Fascination

How is it, as a post at Dan Green’s The Reading Experience points out, that the literary industry (the publicity industry) almost always abuses and marginalises the best literary authors? Perhaps the desire of such authors to publish has nothing to do with money or reputation. Write! says the story to Kafka. Paint! says the painting to Cezanne. ‘My entire work is only an exercise’ wrote Kafka; an exercise: but to what end? There was no end – only endless work, the endless desire to work which unravels all works. Begin again, and again, and again, but you will get nowhere.

Fascination is perhaps one name for the movement towards the curious space the work opens. But fascination – which leads to what the world can only call failure – is difficult to bear. Who will console the Rilke before he was able to write the Dunio Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, the Rilke who struggles for ten years to complete Malte? Who understands the terrible privation which prevents Pessoa from gathering his Book of Disquiet into publishable form? And what of Kafka, who begins stories only to leave them half-completed, not revising them, but beginning new stories each time with a fresh creative gesture? Ah, but perhaps they do not need consolation, these writers of fragments! Because they do not experience fascination as a loss – because it is reaffirmed in the different editions of the Book of Disquiet, in the profusion of Kafka’s diaries and notebooks, and in the letters through which Rilke maintains his prolific correspondence, as the joy of the work. Strange joy which is also failure! Strange persistence which entails failure! I know they are working out there, lots of them, our secret companions, burrowing like moles …

But what does it mean to celebrate the fragmentary? After all, the Sonnets to Orpheus are perfectly formed, well rounded – and isn’t Metamorphosis the most satisfying of stories? Ah, but they are fragmentary, these works, because they present themselves to us in the manner of a flashing indication, pointing to what they cannot seize, making manifest what cannot be frozen into something dead and finished. It is in this sense that they are broken and break us, their readers, from the false consolation that we are reading something edifying, something that will add to the great movement of culture. Fascination: yes, they fascinate us, too. For myself, I am afraid of Woolf’s The Waves – and I cannot read Sarraute unless I am prevented from sleep. On those insomniac nights I read Woolf, Sarraute, Duras because it is only then I overcome my fear of fascination …

But there is, as you would expect, a counterforce – a movement against fascination: the great cultural movement against the indeterminability of the work. Wander the pages of Sarraute’s Childhood and you may well be lost forever. And Beckett’s Unnameable? You will come apart as the sentences unfurl. But the piece in the Sunday paper about Beckett or Sarraute reveals only a hysterical desire to have done with desire, a fear of fear. Is this what one finds in the works of those writers devoted to representing the world, flashing it back to itself and obscuring, in this redoubling of daylight, the obscure paths which others authors are compelled to take? Or in the profiles, interviews and biographies where the power of the novelist is celebrated? Or in the fat book in which the biographer can display a masterful virtuosity over a life?

It is a question, in each case, of a redundant humanism – of the desire to bind creative inspiration to the will of the human being. But perhaps what we call the human is only an adjective and one which is always at the service of a certain determination of culture. Perhaps there is another way of thinking the humanitas of the human being – a humanism which understands what it might mean that the works we take to be great are fractured from within; that the fragmentation welcomed by Rilke or Kafka leaves its mark upon the most imposing monuments of our age.

But if fascination does summon a certain kind of the artist it does not permit her to transform its vanishing ‘object’ into a completed artwork. It is a kind of a ghost of the work, or a ghost of completion, forbidding the artist from recognising herself in her accomplishments. A ghost? Perhaps something still more mysterious: a darkness without contour, a reserve which surpasses every cultural form. Is it the earth from which the ghost of Hamlet’s father arises, the old mole? But it is the same earth against which the world of publicity affirms itself. Today the successful author is a brandname. Publicity surrounds the work as it surrounds everything. The ‘public’ it reaches is a phantasm of the publicity industry itself – a kind of dream or hallucination of a ‘target audience’, an audience constituted around certain demographics, ‘markers’ which indicate the kind of taste they ‘ought’ to have. This phantasmal public, the marketeer’s dream, are the ones who are already familiar with everything written. They are both insatiable and satisfied; nothing will surprise them and they will always want more (but they do not exist …)

There are no shadows and ghosts in the daylight of publicity; the self-withdrawal of the old mole’s earth, the way it presents itself by hiding itself, like the God who showed only his hindparts to the prophet, seems to leave no traces. But is this really the case? Has the era of a certain kind of literature disappeared altogether? Or are there books, paintings, works which would point beyond themselves to the reserve which plunges into darkness – which would present themselves as avatars of the unattainable ‘object’ of fascination?

Beyond the ‘public’ of the great machines of publicity, there are readers the demographers cannot reach, the ones whose strange tastes deform the predictions of the market researchers. The secret reader each of us is or could be – each of us, any of us is already more than a denumerable consumer whose purchases would make up the great lists of bestsellers printed in the Sunday papers. True, publicity calls to the ‘public’ and this ‘public’ to publicity, but somewhere, still, there are encounters: the reading which greets the literary work, the novel, the poem; the viewing which welcomes the television drama or the exhibition. The horror is that the space for these encounters slowly withdraws – chance, for example, will not lead you to a film by Tarkovsky on a terrestrial television station on a weeknight.

What does that mean? That the world appears complete, perfected, finished and I believe, as a reader, a viewer, but primarily as one who is alive, that I am aberrant if I cannot disappear into a world which I imagine to be full of the public I read about in magazines, or whom I think I encounter through reality TV. There is a great misery and loneliness, but then, within that, isn’t there also a kind of refusal of the forces which determine what we want to watch or to read? A refusal beyond cynicism; a simple horror at what seems a vast conspiracy to close every channel of creativity and innovation. And isn’t this the greatest objection to a unified Europe? To the common market which raises its walls against poorer countries? To a movement which may see the old Europe transformed into something streamlined and efficient? Refusal of the denumerable and measurable; refusal of the market and of marketeers; refusal of the great engines of publicity, and the lies of our politicians. Refusal of the system of values which holds our culture together, communicating with itself as it passes through us.

The danger: that refusal fails to recognize its political potential, is ungrasped as a legitimate disgust with our world. Because isn’t it this same refusal which is treated by antidepressants or cognitive behavioral therapy? I think here of Todd Haynes’ film Safe, where, in the closing scene, Julianne Moore, after renouncing much of the paraphernalia of modern life which brought about a protracted illness, speaks directly into a mirror: I love you. Who does she love? Who is ‘safe’? In the mirror she sees the one who refuses, the bare life which has not vanished into the ‘public’. And here the parallel with Kafka, with Cezanne is perhaps apt: has she not glimpsed, in the mirror, what fascinates her and draws her towards it? The one who is not yet – the darkness through which the old mole burrows and ghosts wander. As if she confronted the ghost of herself who said: I am refusal. I am the one who refuses. Now she can begin the work she cannot complete in which she is held into the darkness in which she is unravelled.