Jet Lag

I am now in the state of Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, or, as I prefer to think of it, the narrator of Blanchot’s When the Time Comes. What time is it? When is it? Night or day? This year or last year? I dreamt on the train coming north that the book was unfinished, but it is finished and sent, though, going over the manuscript on the plane, I found more mistakes.

I arrived home at five, spread my bed clothes in front on the TV and let Richard and Judy play above my head. How did I fall asleep for the Simpsons? – but I did. I’ve piled up the books I bought on my trip beside my makeshift bed. The Borch-Jacobsen looks good; Corngold’s The Necessity of Form.

On the train, I reread Kafka’s ‘The Judgement’ and ‘The Stoker’ and then put the book, hearing within me sentences similar to those of Kafka spinning themselves from nothing. How nice it is a book can live in this way! Merleau-Ponty remarks on exactly this phenomenon: to read a novel is to imagine one could write it. Then you see what a novelist must have: the strength not just to begin but to venture at once into the middle of the narrative. How crowded with details Kafka’s narratives are! I thought to myself: he was a great observer of the world. The details are exquisite; everything is there. From where did that strength come? From what necessity?

Thinking about this, I remember Thomas M. Disch’s comments in his history of science fiction on Philip K. Dick. He was a guru, Disch notes, keen to arm wrestle his interlocutors into submission on the issue of the theophany he experienced in 1974. He craved attention, Disch notes, going from one 20 year old girl to another. Perhaps. But there are the books, too. The books written each one of them in a week or no more than a fortnight, which unfolded very rapidly from themselves. Each time a world was born; true, the worlds overlap, but what impresses is the necessity of each birth. His is not the prolix talent which creates first this world and then that, but that ranks the world he creates according to how close they would be to the real world.

That is the lesson of the novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in Dick’s The Man in the High Castle: it speaks the truth; it bears on what really happened. Thus Dick’s novel does not lay before us an alternate history but a false one. Dick is always looking for something, but what? The power to fabulate this world, to write of what is simple and close. The truest hero of Dick’s novel (but which novel does this come from? I’ve not read one for more than a decade?): the tyre-regroover, the one who works against entropy to stabilise and order.

The ‘real world’: how naive this sounds? Isn’t it by attempting to reach through the veil of fiction to the real world that Dick sought to leap from his books into the world, our world? He writes to escape writing; fiction is only a means, for him, of coming to the truth. Why, then, not put down the pen altogether? Why another tab of speed and the daily retreat to his writing shed? Dick writes a great deal; four novels a year and dozens of stories. He writes, but why does he write? To find himself on the shore that lies beyond writing. Meanwhile, there are the works in which dark-haired girls and tyre-regroovers multiply themselves …

‘What day is it?’ I asked R.M. on the phone. ‘It’s Wednesday’, she says, en route to the ballet. ‘I thought it was morning’, I tell her, and it’s true, I feel young as I always do in the morning. But I should be feeling old instead – doubly old, having missed a night’s sleep.

Now the summer is spreading out before me. No major projects, a paper here and there, that’s all. For the first time in sixth months, I will have time to write here, but on what will I write? It’s a little too late to write on cruelty, following Jodi’s example at I Cite. And there is the frustration that this blog is not private enough, not secret enough, but this is foolishness itself, for a blog must be public, writing must find its audience and to write is to let that of which one writes to be born anew.

What I’ve written here over the last months appals me. I am reminded of what Lacoue-Labarthe says somewhere about the originary role of acting. You begin with the mask; you are always an actor, especially and always when you write (but this is my extrapolation …) With whose voice do I write? Whose style is alive in mine? I would hope to find a style which is neutral, from which speaks the surprise that there is meaning, sense, that there is language. Yes, that’s what I would like to find, and it is against that which I measure the weakness of what I have written.

But is this, too, not a pose? The desire, like that of Dick to step from a fictional world into the real one? Staggering jet-lagged about the flat, I wonder whether I come close to the condition of the narrator in When the Time Comes (how ridiculous …): close to that point where fiction frays and what approaches is not real, if this would mean the world of ordinary things and ordinary people, but an immediacy which burns up everything but itself. As though all our experiences assembled themselves in that flaming, amidst it, and we live like salamanders close to a truth we cannot grasp.