It is the same with nearly every book I read: to tell a story, to narrate, means to pass over a more primordial struggle. What would it be to narrate the way in which the event struggles with the non-event? In sense, the beginning is already the end, like the river which spreads its distributaries into a great delta. The end: for what is actualised, what hardens itself as event out of a more general haze comes after the struggle, after the succesful wrenching of what begins from what does not begin.
Reading Auster, say, is pure pleasure, but it is indulgence, too – the swiftness of his narratives, the lack of extraneous detail and those musing passages in other writers I so enjoy, bears me joyfully along; I am a happy reader. But with Kafka, who likewise never permits himself to muse, for whom nothing must be illustrative, I am brought back to the haze; what seems to speak keenly, clearly sets itself against the arrhythmia of the non-beginning, the Word which will never pronounce itself.
(For that is what the Castle is: coextensive with the village, nothing other than it, but also everything that is other, all that sets itself against the bustle of the day. Do not seek recognition from the officials of the Castle; do not seek to know your role. K. falls down exhausted when he tries to approach it, but by this exhaustion does he know it, as when, later, he falls asleep when he is told of the Castle’s secret. Castle, Word, you speak only to the weary and asleep.)
Word, non-Word, I think I discover something of you in Sebald, too – that the narrative detours of The Rings of Saturn, which are like so many ox-bow lakes alongside the streaming of the main story, are what prevents the book from being devoured in one gulp. Extraneousness. Detail. Ventriloquy: sentences which may or may not be quotations. Indirect speech: these are no mere techniques, but arise out of the non-beginning to which the book is tied.
Disributaries spread in a great fan, eventually disappearing into indefinite swampland, where fresh water meets sea water. In the end, like an old junky’s arm, there are no veins of water left, only general sludge. Sebald’s East Anglia is that sludge; human history spreads itself indifferently across his pages. Everything has happened; nothing has happened.
But here is the wonder: that nothing-is-happening is allowed to speak of itself. Not the Word, but the counter-Word, which undoes what is made, or rather shows how the present is redoubled by an indeterminate past. Anything could happen. Anything could have happened: the surface across which his narrator walks remakes itself as he does so. He is the last awakened of the ghosts; the youngest one. The world of the dead is still wondrous to him.
Reading (I am almost at the end), I remember the soldiers who cross the marshland in Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Crossing, trudging, they no longer belong to history. One of them, his cap-brim bobbing up and down, walks more quickly than the others. No matter: he will still miss his appointment with time. The young girl in another sequence, being evacuated because of the Spanish civil war, turns suddenly to the camera. What does she see? The melting ice-plane, the expanse in which all the dead are buried and from which all the dead will arise.
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