Oracle Night – Paul Auster

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Oracle Night is the first Paul Auster novel I’ve read since Leviathan in 1992. Until then, I had read every book. This was not a difficult feat. Auster is supremely readable. In fact, I am afflicted by an unusual inability to stop reading him once a book is begun.

However, in the end, with Leviathan, I felt this was too much. I read it abnormally quickly, devouring each page with less and less concern for what was written on it than for getting beyond that page and to the next page, and the next, to see what was there.

After the last page I was mentally exhausted, nursing a headache. It seems significant that I have no memory of the narrative except for the mental image of a forest to which a character – perhaps the main character – removes himself. The proliferation of anecdotes – or stories within stories – means one can’t see the wood for the trees.

The experience of reading Oracle Night is very similar. It’s almost impossible to put the book down as there are so many compelling stories, one after the other, even though this is a relatively compact novel (240 pages). I’m sure I’ll forget most of the stories, but that isn’t important. Nor is Auster’s distinctly unpretentious prose style important. If you wince at clichés like back in the swing of things and to all intents and purposes that appear on the first half page alone, think of them as stablisers for the roller coaster ride ahead. (Elsewhere, I read that Auster breaks through his writer’s block by typing regardless of the banality of the prose.)

There are two central narratives in Oracle Night – both told by Sidney Orr, a New York writer recovering from an unnamed illness that was expected to kill him. He hadn’t written anything in a year until discovering a blue notebook in a small stationery shop (that isn’t stationary at all in fact. It disappears overnight.) Anyway, the new notebook somehow enables Orr to write a story. Much of Oracle Night is that story.

I don’t want to summarise the plot here as it is characteristically involved and would also detract from the essential element of Auster’s novels. The essential thing is something impossible to convey outside of the narrative itself: the evocation of possibility. At each step in the story – when Orr enters the stationery store to discover the blue notebook, when he returns to his writing den, when he begins to write the story in the blue notebook as if compelled by an occult power, and when, in the story within the story, the character makes a life-changing decision – there is a thrilling, uncanny sense of freedom. I mean, for the reader. A freedom in infinite possibility; innumerable futures present themselves. I have not experienced this so acutely with any other writer.

It’s there too in the opening lines of The Music of Chance: Jim Nashe driving away from his past after a windfall of cash. After that, the story takes shape and the sense diminishes. Until then, however, no particular story is attached to the sense of freedom. Anything can happen. We are free. The beginning of the story is our windfall.

So why is do we feel an urge to continue reading rather than to throw the book aside and live that freedom? Probably because we prefer the illusion of freedom, the possibility of freedom rather than the real thing. We read to enjoy the specific story that replaces the vertigo of infinite freedom. As with a horror movie, we aren’t really horrified. Horror is only the playful withdrawal of a guaranteed safety. And narrative is the guarantee. With a novel, we know we have a circumscribed adventure before us.

Yet that narrative also makes our freedom come true for a moment, even if it is only an illusion. The open future may contain infinite possibilities but it never seems to happen for real. Consumed by habit, we lose contact with our freedom. Reading, or watching a film, reminds us of possibility even as it is removed. And in that reminder, it comes true. The obscure attraction of a book or a film might be, then, the pleasure of contact with possibility and relief in its withdrawal.

But such pleasure has a double edge of course. Indulgence in stories removes us from life; takes us to the end of possibility. Auster’s narrative is, as I’ve said, compelling. It is compelling but in the end doesn’t satisfy the indulgent reader. Oracle Night could go on for another thousand pages. Perhaps it does as Auster’s complete oeuvre. Yet it does stop. Although, actually, it doesn’t quite. The story within the story is not concluded. It is shocking and frustrating for the reader. One wants to know how the author Sidney Orr and the author Paul Auster resolve a chilling situation. At the end though Orr explains why it is left hanging and we realise that it stops precisely for the reason we don’t want it to stop. It is difficult to accept, yet not because it is wrong.

This has angered and confused naïve readers; those untroubled by stories. For instance, Aaron Hughes asks the right questions but asks them only of Oracle Night rather than literature in general. What does it mean, for example, to say that Oracle Night “is not a success” when the nature of success in literary terms is fundamental to the narrative itself? The answers present themselves in the novel under review. When you pick up a novel you become a reader, not a consumer.

Orr describes burning the blue notebook in order to escape its mysterious power; in order to flee the nightmare of possibilities it summoned. Indeed, the end of the novel seems overladen with terrible events. Orr writes: “The true story started only then, after I destroyed the blue notebook.”

We might compare this with something Auster – or should we say Orrster? – wrote in The Invention of Solitude at the very beginning of his career following after death of his father:

For the past two weeks, these lines from Maurice Blanchot echoing in my head: ‘One thing must be understood: I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it.’ [from Death Sentence]
To begin with death. To work my way back into life, and then, finally, to return to death.

In Oracle Night, we joined Sidney Orr working his way back into life from the brink of death – working, that is, by writing. Yet the main symptom of his unnamed illness was dizziness, where the world became blurred and incoherent: a world without form. Almost as if language and meaning had been removed from his life. It took the discovery of the blue notebook and the writing of the new story to return him to both. But that only returns threatens another death, the death of possibility. It is Auster’s rare achievement to keep possibility alive and kicking even as it suffers a death by a thousand plots.

Nowhere Without No – Maurice Blanchot

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Not half way through the year but already a book has come along that, at the end, I will say: this is it — the book of the year.

I am aware that there is something desperate about such a pronouncement. It reveals a need to fulfil empty time with an evasive monument. That is the nature of monuments after all. The bigger the monument the more it evades — hence the respect given to a new 800 page novel spanning generations, the collected works of a writer or a definitive biography of a tyrant. Yet the book I’m holding is a fragile 53 pages and is published by a small press in Sydney, Australia.

Nowhere Without No is, ironically, a collection of thirteen memorials by translators, academics and poets (sometimes a combination of all three) in honour of Maurice Blanchot, the French novelist and philosopher, who died in February 2003 aged 95.

The introduction by editor Kevin Hart explains the title. It comes from Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy in which the poet writes of ‘a space that has been freed from ordinary time’ as experienced by children, animals and the dead:

It is always world
and never nowhere without no:
that pureness, that unwatched, which one breathes and
endlessly knows and never wants. But a child
might lose himself inside the quiet and become
shaken. Or someone dies and is.
For near to death one sees that death no more
and stares ahead, perhaps with a beast’s huge glance.

Blanchot’s gift is to reveal to us how literature is also nowhere without no. His work pursues writing to where it disappears into this space, as it separates itself from the reader and writer. Hart reminds us that Blanchot wrote (in the third person) of his own experience of this separation as he faced a firing squad in 1944. Waiting to die, there was:

"a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however) — sovereign elation? […] In this place, I will not try to analyse. He was perhaps suddenly in invincible. Dead — immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship." (from The Instant of My Death, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg)

The shots didn’t come; he was told to run and thereby regained a life where, from then on, he writes, "the instant of my death [was] henceforth always in abeyance". Later, he discovered that a manuscript had been taken from his room by enemy officers believing it to contain military secrets. Instead of the death of the author, there was the death of the text.

One might say: but this is written in the third person; it is either fiction or Blanchot is writing about another person — perhaps literature itself. That lost manuscript certainly has the convenience of fiction, standing for the agency and meaning as it withdraws. However, such a distinction is impossible. By writing in the third person, Blanchot emphasises the distance inherent to such reminiscence — itself already literature, already intimate with death.

Ten years later, Blanchot’s The Space of Literature is saturated with this experience:

- to write is to break the bond that unites the word with myself.
– to write is to withdraw language from the world.
– to write is to surrender to the fascination of time’s absence.
– the writer never reads his work. It is, for him, a secret.
– in the solitude of the work … we discover a more essential solitude.
– art is the power by which night opens
(trans. Ann Smock)

Throughout this extraordinary book, Blanchot traces the impact of the night on the work of various authors — Rilke, Mallarmé and Kafka in particular. If, for Kafka, "there exists only the outside, the glistening flow of the eternal outside" what does that mean for his world of expression, of escape, of liberty that is writing? The question is part of the work itself. In this way, reading Blanchot is frustrating: there is at once the assertiveness of the phrases quoted above and a resistence to actually saying anything in the usual manner. His assertions serve to obscure what was previously clear. Rather than offering an alternative to, say, a Freudian or Marxist reading of Metamorphosis, Blanchot reveals how each reading has to make a leap over the abyss.

For the reader, it is intoxicating, yet almost impossible to then put to use. Lydia Davis — pioneering translator of the récit Death Sentence — says she can follow the argument line by line yet summary is resisted. "Somehow the experience of reading had to take place moment by moment". This resistence, she finds, is experienced by most other readers. It is not a criticism.

Charlotte Mandell — translator of The Work of Fire and The Book to Come — recalls how she felt a need to write to Blanchot to thank him for the silence in his words — for the revelation of the space. Her gratitude then is not for the man himself but for his absence, such is the perversity of his gift. Mandell doesn’t say whether he replied — though others report replies of exceptional courtesy and concern. Only Jacques Derrida — in the address given at the cremation — tells of the man himself: brief meetings in a university office throughout which Blanchot wore a gentle smile, and then breathless on the phone toward the end. He seems ghostly even in life.

One wonders how much this effacement contributes to the unique aura of his works? Not much, if the attempts to imitate him are any guide. The poet Jacques Dupin writes that in Blanchot’s fragmentary writing:

"his speech yielded a conductive wire of an extreme delicacy in search of the ultimate meaning, that which was well beyond one’s grasp and which indicated from very high up how to pass over the precipices, how to master the turbulance and the proliferation, of the forces of discolation that exhaust the text, that strangle the voice."

While Blanchot’s prose can be said to be poetic — and Dupin is surely right to detect a "demanding poet" behind the prose – it is not flighty and impressionistic. The silence of the words is achieved by the extreme patience and attention to the weight of words — a patience frequently expressed in doubt. Blanchot’s disciples have a remarkable confidence to use key word and oxymorons that appear throughout Blanchot’s work — passivity, sovereign relation, forgetfulness without memory, the impossible real, motionless retreat, purposiveness without purpose — in the assumption that they automatically plumb the depths as they do in Blanchot. Curiously, they don’t. As Blanchot himself wrote:

"Desire of writing, writing of desire. Desire of knowledge, knowledge of desire. Let us not believe that we have said anything at all with these reversals."

The merit of Nowhere Without No is that, unlike so much Blanchot-related material, it doesn’t strain to say too much. Such is the silence brought by death perhaps. The latter also means the distance between the author and his work is foregrounded, if only in the reader’s mind.

Michael Holland emphasises the distance in a remarkable, two-page analysis of science-fiction. The genre, he says, necessarily "hangs back from thinking the totality of what it projects – which is to say total transcendence in the here and now". He means it denies mortality. And that means such transcendence is pure violence: "Sci-fi is thus essentially nihilistic" because it cannot accommodate bodily death on the level of its narrative. He urges us to read and re-read Blanchot in order to hold off such nihilism. This is how we can learn from Blanchot. There is no need to adopt his style. Blanchot himself did exactly that in his own learning.

Mark C. Taylor remarks on Blanchot’s neglected kinship with an earlier enigmatic philosopher-writer: "It was …Kierkegaard" he writes "who first realised that philosophy can be itself only by becoming literature; and it was Kierkegaard who insisted tht the only way to be truly in the world is to withdraw from it." Taylor asked for a meeting to discuss it but got a note saying: "Though I might wish it otherwise, the conditions of my work make it impossible for us to meet". Still, he confirmed to Taylor that Kierkegaard was indeed a secret sharer. He helped Blanchot find his own way. This collection, modest in size and character as it is, offers Blanchot as a guide to us, placing the emphasis firmly on the writing:

"I have long thought that some things are so intimate that they can never be said but must be written. Writing does not merely create distance but also allows one to draw closer than any spoken word. This closeness must not be confused with presence. Writing brings the remote near by allowing presence to withdraw. The lasting lesson of Blanchot is that withdrawal opens up the space-time of desire whose absence is death. Though he has been taken from us, he will continue to give what is never ours to possess."

All Souls’ Day – Cees Nooteboom

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"The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way that ought to lead there."  Maurice Blanchot

How does one deal with trauma? It’s a common question. Arthur Daane, roving documentary cameraman and protagonist of Cees Nooteboom’s latest novel, asks it too. He thinks of some of the traumatic events of his time:

"The woman who happened to be passing by when the bomb exploded in Madrid, the seven Trappist monks whose throats were cut in Algiers, the twenty boys gunned down before their parents’ eyes in Colombia, the entire trainful of commuters hacked to death with machetes in a five-minute burst of orgiastic fury in Johannesburg, the two hundred passengers on the plane that exploded above the sea, the two, three or six thousand men and boys killed in Srebrenica, the hundreds of thousand of woman and children slain in Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Angola."

The list could go on and on. And that fact, Daane thinks, is perhaps the worst. "For one moment, a day, a week, they were front-page news, for several seconds they flowed through cables in every part of the globe, and then it began, the black, delete-button darkness of oblivion." Amnesia sets in "as if … humanity wasn’t interested in individual names, only the blind survival of the species."

Daane is, as you might have guessed, a melancholy soul. But his otherwise mundane ruminations have a traumatic resonance. Some time before the novel begins, his wife and child were killed in a place crash. Alone, in time between jobs, he wanders the streets of Berlin with his camera, recording quiet moments at dawn or dusk in a city full of ghosts. This is his way of resisting amnesia, and yet it is also his way of forgetting ("dealing with" one might say) the permanent absence of his family. The paradox is central to his melancholy and to this novel. How can he move on without obliterating their individual names? The temptation is to dive into work, into experience and other forms of forgetfulness, but to do that, he thinks, would, in turn, lead to the sleep of reason, thereby summoning up the nightmares already spoken of.

In first half of the novel, we follow Arthur on his wandering. He visits friends in a bar, gets caught up with dying tramp on the snow-covered streets, visits a gallery with two paintings by Caspar David Friedrich that he is fascinated by, and a library that will, in the second half, change his life. Many reviewers have referred to this wandering with, at best, condescension. In particular, they disapprove of Arthur’s "intellectual posturing", which seems to mean any mention of anything other than that which will take the story "forward" into forgetfulness. This is a form of criticism that avoids the very issue addressed by the novel. Arthur is searching for an. He talks with his living friends, and listens to those who are dead, which take the form of memories, books, paintings, films, science and philosophy. It helps him. It helps his friends. But like all friends, they have their limits. And he knows it. They are useful only in their uselessness. This novel is a part of that scheme too. It has this wonderfully strange quality of enabling us to maintain contact with what is important to us, that which otherwise seems inaccessible, in that which takes us further away (i.e "escapism"). Indeed, the All Souls’ Day of the title is the Catholic holiday (November 2nd) commemorating the souls of the dead; another form of fiction in which one has to place one’s trust in order to cross the abyss.

On a ferry crossing the Baltic, thinking of the 1994 MV Estonia disaster, Arthur reflects that there is a thin membrane between him and chaos, as thin as the window he presses his face to, looking out to sea. The more ignorant of the reviewers (i.e. Julie Myerson of The Guardian) would rather we weren’t reminded of this and be allowed to plunge into forgetfulness, as if it were possible without denial. Nooteboom’s achievement is to open the abyss of history out of these everyday thoughts. He does this by showing how the rich heritage of speculation in the arts and sciences derives from the same confrontation with trauma as experienced by Arthur. This is seen as a failure by those, like Myerson, who can see learning only as a trophy to be displayed. Nooteboom wears his learning lightly but it seems one can’t escape the philistine thought-police of English literary criticism.

In terms of the plot, Arthur contrives to meet a history research student beginning a project on an obscure Spanish queen of the 12th Century. From what little is revealed, she appears, like Arthur, to be taking a roundabout route in resolving personal trauma. Despite this, both Arthur and readers of the novel seem to be on the brink of relief from endless speculation by falling into a love story. But the student, Elik, a fellow Dutch ex-patriot, remains mysteriously private despite their physical intimacy. Through her silence, she prompts even more fevered questioning. After a date, she disappears without warning and, when they meet again, refuses to reveal very much of herself. She prefers to argue about historiography with one of Arthur’s scholarly friends. The novelist doesn’t fill in the blanks for us; she remains a figure in the shadows at the edge of the prose. We have to speculate as much as Arthur, another reason for lazy readers to complain. Indeed, this novel is, despite its conventional, conversational surface, packed full of implicit allusions to its own provisional status in relation to its own research. There’s Arthur’s private film project (that Myerson selfishly misreads as "solipsistic" when it is precisely the opposite); there’s Elik’s research project much-criticised by her supervisor; and there’s the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich quietly expressing a latent trauma much like that of Munch’s much noisier The Scream. However, the most obvious correlation is Arthur’s half-requited infatuation with Elik. While for Myerson all this is inadmissibly reflexive, it creates a stimulating vertigo for the reader. We’re not allowed to forget for very long that the novel, and so its reader, is subject to the same problems of knowledge and its refusal.

This final point is emphasised by the occasional chapters in which a kind of Greek chorus intervenes in the narrative, looking down on the events with cool compassion. It’s unclear who is speaking. Perhaps it’s the voice of all that which cannot be included in what is, necessarily, a circumscribed narrative. Perhaps it’s Arthur’s late wife keeping a concerned eye on her husband. But most likely it is the voice from 500 years from now, when the past-as-tragedy has become the past-as-absurdist-comedy, just as the life of the Spanish queen seems to us now. Elik’s project was to rescue the queen from such a fate. Her supervisor warns her it might take a decade and be, in the end, futile; no one is likely to read the results. But she continues anyway, perhaps because of that, just as Arthur will continue to pursue Elik. For many, this novel will be similarly futile, slow-moving, overlong and provisional, but I’m very grateful that Cees Nooteboom has taken the long way round and rescued something precious from the traumatic inferno.

There are many remarkable facts about the long life of the French novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot. The strident – perhaps Fascist – nationalism of his pre-War journalism; his near-death at the hands of the Nazis during the war; his reclusive devotion to writing that is similar to, but more significant than, Pynchon’s and Salinger’s; his deep influence on more famous French thinkers (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze). And, finally, in this list, his return to public life to oppose French colonialism in Algeria and then to support the May 1968 student uprising, during which he drafted pamphlets released by those opposing General de Gaulle’s autocracy.

But to concentrate on these facts, relevant as they are, would be to ignore what Blanchot offers, which is a return to the fundamental mystery of literature. That is, why do written words have so much power over us, yet also seem completely estranged from the world they supposedly refers to? When we say that literature takes us to “another world”, we say more than we might imagine. It is an asymmetry that Blanchot presents to us relentlessly. “There is an a-cultural aspect to art and literature which it is hard to accept wholeheartedly” he says. In this age of shortcuts, in which the value of literature is judged by how well literature effaces itself, so that the asymmetry is denied, avoided, denounced even, Blanchot’s resistance makes him, in my opinion, one of the most important writers.

In my opinion. What is that worth? The question of authority – mine, Blanchot’s or anybody else’s – is the invisible centre of our cultural ideology. We all know that Liberal Democracy is based on choice; each individual is free to choose and each individual’s choice is as good as any other’s. So, when I write in my opinion, I remove all weight from the judgement. The complete opposite is equally valid. Despite this, we still make definite choices in what to read, watch or listen to, as if hoping, despite everything, for something more than nothing. The act of choice itself speaks of a need: for nourishment, entertainment or distraction, or all three combined. But we have little guidance on what and why to choose. Perhaps the recent proliferation of award ceremonies and prize competitions for each art form is no coincidence: the award-winning novel, the platinum-selling album, the blockbuster movie. We want a guarantee of value. Each offers a mitigation of one’s apparently random choice. At the same time, however, we know, like a General Election, it is meaningless. Nothing changes. Such is the totality of Liberal Democracy.

Worse still, the condition has a retrospective affect. Nothing escapes its scything action. History is flattened too, shorn of meaning. Even critiques of the condition become just an opinion under the smiling curve of the scythe. Blanchot does not propose an answer. Rather, he looks at how this condition might have arisen, offering in the process a startling revision of our understanding of what literature is. Might the asymmetry of art and world be what makes it vital and important? In a short essay from 1953, published in a new translation by the Oxford Literary Review, Blanchot goes back to the beginnings of modern thought to investigate this possibility, specifically to ancient Athens, and Socrates’ preference for speech over writing.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates says that speech has the guarantee of the living presence of the speaker. One can ask questions and receive answers; there is always the movement of dialogue with those involved always mindful of truth. In dialogue, progress is possible. On the other hand, written words can only maintain a solemn silence: “if you ask them what they mean by anything,” he says, “they simply return the same answer over and over again.” The philosopher links this to religious superstition, when Greeks listened to “the sacred voice” emerging from a stone or the stump of a tree. Blanchot compares this to the silent confrontation with written words:

“Like sacred language, what is written comes from no recognisable source, is without author or origin, and thereby always refers back to something more original than itself. Behind the words of the written work, nobody is present; but language gives voice to this absence, just as in the oracle, when divinity speaks, the god himself is never present in his words, and it is the absence of god which then speaks.” (trans. Leslie Hill)

If, as Blanchot says, the voice of the divine and the voice of literature are comparable, they are effectively indistinguishable, thereby doubling the threat to the human project represented by Socrates. What can be done if the oracular voice develops an alternative outlet in literature, luring truth into “the abyss where there is neither truth nor meaning nor even error”? Blanchot reminds us what was done: “both Plato and Socrates are quick to declare writing, like art, a simple pastime which does not jeopardise seriousness and is reserved for moments of leisure”. Of course, Socrates went on to pay with his life for his commitment to the more serious matter of debate. And while his sacrifice remains emblematic of our notion of the freedom of speech, his dismissal of writing and art sounds very familiar, very now, particularly to anyone searching for truth in art. We can see the correlation between postmodernism (no truth, no meaning), popular culture (no error), and the ancient philosophers’ dismissal of art. It is attractive as there is another correlation, perhaps the most important: both are also liberations. In each case, freedom is granted to those previously enslaved to truth. Writers can let their imagination run wild; there is no comeback.

Instead of celebrating or lamenting this development, Blanchot considers the silence of the gods revealed in the written word. He wonders what it is that disarms Plato and Socrates so much that they deny it is even relevant, and compels us, their descendants, to fill the empty space with reductive theories: social, psychological, post-colonial. For a possible answer, he turns to Heraclitus, the first poet-philosopher, pre-dating Socrates, the first rationalist. In one of his enigmatic fragments, Heraclitus says the oracle “neither speaks out nor conceals, but points”. From this Blanchot deduces that the “language in which the origin speaks is essentially prophetic.” However, he clarifies the final word:

“This does not mean that it dictates future events, it means that it does not base itself on something which already is … It points toward the future, because it does not yet speak, and is language of the future to the extent that it is like a future language which is always ahead of itself, having its meaning and legitimacy only before it, which is to say that it is fundamentally without justification.” (trans. Leslie Hill)

It does not base itself on something which already is. This could be the cry of the opponents of the kind of literature that does not engage with current events or familiar social relations, and where the style, language and subject matter – or lack of it – resists the utility of common understanding. Is modern literature, then, prophetic?

The nature of the question means the answer cannot be stated as such, only experienced. The moment it is answered, the language of the future is negated and drawn into Socrates’ dialogue of utility. However, this is not to distinguish experience and literature. Contrary to popular opinion, literature is intimate with daily experience. Blanchot puts it this way:

“Upon the background noise constituted by our knowledge of the world’s daily course, which precedes, accompanies, and follows in us all knowledge, we cast forth, walking or sleeping, phrases that are punctuated by questions. Murmuring questions. What are they worth? What do they say? These are still more questions.” (trans. Susan Hanson)

We don’t experience the world without this murmuring, a kind of voice-under codifying and animating an otherwise uniform world. Yet we spend most of our lives avoiding or sedating it with entertainment-distraction, drugged socialising, or plausible theories of hominid brain development. It is Blanchot’s unique attunement to these murmuring questions – to what resists the Socratic demand – which distinguishes his work. When he reviews a book, rather than judging it within set external criteria, such as the persuasiveness of character or plot, or its relevance to the breaking news of the moment, he asks certain questions that emerge from the experience of reading the book itself.

This is clear in an exemplary essay on Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable [see note at bottom of page]. Here is a book that has no justification. It has no sensitive social analysis. It is scornful of polite taste and ridicules all notions of the redeeming power of art. It makes much fun of its struggle to efface the author with the usual means of the suspension of disbelief, before spiralling into a calamitous verbal free fall. Blanchot asks, “Who speaks in Samuel Beckett’s books? … Who is the tireless ‘I’ who seems always to say the same thing?” At first, the answer is clear: it is Samuel Beckett. But it by asking this deceptively simple question he opens us to the novel’s terrible dynamic.

Molloy is narrated by a man telling of a past full of cities, forests and seascapes, while stuck in his absent mother’s room. This is the usual displacement of the author’s own voice. Molloy could be Beckett writing in his own room. Eventually, Molloy invents another narrator, Moran, a police detective, who narrates his own story, in this case the pursuit of Molloy. Blanchot says this a “slightly disappointing” allegory of the author’s search for something more original than itself. Beckett is having fun with the conventions of the novel – which is why so many readers see only absurdity in his work. Yet at the same time Molloy and Moran offer a reassuring presence like normal characters in a novel speaking through their all-powerful master, and so protecting us from what Blanchot calls “a greater threat”.

That threat begins to appear in Malone Dies. Malone’s death would provoke the “ultimate disaster which is to have lost the right to say I”. Malone is bedridden, having only a pencil for company. Nonetheless, it enables him to turn his room into “the infinite space of words and stories.” He tells stories – a simple pastime – to fill the imminent vacuum of death. It is a recipe for farce, grotesque tragicomedy and outrageous lyricism; everything that makes Beckett great entertainment:

“All I want to do now is to make a last effort to understand, to begin to understand, how such creatures are possible. No, it is not a question of understanding. Of what then? I don’t know. Here I go none the less, mistakenly. Night, storm and sorrow, and the catalepsies of the soul, this time I shall see that they are good. The last word is not yet said between me and – yes, the last word is said. Perhaps I simply want to hear it said again. Just once again. No, I want nothing.”

And so on, until Malone dies. Well, almost dies, we’re never quite sure, for how can death occur in a first-person narrative? The Unnameable begins without his support for the stories. So really, it cannot continue.

It continues anyway. And according to current understanding, this is where “the real” author should reveal himself, the one “behind the scenes”. Again, it is no coincidence that when producers of “Reality TV” proclaim that nothing is hidden, they nonetheless rely on spin-off books and DVDs promising details of “what really went on” – endless promises of a definitive intimacy. The Trilogy, on the other hand, doesn’t. In The Unnameable phantoms and visions encircle a consciousness stuck in an ornamental jar at the entrance to a restaurant. Words circle on the page too, stumbling on without even the relief of punctuation. For Blanchot, this is the “malaise of one who has dropped out of reality and drifts forever in the gap between existence and nothingness, incapable of dying and incapable of being born.” As readers we undergo:

“[an] experience experienced under the threat of impersonality, undifferentiated speech speaking in a vacuum, passing through he who hears it, unfamiliar, excluding the familiar, and which cannot be silenced because it is what is unceasing and interminable.” (trans. Sacha Rabinovitch)

This is the language of the future. It is “a direct confrontation with the process from which all books derive”: language itself. By asking the simple question of who is speaking in the Trilogy, Blanchot reveals how Beckett reveals language as a form of death, a place where we meet the limits of subjectivity. In reading the Trilogy, we confront the anonymity at the heart of communication, and thereby the limits of our power in the world. Liberal culture sees this as good up to the point where we are taken to another world (“transported” as so many naïve readers put it, neglecting the recent history of the word). Beckett’s Trilogy exceeds this point. It exposes us to the infinite within the confines of novel. The author’s great achievement is to take us to the brink of complete breakdown and yet to stay this side. To declare his work ‘absurdist’ or that it ‘mirrors the breakdown of religious belief’, as might be heard wherever Beckett’s books are discussed, is unwittingly re-inhabiting what is the novel is always in the process of vacating. This suggests why the Trilogy has never been accepted into our culture in the same way as, say, Joyce’s Ulysses.

[Note: Blanchot's essay on Beckett, "Where now? Who now?" can be found in The Sirens' Song: Selected Essays of Maurice Blanchot, edited by Gabriel Josipovici, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch, and in Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage in a translation by Richard Howard. However, both are long out of print. You could always try the Marketplace sections of Amazon.co.uk in the UK and Amazon.com in the US to find a used copy.]

Blanchot’s own novels, such as Thomas the Obscure, have a kinship with Beckett’s work; there is constant dissimulation and wandering. In many ways though, they are closer to Kafka’s; there are many mysterious landscapes, doors and rooms. Only they lack both these authors’ humour. His narratives are often insipid. However, in the late 1950s, the critical writing and the fiction began to merge, creating perhaps an entirely new genre. As the fiction clarified into analysis, the analysis developed the opacity of the fiction. In the massive essay collection The Infinite Conversation there are occasional dialogues between two friends (assumed to be Blanchot and Georges Bataille). Then in 1962, a novel appeared called L’attente l’oubli (Translated as Awaiting Oblivion). It is an almost eventless narrative of an unnamed man and a woman sharing a hotel room. Each fragment of text is denoted and separated from the rest by a printed diamond or star (like this: ). The spaces disrupt straightforward narrative progress.

She was present, already her own image, and her image, not the remembrance, the forgetting of herself. When seeing her, he saw her as she would be, forgotten.
Sometimes he forgot her, sometimes he remembered, sometimes remembering the forgetting and forgetting everything in this remembrance. (Trans. John Gregg)

In a recent interview, the novelist Ian McEwan says that novels “show the possibility of what it is like to be someone else”. Awaiting Oblivion faces a complication to this: narrative progress tends to look straight through that someone else. As we begin to understand the person in front of us, the understanding takes his or her place; it becomes only a means of furthering narrative. No wonder we love to be alone with a page-turner! Perhaps significantly, McEwan’s latest novel Atonement is about the guilt felt by a writer. The other person, like language, resists simple closure to one clear meaning. In the case of Awaiting Oblivion, however, it also resists compulsive interest.

Why did Blanchot go down this route rather than continuing to write novels and critical works? Perhaps he found that once defined, a genre of literature closes in on itself. When infected with another however, not only is the comfort of reader disturbed, but literature itself becomes a question. As Derrida later detailed in The Law of Genre – a close reading of Blanchot’s very short novel The Madness of the Day – this infection is necessary and happens to all genres; in fact, a genre is basically the effacement of that infection. As the dynamic of absence and presence that frequently drives Blanchot’s writing, the direction was necessary.

In a remarkably condensed early essay, How is Literature Possible? this movement is prefigured. In it, Blanchot reviews a critical work by Jean Paulhan about the opposition of what we might call traditional and rebellious literature. The idea of overthrowing cliché and the tired generic forms (that is, Tradition) has dominated our conception of literature for 150 years. Blanchot mentions Victor Hugo’s rejection of rhetoric, Verlaine’s denunciation of eloquence and Rimbaud’s abandonment of “old-hat” poetry. Sixty years on, it hasn’t changed that much. Think of Martin Amis’ famous “war against cliché”, JG Ballard’s expressed distaste for literature and Steven Wells of ATTACK! Books thumping the table of the high-chair with his spoon. Indeed, Beckett’s Trilogy could itself be called a work of terrorism against the citadel of tradition. Yet the rebels themselves are divided into two camps. Those, like Wells, who are keen to dispense with literature altogether in an amphetamine-fuelled auto-de-fe and so destroy the complacent world of bourgeois stolidity, and those, like Amis, who want to prune language of its deadwood so that a consciousness can be experienced in all its grotesque, singular richness. What Blanchot (and indeed Paulhan) does is to point out that in order to do either requires a scrupulous attention to language. “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 wo most eagerly seek to avoid the reproach of verbalism [i.e. using cliché] are also exactly the ones that are most exposed to this reproach.” Does this, then, destroy all hope of what literature might offer us? Yes, according to those who do not consider themselves writers, because writing is a work of distance from the “ecstasies” of the human condition. Not so fast, says Blanchot:

“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.” (trans.Charlotte Mandell)

The experience of these systems of expression, however, allow a chink in the armour of literature. For readers, the opposition of cliché and a virgin phrase is perhaps more troublesome; all phrases become “monsters of ambiguity” when we read. How are we, as readers, meant to know what an author intended? It is precisely this ambiguity, the unremitting silence of the oracle, Blanchot argues, that gives literature the tense dynamic demanded by the rebels. In effect, literature is a vampire rising in the dark to suck the blood of life to continue while the victims are all dependent on the vampire myth for their living. And the other way around. Blanchot takes us a long way in this short essay, yet leaves us more or less stranded as before: authenticity and originality are present, it seems, only in the inscrutibility of their presence.

If literature relies on comforting demarcations of genre to procede, yet demands a naked openness to the world for the sake of authenticity, then the apparence of the printed star in Blanchot’s work is perhaps not just a typographical convenience. It is used again in Blanchot’s famous late work, The Writing of the Disaster, a book made up of fiction and philosophical fragments designated by the same symbol. An appropriately obsolete definition of the word disaster is “an unfavourable aspect of a star”. The star helps us to grasp the possibility of meaning, which we return to at the end of each section, while at the same time threatening break down. The book is in part about how one deals with disaster, the trauma of past disasters and the knowledge of the disaster to come, specifically our own death, where the very concept of ownership is meaningless. It is also about the disaster of language itself:

The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience – it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. Which does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing, is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or extratextual. (trans. Ann Smock)

That is, the disaster itself writes. To write is to partake of the disaster, no matter how much one asserts oneself through opinion or style. Blanchot’s impersonal voice, so cold and yet so seductive, abides in the disaster.

To write (of) oneself is to cease to be, in order to confide in a guest – the other, the reader – entrusting yourself to him who will henceforth have as an obligation, and indeed as a life, nothing but your inexistence.

We are absent from one another as the disaster writes through communication. We are absent even from ourselves as the I belongs not to itself but the disaster. We saw this emerge in Beckett’s Trilogy. Yet it is precisely this absence that Blanchot says can bring us together. The paradox is essential: language gives voice to this absence. And art, where the play of the paradox is central, remains the only medium for the possibility of a community, even if it is a community of those who have no community. The growth in sales of intimate self-portraits and revelatory biographies of public figures, and the pathological obsession with personalities and gossip, masquerading as debate, betrays how liberal democracy functions by removing an effective public life. As in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother, or at least one’s biographer, is always watching. It is a political environment that has redefined politics into a means of how best to smooth the way for corporate oligarchies to manage capital. We need art to raise the absent voice of a community denied by a misreading of absence. It requires the reader to trust, despite the apparent emptiness of art:

Reading is anguish, and this is because any text, however important, or amusing, or interesting it maybe .. is empty – at bottom it doesn’t exist; you have to cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not comprehend. (trans. Ann Smock)

The artist faces a similar challenge. Blanchot says at the end of his essay on Beckett:

“Art requires that he who practices it should be immolated to art, should become other, not another, not transformed from the human being he was into an artist with artistic duties, satisfactions and interests, but into nobody, the empty, animated space where art’s summons is heard.” (trans. Sacha Rabinovitch)

But how is this done? The fragmentary work, perhaps the apogee of 20th Century Modernist literature and philosophy, is Blanchot’s approach. Its refusal to insist on narrative or theoretical completion, as well as, in the process, weakening the voice of authority, means both reader and writer are constantly moving toward understanding, toward what is absent, yet never assuming the nihilism of no truth, no meaning even as it encroaches on each clearing. Blanchot calls it, speaking of Kafka but also of himself, “a combat of passivity – combat that reduces itself to naught”. Some might see this as needlessly equivocal or pretentious, preferring, instead, the apparent clarity of rational progress, even if this, in the end, leads to the bland relativism of modern culture. Yet in his essay from 1953 with which we began, Blanchot says that art’s summons might not have been lost on Socrates – the great emblematic thinker of positivistic Western culture. He might also have sensed the empty, animated space pulling like a black hole at the Light of Reason. While he accepted the only guarantee for speech was the living presence of a human being, he also “went as far as to die in order to keep his word.”

Routledge Critical Thinkers: Martin Heidegger – Timothy Clark

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The Routledge Critical Thinkers series is turning into something special. Maurice Blanchot by Ulrich Haase and William Large, published last year, is a profound and miraculously lucid guide to the French writer’s work. This year we have Timothy Clark’s introduction to the work of a major influence on Blanchot: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). The high quality is maintained.

Undoubtedly, this has a great deal to do with the subjects. Both writers are not only seductively poetic, but make of poetry itself something much more than is commonly permitted. Yet there are innumerable introductions to Heidegger, and a growing number of works on Blanchot. What makes these significant is the series’ focus. Routledge’s general subtitle is “Essential guides for literary studies”. While this would seem limiting, or merely instrumental to passing an exam, it in fact reminds us of the true fascination of philosophy and literature; not as means to an end, but a necessary presence.

Surprisingly, Clark begins by questioning the policy of Routledge’s Series Editor. In the general introduction, Robert Eaglestone says the series aims to see the thinkers idea placed “firmly back in their contexts.” Such an aim, Clark argues, blocks off precisely what Heidegger’s ideas question. “Imagine”, he asks:

” that the whole of Western thought, since the time of the first philosophers in ancient Greece, has been in the grip of a prejudice affecting all its aspects and even what seems self-evident.”

If this is the case, then the demand for an historical context is part of the “unavoidable heritage into which we are all born”. It confirms to us, before an alternative view has a chance to be heard, that our assumptions are correct. As a consequence, Heidegger can be placed into a safely distant past, his ideas categorised, filed away, to be quoted later in an airy repudiation. This is exacerbated in Heidegger’s case by a large dose of political infamy. We’ll come to that later.

Before that, what is this “unavoidable heritage” exactly? Heidegger calls it “deep history”. Its deepness conceals the history of self-evident truths:

“the truly decisive events in history are not battles and the rise and fall of dynasties. They are little noticed changes, behind our backs but affecting everything […] Such shifts are not something any individual or society can direct: they are where they already find their existence.”

However, with infinite patience, the changes can be uncovered. This is the important point. Heidegger’s intense preoccupation with the literature of ancient Greece was due to his detection of a decisive shift in human consciousness at the time of Plato. Rather than being the “guiding spirit of Western thinking” in a positive sense, Heidegger regards Plato as an early symptom of decline. His philosophy began an

“intensification and hardening of ‘theoreticism’, the drive toward technical and objectifying modes of knowledge and, with it, the oblivion of any more primordial or more reverential kind of existence”.

This shouldn’t be too difficult for us in the 21st Century to recognise. What is higher praise or justification now than “it is scientifically provable”; and what is sterner criticism is there than to be labelled “unscientific”, “irrational”? Ancient Greek philosophy is not as ancient as we might imagine. If Plato is the beginning of Western thought, then that beginning, Heidegger says, is still with us. Indeed it is “before us” like a predestined future. We still see the world as an object of knowledge to be understood, manipulated and utilised. It is an anthropocentric attitude that has profound consequences. Heidegger claims it set us on course toward nihilism.

Eventually, everything is geared towards selfish aims with no regard for the earth or the people in it. This seems to contradict our faith in progress. As while we celebrate humankind’s progress in science, medicine, technology, culture, we also lament the sublime disasters that have interrupted it. Yet “interrupted” is one of those evidences of “self-evident” truths we adopt to avoid the possibility that these disasters were a necessary part of “progress”. Slavery, Imperialism, World War I, the Holocaust, Stalinism, among many others: these terrors inflicted upon the world are excused as atavisms we must resist when perhaps, instead, they were, and will be, inevitable. This was recognised in the early part of the Twentieth Century and led to a crisis in confidence with the logic of Western Civilisation. We can see it in the Modernist crisis in the arts. While cultural critics (such as the lamentable John Carey) blames Modernism on a few privileged writers’ opposition to mass emancipation, Heidegger widens the cause to two Millennia of history!

Interestingly, this critique correlates with Gabriel Josipovici’s in his book On Trust. There, Plato’s dismissal of Homer is seen as a watershed in literary history. He saw The Odyssey and The Iliad as part of a tradition of mystification keeping us from the light of reason. Since then art shrunk to only a medium of aesthetic pleasure, a distraction from the Real World. Heidegger says art died (and turned into aesthetics and business) because it was unable to preserve its “world-soliciting force”. This means the work NOT as a re-presentation of the world but as the revelation, the disclosure, of that world in the first place.

Heidegger detects such a disclosing force of Greek temples (see his famous essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”). But it also applied to the other arts. Both Josipovici and Heidegger analyse how writers managed to cope with the death of art. While Josipovici looks at a range of works from the Bible to Samuel Beckett, Heidegger focusses on the major German poets: Hölderlin, Stefan George, Rilke, and even Paul Celan (who was also a student of his work). Clark says that Heidegger was interested in these writers not because they wrote about nihilism but because “poetry is itself a mode of language that engages [nihilism] by enacting the possibility of other, non-appropriative ways of knowing”.

But if these poets renewed art, it is clear that it is, in its Lazarus state on the web and marketplace stall, still close to death. Literature has been appropriated by the very forces it should be resisting: technology and capital. Clark’s book is welcome in reminding us that there is more to art than lifestyle accessory or a alternative social commentary. Instead, at it best, art “presents its own unique and ultimately inexplicable mode of being, something for the reader, beholder or listener to dwell within and not merely something to decode.” Blanchot defines the true artist as he or she who can “see the potential disclosive force of a work, and to follow it through” rather than one with all the accepted craft techniques and friends in the Media.

So where might this disclosure of the world lead us? Well, there are dangers. Heidegger made a telling misjudgement when he made a speech, in 1933, as Rector of Freiburg University, praising Hitler and the Nazi Party, which he had just joined. He announced the beginning of an emancipation from two thousand years of gathering nihilism. Of course, Nazism was the very embodiment of that nihilism, and Heidegger soon resigned as Rector. But one has to wonder whether there isn’t something inherently destructive in the idea of “another life” even after we have rejected that offered by religion.

There is a shelf of books dealing with Heidegger’s short political life and its relation to his philosophy. Clark summarises the debate without diminishing its import. I was struck by the idea that anti-Semitism, to which Heidegger paid lip service, was due to Judaism’s inherent challenge to the Platonic project of Modernity; it retains an ancient relation to the finitude of life and knowledge. Clark isn’t convinced by this idea, but it certainly helped me to understand why a disproportionate number of the great European writers and artists are Jewish: Kafka, Proust, Benjamin, Celan, Appelfeld. Otherwise, it is easy to assume these writers are deemed great by the aura of the Holocaust or by some tortured Outsider status. I’ve never accepted this. Perhaps such an assumption is a natural outcome of Plato’s attitude to literature; that the work itself is never significant in itself. It would take a raft of great critics to articulate how the specifics of these writers’ work disclose the deep history of Western Civilisation as it enters a third millennium. But reading the work in the first place is the important thing.

One great critic of the last century, perhaps the greatest, the aforementioned Maurice Blanchot, developed a Heideggerian approach to literature in The Space of Literature (a breathtaking book by the way) which Clark quotes regularly. It is particularly interesting when dealing with Heidegger’s notion that our alienation from nature is due to instrumental theoreticism, and that only poetry can redeem the situation. For Blanchot, rather than a “homecoming” to the earth as Heidegger saw it, “the [poetical] work does not enter … the realm of meaning, disclosure, cultural debate and truth. It remains with the darkness of the earth.” Whilst remaining with Heidegger’s radical revision of the possibility of art, Blanchot makes it much darker. Art may not be dead but we are exiled from it. Only a violent misappropriation can bring it into the Real World. Yet that is precisely why artists like Kafka, like Celan, like Aharon Appelfeld are worth reading, and the literature of the instrumental moment not at all.

Proust and Signs – Gilles Deleuze

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This isn’t a new book. The French original was published in 1964 and in English eight years later. But don’t dismiss it as out-of-date. Like the book it analyses, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, it pitches the reader into the future with a rare vigour. Buy this re-issue and give your Alain du Botton paperbacks to Oxfam.

Like How Proust Can Change Your Life, Deleuze’s book reveals the various ways Proust’s novel can help the reader in everyday life. Yet where du Botton leaves it at that, entertaining us with biographical anecdotes like a well-read Agony Aunt, Deleuze sees the presence of the novel as the thing itself; the essential achievement. The novel, he says, is the culmination of an obscure apprenticeship to the signs the world emits. Right from the start, Deleuze insists that the novel is not about memory, as is commonly assumed, but signs. The laying bare of signs, through character and plot, is, of course, a traditional skill of writing a novel. However, it is Proust’s feat to reveal the process by which these signs work and how we might discern the truth of our lives from them.

To begin with, Deleuze divides the signs Proust encounters into three groups: the worldly signs (such as formal and fashionable gestures assuming a common reference point between people), the signs of love (those infinitely enigmatic messages emitted by the loved one) and the sensuous signs (those of the senses, obviously).

"The worldly signs are empty; they take the place the place of action and thought; and they try to stand for their meaning. The signs of love are deceptive; their meaning inheres in the contradiction of what they reveal and try to conceal. The sensuous signs are truthful, but in them subsists the opposition of survival and nothingness, and their meaning is still material; it resides elsewhere. However, to the degree that we achieve art, the relation of sign and meaning becomes closer. Art is the splendid final unity of an immaterial sign and a spiritual meaning."

You can tell from this passage that Deleuze is not making concessions to the inattentive. But whoever said the truth is easy? Not even Alain du Botton. Unfortunately, it’s even more complex than this, and I do not have the philosophical frame of mind to lay it down in plain words (or fancy ones, for that matter). What Deleuze does make plain, however, is that the search for truth depends on more than intellect alone.

"The mistake of philosophy is to presuppose within us a benevolence of thought, a natural love of truth. Thus philosophy arrives at only abstract truths that compromise no one and do not disturb. [.] They remain gratuitous because they are born of the intelligence that accords them a possibility and not of a violence or of an encounter that would guarantee their authenticity."

One might assume this chimes with the philistine assertion that philosophy, like art, is subservient to reality and is only a distraction from it. The philistines, though, are in thrall to the violence of the worldly signs, blown by the whims of fashion in all areas: "vacuity, stupidity, forgetfulness: such is the trinity of the worldly group" Deleuze writes.

Worldly signs could be said to be the novel’s equivalent to Dante’s Inferno, and indeed Deleuze says Marcel, the novel’s narrator, must pass through their hellish nature because, though they are empty, "their emptiness confers upon them a ritual perfection, a kind of formalism we do not encounter elsewhere. The worldly signs are the only ones capable of causing a kind of nervous exaltation, expressing the effect upon us of the persons who are capable of producing them." Think of any great charismatic personality: he or she presents to us a rich array of signs, but beneath it all, off camera as it were, he or she is lost, someone almost less than human. Our culture’s fascination with the charismatic individual means our most popular figures are those who emit the worldly signs across the board. They are the ones who never disappoint; they are nothing but show. If they are artists too, then the art is always shallow, secondary to the personality. Worldly signs constitute postmodern art.

Love is what makes the difference in Proust’s novel. When Marcel is in love, or sees love taking its course when Swann falls for the coquettish Odette, the worldly signs begin to unravel.

"The beloved appears unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted. [.] To love is to try to explicate, to develop these unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved."

Rather than accepting the surface signs, we want to know more; indeed we are desperate. But there are problems even when love is requited.

"The beloved gives us signs of preference; but because these signs are the same as those that express worlds to which we do not belong, each preference by which we profit draws the image of the possible world in which others might be or are preferred."

Jealousy is the inevitable result. Marcel sees Swann come "to regret each pleasure he enjoyed with Odette, each grace he discerned in her, for he knew that a moment later they would constitute new instruments of his torment". Deleuze concludes that there is a contradiction in love: "the means we count on to preserve us from jealousy are the very means that develop that jealousy." It is Purgatory.

Disillusion is at the heart of Marcel’s apprenticeship to signs. The apprenticeship depends, of course, on apprehending the signs. This happens in the work that Proust creates. So is the novel merely the description of personal growth – the familiar bildungsroman? Not quite. As Maurice Blanchot explains in an essay that seems to contradict Deleuze’s analysis, Proust’s found means of showing this growth in ornate situations – the familiar territory of the novel, aligning Proust with masters like Balzac while at the same time "eroding the edges of such tableaux till they merge with the flow of time and, gradually losing their fixity, stretch out in time, are absorbed and float along in the slow ceaseless motion [.] not as pure moments but in the moving density of spherical time."

Rather than contradict, Blanchot’s comments emphasise the Proustian dialectic of incessant apprehension and reinterpretation of signs that Deleuze so brilliantly reveals. The famous moments in the novel – the dunked biscuit, the ringing doorbell, the uneven cobblestone – are the revelations that enable Proust to write the events not as passed but as simultaneous to the time of narration. Their intensity is not a result of nostalgia but the presence of the past. These are the encounters that guarantee authenticity.

The ultimate encounter is, of course, with death. Proust began a feverish re-writing of the novel as the Great War began in 1914. Blanchot correlates this to Proust’s own impending death. The war gave him the chance to create ("to swim against his own tide") even as the greatest destruction began. If this is Paradise after the Purgatory of love, then it is a cold heaven for sure. Deleuze has something to say about the challenge of death, but, to be honest, I don’t understand it. Proust and Signs is occasionally baffling. But it is definitely worth the effort.

Deleuze died in 1995 aged 70. Distressed by a serious respiratory illness, but still with the use of his body, he threw himself out of a window. It ended his prolific output of books on philosophy, novelists, cinema and psychoanalysis (with his collaborator Felix Guattari). Throughout his work, there is a resistance to a totalising vision and the reductionism of grand and easy answers, such as Oedipal theory or Marxism. In the case of art, rather than seeing In Search of Lost Time as a means of closing off the troublesome past in a neat, rounded story, or providing aesthetic distraction, he sees it as the place where multiple worlds are revealed; it is where they meet and flourish. Art achieved to the Proustian degree is where we are fully realised as human beings: "there is no intersubjectivity but an artistic one."

“With a variable key
you unlock the house in which
drifts the snow of that left unspoken.
Always what key you choose
depends on the blood that spurts
from your eye or your mouth or your ear.

You vary the key, you vary the word
that is free to drift with the flakes.
What snowball will form round the word
depends on the wind that rebuffs you.”

This is a poem by Paul Celan translated from the German original by Michael Hamburger. The original was written in the early 1950s. Its title is the first line. We assume a translation is second-hand and only the original can provide definitive clarification. But clarification of what? Isn’t our sense of the opacity of translation also the sense of the rebuffing wind in Celan’s poem? Searching for the key to this poem, and being resisted, we sense the climate the poem reports. As we watch the snow gathering, pursuing an answer to explain why Celan chose this particular key – and there are grim details one can point to – prompts only a return journey to the poem.

It is an uncomfortable fact that the bar to a poem’s key – this poem’s key – is the key to the poem itself. Some might dismiss this as tiresomely reflexive; a poem about poetry. It is clear, I think, that this is an insensitive reading. The metaphors are too close to experience to dismiss it as abstract. Indeed, can they get any closer?

Celan’s friend, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, wrote: I believe that Paul Celan chose to die as he did so that once, at least, words and what is might join. He had drowned himself in the Seine in late April 1970, six months before his fiftieth birthday. What is Bonnefoy talking about? Surely death by drowning and words are as far apart as one can get? Bonnefoy is alluding to his friend’s peculiar linguistic heritage and how it affected his life and poetry. Celan was grew up in the city of Czernowitz, then part of Romania, now within Moldova. Its political geography meant many languages were spoken among its inhabitants. In the poet’s home, the language was High German, while the wider community generally used the more latinate Romanian. There were many others in circulation, including Yiddish.

The last is significant as Celan was part of a large Jewish community. There was anti-Semitism, for sure, but German culture was the pinnacle of Western civilisation. It promised something better than feudal sniping. Inspired by his mother’s deep love for it’s poetry, he wrote lyric poems in the tradition of Hölderlin and Rilke. It is said that as a youth he had a remarkable affinity for it too. His taste moved him toward the contemporary symbolist and surrealist movements, and despite his polylingual abilities, he always wrote his poetry in German; his muttersprache.

Then war came. Celan was, by chance, separated from his parents on the day the Nazis arrived and deported the city’s Jews. He never saw his parents again. They were taken to a Ukrainian labour camp. His father died of disease; his mother was shot. After this, as Hugo Gryn said, Celan was in the position of being a writer in the language of his mother and of his mother’s murderers. He could not renounce the latter’s language without renouncing the former’s. Celan was robbed of his parents’ death as well as their lives. Bonnefoy implies the same goes for his müttersprache.

“We can say of Celan as of no other poet: his words did not recover his experience. The loss was felt,” he says, “like a discharge without origin or end.” And as a result: “nothing real could authentically respond to this flux or be its equal, in the absolute, as referent: only the river itself … seems to fold in on itself (losing itself) like the only thing signified on the scale of so much absence.”

So for Bonnefoy, an avowed Christian, another death becomes another metaphor of hope. If his explanation is exemplary, we remain in what Maurice Blanchot calls “the civilisation of the book”, where literature takes possession of everything – that is, submitting it to a pre-established unity symbolised by the enclosing covers of a book. Even Bonnefoy’s sensitive appraisal leaves too strong a trace of the dubious correlation of life and art. Its presence allow us to keep the discomposing reality at a distance, within the inexorable logic of a narrative with a beginning, middle and, most importantly, an end.

This article on Celan will tend toward that logic too. Perhaps it must. But whereas the industry surrounding Sylvia Plath, for example, regards the poetry as an expert witness to judging the case of her tormented life and suicide, with Celan, this would be to miss everything.

Seamus Heaney begins his essay on Sylvia Plath by stating the potential of poetry:

“the poet’s need [is] to get beyond ego in order to become the voice of more than autobiography. At the level of poetic speech, when this happens, sound and meaning rise like a tide out of language to carry individual utterance away upon a current stronger and deeper that the individual could have anticipated.” (Note the pervasive river theme!).

He then goes on to examine how Plath developed her poetry yet never moved beyond “the dominant theme of self-discovery and self-definition”. Nowadays, of course, that theme is enough to launch ten-thousand poems beginning with ‘I’. But what does moving beyond this theme mean? Celan was ambivalent, to say the least, about that rising tide out of language. Indeed, it caused him to lose trust in his most famous poem, “Deathfugue”. This is how that poem ends; the subject, you will notice, is explicit:

“Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we
drink you

death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from
Germany

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith” (trans. Michael Hamburger)

If any help is needed, the line “a grave in the air” can be read as the smoke rising from the camp chimneys; plain fact as much as metaphor. Overall, the poem emerged from reports of small Jewish orchestras playing tangos within concentration camp fences, often accompanying gravedigging and executions. The poem mimics the pace and rhythm of the dance that had captivated carefree Europe between the wars. Its first title was indeed ‘Death Tango’. In placing such lightness within the realm of such darkness, an entire culture is incriminated. The change to ‘Deathfugue’ recalls the divine lightness of Bach, while ‘Margarete’ alludes to the tragic heroine in Goethe’s Faust, forgiven by God despite everything. (It is a bizarre but telling fact that Goethe’s famous oak tree outside Weimar was protected by the SS as the Buchenwald concentration camp went up around it.) Margarete is contrasted with Shulamith, the female symbol of Jewish hope in the Song of Solomon, who is not forgiven.

In post-war Germany the poem became part of the curriculum for schools and was acclaimed by numerous critics in the new Federal Republic. However, praise tended to be for what was called the poem’s “mastery” of what had passed – the Holocaust; enabling a reconciliation of sorts. Germany wanted to move on. It welcomed the rising tide out of language as it bore guilt away. The worst was confirmed when schoolteachers discussed the use of the poem in class. They agreed it was excellent in teaching how poetry might follow a musical pattern like a fugue but, they felt, the teaching should not be side-tracked by talk of the Holocaust. Celan’s subsequent distress led him to refuse to perform readings of the poem again. Perhaps he also felt there was a tendency toward the dark romance of a ‘terrible beauty’ in its aesthetic effects. Above all, it faced the progressive movement of the civilisation of the book, enveloping discordance like the resolving refrain of a Beethoven sonata.

Where did go Celan after this? Does it matter? What does poetry matter in our time anyway? If it is merely a means of reminding us of what has happened and what it means, then one wonders why the facts have not been enough. Perhaps that is the point: the facts have never been enough. Aharon Appelfeld, another writer-survivor, reminds us that “the numbers and the facts were the murderers’ own well-proven means. Man as a number is one of the horrors of dehumanisation.”

Celan does not offer the facts. Poetry is something else, something more than the facts. But, in general, that ‘something else’ remains under suspicion even more than the dehumanising facts because ‘something else’ seems to be only self-regarding gymnastics with a dictionary. Indeed SPIKE quite rightly announces itself to be “violently prejudiced” against poetry. What is the alternative? Celan’s poetry is an answer.

“A word – you know:
a corpse.

Let us wash it,
let us comb it,
let us turn its eye
towards heaven.”

This, the end of a poem, advocates the inversion of literature’s gaze. It moves in the opposite direction to most post-war poetry and prose, which sought practicality, matter-of-factness, accessibility. The quoted words come as a dark reflection at the end of the poem Nocturnally Pouting, itself a dark reflection on a bus journey over an alpine road in Austria. The presence of those departed is perceived in the landscape: in the “greyed moss”, in the “crossed and folded shafts of the spruces” and in “the jackdaws roused to endless flight over the glacier”. All are keys to those who “stand apart in the world”, each one “surly, bare-headed, hoar-frosted”, each one discharging “the guilt that adhered to their origin . upon a word that wrongly subsists, like summer.”

The polemic is striking and memorable, but for that reason perhaps begs the question: how does one turn a word heavenward? Isn’t this a rhetorical gesture? Celan’s title for the collection in which the two quoted poems appear is “From Threshold to Threshold”, and this just about sums up the “failure” of these two poems to cross the threshold to heaven. As readers we tend to grasp moments of manifesto-like clarity such as these; but assertion is not enough. Despite its practical matter-of-factness, it betrays failure. This is not to criticise. Failure is central to the history of modern poetry, although such failure is now usually misunderstood.

To simplify, the concern of the Romantic-Enlightenment poets of the 18th Century – the beginning of the modern age – was humanity’s relation to nature. We are familiar with this in Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the greater Europe, Hölderlin’s inspiration was also “To be one with all that lives, and to return in blessed self-forgetfulness into the All of Nature“. While he pursued it in poetry, others, such as his friend Hegel, turned to philosophy. But where philosophy feeds off distance, allowing the goal of the Absolute – which would be the end of philosophy, the end of history etc. – to be preserved indefinitely as a self-aggrandising rhetorical device, poetry demands the end without delay: if poetry remains, distance remains. Where today’s celebration of nature uses language in an unironic slideshow of clichés (see any New Age CD, website or poetry book made of recycled paper) the Romantics recognised only failure: words, corpses.

Worse, Enlightenment promises actually inaugurated the manifold growth of science and technology that sought (and still seeks) to conquer nature rather than to respect it. The consequence of Enlightenment was at once to liberate us of the fetters of medieval society and to destroy the traditions by which society kept its body and soul together. The contradiction remains with us, and the agitation of modern culture can be summed up as the tension between accepting the wilderness and our instinctive rejection of its freedom. A Celan poem reflects the struggle:

“Should
should a man
should a man come into the world, today, with
the shining beard of the
patriarchs: he could,
if he spoke of this
time, he
could
only babble and babble
over, over
againagain”

(Trans: Michael Hamburger)

He speaks but only just. It is poetry with aphasia. How might a man speak of this time, this ‘destitute time’, as Hölderlin called it, without using destitute words? Celan renews the question.

If for every Hölderlin there is a philosopher like Hegel, then for Celan there is Martin Heidegger.

His analysis of the modern age had a profound influence on Celan’s work, offering a theoretical apparatus to his own poetic one. Simplistically, Heidegger sought a new mode of thought to counteract the mechanistic tendency of the modern world. He believed that humanity had become separate from its harmony with the rest of nature, as he believed was in place in Homer’s Greece. This separation was due, he thought, to the rise of dualistic ways of thinking set in motion by Plato.

Concentrating on the concept of ‘being’, Heidegger argues that ‘human being’ is not a thing like other things (objects in the world as we know it) but a clearing (a non-thing, a nothingness) in which those things are presented, where they actually become things. And rather than this being an argument for solipsism (the world as function of one’s mind), it means our knowledge of the world is not a product of boxed-in consciousness. Instead of minds making thoughts possible, it is the ‘being’ preceding mind that makes it possible for us to regard ourselves as minds having thoughts distant from ‘the real world’.

This is a major challenge to the Cartesian tradition that has dominated Western thought for the last four centuries. But the clearing depends on a temporal and linguistic aspect. Things appear in the three dimensions of time, enabling us to categorise it in language and so differentiate it from the rest of the world. Such categorisation, however, is restricted by our need for control, and so the thing disappears from view. We become blinded to the discourse of the world; to what is revealed. The world becomes an object. This is a necessary tendency but one that can and must be counteracted by the function of the clearing.

Heidegger argues for the truth of the clearing by pointing toward the mood of anxiety that seems to characterise our everyday existence. We spend most of our time avoiding this mood, of course. He says we try to become totally absorbed in ‘the real world’, as defined by such dead language, in order to avoid facing up to our mortal nothingness as revealed in anxiety. So, rather than liberating us, the techologocally-advanced modern world opens a rift between the public self – the one in which we have in order to live without becoming paralysed by anxiety – and the ‘anxious’ self in the so-called clearing. Heidegger says that opening ourselves to anxiety by giving up our need for egoistic certainty will reveal the world in its abundant nature. It will set one free. The French existentialists of the post-war era adopted this theme from Heidegger, although their ‘absurd’ freedom was foreign to him. A French philosopher more in tune with Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, sums up the condition for the present era:

“Today, everywhere … remaining reality is disappearing in the mire of a “globalised” world. Nothing, not even the most obvious phenomena, not even the purest, most wrenching love, can escape this era’s shadow: a cancer of the subject“.

This is not a conspiracy of others but a runaway part of our need to live in the world rather than be imprisoned by autism. Selflessness, of course, while admirable in most cases, can also descend into what we called inhumanity. One of the terrible ironies of this story is Heidegger’s own descent. In the early 1930s, he saw the Nazi party as a political movement capable of mediating the needs of the modernity with authentic existence, making Germany a modern-day equivalent of ancient Greece. In 1933, the Rector of Freiburg University, where Heidegger was a renowned young professor, resigned in protest at Hitler’s anti-Semitic laws. Heidegger took his place after an election among the Aryan lecturers. He soon resigned in disaffection but never revoked his party membership and referred to his regret for the Holocaust only in what Maurice Blanchot called ‘scandalously inadequate’ fashion.

Such facts make Celan’s interest in his work more compelling. Heidegger represents the dangers inherent in the Romantic project. Another example would be the terror following the French Revolution. What does this mean for poetry? Well, in his isolated time after the war, during his denazification, Heidegger came to believe poetry was the means to open up the world; it could rouse the revelation of things in the clearing. In fact, it was the revelation itself. His intense meditations on Hölderlin’s poetry is summarised by an essay title taken from a poem: “… poetically man dwells …”.

Elsewhere he wrote that “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.” If that is the case, and poets tend to feel it is, then it means, following the catastrophe of the Holocaust, language would have to change in order to rebuild the tainted home.

In the post-war era, this was an imperative for Celan as he was now living in Paris as a translator and tutor, physically and metaphorically exiled from his homes: Czernowitz, under Soviet rule, and German, under the weight of “murderous speech” as he called it. It was an imperative because, as his Paris contemporary Samuel Beckett put it: one writes not in order to be published, one writes in order to breathe. Celan could not breathe in the old language. The old language was saturated with the conditions by which an entire culture was able to produce the greatest art and thought in history and then produce death camps with the efficiency of a factory. No wonder Adorno said that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz was itself barbaric.

What Adorno didn’t say, and this has been ignored too often, is that poetry could still be written only not as we had known it. The new language, the new poetry, would be a way of turning us toward that which is absent in our everyday world, that which “stands apart in the world“. This formulation, like Heidegger’s clearing, betrays a religious sensibility. After Auschwitz, however, God was under radical question. The space left by Him, on the other hand, was not:

Psalm

No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
no one conjures our dust.
No one.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower.
Towards
you.

A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing-, the no one’s rose.

With
our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red
with the crimson word which we sang
over, O over
the thorn.

(Trans: Michael Hamburger)

One can draw neither comfort nor despair from this poem, or rather, neither of them alone. It is a psalm and an antipsalm; sacred and bitter. What stands apart is palpable only in its absence; a void saturated by void, to use Blanchot’s phrase. Celan’s biographer John Felstiner has brought out the allusions within ‘Psalm’ to Jewish and Christian mysticism, both of which has to be bypassed here. But, to repeat Eliot on Dante, I think it communicates before any of these allusion are understood.

It may seem paradoxical that the writer of such a poem as ‘Psalm’ has a biographer (Heidegger says the author of every masterful poem is unimportant) and Felstiner’s book does indeed concentrate on the poems. Despite this, he uncovers the probable origin of the title of his 1959 collection “Sprachgitter” – Speech Grille.

Celan’s mother-in-law retreated to a convent and when the family visited her, she would remain behind a grill. Such a barrier holds also for poetry’s revelation. One must accept the limit for it to work; the limit is part of the experience. Or non-experience. Lacoue-Labarthe’s brief and powerful book on Celan is actually called “Poetry as Experience“. It characterises the poem as something always returning to its source, approaching the inaccessible, and, necessarily, inaccessibility. The poem returns to the experience itself – the revelation in the clearing – not ‘the stuff of anecdotes’ but the etymological origin of ‘experience’: a crossing through danger. It is a crossing resisted only in what the poem lets us consume as readers: “a poem has nothing to recount, nothing to say; what it recounts and says is that from which it wrenches away as a poem.”

So what, exactly, remains before and after this wrenching? Celan names it himself, in a speech upon receiving the prestigious Büchner Prize: “the poem has always hoped … to speak also on behalf of the strange – no, I can no longer use this word here – on behalf of the other, who knows, perhaps of an altogether other.” (translated by Rosemary Waldrop)

Perhaps the ‘strange’ can be used no longer because it is already too familiar, too homely. He had to seek another word or phrase: “the altogether other”. His speech, as much as his poetry, has to be attuned to the demands of experience. Celan also refers to the attempt to give each poem its own date, its own unique time, so that it speaks with supreme accuracy.

Deep in Time’s crevasse
by the alveolate ice waits,
a crystal of breath,
your irreversible witness

(trans. Michael Hamburger)

The difficulty is that language depends on generality; the more specific a word the harder it is to reach across time; we will not connect to the “altogether other” trapped in time’s crevasse. In fact, it could not be language anymore. Yet if it can connect despite risking such isolation, it would be all the more richer. In this respect, Celan requires a certain amount of patience on behalf of his readers. For example, a late untitled poem in full:

Illegibility of this world.
All things twice over.
The strong clocks justify the splitting hour hoarsely.
You , clamped into your deepest part, climb out of yourself for ever.

(trans. Michael Hamburger)

This is puzzling, but such puzzlement does not matter much once one sets the need for facts or conclusive harmony aside. Less sympathetic critics dismiss his work as ‘hermetic’, sealed from approach. They say only the writer could know what such a poem is about. Why is the world illegible? What is a strong clock?

I have no answers. Perhaps the lack of a title necessitates a certain blankness in the initial response. The moment one titles an experience the dangers lessen. Would a biography help us understand this? Probably not. Celan was adamant that his poetry was accessible: “As for my alleged encodings” he said “I’d rather say: undissembled ambiguity. I see my alleged abstractness and actual ambiguity as moments of realism.” It seems odd that a poet so keen – perhaps even desperate – to reach across time, to provide us with such realism, should do so by writing wilfully unreadable poems. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to assume it is the poetry’s problem.

Professor John Carey of Oxford would disagree. He is Britain’s foremost opponent of difficulty. In his best-selling book ‘The Intellectuals and the Masses‘, he argues that Modernism – the epitome of difficulty – was invented by intellectuals in order to alienate the so-called masses, who, newly emancipated from illiteracy, were seen as muddying the pure waters of literature. Celan indicates other reasons. In fact, the ‘enjoyment’ Carey demands is really a means of retaining a dualistic attitude to literature; of ‘talking eyes into blindness‘, to use Celan’s phrase. Of course, many Modernists were proto-fascists, yet this doesn’t mean difficulty equals Totalitarianism. It means, instead, a ‘crossing through danger’ is not mere rhetoric. The dangers led Heidegger to his great error.

It troubled Celan that the man he saw as one of the greatest of modern thinkers, so close to his own work, was a Nazi. One cannot even say ‘had been a Nazi’ because he never said anything that amounted to a renunciation. Late in life, Heidegger became interested in Celan’s work. He recognised him as the only living equal of Hölderlin. He attended public readings given by the poet, and in 1967 even invited him to his famous Black Forest retreat at Todtnauberg. Celan accepted. This was a significant move as Celan had developed an intense sensitivity (one might say ‘anxiety’) toward anti-Semitic tendencies in post-war Europe. When his dedicated publishers re-issued the work of a poet popular in the Nazi years, he left for another, and when German literary authorities exonerated him over plagiarism charges, he regarded it as a humiliation to be even under investigation. Yet here he was meeting a man in his most intimate home, a home in which, it is said, he had once run Nazi indoctrination sessions. Perhaps Celan never knew the full extent of Heidegger’s culpability.

Generally, not much is known about Celan’s reasons for accepting the invitation, nor what happened during the visit, but very soon after Celan wrote a poem called ‘Todtnauberg‘. The title reference is explicit; the place name is synonymous with the philosopher. This is the first half:

Arnica, eyebright,
the draft from the well
with the star-crowned die above it,
In
the hut,

the line
– whose name did the book
register before mine? -,
the line inscribed in that book about
a hope, today,
of a thinking man’s
coming
word
in the heart,

(trans. Michael Hamburger)

As Pierre Joris points out in his exceptional analysis of the various translations of the poem, ‘Todtnauberg‘ is barely a poem than single sentence divided into eight stanzas. The first of the three above display Celan’s extraordinary eye for nature, as noted earlier in “Nocturnally Pouting“. Arnica and Eyebright are flowers noted for their healing qualities, so right from the start there is the sense of what the meeting is all about. In the third, the poet signs the visitors book and makes plain his awareness of who might have signed it before – Germans being indoctrinated into Nazi ideology perhaps. He hopes for a word in the heart of the great man. Did the word reveal itself? The remaining five stanzas are:

woodland sward, unlevelled,
orchid and orchid, single,

coarse stuff, later, clear
in passing,

he who drives us, the man,
who listens in,
the half- trodden fascine
walks over the high moors
dampness,
much.

Almost certainly not. The two men walked across woodland each in his isolation: an orchid and an orchid. And the poem remained isolated as far as Heidegger was concerned. He displayed his special copy of the poem proudly to subsequent visitors to the cottage, seemingly unaware of its implications. Perhaps this is enough to indicate the blindness of a man, even one with genius, rooted in his familiar landscape – brought out here in Hamburger’s translation of log-paths as ‘fascine’, a word so close to ‘fascist’, the etymological origin coming, as Joris says, from the Latin ‘fasces’ – a bundle of wooden rods – the symbol of fascism.

‘Todtnauberg’ , therefore, cannot be regarded as a coded accusation, or as a shy expression of bitterness, or sentimental regret, or of pompous self-definition in contrast to a supposed intellectual superior, but rather the very openness Heidegger apparently lacked. As Celan once said: “Poetry does not impose itself, it exposes.” The lack of a second ‘itself’ in this sentence exposes.

“Nothing is more irritating than those works which ‘co-ordinate’ the luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on just about everything except a system.”

What is there to know about Emile Cioran? He was born in Romania, in 1911, the son of a Greek Orthodox priest. In adolescence, he lost his childhood in the country and was moved to the city. He also lost his religion. For years he didn’t sleep – until he took up cycling. He passed sleepless nights wandering the dodgy streets of an obscure Romanian city. In 1937 he moved to Paris and wrote, producing what are generally classified as ‘aphorisms’, collected together under such titles as The Temptation To Exist, A Short History Of Decay and The Trouble With Being Born. He knew Samuel Beckett, who eventually lost sympathy with his pessimism. Late in life he gave up writing, not wanting to “slander the universe” anymore, and died a few years later after an encounter with an over-excited dog.

I hope none of this helps.

Cioran’s sentences are of little or no help. That is their worth. Just think of the aphorisms; each sentence has the company of only one or two others. The gaps between groups of sentences appear like sands of the desert encroaching on an oasis. Or is it the other way around? That the answer is so unclear is the worth of Cioran’s sentences.

His aphorisms are unlike the smug, bourgeois exponents of the Nineteenth century. They open wounds. Still, Cioran is not studied. This is the academic orthodoxy. And that’s fine. Scholars read texts like drivers read diversion signs. La Rochefoucauld 20 miles, Nietzsche 40, Existentialism, forever. Alternatively, just read the sentences.

“… lyricism represents a dispersal of subjectivity.”

The end of a sentence in this case; a place of especial elation and despair. (The want of elation and despair generating their presence in the vertiginous lack which is the peculiarity of consciousness. Reading is like consciousness in that nothing happens. ) Cioran is lyrical. His style is a varient on song. At the same time he is a writer of solitude and subjectivity. This last word has gained a pejorative meaning lately, akin to solipsism, selfishness, ignorance, certainly ‘untruth’. But let us wrest it back for as long as we can. Subjectivity is the state of struggle of one who is alive, within time: sleepless. “Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.”

A special type of sleeplessness being where one is oneself forever and knows it. It is also an indictment of lyricism. Lyricism is sleep; the suppression of subjectivity, the impossible denial of ‘three in the morning’. Adorno’s call for an end to lyric poetry after Auschwitz is a wish for the return of each subject destroyed by a revolution lyrical to its evil core. The Volk wanted to sleep. Then it was mass rallies at Nuremburg, now its anything you care to name: popular culture indeed. Cioran’s physical insomnia disallowed the easy contempt for those who craved such sleep. He needed it too, to stay alive. A familiar irony: Cioran’s tragedy was also his saving. “Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.”

When Cioran began to write in French he had, by then, conquered his insomnia. Exhausted by long bicycle rides, he slept. Still, the writing tries to abide in the old white nights of insomnia, only to collapse into the sleep toward which literature tends. Cioran’s writing tends to disperse the “three in the morning” in lyric expression. So, a bit of a disappointment, to say the least.

“As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they know they must not be impatient, that it will come soon or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present.”

To say again then, his disappointment with writing was inevitable. But this only drives one on, to divest words of their common usage and apply them to this moment. This one. In an interview, he tells of his disillusionment with writing’s other products, particularly those where disappointment is not an issue: ideas, grand narratives, systems. “Philosophers are constructors, positive men, positive, mind you, in a bad sense.” Elsewhere: “Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel – three enslavers of the mind. The worst form of despotism is the system, in philosophy and in everything.” Yet how can one write without constructing some system, even if it is negative?

“‘Optimists write badly’ (Valery). But pessimists do not write.” [Maurice Blanchot]

The violence of Cioran’s work, its verbosity and arrogance, results from a struggle with inevitable positivism. The use of aphorism is also borne of this. It demands our opposition. The blank following the sentences rises up before us. Our exasperation leaves the same silent space hovering there. This is the placeless heaven or hell Cioran is always returning us to. It is pointless to oppose or argue – or explain. One can scan the biographical parabola that gives shape to a life, thereby explaining it and the work, but something is left behind; this place he takes us to. The facts of a life help inasmuch as noise masks silence. But something is left behind. Generally, it seems students study, reviewers review, writers write and readers read in the hope of avoiding this. It’s what the people want, after all.

Cioran has also written essays. They demand the same kind of reading as the aphorisms. It just takes longer. In the landmark essays, the brilliance burns long and hard. Still, the tone remains more or less identical to the aphorisms. While the aphorisms give us the breathing space of a firebreak, the essays threaten suffocation. What is lost is the very sense of its inspiration, the surprise, the horror, the emptiness of the moment. Instead, Cioran has something to say. In ‘Beyond the Novel’, Cioran examines our self-conscious age with regard to what helped constitute it – the novel.

The essay develops out of the idea that the novel grew out of metaphysical poverty. It allowed us to understand our history and our psychology in a world where the old certainties were decaying. Yet now that the decay has reached a zero point, producing the kind of works bereft even of the certainty of the self as subject. If you don’t know what novels these are, they’re the ones NOT written by journalists. Yet however repulsively anachronistic the journalistic novel is (and virtually every novel published is a journalistic novel), Cioran wonders what is the point of writing more than one novel of absence:

“[the] implicit conception of this sort of art opposes to the erosion of being the inexhaustible reality of nothingness. Logically valueless, such a conception is nonetheless true affectively (to speak of nothingness in any other terms than affective one is a waste of time). It postulates a research without points of reference, an experiment pursued within an unfailing vacuity, a vacuity experienced through sensation, as well as a dialectic paradoxically frozen, motionless, a dynamism of monotony and emptiness. Is this not going around in circles? Ecstasy of non-meaning: the supreme impasse.”

This passage – representative of the whole – jerks the steering wheel as if to herald an eternal roundabout. But this will be Cioran’s own journey. Instead of condemning the novelist, and thereby commending his own judgement, Cioran gives him the benefit of the doubt. “Is [the novel] really dead, or only dying? My incompetence keeps me from making up my mind … I leave it to others, more expert, to establish the precise degree of its agony.”

Instead of only railing against repetitious failure, Cioran gives us the guidelines to which potential writers must abide if they are to create an art for the wilderness. In Kafka’s words, this is the help going away without helping. ‘Beyond the Novel’ adds to the demands of genuine creation, and thus the unexpected joy of what has been and might be achieved. Instead of postmodern cacophony – its sloppy apologia borne on positive negativism – we get to hear the silence behind the noise. One thinks of Beckett, of course, and the equally great Thomas Bernhard. To confirm this, Cioran pulls up in a lay-by and, in a passage one might describe as uncharacteristic, seems to hold back from hopelessness and bitter regret:

“Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful … Let us salute it, then, even celebrate it: our solitude will be reinforced, affirmed. Cut off from one more channel of escape, up against ourselves at last, we are in a better position to inquire as to our functions and our limits, the futility of having a life.”

Well, not uncharacteristic after all. This is as near to abstract celebration as Cioran gets. He leaves it to others with ‘the courage of dilution’ to give us the succour using the ‘banalities’ necessary for the novel. His admiration for other writers is due precisely to their ability use the banal surface to reach the subterranean. Cioran’s rapid lyricism will not spread into a delta plain of banality to allow such an exploration. This is his limit.

Despite this, he is able to prospect worth by refamiliarizing us with what is important. Perhaps his most worthwhile work apart from the aphorisms, we can find in his short pieces on other writers collected in Anathemas And Admirations . In particular, the essay on Scott Fitzgerald. Here is a writer one might otherwise ignore: sentimental claptrap elevated to art by a lazy world. Cioran lays this aside. What he concentrates on the time when Fitzgerald awoke from the American Dream into the intensity of lucid consciousness, something “that transcends contingencies and continents”.

By this time, Fitzgerald’s famous books have been written, the American definition of success achieved: fame, money and even requited love. “Literally and figuratively, [Fitzgerald] had lived asleep. But then sleep left him.” Why? Returning to the his deepest theme, Cioran answers: “Insomnia sheds a light on us which we do not desire but to which, unconsciously, we tend. We demand it in spite of ourselves, against ourselves.”

Fitzgerald’s inner experience remained despite worldly success, indeed was heightened as a result. On the heights of his despair, Fitzgerald wrote ‘The Crack-Up’. Cioran’s commentary on this non-work – it was a series of fragments – is like most of Cioran’s commentaries, a commentary on his own procedure, also a series of fragments. ‘The Crack-Up’ represents for Cioran the direction Fitzgerald should have pursued rather than regarding it as an aberration. He tried to overcome it by going to Hollywood to write screenplays. Fitzgerald is rightly judged inferior to what he discovered, unlike a Kierkegaard, a Dostoevsky or a Nietzsche.

“Fitzgerald admirers deplore the fact that he brooded over his failure and, by dint of ruminating so deeply upon it, spoiled his literary career. We, on the contrary, deplore that he did not remain sufficiently loyal to that failure, that he did not sufficiently explore or exploit it. It is a second-order mind that cannot choose between literature and the real dark night of the soul”.

In the same piece, Cioran equates loyalty to failure with sickness. The healthy, he says, keep a certain distance from our ‘contradictory and intense’ states, while to be sick is ‘to coincide totally with oneself’. The former allows us to act. But isn’t it precisely one’s distance from oneself a part of sickness; it is the part which can never act?

“When you imagine you have reached a certain degree of detachment, you regard as histrionic all zealots … But doesn’t detachment, too, have a histrionics of its own? If actions are mummery, the very refusal of action is one as well. Yet a noble mummery.”

The interaction of conditions is inevitable. Nobility is left to the silent and invisible. ‘The Crack-Up’ is called the work of a sick man, yet its impressive lucidity is a histrionics of detachment, more or less identical to Cioran’s own work, sick only inasmuch as it cannot achieve oneness with its subject. Oneness is barely human, hence our fascination with good and evil. Perhaps this sharp division between sickness and health is where Cioran lapses into the sentimentality Fitzgerald was prone to. It is a form of self-pity, trying to justify the inherent hubris of writing and publishing. Aware of this, Cioran tells us not to worry about those who are excessively self-pitying because an excess of self-pity preserves reason.

“This is not a paradox … for such brooding over our miseries proceeds from an alarm in our vitality, from our reaction of energy, at the same time that it expresses an elegiac disguise of our instinct of self-preservation.”

This helps answer a perennial question: why did Cioran live so long without killing himself? Sickness can increase self-pity, thereby reason, thereby self-preservation. To cross the abyss that is life, if that is our purpose, we must use both sickness and health, self-pity and detachment, the desert and the oasis. To deny either is either fatal or contemptible. Cioran shows by example, how various the tension between opposites is manifested. His examples have one thing in common it seems: the admittance of lucidity, that which lies behind all stories, all systems, all action, all help.

As academia eschews ambivalence and individualism, rewarding instead skills of memory and language, it might be worth stepping into the vanishing point Cioran occupied so tenaciously, if only to re-open the stagnant wounds of our lucidity.

“The ideally lucid, hence ideally normal, man should have no recourse beyond the nothing that is in him”.