‘I don’t know where my misanthropy comes from’, I tell W., ‘it’s not that I think I’m better than anyone else. I’m worse, in fact’. Saying that, I remember another reason why I blog: to surround myself with something like a halo of names. To write the word Shostakovich is already to pushed the world away. The word Hamlet is enormous, bigger that the white sky through my office windows.
‘When I feel strong’, I tell W., ‘I can string together all kinds of ideas which usually float around my head without connection’. Yesterday, coming in for the audit, I thought of the glass of pure alcohol of which Bataille writes somewhere. Then I remembered the name of that piece by Messiaen: ‘From the Canyons to the Stars’. ‘From Alcohol to the Sky’. No, not the sky, but that unto which it gives when the word Hamlet is pronounced.
W. is amused I am to be a keynote speaker at an upcoming conference. ‘They’ll tear you apart’, he says. ‘What are you going to speak on?’, he asks. ‘Something very simple’, I tell him. He is amused. ‘Besides I would happily be torn apart’, I say, remembering ‘The Hounds of Love’ by Kate Bush.
W. and I always return to one of the essays Blanchot wrote on the occasion of Bataille’s death. Bataille always spoke with absolute seriousness, Blanchot recalls. Everything was at stake, even in the simplest conversation. ‘That’s what I feel when I talk to X and Y’, W. says, naming two people we admire, ‘but I never feel it with you’. It’s true, of course. So little is at stake for me in conversation. ‘But when I write …’, I begin. ‘We’re no good at writing’, says W. This is true. But there is something there. ‘What?’ asks W., ‘what is there?’ He’s become so militant since reading Badiou.
I know I’ll be happiest when no one reads Bataille. ‘He understood’, I say to W., ‘there’s no one who experienced it as intensely as Bataille’. ‘Understood what?’ says W.
Then I remember the book I bought a few days ago in London. Adventures on the Freedom Road. It’s author is an idiot of course, no question of that, but there are interviews with Klossowski and Leiris. R. M. was with me when I bought it. I kept reading the letter from Blanchot it quotes: ‘I no longer see even my closest friends …’ Then I remember a line from another essay Blanchot wrote, recalling the importance of the word friendship for Bataille.
I won’t rehearse all that again here. The fifth chapter of the first book is undoubtedly the worst. I rewrote it a couple of nights before the book was due in, staying up all night. It was disastrous, but I am fond of my little disaster even now. How well I remember the open contempt to which I was subjected when an earlier version of that chapter was published as a paper. I have always loved contempt; the condition of my specialism in the UK secretly pleases me. I like to imagine that colleagues at other universities look at me with vague disgust, but even that isn’t true. One of them came up the stairs to my office and said: ‘I didn’t know I had brothers at this university’. He was referring to lecturers in philosophy. I left him with someone else and fled to the library.
‘Houllebecq is good, really good’, I tell W., ‘I was surprised’. ‘It’s pure disgust’, says W. And I wonder to myself: what if I could translate the disgust which saturates me into writing? But I lack the strength …
Which one of us hates it all more?, I ask W., who is very good at hiding hatred under a sheen of politeness. I know the answer. Hatred is necessary. Nothing begins except in the midst of the indifference of the world. ‘You have to reach that place where disgust presses out from you into the world and it presses back. The frontier between you and the world becomes rock hard. Then you can retreat and something might begin’. That’s why Houellebecq emigrated to Galway, I tell myself. It’s why Bernhard lived in the countryside.
Kafka is always our model. ‘How could a human being write those stories?’, W says, again and again. It is always the end of the night when he says this. We have drunk a great deal, the sky opens, it is possible to speak of what is most important. It’s hard to speak clearly. I slur in agreement. Drunkenness forces you to experience the difficulty of forming words in the midst of a kind of streaming of language. Words, now, have a price. They are born out of a struggle. To say the word ‘yes’ is difficult. And you can’t remain upright. Remember the great moment in Blue of Noon when the protagonist collapses into an open grave. Above him, the night.
In truth, all words are drunken. Language drinks. This is why Houellebecq drinks. Only then can he feel the half-words streaming through him. All of language runs through him. Is it possible to write? Perhaps; but first, there is the wonderful feeling of immersion.
Somewhere in Galway, now, Houellebecq is drinking. He’s drinking for all of us, for you and for me.
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