No doubt I write very good reports; even W. agrees with that. Perhaps it is what I will be remembered for. But this is a joke, because they are anonymous; unsigned, they will disappear into files, electronic and corporeal, spread across this institution.
Yes, I should be writing a report. I am good at them; I work quickly, officially and without resentment. I should be writing one now, but I had to rise early to be in for work. For hours I sat in a haze of tiredness. After two hours of haze, I read an electronic journal (SubStance) about Derrida’s death and how nice he was. Nice vignettes of a dying Derrida correcting the papers he’d been sent from Irvine. He’d attach 2-3 pages of notes on each paper, it was said. He’d teach a six hour seminar in three sessions, and had six office hours in total. An hour before his office hours started, a long queue would form. Everyone wanted to talk to him. I thought to myself: yes, this is admirable and close my own door tight. No one is to come in here, I thought, I’m tired, and besides, I have to write my report.
But I couldn’t begin. It is true, I felt inadequate after reading accounts of Derrida’s seminars. They would always read the text in its original language, of course: Latin, Greek, English, German (but did they read Kierkegaard in German?, I wondered; certainly he read Patocka in Czech). And how masterly these seminars were, according to those who attended them. Then I remembered what W. said: ‘they’d be so boring‘.
Still, I felt the need to hide from philosophy and the trappings of philosophy. I tried to remember what the name was for that kind of art influenced by the Surrealists whereby a little case would me made that would enclose certain objects. A little case to be hung on a wall for display. No, the name wouldn’t come, but I thought that I might like to be enclosed by such a frame. Sometimes it is necessary to be protected, walls need to be erected so that something can begin in the space they enclose.
Without remembering the name for the artefact in question, I remembered Roubaud. Once, last summer, I had read three books which had something in common. The middle one was The Great Fire of London, as it is entitled in the English translation, althought it is properly only volume one of a six volume work which bears The Great Fire of London as its general title. It’s is properly called, this book, Destruction.
Destruction is the book Roubaud would write even as he knew that by writing it would erase, for every line he wrote, a line of that book he named sometimes the Project and sometimes (it was a dream that led him to this) The Great Fire of London. It is the book he wrote to the work he conceived on his thirtieth birthday ‘as an alternative to self-chosen extinction’, and which served for over two decades as the project of my existence’. The Project, one might say, would have encompassed Roubaud just as the curious box-like frames would have encompassed the materials inserted by the artist I evoked above. It is a way of being protected, of drawing the darkness around you to make a place where something can begin.
Only the Project will not begin; it never began.
I know now (and based on this certititude, explicitly formulated at last, I am going to venture forth one final time) not only that I will never approximate either Sterne or malory or Murasaki or Henry James or Trollope or Szentkuthy or Melville or Queneau or Nabakov, but that no prose work bearing my signature will ever rival The Man without Qualities, Mansfield Park, A Hard Winter, The Golden Bowl, or The Confessions of Zeno.
Ah, but Roubauld knows that this failure is the condition of the book which should be called Destruction.
I am destroying my report. Or destroying the time allotted for the writing of the report. If I don’t begin now, I’m doomed, the report won’t be ready. And it is already late, quite late. But I am thinking of the exercise Roubaud sets himself, similar to the one I should undertake to write my report. The report is my project and the title of this post should be: Destruction.
As he writes down his memories as they occur to him in the present moment (his book is oriented by the present tense), writing allows those memories to disappear. Ah, it’s an old argument, and no surprise when Roubaud refers to The Art of Memory by Frances Yates, which in turn recalls how Simonides of Ceos advises us to construct a Palace of Memory, placing the items to be stored there in a trajectory one only has to retrace in order to remember. What is lost to time can be rediscovered in space; wander through the house and you will reverse time; all the hidden riches of your memory will be yours.
But writing, as Roubaud does, performs the opposite operation to the construction of a Palace of Memory.
Once set down on paper, each fragment of memory […] becomes, in fact, inaccessible to me This probably doesn’t mean that the record of memory […] has disappeared, but […] that […] the words composing the black lines of my transcription interpose themselves between the record of memory and myself, and in the long run completely supplant it.
Whence, presumably, the title Destruction. A Destruction is occurring; a memory-path opens but as it does so, is destroyed. The book advances through an active erasure; destruction is the life of the book. One might say it blazes, but this blazing is still not The Great Fire of London.
Yet if the Project was what Roubaud began to avoid suicide, the destruction of that same Project is what he needs to live today. ‘The great fire of London becomes indispensible to my survival as a man living in solitude’. Roubaud is a man alone, deserted. For his wife has died. She died and he, Roubaud, is alone. And alone, it will be necessary to find a path through the days. That path must be as simply as those repeated rituals which get us all through the day.
For this morning of my new beginning, I readied myself for the waning darkness (3 A.M., solar time): I forced myself, for several mornings, to grow accustomed to the idea of filing these pages with black lines slowly and steadily, under the cone of the black lamp which would be, as it is going to be, as it is at present, slowly attacked, weakened, blurred, invaded by the insidious brightness slowly streaming in from the invisible sky above the street.
Roubaud will write each morning. He preserves what he writes in the order he writes it. he barely changes what he writes. The text which assembles itself through this discipline becomes Destruction.
Roubaud’s text is more complex than that. The path that opens to him as he writes may split; a bifurcation occurs, which necessitates breaks in his prose, sending the reader off to another section of the text. Is his text fragmentary, then? Rather, it is bound together in a new way; it enloops itself; a detour occurs before the reader returns to the continuity of the book.
We are reading not a Palace of Memory but a Palace of Forgetting, Roubaud’s forgetting. I read this book last autumn; it grew in my memory, rather like the way green tea leaves expand when you pour boiling water on them. What did it allow me to remember? The great walks Roubaud took through London, and the walks I took with R.M. when she moved down there late last summer. The great walks of another book which mentions Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory: Josipovici’s Moo Pak, of which more another day. On the back page of Roubaud, I have written: 2/11 – 845 – 60. The last figure records how many minutes I spent on the cross country machine in the gym as I read it; the second-to-last one the number of calories I expended and the first figure the date. the 2nd Novement 2004.
Scattered memories: the passages from his dead wife, Alix’s diary; the manufacture of Azarole jelly, as recounted in several famous parapgraphs in the novel (is it a novel?); Roubaud’s recollection of his thousand-mile trip through America in 1976 (the bicentennial). Yes, those memories. And something else, too.
What else? But it is three o’clock; an hour has passed, and I really must begin my report.
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