whose past impressions only the solitary writer can repossess) are not much further advanced than Homer. Or Proust.

To cut off Medusa’s head without being turned to stone, Perseus supports himself on the very lightest of things, the winds and the clouds, and fixes his gaze upon what can be revealed only by indirect vision, an image caught in a mirror.  I am immediately tempted to see this myth as an allegory on the poet’s relationship to the world, a lesson in the method to follow when writing.  But I know that any interpretation impoverishes the myth and suffocates it.  With myths, one should not be in a hurry.  It is better to let them settle into the memory, to stop and dwell on every detail, to reflect on them without losing touch with their language of images.  The lesson we can learn from a myth lies in the literal narrative, not in what we add to it from the outside.

The relationship between Perseus and the Gorgon is a complex one and does not end with the beheading of the monster.  …  Perseus does not abandom [the severed head] but carries it concealed in a bag.  When his enemies are about to overcome him, he has only to display it, holding it by its snaky locks, and this bloodstained booty becomes an invincible weapon in the hero’s hand.  It is a weapon he uses only in cases of dire necessity, and only against those who deserve the punishment of being turned into statues.  Here, certainly, the myth is telling us something, something implicit in the images that can’t be explained in any other way.  Perseus succeeds in mastering that horrendous face by keeping it hidden, just as in the first place he vanquished it by viewing it in a mirror.  Perseus’s strength always lies in a refusal to look directly, but not in a refusal of the reality in which he is fated to live; he carries the reality with him and accepts it as his particular burden.

— Italo Calvino, ‘Lightness,’ Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Being now in the midst of the pre-term-paper research panic, it will probably be dead here for a little while, but stumbling into this essay by Blanchot fairly well made my afternoon. Here’s a rather large (and lightly edited) excerpt:

According to some, the mission of language is correctly to express thought, to make itself into its faithful interpreter, to submit t it as to a sovereign that it acknowledges. But for others expression is only the prosaic destiny of everyday languages; the true role of language is not to express but to communicate, nt to translate but t be; and it would be absurd to see in it only an intermediary, a miserable agent: it has a power unique to itself, which it is exactly the writer’s duty to discover or to restore. There, it seems, are the two families of thought, each completely foreign to the other. What could they possibly have in common?

We have seen that come struggled against language because they saw in it an imperfect means of expression and because they wished for language a complete perfection of intelligibility. To what does this ambition lead? To the invention of a language without commonplaces, a language without apparent ambiguity, in fact a language that no longer offers a common measure and is completely removed from comprehension. And we have also seen that others struggled against language that was considered a too-complete or over-perfect means of expression and consequently a nonliterary language and that, by their pitiless demand, their concern for an inaccessible purity, they ended up hunting down conventions, rules, genres, all the way to a total prohibition of literature, satisfied if they could make their secret perceptible outside f any literary form. But it must now be added that these consequences— rejection of language, rejection of literature— are not the only ones to which both parties yielded. It also necessarily happens that their enterprise against words, their desire not to take them into account in order to leave thought its empire whole, their obsessive fear of indifference, all provoke an extreme care for language whose consequence is verbalism. That is a significant fate, at once deplorable and fortunate. Whoever wants to be absent from words at every instant or to be present only to those that he reinvents is endlessly occupied with them so that, of all authors, those who most eagerly seek to avoid the reproach of verbalism are also exactly the ones that are most exposed to this reproach.

It is the same for those who through the marvels of asceticism have had the illusion of distancing themselves from all literature. For having wanted to rid themselves of conventions and of forms, in order to touch directly the secret world and the profound metaphysics that they meant to reveal, they finally contented themselves with using this world, this secret, this metaphysics as they would conventions and forms that they complacently exhibited and that constituted at once the visible framework and the foundation of their works. In other words, for this kind of writer metaphysics, religion, and emotions take the place of technique and language. They are a system of expression, a literary genre – in a word, literature.

Now we are ready to give an answer to the question, How is literature possible? It is actually through virtue of a double illusion— illusion of some who struggle against commonplaces; illusion of others who, renouncing literary conventions or, as we say, literature, cause it to be reborn in a form (metaphysics, religion, etc.) that is not its own. It is from this illusion and from the awareness of this illusion that Jean Paulhan [the author of the work under review in this essay], through a revolution that can be called Copernican, like that of Kant, proposes to draw the most precise and rigorous literary reign. Let us note how bold this revolution is at first sight, for finally it is a question of putting an end to the essential illusion that allows literature. It is a question of revealing to the writer that he gives birth to art only through a vain, blind struggle against it, that the works that he thought he wrenched from common, vulgar language exists thanks to the vulgarization of virgin language, through an excess of impurity and debasement. There is in this discovery enough to cause the silence of Rimbaud to fall on everyone. But just as for man the fact of knowing that the world is the projection of his mind does not destroy the world, but on the contrary assures knowledge of it, represents its limits and makes clear its meaning, so does the writer, if he knows that the more he struggles against commonplaces the more he is bound to them, or if he learns that he writes only with the help of what he detests, has the chance to see the extent of his power and the means of his authority more clearly. In any case, instead of being unknowingly ruled by words or indirectly governed by rules (for his refusal of rules causes him to depend on them), he will seek for mastery of them. Instead of submitting to commonplaces, he will be able to make them; and knowing that he cannot struggle against literature, that he could eschew conventions only to accept their constraints, he will receive the rules, not as artificial guidelines that point out the way to follow and the world to discover but as the means of his discovery and the law of his progress through the darkness where there is neither a way nor an outline.

(collected in Faux Pas, translated by Charlotte Mandell)

RSB has an introduction to the work under review in this essay, Jean Paulhan’s The Flowers of Tarbes.

The Bible does not offer reasons why things happen or why certain people are affected or chosen–why Abraham? for example; indeed, why the Jews?–and of course this is how life is. Things happen. Things are. What matters is how we respond to things. In this way, he argues, the Bible is above all, realistic, which may seem odd to us, given how used to the conventions of the so-called realist novel we are, and how unlike such a novel the Bible is, regardless of our attempts to read it as if it were one.

From Richard’s excellent post about Josipovici’s discussion of the Bible, which I mentioned briefly in my last post, which, as always, feels utterly inadequate once the enthusiasm of saying it has worn off…  Luckily, Richard decided to discuss one of the essays that has influenced my thinking on the subject, so be sure and read him talking about it much more eloquently than I did.