What questions do we ask into an oeuvre? What is allowed to echo there? Two boys lost their ball in deep grass on a French hillside. Following it, they discovered it had fallen into an entrance of a cave. Inside, carrying torches, they discovered great ochre coloured beasts on the walls in the flickering light: this was Lascaux where, thereafter, various theorist-adventurers would find there what they wanted, asking their question into the cave’s echo and receiving their echoing question which they took for an answer.
And so with the writer in her criticism: is it not some clue to herself that she seeks when she writes about a body of work? As though the authors upon whom she writes were other versions of her, ahead of her. As though they had advanced further on a journey she was only beginning.
So can a writer find their courage in that pantheon of writers that stands all about them. Courage by their example, by the signatures they left just ahead of you, as the adventures in Journey to the Centre of the Earth followed the marks of a previous explorer.
Courage is important, and also the sense of being accompanied. The critic can also call from a dead body of words something like a ghost of their author – the name Bataille, say, but as it refers to more than the writer who lived and died. Then criticism is also a kind of seance; it lets that shadow flicker on the cave walls that is a ghost of the writer – a way of communing with the dead as they are buried in words, and not under earth.
What kind of life did the author lead? Where did they live? Who loved them? These are questions the ghost cannot answer. But the critic’s question, the first, is what drew her to the oeuvre in the darkness. That led her downwards into that echo chamber where questions return in the guise of answers.
Some writers know to get out of the way of the work, to let it live. Know that the work belongs to darkness, that the ochre beasts should be discovered by the uncertain light of a reader’s torch, and that there should no general illumination, no way of seeing the whole, and all at once.
So Blanchot, who wrote to a director who proposed a film version of Thomas that his desires did not matter with respect to this project; he voices a doubt in his letter – part of his general suspicion of the visible – but then says: treat me as though I were dead. A posthumous existence he’d already claimed for himself in the author’s note at the end of The Infinite Conversation.
Dead, and away from the work. Dead, and retreating into darkness, to let the work be. To let it shine by the reader’s torch and not according to light of his own pronouncements. Discretion, then; withdrawal – impressive to maintain, in the face of the media, a kind of negative celebrity, a void in place of a man. There is the work in the darkness that belongs to it. And the man about whom for a long time we knew nothing.
And as with words, so music. And as with Blanchot, with Jandek, too: for his retreat in the face of his work is as absolute. What discipline does it take to perform live, and yet to maintain his discretion, not to put on a show, to address the audience, and to insist on there being an exit that leads out of the venue by a secret route, where the audience cannot find him?
And what effort to resist replying in depth to the queries that he is sent, limiting himself to a few cryptic, fortune-cookie words written in his familiar hand on a Corwood catalogue? The better, though, to allow the work to speak. To draw listeners to it by their own light – by their listening. And let them bring to it their own questions, which they hear, in the echoing darkness as answers.
Yes, this is admirable. But it does not hold quite all the way. For has there not been, in recent years, a new candour in the lyrics – a directness, a non-obliqueness, that provides the listener with a clue to the whole oeuvre, to a real sense of what it was always about? Depression, of course. For his whole life, says the singer on Manhattan Tuesday. And doesn’t he promise his audience in Newcastle to bring them a little of that – depression?
With this frankness, something new happens; a light flashes out, and the whole cave becomes visible – everything, the whole oeuvre, and at once. And we see that the man who recorded and released his work for many years did so from depression, and out of depression. That was the mood that attuned everything. Depression was the secret.
And yet the point, obvious enough, but worth repeating, that his depression was never complete enough that it did not lend itself as a topic for lyrics. That it did not close over its head so he could not rise gasping to sing of it. Then it was never complete, never absolute, it allowed respite, and that respite was the work, and the condition for that work.
Depression doubled up – depression joyful enough to sing of itself: this is relief, respite – and isn’t that borne also by the work. Isn’t that its hope, that it was possible, that the grey clouds parted, the black sun gave way to the brightness of the real one? Wasn’t that the miracle, the returning miracle of the faith implicit in the work, in the recording of music and its release?
An obvious point; and besides, it is to be remembered that depression wasn’t always his theme, and it was never simple. The light that spreads from Manhattan Tuesday, from the lyrics in recent years is only a flash; everything is seen and at once, to be sure, but this is a fake, an eidolon; it brings one Jandek forward only to push another aside, and the oeuvre is more than what is illuminated now.
‘There’s nothing to get’, said Sterling Smith in response to a question of what the music was about. Nothing: and that is the darkness in which an oeuvre gathers us to itself, and speaks to us in a secret autobiography – not Smith’s, this time, but ours, who listen and seek to find ourselves in listening. But to lose ourselves too, this is true – to become, to get away from ourselves. To move in a new direction.
But isn’t that what is also told in the story of a life? That if we seek to become what are, that becoming also means an escape, and even a kind of death – a dying to what we were, just as the Tarot dealer reassures us that death – the skeleton with a scythe – only means change. And that life will have to fall to what it does not know in order to find not itself – fixed, determinate – but what it might be.
Does this mean we might identify with the music, discovering it as an account of our moods, our melancholy? Or is it – fake alternative – also difference that alters them, our moods and our temperament, that attunes them differently, letting them resonate with what they do not quite know?
But all of this is too simple, as if it wasn’t the play of these alternatives that fascinates – the eternal fort–da of the search for meaning and its defeat. For isn’t it the very ordinariness of the man on the record sleeves that is the source of mystery? The ordinary – a young man in a check shirt, smiling at someone – as it is framed and presented to us as the record sleeve of a music that sets the blues adrift?
And isn’t it what survives of these blues forms that makes this music offensive to those (Chusid) familiar with, say, free jazz and the contemporary art music avant-garde? It is the way Jandek is close to blues forms and far, the way the Representative is presented as a man just like us but who is also withdrawn from us, who does not acknowledge his audience.
Close and far. Living and dying. Or a kind of dying – endless change come close, meaning sliding away. It is not just that Jandek is an enigma, and Smith, but that we are likewise enigmas, and it is this that echoes back when we ask our questions into the dark.
Let me ask my question: Why Blanchot, whom I read for the first time in 1993, and now Jandek, heard for the first time only recently (a matter of months)? Why this pair, heard and listened to before I knew the legend that surrounds either of their names?
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