Category: Books

I have a fierce, stupid love for Jean Genet; it’s always been there, even as I’ve given his books away, or bought them again. But is it Genet I love, I ask myself, reading Sinthome’s post – is it really Genet who interests me? Or his work, his life, a kind of rorschach – blots of ink that give themselves to be interpreted in various ways?

Or perhaps it is more than a matter of interpetation, and I find myself wanting, without having the book to hand, to ask myself what fascinates about the superhero Rorschach in Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Of course he is not quite a superhero – fierce and strong, yes, but he has no real powers.

Once, we get to see his ruddy, ordinary face. Only once, perhaps (I haven’t read the book for many years) – and it is indignant, even embarrassing. We prefer the smooth surface, the mask with changing blots of ink, and the detective’s jacket. He is a man alone, only uncertainly allied to the other superheroes (but are they heroes? – only one of them, perhaps, and what was his name, his skin coloured blue like a Hindu divinity?), and I admit I’ve always like to read of such solitary men, alone just as Jean Genet was alone, never keeping a permanent address and carrying with him only a nightcase with five books – poetry by Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Villon … and a couple of changes of clothes. Genet who says there is only truth when he is alone, and is writing: only then – and not in the interviews where he is half a person, or too much of one.

Solitude – and then to become – who? But now remember that Genet stopped writing when there appeared Sartre’s huge book that read his work and life together: Genet was now anointed: he was a saint. But who had canonised him thus? The philosopher who drew out the juice of his work: Sartre the master-writer, Sartre the canoniser – how was he, Genet, to write now?

Compare, decades later, a book written on him by another philosopher, whose multicolumned form recalls Genet’s own essay on Rembrandt: was Genet allowed to live in Derrida’s vast, risky text with its priestholes? Ah but Genet had forgotten writing by that time (1974); he was moving round the world, allying himself with the Black Panthers and then the Palestinians; it would be another decade before he drew together the manuscript of The Prisoner of Love, whose author has, it is clear, attained insubstantiality, letting himself be drawn into a form – as birds into a flock, as fish into a shoal – only as he is called by a cause greater than him.

But the young Genet, confronted by Saint Genet was a different person. He stopped writing. He was written out, he suggests, because he’d escaped prison, once and for all. Hadn’t he been facing a life sentence? Wasn’t it Cocteau and others who made a case for him as the great writer of a generation? But Genet wasn’t fooled. He repudiated Cocteau, too. He turned away from Sartre.

Later, he would declare Giacometti the most admirable man he’d met, and Greece his favourite country; I forget why. Genet was always escaping, and escaping himself. The books lay behind him. Blocked 5 years, he did not mourn. He lay back and let there come to him those idea-germs from which his work would be born again. He travelled, with his night case. He reread Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, and Villon, although he knew every line. He fell in love a hundred times.

Yes, this is the Genet of my delirium, a little like my delirious Godard – the one whose work sets me, too, to dreaming. And is it of myself I dream? Or rather, the one I might have been, who, in my dream, was latent in the 20 year old who first read Genet, Saint Genet; who first saw Godard. And shouldn’t I mention Mishima, too, the patron saint of 20 year olds?

Solitude. Fold open the bureau in your university room, I tell myself. Read those books again. But what do you read, would-be escaper? What do you promise yourself, you whose later travels would end in farce? You’d never go anywhere, would you, or you’d already travelled with Genet as far as you would go?

In Greece, having run out of books, you bought with your remaining money a ticket to leave today, thus ending your bid to escape into another life. Is it Genet I love? His voice? Or the idea that it is possible to speak thus, that the Law might part and you might be given the right to speech?

You – solitary, you – alone. ‘Alone as Franz Kafka’: didn’t Kafka write that? But isn’t it also to solicit the Law that you would write, to seduce its attention even as you are told off – what bliss! – even as it seems forbidden to write as you would allow yourself to write.

As alone as Jean Genet, telling truth. Alone, but not with the writer of those first 5 novels. Genet after Saint Genet; Genet after Sartre – not writing, but, I imagine, whispering into his lovers’ ears. Genet moving, travelling with his night bag: escaper who, with The Thief’s Journal let his name tremble with the name of those blue, wild flowers that flower along the border and, in my dream, all borders.

He crossed then in literature, in the pages of a book, but now, in my dream, he crosses for real, as he trains Abdullah to walk the tight-rope, as he passes through that country where I chose to live and from which I returned after less than a week, the sun being too bright, the sky too darkly blue.

Jean Genet, Bowie’s Jean Genie, I am folding open my bureau table fifteen years ago and today, and there is the black and white framed picture by Ernst I cut out from a book. Escaper, it was called. Did I escape? Did you? In Morocco I see you turning in your bed. You will not write today. Nor tomorrow. Because you have Abdullah to train. Abdullah for whom you hold a training tightrope five inches above the ground.

I wanted to escape, and reading and writing. Leave them behind; be translated into another life. In Greece, by the busstop I finished A Boy’s Own Story. Eight hours passed; the bus was late, so late, and then wound up through the bay: what beauty! In the town where we stopped, an old woman filled my cupped hands with pomegranate seeds. It was Sunday; strangers were to be fed. Then, later, the bus came down on the other side of the mountains, to another bay. Where to sail next? Anywhere, everywhere but what was I to read? A volume of Mandelstam, and that was all. And after that? Life, apparently. Real living – but what was that?

In his essay on Giacometti, Genet remembers sitting opposite a dirty old man in a train compartment. He wants to read, to avoid conversation. The man is ugly and mean. And then? ‘His gaze crossed mine … I suddenly knew the painful feeling that any man was exactly ‘worth’ any other man. ‘Anyone at all’, I told myself, ‘can be loved beyond his ugliness, his stupidity, his meanness.’ And then, ‘Giacometti’s gaze saw that a long time ago, and he restores it to us.’

To see thus, to be seen thus. In that town, in that bay, I drank ouzo with another traveller, a civil servant who came to the islands once a year, for the whole summer. We drank together, my spirits lifted. Where would we go? But suddenly I wanted to be alone. Just then, I wanted solitude, and I left him behind somewhere on the ferry. We came to our destination the next morning. I thought: but this is not where I want to be, either. To travel, I had thought, was to be worn down like a stone in a river. No more edges, no distinctness, and we would all be alike, us travellers.

In an Athens garden, I read from Mandelstam. It was over, I knew that, as I travelled 6 hours early to the airport to wait for my flight. No escape, no adventure; I was too much myself, or only lost what I was when reading. To be a stone on a river floor, a stone among stones, worth no more than anyone else: how to be worn down by escape? How to live like anyone else, and everyone else? Wasn’t that the question I asked into Genet as I read, and to Godard as I watched? Wasn’t it the question Mishima drew from me (it was the opposite of being stung. The sting – that I did not know was there – was drawn out by my reading)?

I went home; I studied, I read nothing but philosophy for 10 years. 10 years blocked. 2 times 5 years without another kind of reading. Perhaps I had written a kind of Saint Genet. Perhaps I had cursed my reading, my writing. I was no longer alone; others whispered in my ear. Was this life, was I now alive? How was it there seemed no escape, without those texts that moved like ink-blots? Write then, draw the mask over your head. Read and let others be masked. How to give everything away and travel, too, but without leaving your room?

Derrida writes in Glas of the dredgers he can see at work along the Seine and of what is lost by them as they scoop. For my part, from my window, there is my yard, and the scars along the wall, and new plants in new pots. Back in my student hall there was a cat like a remnant, who lived for a time with us for no particular reason. One night I drew her into my room and she transformed that space as she wandered, tail up, sniffing, curious.

What is there around me that is not being renovated, completely transformed? What falls? The leak which rotted the joists between my flat and the flat above; the second leak beneath the kitchen floor which makes the wall still wet. Then the mildew that grows in the new cupboards, and the stains left by rusting metal tins.

Remnants, fragments, that should be remembered as they fall, like the rustbelts that are still found in our New Europe. The cat disappeared, taken home by one of the cleaners. The water company is coming out to look at the leak, the builders to mend the soaked-through ceiling. What remains?

I am on the side of the remnant, I tell myself; I see myself from there, on the other side of the glass. The long scars along the wall; the cat; the rotting joists, the gaze of Giacometti’s statues: each time, a remnant of the past, and as what remains as the past. What returns? what is being sought here? and what will you find, reader for whom this cannot be interesting, and which interests you only because of that?

Perhaps The Book of Disquiet could never be a novel, or even a fiction: Bernardo Soares is too obviously Fernando Pessoa – obvious by the diffuseness of the prose, written over so many years. Unconvincing pseudonym! But Pessoa preferred the word, heteronym – to be other-named, to be named by the other: how to bear that namelessness which writing also demands – the anonymity which abides in place of the author who would lay claim to the book? What you write will not come back to you; what you sign will not be countersigned. Unless the counter-signature can become a name for the absence of name, the heteronym. Whence Bernardo Soares.

The land beneath the sky. Draw a horizontal line on a piece of paper: that’s the horizon, where the sky is divided from the land, or from the sea. And remember the paragraphs in the Penguin edition of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility – stretched out, horizon-like and doubling the description of the horizon that begins the final book, The Decay of the Angel. Everything is finished; the book is over before it began. How can it end but here, before the horizon?

Is the ‘Sebald’ of his novels Sebald? The erasing line through the centre of the reproduced photograph, the scribbled out middle name in a reproduced identity document: ‘Sebald’ has passed through the mirror and lives another life. Is he Sebald? Or is Sebald (or ‘Sebald’) playing a game with us?

The characters of Bernhard, or of Handke are almost exactly the same across the whole of their oeuvres. The same voice, whether the chemist of As I Walked Out or the threshold-expert of Across; the protagonist of No One’s Bay is indistinguishable from Kobald of Repetition (and even indistinguishable from the other characters we meet in this massive novel.)

Do I mind? I read Handke for the Handkean mood, the Handkean Stimmung; the word is given to me in the same way. He writes for an oeuvre, anyway, not for an individual work: the same themes – the decline of the image, the withdrawal into writing, the evilness of the everyday – the same situations – a meeting with the enemy, an encounter with ‘doubles’ – the same attitudes – a love of walking, of journeying, a dislike of mountain-bikers, a meticulous recording of the natural world: an oeuvre, which is to say, his eye is on the whole, and his novels beat a path of research.

Fiction as research: but what is to be gained when Handke writes as fiction rather than autobiographically? What is the difference? The same question could be asked of Sebald. But still, the same organisation of themes, the same palette of moods. The books overlap in topic and concern, but each is an aesthetical unity: each rounds itself off. Someday a post on what I fancy Sebald ‘discovers’ and refines by way of the techniques of his writing. The free indirect discourse at the end of Vertigo, in which Pepys’ diaries merge with the narrator’s own voice is taken up again in The Emigrants (but I haven’t checked the publication dates, and perhaps it is the other way round.)

Fiction, autobiography: but might an autobiography exhibit its own unity, its own weft of themes and topics? And what of those books that seem to fall between fiction and autobiography (Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death)? – No absolute distinctions, then. No criteria to set one genre against another. And yet -.

To begin a fiction seems to me an act of great daring. What temerity – to write, and a fiction! The temerity of inventiveness! Perhaps I am like those who distrust fiction writers who would usurp the place of God. But then I remember that certain fictional works are more like a destruction rather than a creation: the world is pared down, ‘reduced’ as is said in phenomenology, and now in such a way the author is the opposite of God.

How I love those urgent books that seem to streamline every detail, every scene, so as to throw themselves into the uncertain future of reading. No, I do not want the roof lifted from every house, or for every skull to be unscrewed so I can learn of the thoughts of this or that character. And I strongly agree with Steve: if there is to be a protagonist who writes, we must least learn why there is writing, and from where it comes.

This is the marvel of the first paragraphs of Blanchot’s Death Sentence, or of Handke’s Repetition: it is clear from the first they are written and that writing is necessary for their narrators. Something is at stake. A kind of research is required that must pass by way of writing. Writing, for a time, is everything. I admit that this urgency seems real to me in some novels, and not in others.

Reading Kundera’s Immortality a few weeks back, or The Book of Laughter and Forgetting more recently, I wondered whether the narrator hadn’t set himself too far back from the events he related – whether he did not play with his characters and us, his readers, a little too much. He is too knowing, I thought to myself; he is too much in command. I do not believe him when he says the latter novel was written for Tamina (was that her name?), the character who ends up on the island of children -.

And there is always the assurance of Kundera’s old European culture – when he writes disparagingly on ‘popular’ music, for example, when he speaks in the manner of the most tedious fogey, trundling out the same cliches about our supposedly dreadful modern world. Much fresher Bernhard’s vehement intolerance of nearly everything, past, present and future! An intolerance that does not depend upon the certainties of a vanishing world, or on the emerging certainties of the new one.

Bernhard leaves nowhere for his narrator-protagonists to stand in his novels. Everything is at sea; everyone is at sea, and the waves of his prose dissolve everything but their own great, foaming rhythm. The novels are a gale, but a necessary one. Tomorrow, the sky will be clear again, but only because the present world has been shaken apart. But the storm must come the day after tomorrow, and the day after that – the caustic, world-destroying chaos that rides Bernhard’s invectives.

Preferable, too, is Handke’s minutae, the setting-down-in-detail of events too small to notice which seems to expose his narratives to the uncertainty of the future – to wager them, to let the form of his novels tremble because of an ambition Handke knows to be impossible: to make an epic of the everyday. He calls the ghosts of Virgil and Thucydides to stand over his writing; but there is no nostalgia, no appeal to the wonder of the Greeks, the Latins. And he calls the ghosts of languages which can name the world in a different way. And he even calls for a people, who will never arrive (but he calls them for that reason – because they will not come). What does he write? Your people exist. They are somewhere else. A different people with a different history. We are not the only ones. You will never be alone.

But those were, concerning Kundera, uncharitable words, and I write them here only to note the idiosyncracies of my own taste. I know I like novels that occupy certain moods and do not let up: Bernhard, Handke, Appelfeld. Those moods – but is that the word? – are everything, and reach me so as to ‘reduce’ me, suspending those relations to what I regard, for the period of reading and usually a little after, as the inessential.

I wonder what the ‘reduction’ is that I seek – today’s reduction, not that of yesterday, or the day before. Pure writing, the saying of writing, the narrative voice that lets itself speak through the details and events of the narrative: it is not that I seek what lifts itself from the tale, which renders its details irrelevant, but rather that the telling of those details, those events, is charged with a sense of the stakes of that telling. As though narrative were important, and the act of writing filled with danger.

And furthermore, the danger lies in clinging too strongly to the form of the self (Kundera’s fogeyism – and shouldn’t I also bring in, rather abruptly, the assurance of Auster’s prose style, its smoothness, its riskless assurances?) – one propped up by everything stultifyingly and thick-headedly bourgeois (but what is the word, bourgeois doing here? Where does it come from? Another question of taste worth taking up).

Whence the surprise of reading Muriel Spark: a cosy novelist, I had thought, who takes the bourgeois as her topic – the bourgeois and their drawing rooms. But I didn’t know how cold a book could be, how mercilessly a narrator can play with her characters (The Hothouse on the East River) like a cat with its prey. Cat’s claws through the ‘props’ of the bourgeois novel, scratching away the unities of time and space, scratching apart verisimiliude, scratching until the wallpaper’s torn off and the walls are torn away. That even in a book as fun as The Girls of Slender Means – cat’s play again, but the cat half-asleep, not quite ready to kill, but vicious in her drowsiness nonetheless.

Muriel Spark claws her way into a kind of purgatory; her characters are shades and know they are shades – dead already, strange survivors of death, they live on by replaying scenes from their completed lives, replaying them, but also wearing them away, until it is the condition of fiction that wears itself through. This, at least, for Hothouse: a fightening book, a diabolical one – as soon as I finished it, I panickedly sought to contextualise it, reading secondary commentary, looking for interviews. A frightening book, where the void looks through the eyes of the characters. Characters possessed, dispossessed: the bourgeois world is hollowed out, exposed. We are all dead. Everyone, all of us, was already dead.

Taste, then. In a world assured of itself, novels concerned with great destruction and genocide (Appelfeld), with showing its madness and devilish complicities (Bernhard), with peace, with the image, and even the dream of a people (a ‘Slovenia’ inside Slovenia – Handke). It is true I read novels for a kind of politics, an ethics. For difference, for life – for a kind of scepticism that is the narrative voice itself. This is my ‘taste’, my demand as I read – for a sceptical writing, for writing as scepticism, as it lets tremble a world that is bound too rigidly to itself.

Does happiness have a better celebrant than Gert Hofmann (reviews here and here)? Not the delirium of ecstasy (Bataille, Duras), not the withdrawing epiphany which leaves an awed ferment in its wake (Pascal, Kierkegaard), but a steady superabundance of happiness, rosy-cheeked and basic, as it seems to live from itself.

Living from, vivre de: Levinas’s term for that happiness which arises not from lack, but from superabundance. Who has written a more magnificent phenomenology of food, of light and water, of these simplicities from which human suffering is privation? Nothing begins with lack – we are not first hungry and then full, but the other way around. The elements of the world are superabundant: happiness is the plane of life.

For that reason, perhaps, for its immediacy, its simplicity, happiness rarely becomes a theme, or a topic. It is the fall from happiness that is the topic of the novel: the moment of nausea (Sartre) or vertigo (Sebald); the sense that everything is absurd (Camus), or, in act of loving, wondrous (Lawrence); for Hofmann, however, the task is to remain on the plane of this most ordinary of moods.

The hunchbacked Lichtenberg, aphorist and polymath falls in love with a flower girl, Maria Stechard, whom he calls the Stechardess (an archaic German practice for feminine surnames, Gert Hofmann’s son and the translator tells us in an afterword). She comes to fall in love with him, too. Their love continues for three summers, until she dies, aged only 17.

Then where is the dramatic tension? From whence comes the movement of the novel, its narrative interest? In the sprightliness of the narrative voice itself, its spryness, and the many leaps it performs, from short paragraph to paragraph. The narrator – who speaks? – sets the spinning plates in motion – the drama lies in wondering how he will keep them spinning.

When will their happiness end, Lichtenstein and the little flower girl? Will she still love him, she who spends time with one of his young students? She is an adolescent, and he – in his mid thirties, almost middle aged! Surely this is doomed love. Happiness is the tightrope from which one or the other will tumble! But there is no fall. The Stechardess dies; Lichtenberg will fall in love the maid who comes to replace her, who will bear him several children.

Then the events of the novel – the arrival of the flower girl, who comes from an impoverished family to work as a servant in  Lichtenberg’s rooms, the company she and her master keep, and then the love that grows between them – record an episode in a life. One which, we know from his contemporaries, was of great importance to the historical Lichtenberg.

Hofmann keeps the plates spinning. So many exclamation marks! So many little leaps, with the upturn of the voice at the end of each line of dialogue! Then the practice of giving us the dates of the historical personnages we encounter. Then the picaresque delights of the narrative itself: the trip to Hanover with Mr. Britain to perform work for George III, both men sleeping side by side in taverns along the way; Lichtenberg’s conversations with his fellow academics: how is it Hofmann can write so lightly? How is it that he writes on tiptoes, so different, say, to those picaresque episodes in Auster, always reported in the same Austerly style?

A book is a mirror; if an ape looks into it an apostle is unlikely to look out. My heart says, I must finish this book as quickly as possible. It is a delight, a trifle, but I admit it: I would rather, much rather, read Vertigo, a book whose narrator seeks and moves, than Hofmann’s book, which remains for the most part confined in Lichtenberg’s rooms. I would rather read of delirious ecstasy, of vertigo – of that mood which seems not just to confirm the whole – the world, the order of being – but what sets itself against its happy presence.

Why? Why is this the case? Why do I not want to be entertained, and swept away by entertainment? Why do I, who so admire Levinas’s phenomenology of happiness (of jouissance) and exhorts his friends to write of food and light and the simplicity of love, do not want to read of the same? The reduction: this expression keeps returning to me. I am thinking of that step back from the world that, in so many philosophers, is the condition of thought, the perpetual beginning of thinking. A step back that is also, as it were, an unconditioning, the unravelling of certainty, and the certainty of happiness.

And isn’t it to reduce myself, to destitute and desituate myself that I try to read and try to write? Isn’t it the solidity of life, its bourgoise comforts that are suspected? This is why, I think, I prefer The Film Explainer to Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, for at least in that book, there is a sense of that menace, the rise of Nazism that would turn so many from their comforts. At least there is a sense of the great, vile threat that should make all happiness tremble.

This is why I remember Levinas as I read Hofmann. When does Levinas learn of happiness, of enjoymnent, of food and light and air and water? This book was written in captivity during the war, he writes in the preface to Existence and Existents. He claims he notes this only to excuse the absence of meditations on those books published in the war years, among them Being and Nothingness.

But isn’t it to underline the fact that his book was written in the midst of the complete destruction of the solidity of the world, whose victims did not know where to lift their dying gaze? The reduction: there is a kind of reading which is engaged by something like this destruction. A loss of oneself, a falling away. Vertigo. Or a book – like Appelfeld’s For Every Sin, which begins when everything has  already fallen.

This is not to confuse destruction with a heavy ponderousness, with books weighed down by their own importance. Aren’t Appelfeld’s the lightest of novels? Don’t Sebald’s novels move with great fleetness? In their books, the plane of life must be reachieved –  fought for, rediscovered, but with unknown techniques. Reachieved – how to find your way back to the world? Is it possible? And if it is not?

A book is a mirror – but who am I who looks into books for the reduction? Is to desire this, and through fiction, only my idiosyncrasy? 

Sometimes it is better to allow forgetting to intervene after you’ve read a book; do not try to remember it, not yet; do not write about it, for to isolate this or that feature of what, in your memory, is a broad but indistinct plane, is to lose the whole. Let it settle then; let forgetting claim all of it, all at once, until it is only visible like a shipwreck close to the surface of the water: sea-changed, that is true, but all of it there, ready for you to pass over again, at another time.

I lost Vertigo almost as soon as I finished it, my annotated copy left on a seat on the train as I went to retrieve my bike. It’s appropriate, I tell myself; and besides, there are the other books you read just before it – The Emigrants: wasn’t it obscured, almost at once by the book you read after it, as The Rings of Saturn were obscured by The Emigrants? Of course Austerlitz obscured nothing – starting so well, how did it become so bloated and middlebrow? I shudder. – And how ready I had been to give myself to it! Betrayal: a fat and stupid book. Still, there were the others, which rise ever higher in the sky above the showman’s tent of Austerlitz.

The others; I have them here; I reread my annotations, but learn nothing. You cannot cut into these books; it is everything or nothing. The sweep of the whole, that is the thing. Read; sentence follows sentence. Sentence climbs atop sentence and then – suddenly – a great plateau is reached. The earth is flat around you and the whole sky above you and you ask: how is it that I found myself here?

But this is Sebald’s magic: to move through the particular, through the names of streets and the names of personages, through explanations and speculations, through imagined fact and true dreams until that high, wide place is found. Luisa’s memoirs in ‘Max Ferber’; Abros Adelwarth’s diaries: I will not quote a line. Context is everything and here context means exactly that: this is a weaver’s work, and the book is woven from details.

How I admire it: his prose’s constancy, the steadiness of Sebald’s hand on the tiller. We are moving, together, in one direction. Soon the wind fills the sails, and we are borne, not on the story Sebald tells, but one that he allows to tell itself in his telling. And now we learn that Sebald’s telling is the element in which other stories to rise, that like the thermals that rise up by the mountain range it is known by what it keeps aloft.

And so are memoirs of Luisa and Adelwarth’s diaries caught in that uprising. Does it matter that they may be fiction? It does not matter. Another voice is allowed to speak. Another’s voice – not that of the improbable Austerlitz, protagonist-to-please-all, but the kite that rises into the air and holds itself into the wind briefly before it falls again.

These voices are fragile as they reach us from the other side of death. Speak: Sebald’s commandment. Speak: Sebald the resurrector, Sebald the magician who conjures from texts that may or may not be real the fragile presence of those who, like us, will be broken against death.

How did I manage to lose Vertigo as soon as I read it? It continued on the train North without me; I’ve rung Edinburgh station to ask them to notify me if the carriage cleaners bring it in. Vertigo: I read The Emigrants, too, over the last few days. Of course, the loss of a book doesn’t bother me at all; it was a secondhand paperback, nothing more. But the annotations! My underlinings! The descriptive phrases and sentences I was going to copy into my notebook!

Back in the North, I arrived with a new resolve to sort out my life. When I get back, I’ve thought to myself repeatedly over the last ten days, I’ll arrange for a water meter to lessen by bills. And I’ll get the damp proofing done. And I’ll patch up the long scar that runs up the wall where the old pipe was pulled away. And now I’m back? I took a broom to the yard. I moved the plants away from the overflowing drain. It was cold, but clear. Thudding music from upstairs. I thought: I had wanted to copy those phrases from Sebald. I thought: I’m going to sort everything out, one task at a time. I’ll call the damp proofers! a financial adivser! the water company!

Intimacy: how is it that I’ve as though these last few days sheltered not a memory but a place where memory might be kept? How is it that Sebald hollowed out a space in me that was somehow open to the air, like the Roman temples to the sun and the moon? Open, but to movement of time no memory could keep. Open – not to this or that memory, but to the intimacy of memory itself, all at once.

Remember – keep a place for memory. But keep a place, too, for the memory of memory – for what might be kept. Reading Sebald, I come to know of what a memory might consist that would be truly that of home. There is no nostalgia in Sebald, I’m not saying that. Not even a nostalgia for nostalgia – that desire at one remove to make of one part of the world that place to which one might return. It is rather there is an awareness of what homes people have made across the centuries, across the continents. And of the loss of those homes, those dwelling places, which are also dwelling places in memory.

Of what losses does he speak? Of war, of disaster, of that want which drives people to move from one land to another. Loss: but Sebald never seeks simply to put mourning to work. It is never a question of return, of the movement upstream to what cannot be changed. Everything has changed: the town, W., to which he returns has been completely rebuilt, from the foundations up. It’s changed – Sebald’s narrator (is it Sebald himself? Doesn’t Sebald erase his full name in the documents whose photographs he places in his pages?) recounts these changes; he seeks to find out about the course of those lives around him, of those he knew and did not know.

And what of the course of his, the narrator’s, life? That is given in the recounting itself; it is its possbility. The narrator as rememberer, not mourner – or at least, his mourning is not joined to work. It is as I read that history is passing over me, memories I will retain and those I will forget. So many incidents! So many place names (some of which, as in The Emigrants, I know intimately)!

Events, the streaming of events. Until I am left with a sense that I must remember, although I’m not sure what content memory should have. I must remember. To keep memory, to allow memory to be kept, yes, but also to keep a place for memory, to redouble memory and the effort of memory. This is not a call for scrupulousness, for careful documentation. I can barely find the words: to keep place for memorising, for its turning point, its hinge. For that point of articulation the rememberer occupies, even before he remembers anything at all. Just that point, that non-point of suspense, that retreat from the streaming of the world.

Vigilance: not what is remembered, but the act of remembrance. Not me, the rememberer, but the other, the recording surface upon which memory leaves its impression. But not even that: the place of articulation, like the cartilage around the elbow joint, where memory becomes possible. Only this interstice is opened by memory itself: the impress creates not just the impression but the medium of impression, until it is difficult to talk of mediation at all, and perhaps necessary to invoke a kind of immediacy, an ‘all at once’ that affects me not in the present but one step behind the present.

Who are you, double, recording surface? Who are you, flayed surface? Not the point of continuity, but discontinuity; not the intimacy of memory, but its extimacy: the great inversion which my insides are spread open, in which the inside becomes outside, the pure, exposed surface. Memory place, memory unplace. Not the dwelling place, but the nomadism that is a characteristic of Sebald’s own movements. Venice to Verona to anywhere-at-all.

Movement: I do not remember, but remembering happens. Movement: the other, my double, is watches over the non-place. Who am I, that lags behind himself? Rememberer, I know you are just behind me. Uncondition, I know you have unjoined time from itself, even as you bring it together. Where is Sebald’s Manchester? In my exposed heart. And where is it, my Manchester, which I passed through at exactly the same time as Sebald’s last visit?

Cities undone in flight. Cities undone by movement. What reaches me as memory has happened for the first time. The first? Or does it overlay what happened, your real Manchester, your real Midland hotel, with that of Sebald’s book, Sebald’s words and photographs? Does it let one city, one hotel overlie the other? Venice to Verona to anywhere at all: is it that flight undoes the city from within, flayed into a single exposed surface? Or is it I who lie exposed thus?

Gillian Rose is dying. Her cancer has spread beyond control. She has months to live, not years. Only palliative care is open to her. There will be no cure.

Love’s Work is a memoir-collage, to be categorised, according to the back of the book, as Autobiography/Philosophy. In its several chapters, this brief book recounts incidents from a life lived as a struggle to love. It is also a book about dying and those to whom death is close.

There is her friend Edna, who was diagnosed with cancer eighty years ago. At ninety six, with a prosthetic nose and a prosthetic jaw from cancer of the face, Edna still lives. There is her friend Yvette, the one with whom she was going to travel to Jerusalem, who dies in a hospice in Sussex. Cancer of the breast. There is her friend Jim, who dies of AIDS in his apartment, and his lover Lance, who also dies of AIDS. This is a book about dying, about death.

Gillian Rose is dying. But she is also writing. Love’s Work is the book she wrote as she died. That, and parts, if not the whole of Mourning Becomes Law and Paradisio. These are books, each of them, of ferocious beauty.

She is dying, but she is also loving. Love’s Work is a book, first of all, about love. About the inevitable failure of love and about the comedy of that failure. Writing, for Gillian Rose, falls infinitely short of loving. There is the erotic love which draws lovers to one another. That which allows each to recognise herself, himself, as a Lover. That which will also see a distribution of Lover and Beloved, Master and Pupil, which both become in turn.

Then there is the love of agape, of the everyday, of that shared life that erotic love can become. That love which commences in the hours the lovers spend sleeping with one another. Sleeping and then waking into a world shared. To sleep is to journey, each apart – two selves – and together. A subtle negotiation begins. Love is the third term that interrupts love’s folie a deux. Agapic love is not shared egotism, but shared adventure. The everyday is its milieu.

Love is at work; love is working. The world, the fourth term in the love affair, lies beyond. failed love affairs: Gillian Rose claims to be an expert in the failure of love. She has had two affairs with philosophers, she recalls. One lasted for ten years, one for five. In both, she was predominantly the Lover and the other the Beloved. He, the youth, the Beloved became the beautful soul. He withdraws, depressed. She, the Lover worries she blocks his way to the world. She ends the relationship, though not the friendship. The ephebe is set free. Only now, knowing them as friends, she understands them still to be beautiful souls. She was wrong to have left them, but she left them. Did she fail love’s work?

She recounts one failed love affair in detail. It will stand in for all the others, she writes. It was with a Priest, a fellow academic. She sees him at a meeting. She doesn’t know his name, but his presence is intense, sensually knowing. He is a priest. They go one evening to his rooms attached to a church. They speak of Liberation Theology and eat oysters and turbot. She tells him to read more Hegel to bolster his Marxism; she introduces him to Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Later, she will accompany him as he officiates as church; she joins him on his parish rounds. Later still he withdraws from her. She becomes the anxious Beloved; he the withdrawing Lover, rubbing his eyes with thumb and index finger. He cannot give her what she wants.

‘Loss’ means the original gift and salvation of love have been degraded: love’s arrow poisoned and swent switfly back into the heart’.

In the past, she says, she would have pulled out the arrow, and test the wound. This time, she says, she wants to do it differently. She does not ring her sisters in order to draw upon their ‘inventive love’. She steels herself to love again. And, true, she will love again. And fail again.

At the time of writing, Gillian Rose is still loving. We know him as Steve, the one with whom she went walking in Wales before the operation that was supposed to remove her colostomy. But he, too, is withdrawing. That week of intimacy is also the last week of their love. She will woo again. She will learn again and fail again; she will grieve and she will trust. This is love’s work.

There is the love of friendship. She stays with Jim in New York after her disappointing studies as an undergraduate. It is 1970. She learns German and reads Adorno. She discovers the abstract expressionists and the second Viennese School; she learns of pop music and of homosexuality. She discovers Jim, her great friend, who we meet in chapter when he is dying of what we will discover is AIDS. Jim, tall and erudite, possessor of books of philosophy in their original languages, Jim who nevertheless is no philosopher, who cannot experience it as a stage on life’s way and who is made to leave the college where he taught without a Ph.D. Jim through whom in 1991, when he is forty-seven and dying, Gillian Rose meets the irrepressable Edna, one alive, still alive after eighty years with cancer.

Her mother, who refuses to acknowledge that she loved the two husbands she divorced, who denies the suffering of her own mother, who lost over fifty relatives to the Nazis (‘children bayonnetted in front of their parents), is substituted by sixty-five year old Yvette, who speaks of her five great lost loves. Sensual Yvette with a tallboy full of pornography and three concurrent lovers, who teaches Gillian Rose ancient and modern Hebrew. Sensual, dowdy Yvette who counsels all on loving, and on not confusing the Beloved with the object of terror.

Her mother and stepfather told the young Gillian Rose of their intention to commit suicide. She develops agoraphobia. She sobs in her cold rooms at Oxford University. Her lecturers – all except one – tell her how much clever than her are the philosophers she studies. Her earlier, joyous discovery of Plato and Pascal saves her from throwing away philosophy altogether. One which reawakens in New York with Jim. And now – in 1995, writing Love’s Work – her convinction that postmodern philosophy falls short of love’s work – this is another form of love of this book. That it turns, disappointed, from what it takes to be the deficiencies of reason. Philosophy which mourns what it takes to be the end of philosophy, the end of itself. Which can speak only of ashes and the disaster. For what does Gillian Rose call in her last books? For love’s work, for the work of love. For what Hegel calls comedy:

The comical as such implies an infinite lightheartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all; this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustrations of his aims and achievements.

Rose:

No human being possesses sureness of self: this can only mean being bounded and unbounded, selved and unselved, ‘sure’ only of this untiring exercise.

The mismatch between aim and achievement elicits laughter, the laughter of the comic and the holy, not of cynicism or demonism. Laughter of the work of love, ‘to laugh bitterly, purgatively, purgatorially, and then to be quiet’.

Gillian Rose is writing in the face of death. Not tragically and not stoically, but comically. She does not laugh at death, but at the coming of what makes failures of all our works. Only to work is inevitably to fail; it is our condition. Then there is nothing about death’s coming which compromises love’s work or reveals its truth. Why write this book?

However satisfying writing is – that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control – it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and the agony of loving.

Why write and not love – unless writing is another kind of loving? Jim, dying, is fetched Herzen’s autobiography. This passage from that book is what soothes his ‘problem of self-representation’:

Every life is interesting; if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting, the life itself is interesting. Man likes to enter into another existence, he likes to touch the subtlest fibres of another’s heart, and to listen to its beating … he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks for himself confirmation, sympathy, justification …

Philosophers should all be made to write autobiographies as well as all those dry pages.

Why write and not love? Gillian Rose writes Love’s Work to remind herself of the work of love. To let it abide in her. To give herself faith. But to give us faith, too. She is the Master of faith and the Master of loving, she who has experienced the failure of loving so many times. She who has been reborn from love. She who surrounded by books of alternative medicine which advocate ‘edgelessness’, yielding to the world-soul, to emptiness and to the no-self, would prefer the edginess and the struggle of love.

Now I understand. I am the Beloved and Love’s Work is the Lover. Gillian Rose’s book loves me as she could not. Despair yesterday when I could not get past page 88. A kind of laughter as I finished the book and knew comedy would be the cradle in which this book would hold me.

To leave a blank Word document open – the promise of writing as I go about the house, clearing up in preparation for the visit of R.M. Outside, a white sky, inside, a white Word document: two expanses. Did I drink too much last night to write this morning? I think so. Five pints and two tequilas, spread over a long night, it is true. Too much. Last night we sunk pickled eggs into our porter – an old Stoke practice, apparently, from the potteries. How lovely they looked! It made the four of us, the usual four, laugh happily.

I am listening to Malone Dies and clearing up instead of writing. Listening to Beckett’s words make it difficult to write my own, but there are several things I should write. I have printed out Steve Mitchelmore’s essay on Roubaud here beside me on the table and then the book itself, much read, annotated, and I wouldn’t say loved exactly but one which I waited my whole life to read. Which was prefigured in every day of that life.

Here is a passage on which I would like to write. Alix is the name of Roubaud’s wife:

1178 days. I knew Alix 1178 days, and the moment of this new beginning (months on end have elapsed, vanished between the first and second fragments of this bifurcation) is the first to go by, 1178 days after the day she died. My obsession with numbering correlates one day of grief with each day of her love.

This is not going to be a proper post – a well-rounded little essay on Roubaud, a mini-treatise on his use of interpolation and bifurcations, however much I’d like to write one. I am hungover, for one thing and although all the signs are propitious for work, strength fails me (why did I let myself drink those two late tequilas in the nightclub?) And then there is the perverse desire to answer Destruction with a destruction of my own. But what does that mean?

Conversation (a while ag0) with W. He says he wants to be as clear as possible in what he writes. I tell him that’s not my aim. He says, that’s obvious and we laugh and then, speaking of the commentaries I’ve written I say: I want to let Blanchot’s prose as it were carry my own prose, to bear it. To allow the book on which I write to continue a movement which began and continues to begin in his writing and that before everything. To exhibit a fidelity which would not be a simply imitation, but something else. Ah, I didn’t put it in those terms, and besides, I completely failed in my ambition. But it is a pleasant hope, one which Derrida himself had and not just of Blanchot (of writing on Blanchot).

Weber distinguishes ‘classical’ deconstruction from what was to come later, after the second cluster of three books were published in 1972. Is this plausible? W. dislikes Derrida’s attempt, as W. puts it, to become a writer. What do I think? The prose is so laborious. I’d rather read him speak about his prose than read it, with a few exceptions. And then, late on – in the 1990s – even the interviews come to disappoint, again with a few exceptions. But who doubts we are in the presence of brilliance? As I read, I ask myself not what Derrida is working towards but why he works in this way. He speaks wonderfully on the subject and says he feels distant from the others around him, all the others, except Lacan, the other one who takes written risks, for whom writing itself is a risk. He feels close to Lacan for this reason, he says, but then on another occasion, will write that it is to Deleuze he feels closest, even though their works seem to differ in so many ways.

I tell W. I’ve always felt a tenderness towards Derrida’s texts. W., demurring, speaks of a sincerity possessed by certain writers, perhaps those who have passed close to death. You can only write when you’ve died, says W., and he mentions Hugh Selby Jr. and Bernhard. When you’ve died and come to life again. That’s what he said, and I remembered a passage in Derrida’s ‘To Speculate – on Freud’ where he suggests that the death of Freud’s daughter Sophie is prefigured by Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. Yes – prefigured, and not, therefore, remembered in Freud’s speculative essay as so many commentators would have it. Prefigured, meaning the temporality of Nachtraglichkeit would have in some strange way have to be reversed. It is not the trauma that awakens itself long after the original event, but a strange anticipation of the event.

I would like to use the expression ‘dark precursor’ here, thinking of its French sense as the gathering darkness before the lightning strikes, but I’m not sure how. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ would be the stormcloud that gathers so the lightning-strike of Sophie’s death could burst through the sky. That dreams in advance of the death of it’s author’s daughter.

Now I remember another peculiar scene. As recorded in ‘The Instant of My Death’ – a text repeated word for word, in its entirety in Derrida’s Demeure after Blanchot wanted to withdraw his little tale from his publisher, who was preparing to print some anti-Semitic creed – Blanchot records what we must take to be his escape from death. In 1944 (but on what date? – I’ve forgotten) he was put up against the wall to be shot as a member of the Resistance. Then the resolve of his captors withered. He was free to go, and so he went.

I know it – do I know it – that the one at whom the Germans were already aiming, awaiting but the final order, experineced then a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy however) – sovereign elation? The encounter of death with death? In his place, I will not try to analyse. He was perhaps suddenly invincible. Dead – immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship.

What is strange is that the relation to death this incident would lead to is prefigured in Blanchot’s earlier writings – his Thomas the Obscure and Aminadab, not to mention the manuscript confined from the house by his would be murderers and the many literary essays he had already written. Then he was bound to death in friendship before the the event in question.

Between W. and myself there is a contretemps about death and writing. I remember what W. said about Hugh Selby Jr. and Bernhard. Yes, they came close to death; perhaps they might even be said to have passed through it (how beautiful!) But I think of a marvellous commentary on Derrida’s essays on psychoanalysis by Maud Ellman where she writes, after noting Derrida’s claim about the prefiguration of Sophie’s death:

Is this an attack of mysticism – or numerology – on Derrida’s part? Or is he imputing to Freud’s text the temporal inversions of Nachtraglichkeit […] whereby the psyche strives to master trauma after the event by generating the anxiety that should have been aroused before the unforessen catstrophe? Or is he tracking down the deadly work of the compulsion to repeat, which overrides the boundaries between life and text, before and after, cause and effect, disseminating symptoms that refer to nothing prior to their own proliferation. If so, Sophie’s death, rather than preciptating this compulsion, is swept into its maelstrom, rolled round in its inexorable revolutions.

It is a lovely passage. Derrida is fortunate in his best readers, but then he created the texts which allowed them to so read. What a gift! But then what happened, later on? What happened as more and more texts appeared while around them the swirl of commentary moved ever more quickly? Derrida, marvellously, knows that of which we might suspect him. Guiltily, promising myself not to tell W. of my purchase, I bought Derrida’s Counterpath. There he recounts a marvellous dream about Blanchot he had on my birthday (May 2nd) and remembers his friend Blanchot’s anxieties about his (Derrida’s) willingness to travel the world to give lectures. It is a humorous moment. I laughed, and thought: Derrida knows, it’s clear to him …

I read Counterpath on the train returning north. That was some time ago. I didn’t buy Rogues; I forced myself not to. Enough, I told myself. Writing this post, the issue that bothers me with respect to Derrida, to Derrida and writing, has crystallised itself in a question: can we speak of an experience of death through which the writer has to pass in order to write? Ah, you might say, existentialism! How hackneyed! But I would say in turn, this is a time which needs resoluteness and decision. How many books there are! How many books! This is the age of philosophy, whether you want to call it theory or not, when everyone in the humanities and the social sciences reads philosophy. Yes, it is everywhere, but that is also to say nowhere.

A decision is required. A decision about writing and about philosophy. One into whose space I cannot bring myself. I am lagging – why? Speaking of this to W. we come to a similar conclusion: it was literature. I am caught, snagged, by an experience of reading. Of reading literature. The same is true for W. Is this why we devised the rules of Philosophy Dogma. I am laughing as I write this, but still …

The decision, then: for Derrida, the death of Sophie was prefigured in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’; death would be woven into a repetition which allows life to live, on this account. One need not think of a particular event as instigating that trauma which will then repeat itself according to the logic of Nachtraglichkeit (yes I know I should put in the umlaut). But then what of death? What of that death through which one would have to pass in order to write as it were on the same path as Plato’s eros is said to wander in the Symposium. That path not towards philosophy but that is philosophy itself. A loving, a friendship – with death? That’s what reverberates for me in Blanchot’s text (in the passage I quoted).

Candour: I suspect it is Derrida who is right. What does this mean, then, for the decision, for resoluteness, for the whole thematics of assuming death in which ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ is implicated? I began this blog for many reasons, but one was to surprise myself writing, to learn of my unconscious as I wrote quickly – of that realm populated not only with images of fathers and mothers, the whole Oedipal drama – but of desires which might then turn me in the direction of philosophy. Laughable ambition! But a persistent theme – its persistence surprises me – is that of inadequation and impotency, of the fall and the buffoon. What do these themes announce? They prefigure an encounter with Derrida’s philosophy (but also with Deleuze’s): of an experience of difference and repetition. But an encounter buried deeply in my life, prefigured there from the first.

Now I would like the book which began 1178 days before Roubaud met Alix, prefiguring it. I would like to write the dark precursor that would end in a flash of lightning. And what is that flash?

… night for night, the palindromic distancing of time (palindromic in relation to recollection) brings me back to the moment of our meeting, then to the moment before our meeting, when from the tiny Mitsou car I happened onto the site of an incipient coincidence exactly below the window from which would give rise the sound of a delivery van that I mentioned at the start of the very first fragment of this story.

The book – my imaginary one, the destruction of Destruction – ends with Roubaud meeting Alix.

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.

1.

I have read several things today. Firstly, I finished Quotes, by J. G. Ballard. Then, there was the short version of Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939. Finally, Josipovici’s preface to Appelfeld’s The Retreat. The following is a peculiar attempt to tie them together; it is only provisional (well, what post isn’t?).

J. G. Ballard was 12 when he was taken into the prison camps of Shanghai. There, he loses faith in his parents, who were imprisoned with him, and, perhaps, with the adult world altogether. It is all imposture, he thinks to himself, and when later he goes to live in Britain with his family, a country he had not seen before, he finds more imposture. As he begins to write, he understands his role is to articulate upon the new psychopathies which have appeared in the wake of Hiroshima. If the first half of the twentieth century belonged to Surrealism, the second half will belong to science fiction, he thinks to himself.

Graham Greene: The place reminded her of a seedy hotel, yellowing mirrors in the bathrooms, broken toilet bowls and dripping taps, where the chambermaids spoke in impertinent voices and the doormen reached out to them with their big, strong hands.

Ballard admires Greene. Why? Because Greene would have disclosed, for his characters, the latent content of the world. Ballard, of course, is thinking of Freud, certainly, but more especially of Surrealism, for which it is a matter of discovering the path desire lays before us – a difficult task because we have been disenfranchised from our desire by the reign of logic, of rationalism, and by a civilisation which requires we are enchained to the work we do to make a living. Ballard admires Greene as an author who shows how the world is already invested, changed, constituted by our desire.

Josipovici, commenting on the same passage from Greene: ‘A novelist like Greene is always out to make an effect; his eye is on the reader. Appelfeld, by contrast, is trying to catch the truth: his eye is on the object’. For Jospovici, truth is a quality of the world itself, of the disclosedness of the world the novelist can accomplish for the reader. The novelist’s eye would be on that disclosedness and not on the reader; he is not trying to seduce or to flatter; he is not intent upon demonstrating his authorly virtuosity or prowess; what he wants is to tell the truth. And to be truthful is to attend to the solidity of the world, the way it stands beyond what you and I make of it. That is to say, the world resists the measure of the ‘I’; it is not constituted by the protagonist of the story but is there before him; it precedes the entrance of the protagonist on stage and will outlast him.

One might say Josipovici understands the way a protagonist inherits a world, is thrown there, and must make his way there, struggling against everything which resists his powers. Only what resists, ultimately, is the world itself – yes, the stubbornness and opacity of what remains as the world after human beings pass through it. Greene’s fault is to have forgotten this stubbornness. Appelfeld, however, turns to the world, to what remains. Josipovici finds him ‘summing up the world in a gesture which is neither quite internal nor quite external …’; we recognise in his work ‘that the miracle of literary art is that by a fusion of the imaginative and the verbal the entire complex tangle of reality which would otherwise remain forever closed to us is caught and conveyed’. Reality is too complex to be reduced to a subjective impression – this, perhaps, is the kernel of Josipovici’s argument. Greene would remain at the level of the subjective.

What might Ballard reply? That the world is experienceable only in terms of the constituting activity of the psychopathologies which traverse us. There have always been psychopathies; once they were called myth; now, having spread across the world, we need no name for them other than reality. Psychopathies alter. ‘Computer punchtape, old telephone manuals, printed circuitry whose alphabets have died, the luminescent bodies of dead spacemen – all these form part of the astronomy of dreams that full our heads’. Whence Crash, in which the fantasies of its protagonists are a deliberate attempt to remake the world.

‘Crash is about the unconscious marriage which takes place between the human imagination and technology, the way in which modern technology offers us a back-door pass into the realm of psychopathology’. A marriage, then, which a kind of speculative fiction can reveal.

‘Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to derive the arts, sciences and industries of the world’. This is why, for Ballard, Greene points a way which other realist novels do not. But Greene only points; new psychopathies are the topic of science fiction. Thus it is that science fiction is the literary art of the twentieth century. The twentieth century would have seen only two genuinely artistic movements: Surrealism and science fiction. A claim I found wholly plausible for many years.

2.

I read almost nothing but science fiction until I was 20. What changed? What changed for me? A great deal is at stake in this question. When I reread what I write, I always think: ‘this could have been written in the 1950s’. When I watch the news, I think: ‘why can’t I write about cloning and stem cell research instead of writing?’ When I visit an art gallery, I think: ‘why don’t I write about new media art rather than literature.’ And when I try to write philosophy, I think: ‘why am I fixated on writing, on the infinitive, to-write?’

In a study on science fiction, Thomas M. Disch recalls claim that science fiction is aimed at 12 year olds. Who else but the 12 year old in you enjoys Star Wars? Is there a time to put childish things aside, to turn from science fiction altogether? It would be interesting to construct a reading autobiography – to tell one’s life through the books I read. When I was 12, The Drowned World, at 13, Barefoot in the Head, at 14, The Terminal Beach, at 15 the short stories of James Tiptree Jr. and Robert Zelazny. At 20, Rilke and Stevens, at 21, Pessoa and Proust.

But it is age 22 that is the great turning point. That year, leaving university for unemployment and sporadic temping, I became a re-reader, endlessly returning to those works in which I discovered an acknowledgement of the emptiness of my life and a door leading somewhere else. A door which was not the finely imagined world of the science fiction, but the heaviness of a prose on the edges of poetry, of a writing which answered to stultifying boredom of adult life. At 20, Camus and Sartre disgusted me; I liked Lawrence. By 22, I knew only a kind of impotency, a vast failure. Even Burroughs, whom I discovered at 21, had become dead to me. Soon Beckett’s Trilogy would open to engulf me. I wandered in its labyrinth. Finally, the miraculous year 1993, a time of the greatest despair and the greatest happiness. What did I write in the cover of Inner Experience when I first came across it? I won’t transcribe it here.

What it was to be rescued by books! Of course, I’d long since forgotten science fiction, even Gene Wolfe and John Crowley seemed unimportant to me – yes, even the author of the magnificentBook of the New Sun. Why? I don’t have an answer. I want to return to these books; I will. Then, busy studying, I stopped reading fiction for many years. When I restarted, I wanted plain prose, simplicity. I wanted a sense of the resistance of the world to human desire. This married with my philosophical interest in Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ as he writes of the resistance of earth to world – of the drama of what might be called earthing and worlding – and of course, in Blanchot’s work as it was written in the margins of Heidegger’s. Increasingly, I had a sense of the great catastrophes of the 20^th century, of the wreckage of the dream of reconciling work and freedom.

It was not that I discovered the hell of Auschwitz in Beckett or of Treblinka in Blanchot. It was never that simple! But there was a sense of shame, as Levi might call it, the shame of being human. And I sought a literature that would have acknowledged that shame understanding that the resistance of the world, its stubbornness, its materiality, would also offer a kind of hope. This is what I discovered in Appelfeld, reading The Age of Wonders last year. In Bernhard’s Extinction, too. What could science fiction mean to me now?

3.

Josipovici notes that Appelfeld has no interest in repeating the story of German atrocities. ‘What happened to the Jews in the Second World War is beyond tragic’, says Appelfeld in an interview, ‘It is impossible to understand it. We are not able to think about the death of a single individual, a close person, a single one. How can we think about hundreds and thousands of people?’ Josipovici comments: ‘Instead, he concentrates on those things that can be imagined, on the temptations of the imagination. His theme is the folly of willful blindness and the inability of imagination to face reality’. Thus the Jews of the town of Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939 imagine the coming war could pass them by.

Freud did not follow the Surrealists in their great confidence at unleashing psychopathology. Perhaps he was too pessimistic regarding the darkness of our desires. After all, it was Hitler the masses wanted in the years he was writing Civilisation and its Discontents. Ballard acknowledges this darkness: ‘Fascism was a virtual psychopathology that served deep unconscious needs. Years of bourgeois conditioning had produced a Europe suffocating in work, commerce and conformity. Its people needed to break out, to invent the hatred that could liberate them’. Still, the same psychopathy can permit other ways of breaking out. It drives science fiction; it drives that fiction which does not turn away from the transformation of our desires.

Ballard’s fiction is a turn to inner space, not outer space. He was despised by fellow science fiction writers for that reason, he remembers. But he insists on what he calls mythologisation: that attempt on the part of his characters to make sense of the world through the construction of a private myth. ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’: ‘Already he seemed to have decided that she was leaving him only in the sense that she was dying of pancreatic cancer, and that he might save her by constructing a unique flying machine’.

There is always the possibility of meaning, for Bataille. That possibility lies in psychopathy, in the active embrace of mythologisation. How else does Jim survive in the prison camps of Empire of the Sun? But Jim is a child. How old is he? 12? Are we all to become 12 year olds, then? The drama of Ballard’s stories lies in the way his protagonists will attempt to create meaning, to make the world make sense. They run up against non-meaning: massive trauma, nuclear testing in the Pacific, the Shanghai prison camp and impose meaning on their trauma. Ballard focuses on things which cannot be imagined and shows how imagination works nonetheless. The marvel of The Atrocity Exhibition lies in this.

Still, I wonder whether there is something which resists the imaginative transmogrification of the world. Something remains of the untransformed Shepperton in The Unlimited Dream Company. Eniwetok endures even amidst ‘The Terminal Beach’. This ‘what remains’ Josipovici would call it truth. Heidegger would call truth what happens as earth and world struggle each against the other. Truth, he might say, is forged in the relation between meaning and non-meaning. Crucially, for Heidegger, non-meaning presents itself in the work of art. It presses towards us, its viewers. Is this what happens in a story by Ballard? What comes towards us? The words he uses and luxuriates in again and again; favourite sentence structures … yes, all this is there, and we are indulged as his readers.

But I have set a whole swarm of questions in motion: When did my desire to be indulged come to an end?, I ask myself. When did I seek a plainer prose and for what reasons? Why did I leave Ballard’s narrative feast behind? I could write, because I was tired of being 12, but this is unfair. There is a better answer: Ballard tries to organize the economy of meaning and non-meaning in terms of what he calls mythology. He allows his characters to come to dwell in the mythologies they make for themselves from the psychpathies that pass across them. They are not sedentary, living in a version of the Heideggerian polis, but move, drifting across a landscape. Think of Kerans of The Drowned World, forever moving South. But even as they move there is something they do not confront: the bareness of non-meaning itself. They move through a world, but what happens when the world vanishes? What would happen when they confront that bareness upon which they cannot project their dreams? This moment is not marked explicitly in Ballard’s text. It is there implicitly, it is true – but I suppose I wanted to read a fiction where it was more strongly marked.

Ballard was 12 in the Shanghai prison camp. He fantasized; he would continue to do so when he returned to Britain, a country much duller than it is today. He fantasized, he seized upon today’s psychopathies, he wrote, and marked, in his own way, that great voiding of meaning which lies at the heart of the twentieth century. He marked it – but where? In the way the protagonist of The Atrocity Exhibition must always be re-named. He is Travers then Traven, then … And in the rhythm, of the repetition of that book and others like it (Crash). At the hinge, articulating this books, is the experience which opens itself to the reader of Ballard as to the reader of Appelfeld: the void of meaning, the need to mythologise again, and again. Yes, but in Appelfeld this need is expressed as such. It is there and it is present. Perhaps.

Ballard has written a great deal. I detect in the repetition of the same cluster of themes the same repetition we find in Freud’s young grandson flinging a cotton reel into his curtained cot with a sadistic ‘ooo’ and then retrieving it with a satisfied ‘aahh’. The child’s mother is dead; for Freud, his grandson seeks an aesthetic mastery of this loss. He hears ‘fort’ (gone) and ‘da’ (here) in the child’s phonemes and interpets the spool-play as a kind of gambling with loss. Every story Ballard writes sends the spool into the cot. When he purposely fails to complete them, allowing one to overlap with another, what is marked is a loss without recompense. Life is only a detour through which death sends life to itself, Freud muses. So too are Ballard’s stories and that science fiction of inner space as they bring us over and again to the disaster areas of the twentieth century. But there is another way in which those disaster areas ask to be written.

W. and I are often drawn to discuss questions of sincerity. ‘Why did X write that book? What did it mean for him?’ As if one should only write when everything is at stake in the act of writing. As though writing were tauromachy.

‘… to lay bear one’s heart, to write that book about oneself in which the concern for sincerity would be carried to such lengths that, under the author’s sentences, ‘the paper would shrivel and flare at each touch of his fiery pen’. That was Michel Leiris. ‘To write a book that is an act’: but what would this mean for him? His answer may seem disappointing: to effect a kind of catharsis, to be absolved, to confess …

There is a picture of the author on the back cover of the book. I think to myself: this man is sincere. He is dressed in what I imagine is an English suit; his large eyes, deep set and spaced widely in a bull’s head which rests upon broad shoulders suggest depth, fear and intractability. Here is an obstinate man, a stubborn one, but one who searches. A man of what would come to be called experience (I am thinking of the term Foucault uses for Breton, Bataille and Blanchot in an interview he gave on the occasion of Breton’s death). I recognise in Leiris a fellow Taurean.

Manhood carries the dedication: ‘To Georges Bataille, who is at the origin of this book’. The parallels are clear: both have a fascination with bullfighting completely distinguishable (or is it?) from Hemingway’s machismo. Both speak of their sexual impotence, although both frequent brothels and are drawn to sadomasochism; both orbit the Surrealists and both leave at the same point (Leiris will join Bataille’s circle); both are men of sincerity.

Reading the first few dozen pages of Manhood, I sigh to myself and wonder whether I should trace all the classical references I find there. Who is Lucrene?, I ask myself, Who is Holofernes? But then: I don’t care, and turn the pages rapidly, half watching The Last Days of Disco instead.

Leiris, I think to myself, is like an author of the eighteenth century: his classical prose protects him from that of which he would write. He is a man who wants to be understood; he keeps his paragraphs short; he writes precisely, with an anthropologist’s eye. And he writes of preoccupations that are recognisably Bataillean, and I wonder whether he is just one of those men strongly influenced by others (I am thinking of my disappointment reading the pages Antelme and Mascolo wrote on The Writing of the Disaster; they repeat Blanchot’s formulations without, it seems, being aware of what it might be to understand them, or at least allow them space to resonate, still thinking it worthy of publishing their meditations …) Ah, I think to myself: he links death to eroticism, and writes of the little death of orgasm. I admit, I am bored of these themes.

But as the book continues, Leiris shows what he previously only deigns to state: that conjunction of a death-obsession with a blocked desire to give himself to another; thus will he take his homosexual friend in his mouth and allow himself to be taken in turn; thus his nights of dancing and bar-hopping. ‘Jazz was a sign of allegiance, an orgiastic tribute to the colours of the moment‘; Leiris will describe the religious moment of ‘communion by dance’ which led him to the dream of a black Eden and to those anthropological adventures which took him to Africa.

I begin to understand: what appears to be a classical prose is one braced against the experiences it allows Leiris to convey. It is made to take a wrong turn; it drinks but remains upright, it staggers as it dances. ‘I made her and the madam slap me until my face was black and blue; enjoying themselves, the two women, when they saw me grinning, struck me all the harder, saying: "You ready for some more, you old bugger?"’

Leiris’s story speeds up towards the end. And, as it speeds, something assembles itself as the book which recalls me to Breton’s Nadja (it’s closing pages) and even Maldoror (though that book is too exhausting): yes, the book as though spreads itself above me in the sky. The marvel: the confession upon which it would bear is not personal. As Leiris describes the process which leads him to regard writing more highly than any other activity, his prose achieves that great indication which allows it to achieve a kind of life. No longer is a story reported to me; no longer am I referred to what would have occurred outside the text: the text itself speaks, and speaks in every part of itself. The whole text speaks.

I think to myself: anyone could write a text like this. Anyone, that is, who had a friend like Masson to encourage him. And then I think: anyone writes and by writing achieves what the Chinese calligrapher can achieve by one stroke: a life and writing united in a single stroke.

Should one write personal blogs or not? Begin by writing something personal, and something else might occur. Best of all when this ‘something else’ delivers itself by way of the personal and returns there, when it is contextualised so that the leap (or the failure to leap: impotence) reveals itself. Impotence: yes, that is the word as it would refer, now, to the impossibility of letting the book drop away from what it would designate. Manhood does not refer, it is; it is not the windowpane through which one can see the events of which it would report, it is those events itself.

Is ‘impotency’ a word? It should be; let it be the word which remembers the failure to leap and transcend itself that allows a book like Manhood (but how many books are like Manhood?) to as it were collapse into itself and carry its reader with it. Impotency: a sign to the blogger to write while failing to write, to let what is personal collapse even in the midst of the personal, and to confess only the impossibility of grasping an experience that does not so much vouchsafe itself in writing, offering itself to any and all, as keep itself in words and sentences, locked there. Until writing serves neither to hide or illuminate any personal secret, attaining a density which is born of the continual collapse into itself.

Attain that speed which allows writing to become itself. Follow writing as by the same stroke it offers itself to be read and flees that reading, as it passes through what is written as between the shores of meaning and non-meaning.

What was the name of that story by J. G. Ballard gathered in a book (The Day of Forever) I lent out many years ago (to M., in fact, whom I wrote about in my last post)? I’ve forgotten its name and its details, but something of it has remained in my memory, wrapping itself around me. A man comes to a house where he lives with his executioner. These are his last days, aimable ones, by the sea and in the sun.

When will he die? He doesn’t know; but his death will come, he knows that. The executioner is kind, and this is the point: he speaks with infinite solicitude and patience. What he does not doubt, the executioner, is that he must enact the penalty (what for, we never find out). Death will occur, but meanwhile … why not be kind? Execution is a job like any other; you – the one to be executed, and I, the executor, are bound as client is to vendor. The functionality of the relation clarifies our relationship.

I will kill you, not now, but soon, but meanwhile there are a few hours, a few days, weeks. I am waiting for the order and you will die by my hands. What can we do about it? I, after all, am an executor; you – for some reason, and one I may never know, what does it matter, must be executed. There is no room for clemency. The sentence must be enacted. It’s my job. Both of us bend, in our own way to the law, and the law is mighty. What are we compared to the law? It’s humble servants. For the law rules over life and death. It spreads its wings around us, protecting us, holding us, saving us from ourselves, but it rules us. And who am I, the executioner? Only the one who enacts the law, who allows its course to be followed. A crude, too crude instrument of the law.

I do not love the law, I have no opinions regarding its justice or injustice. It is the law and that is sufficient. And the law pays no heed to me, who am only its servant. Nor to you, the one who will be killed. Come, let us be realistic and put the thought of the death sentence out of our heads for as long as we can. That unpleasant business lies ahead of us, meanwhile, there is the sun, the sea and this quiet house.

I’ve dismantled the bookshelves in my bedroom. Walls of books, so comforting, have now disappeared, replaced by the books in the imaginary museum of all the books in the world – books I can order from the library. What is lost: singularity, specificity: that edition of Rilke’s Malte, that blue smooth-sleeved copy of Finnegan’s Wake, that puckered copy of Pound’s Pisan Cantos. Lost from my bedroom: the presence of what is called modern literature, the vast presence of books each of which turned another literature towards me: literature become dark, unreadable: literature which says ‘I will not serve …’: literary books become monuments without access, obscure monoliths …

Yet it paralyzed me, too – something had come to an end; a culture had withdrawn. These destructive books, book-explosions seem to call now for a literature in pianissimo – a quiet writing, prose bound in no more than one hundred and fifty pages, prose with few adjectives, unlyrical, restrained, because of a suspicion of literary lushness which you still find in the new books in the bookshops. A modest prose, modest in the wake of the big books which destroyed literature, modest as they speak in quiet voices, liable to be ignored as if they each included no more than the piping of the mouse-singer of Kafka’s story.

These are the foolish thoughts I have as I read Aaron Appelfeld.

Not-yet-thinking: a thought not formed, a thinking which is not determining or identifying. It is not the ‘thing itself’ long sought by philosophy unless this designates what ‘in’ the thing which does not let be claimed or identified as the thing. It is a claim, an appropriation which cannot be appropriated in turn – cannot be grasped, that is, by a determinative thinking. Not-yet-thinking: a thinking which has yet to find its term, yet to allow itself to be enfolded by the concept. But what is it which allows this unfolding to unfold? What enfolds such a thinking so that it unfolds itself and the claim of the concept?

Not-yet-thinking attends to the coming-into-presence of the thing. But it is also that which sets itself back before what can be identified in the thing: it is a kind of residue, a stubbornness which belongs to the singularity of the thing, its unique occurrence. If it is not, here, a question of mediation, it is not one of immediacy either. The suspension of mediation, its incompletion. Think of it in terms of the coming-into-presence of things before they are identified or grasped as things. Of the way what gives gives itself and lays claim to experience.

Not-yet-thinking is non-wilful; it is a thinking that is implicated, unfolded by what there is to think. Unfolded, magnetised, drawn out of the power which is proper to it. Called out of itself, displaced with respect to itself and hence deferred with respect to its goal. Not an abdication of thought, giving up before the unthinkable and standing guard over the ineffable, but thought’s suspension – a detour of a thinking-on-the-way-itself – a non-developed thought or thought as interruption which is taken in by what, in things, turns away from their identification, their determination.

Not-yet-thinking is a name for life lived, for that opening to the world in which everything touches me before I assemble them into identities. Everything: it is a matter of the world, of that contexture of things and persons, of everything that is woven by me into a contexture. Is it this to which the opening passages of Woolf’s The Waves attends? When the child-narrators have not gathered what they experience into a world? When it is only this patch of blazing colour, this tremulous sound, this atom of sensation which awakens them?

"Birds are singing up and down and in and out of all around us," said Susan.

True, Woolf’s infants speak what they cannot speak – they indicate with words what words cannot find. But as they speak they also give voice to a speech which resounds in the pages of that literary writing which is claimed by a reserve that is not yet thought and not yet woven. They speak what literature speaks as it unweaves our world – as it tends towards that living fire which reaches us only in our most distant youth. Only children read, only children write.

Another day passes. Another day – I always wondered whether you didn’t grow wise during the day as one might in a lifetime. A day as a life, and so as evening draws towards night you become wise because of the adventures of the day. And today? Broken paths, dead ends. What was I supposed to do? Bridge the gaps in the chapters of the book on Rousseau’s Confessions, on Kierkegaard’s practice of writing, the early Levinas’s criticisms of Husserl. And what happened? I wandered from home to work and back again, then through town, from shop to shop, repeating in my own way Rousseau’s wandering life.

Movement outwards to the world, desiring company, and then the retreat to write – yes, this is close to the movement of the Confessions. And I had a little vision this morning – my own version of the ‘heavenly fire’ Rousseau witnessed at Vincennes: I knew what I was to write, the path lay open before me, everything was simple, I was young. And now, older, I know I will still try to write, dreaming like Rousseau as he finishes Part Two of writing Part Three where everything will be laid bare (he wrote the Dialogues and then the Reveries …). As though it were possible to answer the question, ‘Who am I?’ which Rousseau asks himself at the outset! As though one could write, just write my way towards an answer. Rousseau’s faith: he will be able to speak, he will find his way to the truth.

Rousseau’s fear: writing will carry him away. What happens? He writes, he writes in faith but he also writes in fear. Whence the necessity to write more and more. Whence the strange outbidding in the Confessions whereby every catastrophe is greater than the last and Rousseau, again, is shipwrecked anew. It is as though he knows that to approach the true, the immediate, is to miss that truth, to pass by way of a lengthy detour. First the primal light to which Rousseau will return over and again: the natural, truth, all that thereafter becomes distorted. But then the great corruption whereby the natural is lost, when a great deviation is necessary in order to return to the primordial. And then the real catastrophe: there is no end to his wandering; he must return to himself by way of writing which is to say he is lost, he was lost straightaway, as soon as he picked up his pen …

Liberty: saying everything. This is what Sade would have enjoyed. Joy of being able to say anything at all. Writing opened before him. The chance to write whatever he wanted, however obscene. He took this chance; he wrote and wrote voluminously. But why the desire to fill book after book? Why not rest, stop? Because the movement of writing is infinite. Because the desire to say everything will carry you to the point where you know you haven’t begun, and that every beginning was an imposture, an usurpation with respect to the writing of a writing which withdrew itself in advance. Did Sade know of this frustration? Or did he bury this knowledge in a sheer movement of writing – in the desire to write everything to avoid the terrible awareness that to write is to write nothing?

‘Begin.’ – ‘But I cannot begin.’ – ‘Begin and accomplish a real act in the world.’ – ‘But the beginning eludes me. I begin and the beginning slips away. I write and writing escapes me. Empty eloquence. Empty prolixity.’ – ‘Then give up writing. Turn away.’ – ‘But it is as if, in turning away, it is only then that writing turns and turns towards me. As if, at the point where everything is lost, everything is gained.’ – ‘But what is gained? You have produced nothing. You waste time.’

Job received everything anew after the ordeal. He kept faith – and thus if he had 7,000 sheep before his trial, he had 14,000 after; if he had 500 yoke of oxen beforehand he had 1000 after. Abraham received Isaac anew after he raised the knife to sacrifice him. Think of Kafka: what does he regain when he breaks his engagement, estranging himself from other around him? And Kierkegaard, whom Kafka admired? And Sade? Empty consolation: consolation without consolation: the restlessness of a movement in which nothing is regained and nothing is your reward. Is this the content of one who knows nothing will come to anything, that all is vanity and nothing is new under the sun? The pleasure of one who knows he or she has gone beyond every human work and laughs at them all. I am not sure. Or at least, I am not sure that the one who takes pleasure is the same as the writer who writes. Then there is one inside the writer who laughs at writing. Who is laughter laughing at the imposture of writing and the usurpation that authorship is.

‘Who laughs? Who laughs within these sentences? Whose laughter tears these sentences apart?’- ‘The one you become when you measure writing against other acts in the world. The one who knows it is all for nothing.’ – ‘”For nothing”: but I have written a book.’ – ‘You have written only what permits you the illusion of having done with writing.’ –

Ostentiously, perhaps, Mishima leaves the completed manuscript of the fourth part of his tetralogy on the desk in the hallway of his home as he sets out to commit ritual suicide. It is not by chance that the Sea of Fertility closes with a kind of denial that anything it recounted had actually taken place. Thereby Mishima underlines the errancy of fiction, its falsity; he is ready to leave the sham behind him, to follow the course of action he had adopted to its end. He will take his life; his body, trained, supple, ready, awaits the blade of the sword; his head will be struck off by his ‘second’. He dies, because to die already attests to a desire for truth which is the opposite of fiction. But it is only its correlate, and Mishima’s delusion is that action can overcome the inaction to which writing is linked. Writing escapes the measure of action; the life of action is only an attempt to escape writing.

It is Mishima’s greatness to know the limit of the books he wrote – to allow them, especially The Sea of Fertility, to unravel themselves (it is often awkward, ungainly). He is not content with the masterpiece, even though he is capable of them (this is why, indeed, he recognises himself in Bataille – remember Mishima’s remarks on My Mother). But he compensates for this discontent in his fervent nationalism, his militarism, his worship of the emperor. Each member of his army, the Shield Society, is supposed to be related through him to the Emperor. But the Emperor is the idol who must himself be shattered. It is unsurprising that Mishima admired de Gaulle – unsurprising, but disappointing, too, for it is in this temptation he avoids the demand of writing.