Dissipation now term starts again. Endless administrative tasks distract me from work. How to regain the focus I had over the last few days? The intensity? I speak to W. on the phone, and we agree we are not proper philosophers. So we make a pact: 1) to read for two hours day – starting from the beginning of a book and working patiently to the end and 2) to write for one hour a day in a manner that is concentrated, cumulative, risk-taking. This will have to be done in the evening, as there are too many things to get on with at work. W. says we have to read the books in the original language as well, which is a pain. He also says note-taking doesn’t count as real work. W. is cruel.
A Struggle for Speech
I like to tell myself we are not capable of sincerity, of the simple lucidity of speech. That we are too late for innocence. But isn’t innocence always too late for itself? It is always tainted by the corruption from which it seeks to differentiate. But this means, too, that corruption is never entirely corrupt, that there is an innocence in corruption, too. Could I write same of sincerity, of unprotected speech? I admit I am disturbed by the lines I quoted from Van Velde, and even from Beckett. They are too naked, too simple. But their speakers won their way to simplicity! Still, I feel a kind of laughter breaking out in even amidst my great admiration for the lines I copied out. A laughter because such speech every rule of discourse. Who could speak like that? Who would dare? Isn’t it impossible, today, speak in that way? But look at the imposture of this word ‘today’ – as if there were ever a time or a place when one could speak with sincerity! As if, once again, it were not a matter of a struggle for speech, to be able to speak!
The Hunter Gracchus
Max Brod points out that the name Gracchus, by way of the Latin noun graculus, meaning jackdaw, is an approximate translation of Kafka’s own family name which, in its original Czech form, also means jackdaw.
(the above from Brod’s biography of Kafka, by way of Leslie Hill, Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot.)
Excerpted from an online translation by Ian Johnston:
“Are you dead?”
“Yes,” said the hunter, “as you see. Many years ago—it must have been a great many years ago—I fell from a rock in the Black Forest—that’s in Germany—as I was tracking a chamois. Since then I’ve been dead.”
“But you’re also alive,” said the burgomaster.
“To a certain extent,” said the hunter, “to a certain extent I am also alive. My death ship lost its way—a wrong turn of the helm, a moment when the helmsman was not paying attention, a distraction from my wonderful homeland—I don’t know what it was. I only know that I remain on the earth and that since that time my ship has journeyed over earthly waters. So I—who only wanted to live in my own mountains—travel on after my death through all the countries of the earth.”
Not low Enough
Van Veldt on Beckett, from Juliet’s book.
He sees himself as dead as he is more alive than anyone else.
He is dispossessed and he has this frightening strength. Both are necessary.
That’s right, he has managed to live without his head.
[On Artaud] He has fallen apart. And you can understand how that can happen to a person. He is so fragile. Beckett’s different: he has managed to contain his drive towards madness.
Van Velde was happy with what he has painted. Beckett visits him. He told Beckett he was almost satisfied. Beckett, expressionlessly: ‘There’s really no reason to be’.
Beckett to Nadeau: I can’t write. I’m not low enough. Van Velde comments: ‘You have to keep as low as you can’.
Van Velde on Painting
Painting is an eye, a blinded eye that continues to see, and sees what blinds it.
All the paintings I have made, I was compelled top make. You must never force yourself.
They make you and you have no say in it.
Yes, I abandoned everything. Painting required it. It was all or nothing.
Painting is being alive. Through my painting. I beat back this world that stops us living and where we are in constant danger of being destroyed.
I paint the impossibility of painting.
In this world that destroys me, the only thing I can do is to live my weakness. That weakness is my only strength.
No country, no family, no ties. I didn’t exist anymore. I just had to press on.
All these exhibitions…. People put out their hands to you, and when you try to take them, there’s nobody there.
I do not see this world. But my hands are tied, and that’s why it frightens me.
Dead days are more numerous than live ones.
An artist’s life is all very fine and moving. But only in retrospect. In books.
I am on the side of weakness.
The artist has no role. He is absent.
Most people’s lives are governed by will-power. An artist is someone who has no will.
Painting doesn’t interest me.
What I paint is beyond painting.
I am powerless, helpless. Each time, it’s a leap in the dark. A deliberate encounter with the unknown.
When I look to try and see where seeing is no longer possible, where visibility is gone.
When I look back at a recent painting, I can hardly bear the suffering in it.
I never try to know.
Everything I’ve painted is the revelation of a truth. And therefore inexhaustible.
I never know where I’m going.
The hardest thing is to work blind.
In the normal way, nothing is possible. But the artist creates possibilities where almost none exist.
It’s because artists are defenceless that they have such power.
Yes, he agrees, he is tending to lose all individuality.
Painting lives only through the slide towards the unknown in oneself.
My pictures are also an annihilation.
I am a watered down being.
I am a walker. When I’m not working, I have to walk. I walk so I can go on working.
Van Gogh? … He was a beacon. Not like me. I just feel my way in the dark. But I am good at feeling my way.
What is so wonderful is that all that [painting, an oeuvre, the role of the artist …] is so pointless and yet so necessary.
[On Picasso] Admittedly he was exceptionally creative and inventive. But he was a stranger to doubt [….]
Painting has to struggle to beat back this world, which cannot but assassinate the invisible.
The painter is also blind, but he needs to see.
Discouragement is an integral part of the adventure.
I am a man without a tongue.
The amazing thing is that, by keeping low, I have been able to go my own way.
Always this poverty… But I never rebelled against it. I have always known that that was my place. And anyway, I had my work.
Even failure isn’t something you can seek.
[…] I never really liked French painting. It’s often too disciplined, too elegant. It is not genuine enough. It’s as of art has got the upper hand.
I did what I did in order to be able to breathe. There is no merit in that.
When life appears, it is the unknown. But to be able to welcome the unknown, you have to be unencumbered.
So many painters and writers never stop producing, because they are afraid of not-doing.
You have to let non-working do its work.
I am held prisoner by my eyes.
Source: Juliet.
The Failed Work
When you love the great work of an author or a composer, you should also love his or her minor works, however forgotten, half-formed and misconceived. In fact, they are deserving of a special love and attention because they can indicate something about the physiognomy of the author in question. The weaknesses they reveal – the way they miss the point – belong to the overall movement of ‘greater’ works. This, at least, is what I think when I read a book like Duras’s Yann Andrea Steiner, or watch Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg. How poorly they ape the past successes of their author! But how marvellous that we have these imperfect works – that their creator, in her or his generosity, sent them into the world. Here, I am not commending the cult of personality to which Duras and, I think, Bergman succumbed (how else can I account for the cruelty of his remarks about his sister in The Magic Lantern?) No, it’s the very way their signature begins to break apart in the minor work – the way, indeed, the artifice trembles in its versimilitude. It almost falls apart – this is marvellous not because it is then that it is confirmed that the artist is as imperfect as I am, but because the great delicacy of the artist’s task reveals itself. To be strong enough to be weak – to endure the draft of inspiration, to hold her- or himself in the claim of the work, to allow, to the point of deformation, the particular book or film to realise itself – yes, this is impressive. But also to be weak enough such that strength – the power of form – does not obscure the heart of the tabernacle at the heart of the work: to preserve that weakness to the point that it overwhelms us through its very materiality, its unbridled force – this is the miracle that reveals itself in the ‘failed’ work.
Artifice
What did I mean yesterday when I tried drunkenly and incompetently to write of the rarefaction of style that occurs in the later work of some artists? I suppose I am thinking of those who are criticised because the worlds they construct become hermetic and self-enclosed. The books seem only issue from an understanding of the world that has already formed, rather than one which is to be fought for anew. Here I think of the later books of Duras, or the last films by Tarkovsky. But I suppose it would be plausible to claim that this self-enclosure was present in the films, say, of Hal Hartley from the start. What I love – and this is what I wanted to say – is the artifice as it presents itself in its very artificiality, when it no longer hides the fact that it is a sham. At this moment, it is as though the mask knows that it is a mask, and that art, in some sense, is only a play of masks over the void.
What does it mean to invoke the void here? I have tried to write of this before, but failed miserably. I suppose it is the affirmation of a kind of matter or materiality: the heaviness of the word, the timbre of the tone, the nuance of colour. The artwork affirms its own heaviness or bulk – its unwieldiness. It does so by allowing it to be present in the very lightness and deftness of the artist’s touch. Just as the old calligrapher learns to create his work in a single stroke, a few elements are sufficient for the Durasian universe to be brought into creation, a few notes are all Smog needs to make a song. But the extraordinary grace through which a book as tiny as ‘The Slut of the North Atlantic Coast’, or ‘The Man Sitting in the Corridor’, or a song as self-effacing as ‘Rain on Lens’ or ‘Floating’, also brings us into contact with what I like to call fate, which is to say, the way things are and will be. I even like to think of this as ‘truth’, remembering the role Nietzsche assigns to art when he claims that its dignity lies in beautifying the ugly, in making truth endurable.
Outside
Cat Power: I associate Chan Marshall with a gift, a giving. She takes songs, very familiar songs by The Rolling Stones, Procol Harum and then strips them of their familiarity. No longer, then, is ‘Satisfaction’ part of the unfolding of the Rolling Stones’ career; no longer is it part of that endlessly rehearsed story about the ‘glimmer twins’, about heroin and Marianne Faithful. Chan Marshall has disclosed what, in that song, join itself to an impersonal force.
Is it appropriate to observe an asceticism in her work? It becomes simpler, but not monotonous – do not think she reduces songs to the same mood. Nor is it a matter of imposing a style – her style – upon the songs she covers. Chan Marshall holds these songs, these too familiar songs, into the draft of the outside. They become no-one’s songs. And, in that moment, they are able to be touched, in the great fragility of her performance, as a spider’s web is touched by the wind. They bear what they could only bear if they were allowed to become as thin and as delicate as the strands of a web.
I hardly dare write of her own songs. No, I must stop here, out of discretion.
Intimacy
Let us imagine (it will never happen) I was commissioned to write an essay on Will Oldham. I would have to avoid, straight away, any attempt to get hold of all his recordings. They must reach me: no – they must have already reached me. The accidents through which I found the songs must be part of my account of ‘Will Oldham’. He insists upon it – which is why he scatters his songs like the sower in Van Gogh’s great pictures. Disseminated are the song-seeds which cleave onto the hearer, growing as we grow, but never allowing us to possess them entirely. Will Oldham has said it on many occasions: he did not make his songs. We, the listeners make them. Or we own them as they own him – each of us possessed, dispossessed by what we hear.
Truth
Bergman complains more than once that Tarkovsky makes only Tarkovsky films – this is true, of course, but what’s the problem? None for those of us who rather like the idea of the exacerbation of a particular style – of a stream of artworks allowing an artist to construct a self-contained world. Take the gorgeous rewrite of Duras’s The Lover. The Lover from North China, published six or seven years later, is more fragmented, bitty, and the characters act in a manner which is – let us say – implausible. Particularly moving is the introduction of the servant boy, Thanh, who, if memory serves, is the dedicatee of the book. Everyone is always weeping. And everyone is in love with the younger brother – this is marvellous I think. And there are more silences than ever.
There’s a good blog in here somewhere, if only I was sober enough to write it. Here is my point in rough, unsubstantiated outline: the exacerbation and rarefaction of a style foregrounds, in the work, both the artificiality and self-sufficiency of the artist’s world and the kind of substrate of that world. A substrate? That word is not right – I am thinking of the materiality, of an absolute density that makes itself present when the work presses itself towards an experience which dissolves its protagonists, its verisimilitude, its attempt to present a real or convincing world. How clumsily I am expressing myself! I will have come to back to this another day.
Few works can endure the attraction to this black star. Let me say, very simply, but also in a way that is entirely unsubstantiated, that Smog’s The Doctor Came at Dawn is the great artwork which comes closest to dissolution. Do not tell me it is mannered or monotonous. The greatness of this album is the way it endures absolute breakdown and sustains itself by enduring the terrible gravitational force which threatens to tear it apart. It is an argument which few would agree with, but I think Rain on Lens bears witness to the same threat. This is a tenacious album – some find it monochrome – but that is what allows it to draw close to breakdown and survive.
What is great, utterly great, about Bill Callahan, is the way in which he imposes a tone upon silence, the way he allows it to resound in his work, in particular, in the strange drone you can discern on some of the tracks on The Doctor Came at Dawn. His music, because it is simple – and what a great struggle it must be to maintain and endure this great simplicity –, forms a kind of echo chamber. What resounds there? Somewhat pompously, I hear truth. Yes, truth is always the world I associate with The Doctor Came at Dawn. Not because it accurately represents the world, or corresponds to it; not even because it holds together as a self-enclosed suite, with perfect coherence, but because it lets breathe – but is it a breath or a death-rattle? – a murmuring outside words and a sonority outside music. As if it is attuned to the origin of the world, when nothing had yet emerged from darkness. As if songs themselves were a seismograph attuned to the great but distant movement of the earth.
The Work
Work and rest – the same? I fear rest, empty hours, time without stucture. I work to consume rest, to use the day, the open, endless day, as fuel for the work. The dream: there is nothing left but work – or, better, work is the day aflame, with nothing to burn but itself. But the work would work me away, too, until it stood sufficient unto itself, the star, perfectly sufficient. But isn’t that to dream of another kind of repose? Of a kind of death, of a life sacrificed to the work that, in the end, does not need me?
Fate
Work is not the opposite of rest. Work and rest are not opposed if they follow one another, if they follow a secure rhythm. And when they don’t? Rest becomes worse than idleness. Nothing is possible because everything is possible; the horizon is open. In one sense, it is like being a child, insofar as the future is not determined. But you know you are no longer a child, that you are a certain kind of person, that although everything is possible it is not possible for you as an agent, that is to say, as one who acts in the first person. Yes, anything is possible – but this means you are victim of blind fate, of the god’s whims. And work? When you work too hard, the imposture upon which work is based reveals itself. You think you are the author of your actions, that your labours are under your control. But a kind of compulsion takes over – it mocks you, mocks you idea that it is you who are in control. In truth, once again, it is a question of fate, of compulsion, of the gods’ whim. Work and rest: the same.
Time without Project
Horror of unemployment: the day is too long, too vast; there will be another day, as long and as vast and on forever. Not having nothing to do, but the feeling that whatever you did could not fill the vastness which beats against you as if asking the question (is it a question?) who are you? No – not a question, but a kind of interrogation: again and again you are made to account for yourself even as you are reminded that in the vast expanse of days you are nothing. No wonder I always try and carve time up into specific projects and tasks, to forestall the moment when I am up against nothing in particular, undetermined time. I fear it … this is why I fear drifting, reading, writing, wandering. Yesterday, my office wasn’t open. I couldn’t escape my flat. I felt the same old horror … I thought books could distract me, but reading Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Blanchot only exacerbated the problem. Then I remembered what someone wrote about Mahler: he was a neurotic, the great existential questions that resound in his work are those of a neurotic. But then I also remembered the pages on anxiety from Heidegger, which disclose the other side of neurosis. But Heidegger provides no solution, because it was not death I dreaded, but time without project.
The ‘other’ image
Another day, full of dread. Nothing to be done other than watch episodes of Friends and lose myself in the pages of The Space of Literature.
The image is a copy, is it not? Secondary to an original? Derivative? But what if it is not derivative? What if there is an experience in which the ‘image’ of the thing indicates something ‘behind’ the thing? Such is suggested by the pages on the ‘other’ image Blanchot provides towards the end of The Space of Literature, in which he focuses on a phenomenology of the corpse.
The corpse, is, what Blanchot calls an image. The image of something, on our ordinary conception, is second to the thing it imitates; it is derivative. It is something which diverts and perhaps entertains us, but it is nothing significant. Could one say that the corpse is an image? This seems strange indeed. We normally conceive an image to be a reflection or imitation of something else. But the corpse is not an imitation, is it? It is the mortal remains of a person, let’s say for the purposes of this discussion a friend. It is my friend’s corpse. One could say the corpse resembles my friend. But does the corpse does not imitate my friend as a portrait the original? Perhaps one way of approaching this difficulty is to claim the corpse does not so much resemble my dead friend as disclose the way in which my friend always resembled a corpse. Or, better, the the corpse presents what was dissimulated by the living presence of my friend, hidden by his gestures, his conversation. This animation was precisely what is missing in the corpse; it is not ensouled, but, for that reason, according to Blanchot, it becomes the ‘other’ image.
Let us approach this from another angle. Blanchot always seems to present his claims against a background of what, for him, is the Husserlian conception of the human being as the source of light, of meaning, illuminating things in the world around it. Sometimes meaning breaks down. Heidegger elevated these breakdowns to the status of phenomenological ‘epoches’, reductions, in which something primordial gives itself over to be experienced. A tool breaks; I am gripped by anxiety – what happens? The tool appears as what it is when it is no longer useful – which is to say, it obtrudes; it is present to me; I no longer ignore it. And in anxiety? I am ‘there’ insofar as I am not there – I am, in Heidegger’s expression, a lieu-tenant – I keep the place of the nothing that I, nevertheless, am. Which is to say, with respect to this nothing , I am no one in particular – I am not yet someone; I am suspended. Only then can I resolve to authenticate my existence, to seize it as my own and answer to what is most proper to me.
Common to both Heideggerian ‘reductions’ is an interruption of my capacity to produce meaning. This production is understood, by Blanchot, in terms of the ek-static movement of the human being into the world, which, as it were, throws out webs of signification in which particular things are ‘caught’. That is to say, things show up as being meaningful, as being imbued with meaning. Yet not all things allow themselves to be caught in this way. There can be no guarantee of what things resist, since Blanchot’s intention is to focus on what it is they reveal through this resistance.
(To this extent even my claim that he is conducting a phenomenology of the corpse is inaccurate. Never think phenomenology is a matter of provoking us, through its analyses, to say a-ha, that is what I was experiencing all along. Blanchot is doing what all great post-Husserlian phenomenologists do: disclose the hidden – to lay bare the structure of my experience. This is what Marlene Zarader understands.)
Would the corpse, understood as the ‘other’ image, tell us something we have missed about the world? No: it reveals, rather, its hither side, which Blanchot presents when he invokes the other ek-stasis – not the initiative of the self, based on power, upon the opening of possibilities – but the interruption of this power and this possibility. The ‘other’ image stands out and makes us, too, stand out. We are ex-posed; what we encounter does not permit us to draw back into ourselves. We are brought into an encounter with what outstrips us, with what, that is, refuses to be interiorised. And thus a kind of reversal occurs; I encounter something which not merely limits my power to bestow meaning, but escapes the measure of sense altogether.
Perhaps one has a sense, now, why the word image is important to Blanchot. It will allow him to play with the notion of the simulacrum, of copy and original.
This reversal is what I encounter in the ‘other’ image. It is not just another object – or rather, it reveals what is other than all objects, what exceeds objectivity to the extent that it resists me, resisting my grasp. One can adapt what Heidegger writes of anxiety to the experience Blanchot is elucidating: I am implicated in what I experience to the extent that I am no longer present to myself; I am a lieu-tenant. But Blanchot’s claim is subtly different to Heidegger’s: the experience he describes is brought about by the encounter with a particular thing, the corpse, rather than opening up through a mood that implicates one’s being-in-the-world.
Thus the experience in question is not something I can negate and pass over – or better, even if it appears that I have this power, I have to live the encounter with the image on another plane. Here, the weight of the image drags me with it; I pass into an experience from which I cannot escape. The measure of negation has failed; I meet what is non-negatable, the indeterminable, the incessant – not as an object like other objects, but the very impossibility of their subsisting an object that could be encountered by a subject. Nothing is there, but this nothing has a kind of presence. There is absence, but this absence affirms itself. There is no ‘content’ to this experience; it is only an ek-stasis, an experience which draws me from myself – yet this contentlessness is affirmed as the content of my experience, as it shatters all forms.
Let me be clear (or as clear as I can be): it is not the shadow of a particular thing that I confront – a shadow that would be linked in a determinable relation to its ‘original’. The ‘object’ of experience is not delimitable. It is, to that extent, as great as the world, and resounds through the world. It is as though the encounter with the ‘other’ image is only the ‘trigger’ for a broader collapse – but this is insufficiently precise: the ‘other’ image is always indeterminable, which is to say, it reveals what is indeterminable in and as the world.
In this way, I encounter what Blanchot calls the ‘neutral double’ of things in the world; their hither side. Thus, although things appear to have meaning, offering themselves to us, and form part of the continuity of a world, this is illusory. This is not to invent a world beyond this world, but what Heidegger has called the ‘earth’ , which is to say, a resistance, an opacity implicit to things and implicit in others ‘in’ the world.
Meaning, non-meaning: these cannot be reconciled through dialectic. Non-meaning, here, is to be understood as the other of meaning – what escapes us in the world even as the world appears to enclose us, and confirm us in our powers. What comes first, then? Meaning? Non-meaning, which is to say, the ‘other’ of meaning? The original? The copy? There is ambiguity, which is to say both at once. We might experience the image as what is primordial or profound ‘in’ things and the ‘original’ – things in the world – as what is superficial. Or we might experience things in the world as what are more real or more significant than the image. Put another way: the world might appear solid and sure, but at any moment, this solidity and certainty can give way and we are turned over to the uncertainty of the image, which seems, because it reaches us when we are passive, to be much more real than anything else. Then again, the ‘reality’ of the image often seems illusory – we begin to forget those periods of fascination in which we can no longer make our way with confidence in the world.
What happens when we are fascinated? It is as if everything we were taught was a lie, a fake. One is aware that a great dissimulation has occurred – that beyond or beneath the self and the world, subjects and objects, there is a more primordial experience in which what is, what we thought existed, is suspended. At one and the same time, things are and they are not. But this imprecise, for, being and nothingness are not be counterposed in the manner of Hegel’s dialetic. It is necessary to maintain an ambiguity, to suspend the dialectic in its movement. It is possible to negate the image, to absorb it, to integrate it into one’s experience, to learn from it, to enjoy it – this is true, But there is another experience of the image, of a portion of the world become image which escapes integration.
Think of Plato’s account of the escape from the cave. I philosophise; I am no longer ensorcelled by images; I have burst forth into the real world. Blanchot’s version: I am captured by a particular image, fascinated, to the extent that I break through the ‘real’ world, but not into another one. I plunge into the cavewall itself; I encounter the heaviness of rock, the density of stone; and I learn that I, too, am as if I were made of rock, and weighed down. It is as if the world I experienced collapsed upon itself and I with it, forming an infinitely dense point, a singularity into which all light disappears. At the point of my fascination, there is nothing left. Thus does the ‘other’ image claim me.
Tarkovsky
Kaidanovsky quoting Tarkovsky from the set of Stalker:
I don’t need your psychology, your expressiveness…. The actor is part of the composition, like the tree, like water. (A Visual Fugue, 45)
Alexander Knyazhinsky, on Stalker, confirmed both the thoroughness with which Tarkovsky prepared the visiual side of the film, often taking two days to st up a particularly complicated and lengthy shot before filming it on the third day, and also the fact that no deviation was permitted once filming began. One consequence of this careful preparation was that he rarely needed, in any of his films, more than one or two takes for any shot. In Nykvist’s case Tarkovsky suggested that they should spend a full year together discussing how to make the film … (49)
Bresson
From Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer:
I have dreamed of my film making itself as it goes along under my gaze, like a painter’s eternally fresh canvas.
It is from being constrained to a mechanical regularity, it is from a mechanism that emotion will be born. To understand this, think of certain great pianists.
A great non-virtuoso pianist, of the Lipatti kind, strikes notes that are rigorously equal: minims, each the same length, same intensity; quavers, semi-quavers, etc., likewise. He does not slap emotion on to the keys. He waits for it. It comes and fills his fingers, the piano, him, the audience.
Oscars to actors whose body, face and voice do not seem to be theirs, do not produce any certainty that they belong to them.
It is what I do not get to know of F and G (models) that makes them so interesting to me.
The Mirror is Broken
Bergman in his work diaries for Winter Light:
There are times when self-discipline, which is a good thing, becomes self-compulsion, which is totally harmful.
Peter, from Bergman’s film From the Life of the Marionettes, when he discovers his wife lying murdered: ‘The mirror is broken, but what do the fragments reflect?’
From the notebooks to Persona:
The only thing is, she refuses to speak. In fact, she doesn’t want to lie.
I am unable to grasp the large catastrophes. They leave my heart untouched. At most I can read about such atrocities with a kind of greed – a pornography of horror. But I shall never rid myself of those images. Images that turn my art into a bag of tricks, into something indifferent, meaningless. The question is whether art has any possibility of surviving except as an alternative to other leisure activities: these inflections, these circus tricks, all this nonsense, this puffed-up self-satisfaction.
From the notebooks to Cries and Whispers:
I believe that the film – or whatever it is – consists of this poem: a human being dies but, as in a nightmare, gets stuck halfway through and pleads for tenderness, mercy, deliverance, something.
From Images:
I love and admire the filmmaker Tarkovsky and believe him to be one of the greatest of all time. My admiration for Fellini is limitless. But I also feel that Tarkovsky began to make Tarkovsky films and that Fellini began to make Fellini films. Yet Kurosawa has never made a Kurosawa film.
[Of The Serpent’s Egg] The movie does not tire for a moment; rather the opposite. It is overstimulated, as if it had taken anabolic steroids. But its vitality is powerful on a superficial plane; the failure is hidden underneath.
From Bergman on Bergman:
The people in my films are exactly like myself – creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they’re talking. Mostly they’re body, with a little hollow from the soul. My films draw on my own experience; however inadequately based logically and intellectually.
Sunlight gives me claustrophobia. My nightmares are always saturated in sunshine. I hate the south, where I’m exposed to incessant sunlight. It’s like a threat, something nightmarish, terrifying.
– In some way the sunlight goes right through your people and their actions
– Yes, they’re eaten out.
Nothing
Beckett to Duthuit:
The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.
Blanchot:
The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it.
Quoted by Steve at In Writing.
The Impossible Journal
Today, I dream of the impossible journal, the journal with no pages and no writing – the journal that is like a flame burning only itself. Purity. The word before the first word. The contentless opening of writing.
Caliban and Ariel
To write, I am unhappy is already to belie that unhappiness. Can I be unhappy if I can write? And why write of unhappiness – does this confirm it and thereby deepen the same unhappiness? I’m going to quote it again, my favourite passage from Kafka’s Diaries:
I have never understood how it is possible for almost anyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of suffering them; thus I, for example, in the midst of my unhappiness — my head, say, still on fire with unhappiness — sit down and write to someone: I am unhappy. Yes, I can even go beyond that and with the various flourishes I might have talent for, all of which seem to have nothing to do with my unhappiness, ring simple, or contrapuntal or a whole orchestration of changes on my theme. And it is not a lie, and it does not still my pain, it is simply a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being and plainly exhausted all my strength. But then what kind of strength is it?
A surplus of strength: to confess is, as Stock might argue (see my previous blog), to enter into the play, irony, theatrics, or ambiguity that opens when I write. Who am I? I have left a trace; what I have written has form, content. It is not simply a record of my unhappiness, since, when I write, I have, in a sense, left myself behind. Why, then, did I desire to write ‘I am unhappy’? It is a ‘merciful strength’, according to Kafka. Merciful because it lifts me from my unhappiness. Because, it might lift me, in some sense, from myself. I begin to write. Towards what? For whom? I write … and writing itself fascinates me. I can make grief sing; unhappiness becomes lyrical. But there is the danger in the very ease of writing. As you know, I like to write; it is, after all, something to do in the evening. It opens a vista before me, I can look into the distance. I write and I feel pleasant rhythms traverse me, it is sheer relief. But it is also a temptation to complacency.
Writing, as Mishima writes in Sun and Steel, which I was rereading last night, is like a horde of white ants that eat up everything. He remember words pouring through him like rain when he was a very young child. He learnt to speak, to write, before everything, he recalls. In so doing, he loses the world.
Mishima supposes that it is the body, the interior of the body that is lost to writing. He became a bodybuilder, a martial artist; he formed his own militia. In the end, he committed hari-kari, opening himself as if to the blazing sun. This was a way of escaping writing. But on the day he stormed the military headquarters and took a Japanese army General captive, before taking his own life, he delivered the final pages of his tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. It is as though he sought to affirm a strength against strength, to fight the great ease he felt in writing with the ardour and discipline of physical training. Remember how much he wrote – a truly enormous quantity of material, across a variety of genres.
A strength against strength – I prefer Bataille’s attempt to write against discourse itself. ‘Experience is in the first place a struggle against the spell in which useful language holds us’ (‘Socratic College’, 16). It is as though Bataille would make the white ants devour themselves, to reach that point where there is nothing, just silence, affirming itself without content. Of course it one cannot remain at that point – to reach the summit is to experience decline. Nevertheless, the task is to shatter the forms.
To have that strength! But I have had to learn to write, it did not come easily (I haven’t learnt … I am learning). It is as though there is something tangled in me that prevented me writing in clear prose. A fundamental absence of grace. Which means I am attracted to authors whose work exhibit grace. I am an admirer of the beautiful perhaps because, like Caliban, I envy Ariel. But Bataille and Mishima are both Ariels; the grace and beauty of writing comes easily to them. Witness Bataille’s perfect novella, My Mother, which Mishima praises. All the more extraordinary then are shattered texts like The Impossible, ‘Method of Meditation’, ‘Nietzsche’s Laughter’ where Bataille becomes Caliban. And Mishima? Mishima becomes Caliban only in taking his own life.
5 rue Saint-Benoît (IV)
By the 1970, our protagonists are now scattered. Duras, who is in her mid 50s, has three properties, and employs staff. As we shall see, Blanchot, in his early 60s, is debilitated by illness. Mascolo … I don’t know what he was up to. Antelme would also fall severely ill. But they would continue to follow paths that traversed rue Saint-Benoît.
Duras
In 1975, Duras starts drinking heavily again. She drinks cheap wine, coughs up blood and drinks more. This is at Neauphile. She is taken to hospital in 1976 for five weeks, but when she left, she started drinking again. She writes the play Eden Cinema in 1977. She travels to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, showing her films. But she is still drinking heavily. She makes films, makes short films from offprints of longer films …
In 1979, she meets Yann. Now something new begins. Another great leap, another stream of wonderful books. She is famous. Hundreds of letters arrive at Saint-Benoit. She reads but does not answer them. All except for those of a student at Caen. She began to wait for them. She gives a talk at Caen. At two in the morning, Yann introduces himself. Then she writes to him. It is now 1980. She is severly depressed and drinking heavily. She spends two months in hospital; she writes to Yann again when she returns to Neauphle. She stops drinking for 6 months. Now she has friends to stay again. In this period, Serge Daney records his conversations with her, she rewrites them, to produce a volume published as Green Eyes. Duras always writes great ‘occasional’ writings. I should also mention the splendid book of dialogues with Michelle Portre from 1976, called – what is it called? Then there is Practicalities, which is a book full of ittle essays, recipes, notes on incomplete projects, rather like a literary blog. The collected volume of journalism, Outside, is good too.
Yann telephones in September 1980. She gives him the surname Andréa. He is happy – full of laughter and talk. He is unassuming, patient, kind. She will tell the story of their meeting herself in Yann Andréa Steiner, published much later. He stays for days. Yann returns. He stays. She will write about the impossibility of loving. This is not by chance – Yann is homosexual. But they stay together, they drink heavily. He disappears from time to time, but returns. She writes to him in July 1982:
The passion that binds us will last as long as I love and for the length of the life that to you looks long. Nothing will be any good. We can expect nothing from one another, no children, no future … You are gay and we love each other … Nothing will be any good. There’s no point you going back to doing the rounds of the Tuileries, to back-rooms, to carriage entrances, to circling the place Saint-Martin. Nothing will be any good. You will llove me for the rest of your life. Because I shall be dead long before you, in a very few years, and because the huge age gap between us reassures you and neutralises your fear of facing a woman.
Mitterand, the friend who slept in the backroom at Saint-Benoit, is elected President of France in 1981. Duras is drinking, drinking. Yann looks after her. She drinks 6-8 litres of wine a day, and writes The Malady of Death. She drinks, vomits, drinks again. She goes for alcohol treatments. She hallucinates. She has visions. She looks like a tramp.
Adler:
Michelle Porte went to visit her. Physically she thought she looked well, but all she could talk about was the hallucinations she kept having, which were on the increase. She really could see things: monsters, mythical nimals – it was like hearing her innermost imagination speak. Each vision was an opportunity for embellishment, an abandonment to words she found beautiful ,Michelle Portre spent an afternoon listening to the story of a blue fish beached on the carpet.
But she is tough; the hallucinations cease. She corrects the proofs of The Malady of Death and plans a stage version. Peter Handke makes a film of it which she doesn’t like. Blanchot writes an extraordinary commentary on the text in The Unavowable Community, but she doesn’t like that either. It is in this text, though, that Blanchot celebrates the Manifesto of the 121, May 1968 … part of the text was written in response to Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay ‘The Workless Community’, in which Nancy argues that Blanchot, like Benjamin, was unable to sufficiently develop his notion of communism … Does that mean it is up to Nancy? No – Blanchot writes, The Unavowable Community. But it is an oblique, difficult text … is it developed? thematic? Then, in this period, there is an attack on Bataille’s reputation from Boris Souvarine, his former colleague from the radical left in the 1930s. Intellectuals in Question is a response to Bataille’s accusers, but also, like The Unavowable Community, to those who would take Blanchot’s friendship with Levinas too lightly. This, in the end, I think, is what separates him from the community at rue Saint-Benoît, and it is why a detour through the work of Levinas is necessary to follow the winding course of Blanchot’s own thought.
Perhaps Duras, too, feels Bataille is under attack. She claims in a television interview that Bataille and Blanchot are the writers she esteems most highly.
Duras’s friends are young men. She insults Yann in front of her friends. He is calm. He can take it. He retreats to listen to Schubert. He still disappears from time to time. How difficult it must be to be dependent on Duras!
She writes the beststeller, The Lover. A year later she discovers the diaries she wrote during the way, concerning Antelme’s deportation. Or did she? Here is what Paul Otchkosky-Laurens recalls:
One day she phoned me and said, ‘Come over, I’ve found something incredible’. Evidently extremely moved, she showed me an exercise book that was falling apart. The pages were covered in writing. But the pages were torn and the writing faded. Nothing has been changed since the end of the war.
But Duras had already published part of the diaries anonymously in 1976. When she publishes her account of life in the wake of her then-husband’s deportation and his return as La Douleur, she dedicates it, in part, to his son. Monique Antelme does not acknowledge the volume Duras sends her. The book is rejected by Antelme and others. Mascolo writes, ‘Many things described in La Douleur are true. Some of them are exaggerated’. Mitterand expresses reservations.
Yet more films … the Villemin scandal. Duras wins more awards, investing prize money in property. She is often on television. She is famous, famous. She is something of an egomaniac. She is rich, she has staff.
In 1990, the book only a famous author would be allowed to write: The Lover from North China. It was subjected to savage cuts by the publsiers.
Only a few years left. She waits calmly for death, according to Adler, who knew her well in this period.
What I remember most about her, apart from her writing [..] was the gentleness of her presence, the way she had of taking me in her arms, of saying, as I left, ‘Take care of yourself’.
I wasn’t feeling particularly relaxed as I rang at the door of the rue Saint-Benoit [I get the impression this was around 1986 – Lars]. Duras intimidated me. Her voice, her style, her outbursts, all had contributed to creating a Duras legend where a rather unhealthy interest in the person vied with admiration for the writer. I soon realised I had been quite wrong. The famous author opened the door, led me into the kitchen and made coffee. The first thing that struck me about her was the sparkle in her eyes and her tremendous laughing energy. That impression was to stay with me. Her closest friends from her different lives […] all said, when they talked about her, that what they most remembered of Marguerite was her laughter. That mischievous, childish laughter, that communicative laughter of friendship, that mocking, indeed sometimes spiteful laughter.
She writes (dictates) No More …
28th February 1995: Duras is dead. I bought Le Monde by chance that day. The first and last time I bought it. What did I discover? Duras was dead.
Blanchot
Between 1970 and 1973, Blanchot is in poor health, and is hospitalised. From 1970 onwards, he is no longer able to meet his friends regularly; he writes to tell them he will be unable to see them in January 1972. In 1972, he gives up his apartment in la rue Madame – he is no longer able to cope with the stairs – for a new apartment in rue Jean-Bart. He gives out his address and phone number only to a few friends. He spends a lot of time with his brother René and his sister-in-law Anna who live in a grand house near Versailles. Little by little, he will abandon his Paris residence altogether, moving into the house at Versailles.
Le Pas au-delà appears in 1973; The Writing of the Disaster in 1980. What can I write about these books? They are inexhaustible. We haven’t begun reading them.
1976 – Gramma devote a double issue to Blanchot. A complete bibliography reveals the extent of his prewar journalism. Blanchot’s early career is discussed in the articles. Michael Holland and Patrick Rousseau are the editors. In 1982, Jeffrey Mehlman’s article on Blanchot’s early journalism appears in Tel Quel. Accompanies Todorov’s slurs in an article, originally publised in 1979, but gathered in Critique of the Critics, published in 1982.
Blanchot remains extremely ill. His brother René dies of cancer in 1978. A few days later (January 23rd), Denise Rollin dies at 71.
In 1983, Antelme is rendered hemiplegic through a stroke during surgery. He will live until his death in a hospital, confined to bed, speaking only with great difficulty.
From 1983 onwards, Blanchot begins to correspond less, and to use the telephone less frequently. He is still ill – his eyesight is weakening, his hands tremble, he is losing his voice … sometimes, he is able to write. Short texts, denser, more allusive, issuing from arguments he has made elsewhere, they are inexhaustible. How difficult they are to get hold of!
1987, Farias’s book on Heidegger begins the ‘Heidegger Affair’. Blanchot writes a letter, ‘Thinking the Apocalypse’, published in Le Nouvel Observateur, which supports Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heidegger, Art and Politics.
1989, Blanchot in a letter to Bernard-Henri Lévy: ‘today I think of nothing other than Auschwitz’.
In 1993, Blanchot contributes ‘For Friendship’, a prologue to Mascolo’s A la recherché d’un communisme de pensée.
In 1994, Blanchot publishes ‘The Instant of my Death’. Derrida (poorly translated):
In the first words of the letter which accompanied the sending by The Instant of my death, July 20, 1994, marking the return or the repetition of the anniversaries: “July 20, fifty years since I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to death. 25 years ago, we put our steps on the moon.”
Derrida also notes, in the same obituary:
Regularly, one or twice per year, I telephoned him and sent him a postcard of the village of Eze [the village where Blanchot lived during the 1950s – Lars]. However each time, I addressed an old postcard to him from before the war after having chosen it in a shop in the lanes of this old village of Eze where Blanchot, had remained and undoubtedly crossed the path of Nietzsche […] each time, therefore, as the years passed, I hardly dared to hope, while murmuring that I will still have time to send other postcards to him with same ritualistic enthusiasm, affectionately and a little superstitiously.
So many deaths. Antelme dies on the 26th October 1990.
Joe Downing:
I find that there is a noun missing from the French language. Robert was a voluptuary. This man, who had known every privation, the worst possible fears and humiliations, loved good cooking, great wines, conversation, friendship, travel. And he revered women[….] He loved to laugh and to make others laugh, and he didn’t hold back.
Robert would not have been Robert without Monique – who is a flame, as clear and transparent as crystal; like Robert, indignant at life’s many injustices; like Robert, lover of the good ,life, good company, a good table, good wine; like Robert, filled with a thirst to know, to understand, curious about everything. They had this loveliest gift of fate: perfect complicity as a couple.
Downing would visit Antelme in hospital, and take him, in his wheelchair, to the Rodin museum.
Blanchot’s little text on Antelme, ‘The Watched Over Night’ is the last piece, I believe, that he wrote.
In 1997, Mascolo dies.
In 2003, Blanchot dies.
Of the community, Monique Antelme remains. Denise Rollin’s son wrote a book in which he quoted letters from Blanchot in 1997. Presumably there’s more to come. Blanchot’s political writings, from 1958 onwards, are finally going to be published in one volume in France.
5 rue Saint-Benoît (III)
The continuing story of rue Saint-Benoît …
By the mid-60s, Duras has become famous. Her books sell tens of thousands of copies. She tours the country, giving talks to schoolchildren. She tells them about Henri Michaux, who was, apparently, a friend of hers back in the days after the war. She takes a holiday with the Vittorinis in Italy – but Elio will die in 1966, as will her lover Jarlot, who was only 43. Adler quotes Jarlot:
With madness we destroy time, in other words we kill death. The same can be said of poetry, love if need be, alcohol and drugs … with all of those things we kill death.
She herself wrote:
He was a wonderful man, in every sense of the word accomplished, evhsuated from always dying without it killing him, demanding as much from death as from passion.
Duras has been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. She tries to give up drinking.
Meanwhile, Duras is making films. Her son loves cinema. Jean Mascolo also assists Duras in making films. He will move out of Rue Saint Benoit in 1967, to move in with his wife Solange Leprince who will edit Duras’s film India Song. They have a daughter, Virginie.
I’ve never seen any of Duras’s films. I’ve read the scripts of some of them, and seen excerpts … what a shame. I’ve never seen many of Bergman’s films, either, which I know from scripts … The Passion of Anna, Shame, The Touch (a great script) …
Duras works on the radio, too. She is the envoy of RTL to the Canne Film festival in 1967 … in short, she is famous.
Adler notes that, throughout this period, Duras, Mascolo and Antelme meet often.
Blanchot, in this period, continues to publish great essay after essay. His work has become more avowedly political and ethical – that is, the political and ethical stakes of his discussions of the work of art came to the fore. He had already linked himself to some of the views expressed in the journal Arguments in an uncollected essay from 1959.
The publication of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity was a great moment for Blanchot (some of these texts are quoted in Godard’s film Forever Mozart in 1996). In 1963, he begins to correspond with Jacques Derrida, then in his early thirties, author of a dazzling sequence of essays. Derrida himself will note, in Resistances, the changes in Blanchot’s work in this period – it seems he foregrounded the word writing, and placed inverted commas around the word presence. This indicated the influence of Derrida – but then Derrida’s work is itself unthinkable without Blanchot.
On many occasions, as I understand it, from the ‘Beaufret affair’ onwards (1968), when the French Heideggerian Jean Beaufret, who was about to publish a text by Blanchot, revealed himself to be a Holocaust denier, Blanchot will visit Derrida in his office in the rue d’Ulm; they will often meet with Levinas, too. Alas now Derrida is dead, we will hear nothing more about such meetings!
Is Stein, in Duras’s Destroy, She Said, modelled on Blanchot? He is imposing and mysterious – haunted by the end of history, ill, insomniac …
See this post for an account of what the May 1968 Events meant to our protagonists.
May 1968 was where it was all leading, I suppose, for Rue Saint-Benoît. After the Events? Mascolo has remarried, Blanchot becomes ill, Duras becomes very famous. Mitterand becomes President; now, Rue Saint-Benoît will become the subject of reminiscences and biographies. People like me spend Saturday night writing about it (why?)
5 rue Saint-Benoît (II)
We’re back at Duras’s flat again, taking up the story from 1960 onwards.
Our protagonists:
Marguerite Duras (1914-1995). She is now a well-known and greatly respected author; she will begin to make films, too, and contributed a script for Resnais’s extraordinary Hiroshima Mon Amour.
Dionys Mascolo (1916-1997). The former lover of Duras and the father of her son. He still shares the flat with her. Author of Le Communisme, published 1953. I get the impression that Mascolo is a tremendously active and passionate man, whose energies are devoted to social change. He works as a reader for Gallimard. Must get his book Autour d’un effort de mémoire, in which Mascolo remembers the community at 5 rue Saint-Benoît, published in the late 1980s.
Robert Antelme (1917-1990). The former husband of Duras and a close friend of Mascolo. Author of The Human Race, published in 1947 and republished, to great acclaim, in 1957. He works on the Gallimard Encyclopeadia and is married to Monique. Antelme commands enormous respect from everyone. People remember him as a kind of saint, a gentle man who seems to embody responsibility and justice.
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003). Blanchot appears from time to time at 5 rue Saint-Benoît, and is a close ally of Duras, Mascolo and Antelme. He returns to Paris in the late 1950s, having spent several years alone in a village between Nice and Monte-Carlo on the South coast. He already enjoys an enormous reputation as a literary critic and a writer of novels and tales (récits). During the 1960s, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze will all indicate their indebtedness to him. In this period, his relationship with Denise Rollin is ongoing. They live apart. Blanchot, like Antelme, is remembered by those around him (in this case Rollin) as resembling Prince Myshkin.
Mascolo, cited in The Blanchot Reader:
In 1958 de Gaulle seized power. With Jean Shuster – from the Surrealist group – I founded an anti-Gaullist journal with the title le 14 Julliet. As soon as the first number appeared, Maurice Blanchot, who since the war had not said a word politically, sent me a letter which I found stunning: “I want you to know that I am in agreement with you. I refuse all the past and accept nothing of the present”.
Le 14 Julliet exhibits fidelity to the notion of revolution, ongoing resistance to the Gaullists, and a refusal of political power. 19 signatures in the first edition, including Antelme, Breton, Duras, des Forêts, Lefort, Morin, Nadeau, Bruce Parain, Vittorini. For the signatories, the Gaullist regime set up in 1958 was analogous to that set up by Petain under the Occupation in 1940. The state was no longer answerable to its people; it was undemocratic.
25 October 1958, Blanchot’s text ‘Refusal’ appears in the second edition of Le 14 Julliet. Here’s an excerpt:
At a certain moment, in the face of public events, we know that we must refuse. The refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not argue, nor does it voice its reasons. This is why it is silent and solitary, even when it asserts itself, as it must, in broad daylight. Men who refuse and who are tied by the force of refusal know that they are not yet together. The time off joint affirmation is precisely that of which they have been deprived., What they are left with is the irreducible refusal, the friendship of this certain, unshakable, rigorous No that keeps them unified and bound by solidarity.
That’s the first paragraph. The essay itself, although is 4 paragraphs long, is immense. It is from a book that seems as vast as all the libraries in the world: Friendship.
Hill comments of ‘Refusal’:
Importantly [the title ‘Refusal’] also mobilised, with undiminished virulence, but in the service of a different kind of political project, one of the few terms in Blanchot’s political lexicon to have survived from his pre-war activist past. This shows how far Blanchot’s return to political commitment, whatever some have charged, was not preimised on a cuplable repudiation of his pre-war involvements, which in any case remained largely unkown to the majority of his new political associates.
1960 … Duras, in this period, is in love with Gérard Jarlot, a journalist and novelist. He is accepted by the Antelmes and des Forêts, but Duras knows him to be a liar. Adler: ‘Jarlot didn’t care about anything – not truth, not love, not death – he respected only womanizers and writers’. Duras writes two screenplays with him.
In the same year, Blanchot writes yet more brilliant essays for La Nouvelle Revue Française: "Héraclite," "Albert Camus," "Entretien sur un changement d’epoque," "Le détour vers la simplicité," "La marche de l’écrevisse," "Reprises," "Oublieuse mémoire," "La question la plus profonde" (I).
I make this list because the essays are so profound. Notice, too, the changes in style and register from essay to essay. And, one presumes, he’s also writing L’Attente, l’oubli (published in 1962). But Blanchot is busy with the events that surround the drafting (with Jean Shuster and Mascolo)the "Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algerie", the so-called ‘Manifesto of the 121’.
Adler:
Before the Manifesto was drawn up, Marguerite and Dionys had aided and abetted those fighting for the cause of Algerian independence. They both hid FLN funds up the chimney in rue Saint-Benoît, carried suitcase and lodged people wanted by the police. The pro-FLN activist Madelaine Lafue-Veron, at the time a barrister practicing in Paris, under surveillance and for a long time accused of undermining national security, remembers that whenever she had a ‘favour’ to ask of Marguerite, this was promptly carried out. Her apartment was a crossroads. ‘We had a lot of funds in the rue Saint-Benoît, which had to be delivered around Paris. I was a porter. I remember the terror of being followed and searched’, Margeuirte told Luce Perrot.
Blanchot recalls that Laurence, Bataille’s daughter, was arrested as a ‘bag carrier’. Bataille himself was too ill to sign the Manifesto.
The third issue of Le 14 Julliet published the results of a questionnaire devised by Schuster, Breton, Blanchot and Mascolo which was sent out to intellectuals. It was really from this that the Manifesto grew, according to Adler.
De Gaulle’s militarism, his nationalism, his self-importance, his sense of authority, as well as those who accepted his ascendancy: this is what the writers linked to Le 14 Julliet vehemently refused. But as the campaign developed, it is a matter no merely of defending democracy and the constitution, but also of ending French colonialism in Algeria. This required resistance to the war the French Republic was prosecuting in Algeria, even as they denied there was such a war.
Hill commenting on the Manifesto:
In its opposition to the [Algerian] war, the Manifesto did not invoke a moral duty, based on a universalising code of laws, principles, values, and obligations. As Blanchot points out, it was this that distinguished it from an act of commitment in the Sartrian sense; indeed, it might be argued in this respect that the Manifesto was one of the first texts, in France, to contest and rethink the figure of the intellectual as universal conscience, as Foucault and others were to do increasingly after May 1968. Instead of appealing to morality, and thus necessarily to some institutionalised code that had disquieting similarities with the very authority of the state it sought to challenge, the Manifesto reaffirmed each signatory’s inalienable right of refusal, a right that was absolute to the extent that it logically preceded any form whatsoever of recognition of the power of the state and any complicity in its decisions.
The Manifesto itself was circulated in France and then all over Europe, being passed from person to person. Those who signed it did so at considerable risk: these so-called ‘propagandists of desertion’ were banned from the RTF, the French broadcasting service, and deprived of state funding for films and artworks. The Manifesto was supposed to disrupt the trial of Francis Jealson, who had set up a clandestine network providing the FLN with accommodation and financial assistance. The military tribunal drew great crowds. Sartre, Claude Roy, Sarraute and others were character witnesses.
Blanchot on the Manifesto:
What happened then (and took months to achieve) belonged to everyone; it was like what Victor Hugo says of maternal instinct: ‘Each has in it his or her own share, and everyone has it all in its entirety’. The responsibility was common to us all, and even those who refused to sign did so for reasons of substance, which were carefully thought out, explained at length in correspondence. At times, matters became very fraught.
As soon as the Manifesto was published (but only in two magazines, Nadeau’s Lettres nouvelles and Sartre’s Temps modernes, which were immediately banned, censored, silenced – it would therefore be more accurate to say that the Manifesto was published, but failed to appear), and as no newspaper, including the most prestigious, reproduced even the smallest extract from it (the risk was too great), we were prosecuted, accused, and charged without anyone knowing why.
Autumn: Blanchot interviewed by Madeleine Chapsal, who finds him ‘the most gentle of men’. The interview, published in early 1961, makes the stakes of the Manifesto clear.
… the right to Insubordination. I say right and not duty, a term that some people, in all ill-considered way, wished the Declaration to use, no doubt because they believe that the formulation of a duty goes further than that of a right. But that is not the case: an obligation depends upon a prior morality, that vouches for it, guarantees it and justifies it; when there is duty, all you have to do is close your eyes and carry it out blindly. In that case, everything is simple. A right, on the contrary, depends only on tiself, on the exercise of the freedom of which it is the expression. Right is a free power for which each person, for his part and in relation to himself, is responsible, and which binds him completely and freely: nothing is stronger, nothing is more solemn. That is why one must say: the right to insubordination; it is a matter of each person’s sovereign decision.
Le 14 Julliet led to the Manifesto of the 121; that, in turn would lead those who were associated with 5 rue Saint-Benoît to another venture. Perhaps this has something to do with an incident Blanchot recalls in ‘For Friendship’ (though Robbe-Grillet had already alluded to it). Writing of his clashes with the examining magistrate who had sought to prosecute him in the wake of the publication of the Manifesto, Blanchot recalls:
After I had finished giving my statement, the examining magistrate wanted to dictate it to the clerk of the court: ‘No, no’, I said, ‘you will not substitute your words for my own. I do not wish to question your good faith, but you have a manner of speaking that I cannot accept’. He insisted. ‘I will not sign’. – ‘We will do without your signature then, and the inquiry will resume in some other place’. Eventually he gave in and allowed me to restate the exact same words I had uttered earlier.
When Blanchot, the accused, speaks, what he says is different from what the examining magistrate would dictate to the clerk of the court not because of a difference in the content of what was said, but because of the place of each speaker within certain networks of power. We believe we are able to speak and to write, to listen and to read in our own name. And yet, as Blanchot shows, none of us can be said to possess language, making it do our bidding, allowing us to subordinate it as a vehicle for the transportation of meaning. We are each possessed by the field of forces and powers with which language is always associated. But we can also refuse to be so possessed. This refusal is linked to the practice of a fragmentary writing which, for Blanchot, was linked to a new form of collective writing, of writing in friendship.
Le 14 Julliet folded for lack of funding. But Blanchot, Mascolo and Vittorini had already begun to dream of a Revue Internationale, published in French, German and Italian editions. A list of some of the authors who agreed to participate:
Italy: Elio Vittorini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia;
Germany: Hans-Magnus Enzenberger, Martin Walser, Günter Grass and Ingeborg Bachmann;
France (in addition to our protagnosts): Louis René des Forêts, Maurice Nadeau, Roland Barthes, Michel Leiris.
Britain: Iris Murdoch was involved. Imagine!
Alas, the magazine appeared only once, in April 1964, as a supplement to the Italian review Il Menabò as a supplement. Blanchot’s texts ‘The Name Berlin’ and ‘The Conquest of Space’, written in 1961, as well as ‘Parole de fragment" and part of ‘La parole quotidienne’, appear in this supplement.
Here is what Blanchot remembers:
Who was the first to have the idea of an International Review? I think it was Vittori, the most enthusiastic and most experienced among us. But recently [Blanchot is writing in 1993) the periodical Lignes, thanks to Dionys Mascolo who had kept them, published some of the documents concerning this enterprise, which was not in vain even if it failed.
Blanchot remembers Roland Barthes took the failure of the journal very badly, and writes:
He would have liked to erect a monument and transform out disappointment into a work. If we refused, it was both in order to preserve the future and to avoid accusing some rather than others, thereby eluding the unhappy fate of groups that survive by the brilliance of their disputes.
Blanchot adds, in a footnote:
Responsibility lay with the building of the Berlin Wall, which was an event that affected us all, but overwhelmed our German friends. Enzenberger, who was closest to the project, and the most friendly, went to live in Norway; all went their separate ways. The review carried on, didn’t die, but solely faded away.
The Berlin Wall? Really? It took until 1965 for the dream of the Review to pass away entirely. But the Events of May 1968 were approaching …
What of Duras in these years? She works alongside the others in 14 Julliet and the Manifesto. She is also writing a string of books, screenplays, plays for theatre and continuing her career as a journalist.
In 1960, along with Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute and Roy, Duras sits on the panel for the prix Médicis. She is instrumental in rewarding Monique Wittig (she died this year) for her first novel.
Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night, another Duras novel appears. The critics are accusing her of repeating herself. The Sea Wall and The Sailor from Gibraltar are reprinted in paperback, selling 60,000 copies.
Next, The Afternoon of Mr Andesmas – An/telme, des/Forêts, Mas/colo. Duras, perhaps, satirises those from who she formerly sought advice about her writing.
Duras reads all of Henry James before adapting The Aspern Papers with Antelme. She then helps James Lord adapt ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, which was performed in 1962.
Duras is now extremely fashionable. Beckett attends the first night of her play The Viaducts of Seine-et-Oise in 1963 – he is impressed; Duras wins an award.
In this period, she also writes a draft of what would become The Man Sitting in the Corridor, a violent, mysterious tale.
Duras awards the Médicis prize to Jarlot’s novel, written with her guidance. He, however, is tremendously jealous of her success.
Duras and Jarlot are drinking a lot. Jarlot is certainly not faithful….
In 1963, Duras writes The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein … what years!
We’re up to the mid 60s. 5 rue Saint-Benoît III to follow.
Blanchot and the Events
Here is a snapshot of Blanchot’s activities during the May 1968 Events, taken from Bident’s marvellous biography.
Blanchot links himself to the movement of the 22nd March, so called because of it was that day the administrative block was occupied at the university at Nanterre.
In late April, Blanchot visits Levinas who is rather unimpressed by the students’ revolt. Here is what he says much later, in an interview from 1984:
In 1968, I had the feeling that all values were being contested as bourgeois – this was quite impressive – all except for one: the other. Nobody ever said that the right of the other man – despite all the liberation of the spontaneous ego, despite all the license of language and contempt for the other as other – remained unpronounceable.
Interestingly, Levinas seems to have changed his mind on this point. In “Judaism and Revolution”, a commentary on the Tractate Baba Metsia delivered a year after the Events, he writes: “those who shouted, a few months ago, ‘We are all German Jews’ in the streets of Paris were after all not making themselves guilty of petit-bourgeois meanness” (Nine Talmudic Readings).
Levinas refers here to the spontaneous support that broke out during the demonstrators for one of the student leaders of the revolt, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was subject to anti-Semitic remarks on the part of the authorities.
Blanchot comments on the cry “We are all German Jews” in one of his anonymous writings published in Comité. He cites Blanchot as follows: “’Never’, he claims, ‘had this previously been said anywhere, never at any time: it was inaugural moment of speech, opening and overturning borders, opening, overthrowing the future’” (cited Hill, Extreme Contemporary, 219). The text in question, “Les Actions exemplaires”, was published anonymously in a short lived journal. However, Blanchot included a short essay entitled “War and Literature” in Friendship, published in 1971, originally a response to a Polish questionnaire, in which he recalls the spontaneous demonstration in question, commenting “this was to signify the relation of solidarity and fraternity with the victims” (109).
But I am getting ahead of myself. Perhaps it would be better to run through events more or less chronologically.
Early May … the first occupations, expulsions, condemnations, demonstrations … Blanchot is staying with the Antelmes.
On the 9th, Antelme, Nadeau, des Forêts, Duras, Jean Schuster, Leiris, Claude Roy, Mascolo, Klossowski, Sartre, Sarraute, Lefebvre signed a petition written by Blanchot and published in Le Monde supporting the students.
The first night of the barricades 10th-11th of May. Blanchot is there; he is profoundly shaken by the unfolding Events.
On the 13th, Mascolo, the Antelmes, Duras, Blanchot, des Forets, Nadeau, Schuster, Leiris take part in the biggest march seen in Paris since the protests surrounding the Algerian crisis and the assassination of protestors at the Charonne Metro Station, remembered by Blanchot in The Unavowable Community.
Bident notes Derrida, whom Blanchot had met for the first time recently, expressed some reservation about the ‘spontaneous fusion’ of the Events.
Roughly translated from the obituary Derrida wrote for Blanchot:
I have just marked the date of a first meeting, in May 68. Without pointing out the cause or the occasion of this personal meeting, which initially related a problem of an ethical and political nature between us, I underline only that at the same time, in May 68, Blanchot radically engaged, being, body and heart, in the street …
Perhaps these disagreements concern Derrida’s worry about spontaneism. Derrida also remembers ‘the softness of the smile [which] did not leave Blanchot’s face for a second during our meetings’.
At some point in the Events, Blanchot met Foucault, too, who had long admired the work of the older author. As Blanchot remembers in a text published in memory of Foucault, ‘Whatever the detractors of May might say, it was a splendid moment, when anyone could speak to anyone else, anonymously, impersonally, welcomed with no other justification than that of being another person’. This is why Blanchot emphasizes that he had no ‘personal relations’ with Foucault, even though they were both participants of the Events in which ‘anyone could speak to anyone else, anonymously, impersonally, welcomed with no other justification than that of being another person’
This point is worth underlining: what affirmed itself in the Events, for Blanchot, opened each participant to the Other without determining that relation. Protesters were able to come together before judging one other obscure or famous, young or old, rich or poor, and in which they refused to recognise the authority of those in power, at the same time refusing to allow their refusal to be transformed into the desire for a particular set of reforms. It was not a solution, the satisfaction of an aim, that was sought.
On the 27th, Blanchot, with the Antelmes, is present at Stade Charléty to hear Mendès-France giving his support to the Movement.
May 20th sees the creation of an Action Committee, the Comité d’action étudiants-écrivains. Participating: Butor, Jacques Roubaud, Jean-Pierre Faye as well as Mascolo, Antelme, Duras, Blanchot. Regular attendees at the Comité include Sarraute, Schuster, Nadeau, Roy … Blanchot and Mascolo will play a leading role in the group.
Adler:
In mid-May, [Duras] and Maurice Blanchot, her constant companion throughout that blissful month, were among the founding members of the students and writer’s Comité d’action. Committees were set up and a secretariat established. There were some sixty writers, journalists, students and television reporters in the room.
The next day they were down to twenty-five – the television reporters and journalists had disappeared. The debates were mess heated, more audible. Marguerite along with Blanchot, Antelme and Mascolo was there every day. The comité consisted of some twenty regulars and others – students and teachers – who’d drop in. Some listened and then, slamming the door behind them, left never to return, disgusted at the fuss the members made as word by word they pored over the contents of revolutionary tracts.
Some found the procedure quite exasperating. Marguerite persevered. She proved to be a skilled negotiator and was delighted by the contact with these brilliant young people who didn’t recognise her but who bullied and admonished her. She saw herself as a high priestess discovered the joy of being anonymous.
The comité kept on meeting until the end of August. Blanchot wrote many short pieces (some 18, which are available in The Blanchot Reader, but impossible, for the time being, to track down in French) in the journal of the group. They were not published under his own name. Mascolo wrote several too.
According to Mascolo, Duras came up with the slogans, ‘We don’t know where we’re going but that’s no reason not to go’ and ‘No prohibiting’.
Hill:
The political activity of the committee was essentially […] a linguistic or textual one; and what it placed highest on the political agenda, therefore […] beyond all economism, reformism, or concern with party political organisation, was the need to suspend the dialectical closure of representational politics, alongside the essential complicit bof government and legal opposition deriving from it, in order to affirm a different kind of politics, no longer dependent on the law of possibility, and […] beyond the reliance on received political concepts such as those of project or subject. This was why the anonymous production of texts, literary as well as non-, extra- and anti-literary, by doing away with such concepts, was such a crucial political touchstone.
In one piece, Blanchot makes a comparison between the Events and the Prague Spring. Hill writes, ‘Blanchot suggested that what was at stake in both movements was far more vital than a call for greater dialogue between government and governed’. Here is Blanchot:
Something quite different is at issue: a movement beyond measure, irrepressible, incessant, the impetus of outraged speech, speaking always beyond, transcending, overwhelming and thereby threatening all that confines and limits; the transgressive act of speech itself.
Adler:
Then the members were stuck in an attitude of political and metaphysical refusal. They had survived everything: the elections, the return to order, the summer doing nothing. Having been brought together by fate, they continued to debate philosophical issues from the ruins of a failed revolution, determined to pursue their dream of a world where Marxism was finally free of Stalinist crimes and where some of the aims of surrealism had at last been realised.
In a letter to Levinas reprinted in Nine Talmudic Readings, Blanchot explains his departure from the Comité group when its members began to question the legitimacy of Israel, writing,
I have always said that there was a limit beyond which I wouldn’t go, but now I’d like to ask myself for a minute … ask myself why these young people who are acting violently but also with generosity, felt they had to make such a choice, why they operated on thoughtlessness, on the usage of empty concepts (imperialism, colonisation) and also on the feeling that it is the Palestinians who are the weakest, and one must be on the side of the weak (as if Israel were not extremely, dreadfully vulnerable).
Later in 1968, Duras wrote to Henri Chatelain, a young friend:
The Events. I was there day and night. May will never come round again. I am suffering from angst and ennui. So much so that I am seriously thinking of leaving France. The tragedy of Prague killed me. [The Soviet invasion in August had put an end to Czech liberalisation]. I dream of a time when I won’t be writing.
Marguerite found the post-68 disillusionment difficult to deal with. For a year it was the dark night; she later said she felt she was suffocating, that she wouldn’t get over it, she wanted to die. Writing would once again save her from the void. ‘When I began to write again, I wrote against myself, I wrote without a routine, against Duras, because I couldn’t stand myself any more. Sometimes you have to take a risk, I’m in the dark’, she confessed in January 1970. (275)
It was in this period Destroy, She Said was written. I would like, another day, to copy out some of the pages from the long interview that forms a postscript to that book.
What did the failure of the Events mean to Blanchot? Hill cites a letter from Blanchot to Mascolo on the Action-Committees:
This is why they are nothing outside of the presence constituted by each meeting, a presence that is their whole existence, and in which it goes without saying that the Revolution, by that very fact, is present: in much the same way as in séances when a Spirit shows itself.
Hill:
As Blanchot’s letter went on to suggest, the limitations of the action committee as a mode of political activity were self-evident; but in themselves these were not important, for what such committees created, by their very existence, was potentially much more subversive than it seemed; for what they effected was a radical hiatus in the political order itself.
Blanchot mentions the events in many of his texts in the 80s and 90s; here, as with so many of these texts, he is concerned to defened the memory of the Events. I have already quoted from his text on Foucault, written in this period. In The Unavowable Community, published in 1983, after writing of
the opening that gave permission to everyone, without distinction of class, age, sex or culture, to mix with the first comer as if with an already loved being, precisely because he was the unknown-familiar,
he observes
May 1968 permitted a possibility to manifest itself, ‘the possibility – beyond any utilitarian gain – of a being-together that gave back to all the right to equality in fraternity through a freedom of speech that elated everyone.
A little further on, he writes of the committees as:
the circle of friends who disavowed their previous friendship in order to call upon friendship (camaraderie without preliminaries) vehiculated by the requirement of being there, not as a person or subject but as the demonstrators of a movement fraternally anonymous and impersonal.
Bataille’s War
Here is a summary of key events in Bataille’s life and writing during WWII.
Our protagonist: Georges Bataille, born in 1897, author, by the outset of the war, of Story of the Eye (published pseudonymously), The Solar Anus and Sacrifices. His lover, Colette Peignot, known as Laure, died in November 1938. Bataille frequents brothels and strip clubs in this period, and is involved with several women. His secret society, Acéphale, continues to meet; Laure’s tomb becomes another sacred site for Acéphale. He lives in a flat in Saint-Germain-en-Laye which he had taken with Laure. In this period, he also begins ‘The Manual of an Anti-Christian’. Bataille feels he is being deserted by his friends. His great communal experiments have come to nothing; he is alone. In 1938, learns to practice yoga.
1939
The last issue of Acéphale, the review linked to the group, is published anonymously in June under the title ‘Madness, War and Death’, two years after the previous edition. All of its contents were written by Bataille, including his first ‘mystical’ pages: ‘The Practice of Joy before Death’.
Guilty begun 5 September 1939. Bataille is reading Angela of Folingo, the Liber visionum.
The date I start (September 5, 1939) is no coincidence.
Alongside Guilty, Bataille drafts what will become, many years later, The Accursed Share.
On 2 October 1939, he meets Denise Rollin-Le Gentil, who is 32 and married with a young son, Jean. Surya writes, ‘She was beautiful, a beauty that would be described as melancholy if not taciturn. She spoke little or, for long periods not at all’. She joins him at his flat in October; thereafter, Bataille will spend time in her flat at 3 rue de Lille.
1940
Part of Guilty published as ‘Friendship’ in the Belgian journal Mesures.
Bataille meets Maurice Blanchot, who is about to publish Thomas the Obscure and the long essay How is Literature Possible? (Animadab would follow in 1942 and Faux Pas, a collection of articles, in 1943.)
1941
Madame Edwarda written September to October and published in 1941. Begins ‘Le Supplice’, the great central section of Inner Experience, immediately after.
Autumn 1941 sees the commencement of two discussion groups organised by Bataille in Denise Rollin’s flat. They consisted of readings of passages of Inner Experience, which Bataille was writing at the time. The first group includes Queneau and Leiris. Blanchot belonged to both groups. The meetings were, according to several participants, essentially a debate between Bataille and Blanchot. The meetings last until March 1943.
1942
Bataille is diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. He contracted it originally as a young man in an army bootcamp. For eight years, however, it has been dormant; eventually (in 1962), it will kill him.
Bataille completes Inner Experience during the summer of the same year. At that time, he is staying with Marcel Moré’s mother at Boussy-le-Chatêau. It is published by Raymond Queneau, an old friend of Bataille’s with whom relations have lately cooled.
He stays in a village called Panilleuse with Denise Rollin.
He writes The Dead Man.
Bataille’s illness leads him to lose his job with the Bibliothèque Nationale.
‘Nietzsche’s Laughter’ published in Exercice du silence, Brussels.
Denise Rollin leaves Paris for Drugeac; Bataille follows her, accompanied by his daughter Laurence, 10, and by his old friend André Masson and his wife Rose. Towards the end of the year, Bataille moves out of the flat he had shared with Laure. He takes a new flat in Paris at 259 rue Saint-Honoré in December (Paris VIII).
Gives the lecture ‘Socratic College’ (note that the date given in the Oeuvres completes is incorrect) which sets out a proposal to organise his discussion readings on a more programmatic basis. This move is rejected by the participants. In Inner Experience, he gives a summary of discussions that arose with Blanchot, presumably in the discussion groups.
There are three principles; experience will:
– only have its principle and end in the absence of salvation, in the renunciation of all hope
– only affirm that experience itself is the authority (but all authority expiates itself)
– only be a contestation of itself and nonknowledge.
This is nicely summarised by Stuart Kendall, one of the editors of The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge:
Their initial proposals were three: they held to the rejection of all hope for salvation, indeed all hope of any kind, the acceptance of experience itself as the only value and authority, and the recognition that experience meant self-expiation.
1943
Inner Experience is published. Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness are published in the same year.
In March, moves to 59 rue Saint-Étienne in the village Vézelay with Denise Rollin and her 4-year-old son. His daughter, Laurence, now 13, moves with them. The house is ramshackle; the village austere. Between March and October, Bataille embarks on an affair with the Canadian born, half-Russian and half-English Diane Kotchoubey, an admirer of Inner Experience. She is 23, and has a 3 year old daughter. Diane Kotchoubey and Denise Rollin apparently are joined for a while with Bataille in a ménage-a-trois.
Bataille finishes Guilty in May 1943. In the same month, ‘Nom de Dieu’, a text written by the Surrealists, argues Inner Experience evidences a simple minded idealism.
Blanchot reviews Inner Experience in Journal des débats in May.
Sartre publishes a long, unfavourable review of Inner Experience in Cahiers du Sud. Bataille’s reply is found what will be published in 1945 as On Nietzsche.
Bataille splits up from Rollin after returning with her to Paris. Kotchoubey had already returned to Paris. Bataille finds lodgings with the painter Balthus through Pierre Klossowski, and spends the winter at Balthus’s studio at 3 cour de Rohan. Bataille is at real risk from Kotchoubey’s husband.
1944
He regularly meets, as he is accustomed to do, with friends like Leiris and Queneau. He co-writes a film script, now lost. His co-author leaves the following record of Bataille’s appearance:
A very handsome face, a gentle voice, a very abstract way of moving in space, at once present and absent. When he spoke about the most everyday things, the impression he gave, without being aware of it, was that he was about to impart something of the utmost importance.
He publishes Memorandum, a collage of Nietzsche’s later writings.
Bataille keeps the diaries that will comprise a large part of On Nietzsche.
In March, Bataille gives the lecture, ‘Discussion on Sin’, based on the ‘Summit and Decline’ section on what would be published as On Nietzsche. Sartre, Klossowski, Blanchot and many others present. Here, Bataille meets Sartre for the first time. The men meet on several occasions thereafter.
In April 1944, he leaves the studio, moving out of Paris to the rue de Coin-Musard in Samois, near Fontainebleau, close to the house Diane Kotchoubey was living in. He visits her by bike. At the time he is often alone and miserable.
Marcel reviews Inner Experience more or less favourably. But he accuses Bataille of complacency and self-satisfaction.
Guilty is published.
Bataille is very ill in this period. He writes Julie. He also begins to write poetry, mostly at Samois. Some bear witness to his love for Diane Kotchoubey. He publishes Alleluia, a collection of poems, apparently reply to the questions she asked him (so Surya).
In October, he leaves Samois for Paris, taking a flat at 16 rue de Condé. He spends winter 1944-1945 there.
1945
In early 1945, Bataille leaves Paris for Vézelay, where he will live for several years with Kotchoubey, who had left her husband. He will remain there until 1949.
On Nietzsche published.
Blanchot commences an apparently largely epistolatory affair with Denise Rollin, which will continue until her death in 1978.
Just after the war, the journal Fontaine publishes extracts from ‘Method of Meditation’ under the title ‘Devant un ciel vide’, ‘Before an Empty Sky’. Alongside this text, Bataille is also writing the fictional texts that will appear first as The Hatred of Poetry and, later, as The Impossible. He befriends Giacometti, Michaux and Merleau-Ponty and begin editing Critique. The Hatred of Poetry appears in 1947.
5 rue Saint-Benoît (I)
I want to write about the community of 5 rue Saint-Benoît, drawing on Laure Adler’s Marguerite Duras, A Life.
Our cast:
Marguerite Duras, 1914-1995. When she meets Antelme, she is a graduate with the Colonial Office, who will write a book supporting French colonialism in 1940.
Dionys Mascolo, 1916-1997, erstwhile philosophy student. He never took the examination, but wanted to be an intellectual. Mascolo finds a position doing odd-jobs for Gallimard, because of his college friend Michel Gallimard. Duras offers him a job with the Paper Allocation Agency. He will read manuscripts with her. From their first meeting, in November 1942, it is love. At this time, he lives with his mother.
Robert Antelme, 1917-90. Said by all to be an extraordinary man. Arrives in Paris in 1936. Studies Law. He meets Duras in the late 1930s, in 1938, I think. They fall in love. He is called up in 1938. They marry in September 1939 (Duras proposed). At the end of 1940, they move into 5 rue Saint-Benoît.
Duras and Antelme’s flat, 1943. They are married, and have become active in the Resistance (the MNPGD group). François Mitterand, the future president, lives for a while in the back bedroom. So, too, does Jacques Benet (an old schoolfriend of Antelme). Dionys Mascolo, Duras’s lover, visits everyday. Antelme has a lover too. Mascolo edits Combat, the Resistance magazine, working with Camus. He meets Edgar Morin at this time. With a few others, they form an irregular force, ready for action. They often meet in Antelme’s sister’s flat – this is Marie-Louise, who will die at Ravensbrück to whom The Human Race will be dedicated. Robert Antelme and then Marie-Louise are captured …
Duras waits for Robert’s return. Mascolo is with her. She is thin, lethargic. She is writing the pages eventually published as La Douleur (The War). Then, in May 1945, Robert is identified at Dachau. Mascolo and Beauchamp, another member of the Resistance, drive there. They bring him back to Paris. He is starving, on the brink of death. In the car, Robert talks and talks. A famous sentence, said to Mascolo: ‘When anyone talks to me of Christian charity, I shall say Dachau’.
They are all there at the flat to meet Robert Antelme. A doctor used to the effects of famine treats Robert, giving him serum first of all, and then introducing him gradually to food. By the end of June, he is recovered.
In 1944, Duras becomes a communist, joining the clandestine French Communist Party. She sells the party’s newspaper on Sunday morning. It is the party, for her, of the poor, of the pure. Every evening she goes out to spread the word, ringing doorbells, talking in cafes. Robert Antelme talks about his experiences. There are few references in the papers in this period to the persecution of the Jews. At the flat, Duras, Antelme and Mascolo speak of the persecution.
After the war, another great period of hospitality. Raymond Queneau and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are frequent visitors. Edgar Morin is always there. Mascolo often sleeps on the couch in the hall. He and Duras make love in hotels; Antelme, too, has a lover; he and Duras sleep in separate rooms. Mascolo, too, has a lover.
Mascolo and Antelme join the Communist Party in 1946. Duras, of course, is already an activist; she becomes secretary of the cell. But she begins to lose her ardency; Robert is expelled in 1950 … but they remain lifelong communists.
Elio Vittorini (whom I’ve yet to read, although Duras, apparently, owes a great deal to him) comes to the flat. Another communist. Antelme, Mascolo and Duras holiday together with Vittorini in Italy. Vittorini attacks what he sees as the slavishness of the French communists. They form the Groupe d’études Marxistes with Merleau-Ponty and David Rousset (I’ll need to find out about him – Duras falls under his influence after her expulsion from the Party). It is a question, for them, of returning to Marx and Engels, and of remaining within the French Communist Party while criticising it – the Italians, here, are an inspiration. The Italian communists take communion on Sundays; they draw upon a spiritual sustenance.
Meanwhile, Antelme is writing The Human Race at the flat. At night, everyone drinks and laughs and sings Edith Piaf songs. Mascolo’s mother moves in. Michel Leiris is a frequent visitor, as is Georges Bataille; Jacques Lacan visits on several occasions. Duras is pregnant by Mascolo … Antelme wants to get out of the way, but they still live together. In 1947, Jean is born; he is always called Outa (Mite). In the same year, The Human Race is brought out by Cité universelle, the publishing house Duras and Mascolo have formed. The book meets with little success.
Morin (from On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race):
A good many deportees’ accounts are heavily rhetorical, written in a stereotyped language[….] The Human Race was the first book – I would even say the only book – that stands firmly at the level of humanity, at the level of naked experience lived and expressed in the simplest, most adequate words there are.
Meanwhile, Vittorini announces his break with the Communist Party; Duras and Antelme will remain in the Party for two more years, after signing up, with Morin and Mascolo, to the Cercle de la commission des intellectuals, a circle of writers within the Party itself. But gradually, they are ostracised by the Party; they are found to be cynical and disrespectful. A bitter blow. Antelme, in particular, is depressed. But he, like Duras, like Mascolo, like Morin, will remain communists.
At rue Saint-Benoît, Italo Calvino and John Dos Passos are entertained as they pass through Paris. Duras’s The Sea Wall, is published in 1950; The Sailor from Gibaltra follows in 1952. Duras has a long affair with Jacques-Laurent Bost, a friend of de Beauvoir and Sartre, whom Duras never liked. Vittorini, Mascolo and others insist she ends the affair. He is bad for her, they think. In this period, Duras spends time with Maurice Blanchot, whose influence, I’m told (I haven’t read it), is strongly marked in The Sailor from Gibraltar. The Little Horses of Tarquinia is published in 1953.
Robert Antelme has already left (but when? And when did Mascolo move in permanently? After his mother died); he is now with Monique. Duras begins to drift from Vittorini.
Adler:
The apartment at 5 rue Saint-Benoît was Marguerite’s universe, filled with her family photos, her bunches of dried flowers, her beautiful shining furniture, her broken stove, her shawls draped over the backs of shabby armchairs, loose parquet, the smell of rose petals. She was a talented DIY enthusiast and she entertained several times a week. Marguerite was considered an intellectual and charming hostess.
Men would turn up alone just to flirt with her. She was careful to kindly their admiration and passion. The small world in which they lived encompassed a tiny area of Paris. A few hundred metres separated rue Saint-Benoît from the offices of Gallimard and the bistro Espérance, where Robert and Dionys often stopped for a drink after work. Head of rights and reproduction for Gallimard, Dionys was one of the six section leaders. Robert Antelme worked for another publishing firm, la Pléaide.
1951-60 Antelme works as a critic for the French radio television network. From 1951-1981, he is a reader for the Encyclopaedia of the Pléiade, directed by Queneau.
Mascolo publishes Le Communisme in 1953.
Duras is becoming a diva. Gallimard must send a messenger to collect her manuscripts. Louis-René des Forêts is the only editor she trusts. Duras wants financial independence from Mascolo.
In 1955, The Square is published. It is staged a year later.
Duras and Mascolo support the Algerians in hteir war of independence against France. Mascolo sets up the Committee of Intellectuals Against the Pursuit of the War in Algeria. André Breton comes to the first meeting. Claude Roy, an old friend of the rue Saint-Benoît community, is there too. The Committee is dissolved and replaced by the Committee of Revolutionary Intellectuals (Blanchot is a member).
There are arguments at rue Saint-Benoît about the Algerian situation. Morin and Roy are hesitant about the Algerian National Liberation Front who shot at the French. The group, which formerly had included Left and Right, begins to dissolve in the face of the attempt of the French and the British to occupy the nationalised Suez Canal and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
In 1957, Antelme’s The Human Race is reissued by Gallimard to great acclaim.
Mascolo and Duras are drifting apart. Mascolo has been having an affair all along; he is a womaniser. They split, but Mascolo will live at rue Saint-Benoît until 1967. Duras takes up with Gérard Jarlot, a journalist and novelist. Duras’s Moderato Cantabile, published in 1958, is dedicated to him (It is published by Minuit, not Gallimard; Alain Robbe-Grillet persuades Duras). Mascolo dislikes Jarlot, who does not visit rue Saint-Benoît often.
Mascolo launches le 14 Juillet, a magazine opposed to Gaullist power, in which he sees the risk of a French-style Francoism.
Adler:
At this time Blanchot was a very regular visitor to rue Saint-Benoît. He got the poet René Char involved in the magazine and wrote (for the second issue) a long political trace entitled ‘The Refusal’ (sic: it was ‘The Essential Perversion’ – Lars). One of the consequences of the magazine was to bring Dionys and Maurice Blanchot closer together.
Here is what Blanchot himself writes, when he remembers Mascolo in ‘For Friendship’:
I don’t think I exchanged many letters with D.M. (if I recall correctly, none at all until the publication of 14 Julliet). I was silently absent. Political responsibility and urgency are what in some sense made me return and look to Dionys with the certainty (or premonition) that he would provide an answer). On receipt of 14 Julliet I heard his call and responded to it with my resolute agreement.
Le 14 Juillet is a magazine unlike the others. Giacometti and Matta contribute works to sell in order to raise cash for its distribution.
Duras takes up journalism, interviewing Bataille in 1957. She no longer distributes her manuscripts to Antelme and Mascolo before she publishes them. She begins a sequence of great works, the books I love, and find frightening. In the early 1960s, she buys a house called Neauphle, a house in the country. She welcomes her friends to stay. She will later buy a flat in Trouville, by the sea.
Meanwhile, the ‘Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la geurre d’Algérie’, the ‘Manifesto of the 121’ is drafted at rue Saint-Benoît. Blanchot writes to Mascolo:
Insubordination, the actual word can appear limiting. We could add to it and say quite bluntly: the right to insubordination and desertion in the Algerian War. But I think insubordination should suffice. Insubordination means the refusal to carry out military duties. And on the basis of this, the principle can be expressed through different behaviour …’ (cited Adler, 233)
Here’s what Blanchot remembers years after:
Unable to tolerate what was intolerable in the events of that time (the Algerian War), I had telephoned D.M., saying: "We have to do something …" – "As it happens, we’re working on something". Inumerable meetings followed, on an almost daily basis, and the preparation of what would become, with the support of all concerned, the "Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la geurre d’Algérie"’.
From the ashes of Le 14 Juillet, a new dream is born: a Revue Internationale, with Italian, French and German editions. A lack of financial backers meant the magazine only came out in one edition, in Italian: Gulliver, as it was called, was published as a supplement to a newspaper.
Jarlot died in 1966. Vittorini died that year, too.
1968. I will write about the Events another day.
The Heteronym
To go by another name – it is tempting, sometimes, to write under another name, relieving oneself of the burdens of an identity that has become onerous. Here, I think of Kierkegaard’s practice of indirect communication. It was necessary, he thought, as an author troubled by what he saw as an excess of reflection and irony in the age in which he lived, to publish many of his books under pseudonyms (the word heteronym is, I think, better, for there are many names, each of who indicates an attitude, a style of existing, a way of living and writing.)
These heteronyms would leave in the works they were supposed to have composed a ‘stinger’ that was supposed to stir the reader into a sense of the fragility and precariousness of their own existence. No doubt it was, for Kierkegaard, a question of communicating a Christian message, of leading his reflective and ironical readers to God, and his work, if we read his later overviews of his own creative endeavour, was intended to systematically expose the weaknesses of various ‘spheres of existence’.
But these books are readable by a non-Christian audience, which is to say, they communicate in a manner that is so indirect that the message never actually gets through. The ‘medium’ interposes itself; the fictional character Johannes the Seducer of the first half of Either/Or troubles the fictional young aesthete, A., who is supposed to have created him. He troubles us, too. But despite this, ‘The Seducer’s Diary’, the fictional story A. relates, is, with A.s’ essay ‘Crop Rotation’, the most attractive section this volume. B., Judge Vilhelm, whose fictional letters are gathered in the second half of Either/Or, is simply a windbag. And the Jutland Pastor, who has the ‘Last Word’, the ‘Ultimatum’, which is appended to the end of the second half of Kierkegaard’s book, seems to speak from another era.
What does it matter? The same point was made about Milton, who was able to describe the fires of hell in a much more exciting way than the splendours of heaven. There are always ‘minor’ ways of reading ‘major’ authors – or more precisely, we shouldn’t let the notions of ‘literature’, of the ‘canon’ or ‘culture’ distract us from the works themselves.
No doubt. But there is, perhaps, a deeper way of understanding the meaning of ‘medium’. Before or beyond Kierkegaard’s heteronyms and to the lives to which their names are linked, there is an indirect communication with respect to which it can no longer be a question of taking another name. This is a true heteronym – I am ‘other named’ as my writing reveals in its sonorities and rhythms, in its nuances and musicality, not another meaning, but the ‘other’ of meaning.
A book, and especially a literary book, is always more than a medium through which something might be communicated. It is also the body of words themselves in their resistance to mobilisation, that is, to the sense their author and their readers would discover in them. This is a writing that passes outside every attempt to enclose it, a writing that describes a line along the outside, un-naming me as I write.
Sabi
From its seamless, extended opening shot, it is clear, in this film, that we are in the presence of a great work of art. Nothing is mannered; there is an absolute decisiveness, a necessity, a plausibility; Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is magnificent.
The Sacrifice was Tarkovsky’s last film; he died, too young, in 1986, the same year as it was released, and of the same cancer that claimed the great actor whom he had wanted to play its protagonist. In the end, the role went to Erland Josephson, who also played Domenico in Nostalghia. If Domenico in that film prophesised the end of time, the apocalypse has arrived in The Sacrifice; nuclear war has broken out, there is no time left.
In his later work, Tarkovsky attempts to purify and simplify his films. To approach time? To approach cinema – or what he calls the cinematic image. What does this mean? The image is authentic when it allows time to live:
The image becomes authentically cinematic (when amongst other things) not only does it live within time, but time also lives within it, even within each separate frame. No ‘dead’ object – table, chair, glass – taken in a frame in isolation from everything else, can be presented as it were outside passing time, as if from the point of view of an absence of time. (68)
Life is a kind of welling up of time, which it is the special vocation of cinema to imprint. This is a lofty vocation. For as Tarkovsky notes, in our world, time itself threatens to disappear. This seems horribly abstract. How should we understand this? Tarkovsky quotes the journalist Ovchinnikov who, on visiting Japan, observed:
It is considered that time per se, helps to make known the essence of things. The Japanese therefore see a particular charm in the evidence off old age. They are attracted to the darkened tone of an old tree, the ruggedness of a stone, or even the scruffy look of a picture whose edges have been handled by a great many people. To all these signs of age, they give the name sabi, which literally means ‘rust’. Sabi, then, is a natural rustiness, the charm of olden days, the stamp of time. Sabi, as an element of beauty, embodies the link between art and nature.
One might remember the items the camera passes over in Stalker – the patina of age lies upon these apparently derealised objects. Derealised? Perhaps it is only when they are isolated thus, cast out of the networks with which we associate them that these items present themselves as what they are.
This may sound mysterious. But the materiality, the weight or the being of things is often hidden from us. I don’t think about the muddy ground until the wheel of my car is stuck in the mud. Likewise, the tables and chairs I bought cheaply at an out of town store sit unobtrusively in my lounge. The cup and the plate on my table are mass produced and cheaply available; they do not obtrude into my awareness except when they make my flat look untidy. And my flat is a flat like any other; nothing in particular binds me to it; anyone could be living there just as I could be living in any other flat. Things, then, mean little to me. Everything is replacable; and I know that for the Human Resources department where I work, I, too, am replacable. I am a resource like any other, and I am kept on a short-term contract to remind me of my disposability. From a certain perspective, I, too am a thing, with a shelf-life and a monetary value. And is it not true that other people in our modern world are things for me?
For Tarkovsky, the cinema, the cinematic image, by bringing things into view, confronts us with the fact of the heavy materiality of things, their presence and perhaps what one might call their saba, their wisdom, the way in which they evidence the claim of time.
I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience – and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema … (63)
In The Sacrifice, Alexander, a retired man of the theatre, lives with his wide, Adelaide, his young son, Gossen, or ‘Little Man’ (this is a poor translation – just use the word lad instead), and daughter Marta in rural Sweden. All is not well – we sense Adelaide is having an affair with Victor, a friend of the family. Alexander is jaded, weary, ironical and detached; he does not believe in God.
They are a wealthy family, with a servant and a large house. Then there is Otto, a mysterious character, collector of extraordinary events, who is also the postman who brings birthday greetings to Alexander at the outset of the film (I think Otto is my favourite character in cinema).
Nuclear war breaks out. Alexander kneels and prays for salvation. He offers everything he owns in exchange for the survival of the world. Otto visits him and tells him of the mysterious foreigner Maria, a witch, a saint, a holy fool whom, he says, Alexander must go to and sleep with. Alexander obeys. When he wakes the next morning, it is the day before the catastrophe. The day of his fiftieth birthday has begun again, it would appear that catastrophe has been averted. But now Alexander has to keep his part of the bargain: when his family (and Victor) go out for a stroll he sets fire to the house; he loses everything. He is taken away in ambulance.
Alexander sacrifices himself – but for what? For all of us. The world is given to us anew.
Is this what Tarkovsky is trying to in cinema when he appeals to the cinematic image, to life, to time? Is this not an attempt to give us the world anew, allowing an audience to receive time from which they have been estranged?
We go to the cinema to receive time, according to Tarkovsky:
I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience – and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema … (63)
Is this true? Does the cinematic image allow us to attend to the world in a new sense? In my favourite passage from Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky writes:
We’ve come to the end of the day: let us say that in the course of that day something important has happened, something significant, the sort of thing that could be the inspiration for a film, that has the makings of a conflict of ideas that could become a picture. But how did this day imprint itself on our memory? As something amorphous, vague, with no skeleton or schema. Like a cloud. And only the central event of that day has become concentrated, like a detailed report, lucid in meaning and clearly defined. Against the background of the rest of the day, that event stands out like a tree in the mist[….] Isolated impressions of the day have set off impulses within us, evoked associations; objects and circumstances have stayed in our memory, but with no sharply defined contours, incomplete, apparent fortuitous. Can these impressions of life be conveyed through film? They undoubtedly can; indeed it is the especial virtue of cinema, as the most realistic of the arts, to be the means of such communication. (23)
The film coalesceces from a kind of uncertainty, which, like the mist in a great Japanese painting, hovers on the edge of our awareness. Thus the wordless shepherd’s cry, the flat green landscape of Gotland, swallows’ song … These remind us, perhaps, of the diffuse, ambient background of our day, which is liable, because it is nothing in particular, to pass into forgetting.
Sven Nykvist, the great Swedish cinematographer, recalls of Tarkovsky, ‘he first and foremost wanted to communicate emotions, moods, atmosphere. By images, not by words. He wanted to impart a soul to objects and nature. Here he actually went further than Bergman ever did’.
The Sacrifice brings us, in its story, to the threshold of the end of the world. Somehow, he is able to make what is to be lost more present to us before. And our own lives? Do we not stand at the threshold in our own way? We go to the cinema for time, Tarkovsky writes – but this means, we go to feel the age of things, to discover the temporality which ensouls our world. It is to bring us sabi that The Sacrifice sacrifices itself.
Still, I wonder whether it is possible to feel the sabi of things. There is little now, it would seem, that hasn’t been sucked into the vortex of the market. How can I recognise the life of things in a film when there is no life in the things around me? Sometimes the world of Tarkovsky’s films seems entirely phantasmic and his book, Sculpting in Time, preposterous. But then, at times, it awakens a strange nostalgia for a life I have never led. It is at these times, perhaps, that time begins to open for me. Is it the power of his films to return to us a sense of permanence and endurance? Or does does it give us a kind of screen-memory for a lack or an absence that is eating our world away? I think I see something frightening in the cinematic image Tarkovsky does not want us to see – the nothingness and non-meaning that threatens to swallow our world.
Hope Against Hope
The length of the shots and the glacial slowness of the film verge on affectation. It is a lugubrious film. But somehow Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (this is how he asks us to spell it) is a film about hope.
At the outset, Gorchakov and Eugenia drive through the dawn mist towards the ancient Chapel of St Catherine. Gorchakov is a Russia writer, in Italy to research the life of a Russian composer. Eugenia is a translator, beautiful and independent.
Her high heels prevent her from kneeling to pray in the Chapel of St Catherine to which she has driven Gorchakov. But the Russian does not enter the church. Eugenia berates him: it was his idea to drive halfway across Italy to see the painting of the Madonna by Piero della Francesca …
Perhaps we are supposed to see Eugenia as modern woman, too proud, too independent. We see her wandering the dark church in her opulent clothes. The Sacristan asks her: ‘have you come to pray for a child, or to be relieved from one?’ Eugenia tells his she is looking, just looking … Tarkovsky is sexist, we think to ourselves. But perhaps something else is happening here.
Eugenia says on first seeing the cathedral: ‘It is an amazing sight, when I saw it first, you know, I simply cried. Just look at the light!’ The film asks us to compare her to the woman at cathedral entrance, chanting ‘Virgin … Mother … Sister … Bride … Sea … Sky … Sun … Moon … Star’. It is incantation. They kneel to pray at the cathedral steps and, kneeling, mount the steps.
What do we see? It is as though the Chapel belongs to an older world, one we cannot re-enter. But it is this world to which the madman Domenico belongs.
We meet him first trying to cross the hot pool dedicated to Saint Catherine of Siena in the Tuscan village Bagno Vignoni, where the protagonists are staying. Then we hear he locked himself in the house for seven years with his family, waiting for the end of the world.
He’s mad, Eugenia tells Gorchakov, who replies:
We don’t know what so-called insanity, or madness, is. First, they are inconvenient, they get in everyone’s way … Their behaviour, their wishes lie outside the generally accepted rules… And then, we simply don’t wish to understand them. They are terribly lonely, but I’m sure they are closer to the truth than we are …
Domenico is an Idiot, a Holy Fool. Gorchakov is fascinated by Domenico, this former teacher of mathematics; he demands to be taken to him. He talks to the Fool. Eugenia leaves. Domeinco tells him he intends to save the world. And he tells Gorchakov to cross the hot pool at the Tuscan village Bagno Vignoni holding a lit candle in his hands.
Domenico immolates himself on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Capitoleum, an ancient Roman square, after preaching to onlookers for three days. Aflame, crawling along the ground, he cries, ‘What is this world worth, what is the value of its truth if some unhappy mental patient, as you call us, tells you: “You should be ashamed of yourselves!” While there’s still time!’
And Eugenia? She travels to India with her new companion ‘He’s interested in spiritual matters’ she tells Gorchakov on the phone. Gorchakov carries the candle across the pool as Domenico asks. Twice he fails, but the third time, he succeeds. At the end he stumbles. Commentators tell us he dies, but I’m not sure.
It is a lugubrious film. The key, one might assume, is Tarkovsky’s own nostalgia for Russia. But Russia here means not only Gorchakov’s wife and daughter, but also the unity of a culture in terms of which everything will make sense.
Gorchakov: ‘Poetry can’t be translated… Art in general is untranslatable …’
Eugenina: ‘… but how would we ever have known Tolstoy, Pushkin? How could we even begin to understand Russia, if …’
Gorchakov: ‘But you don’t understand Russia at all’.
Eugenina: ‘And Dante, Petrarch, Macchiavelli? So Russians don’t know Italy!’
Gorchakov: ‘Of course not, how could we?’
Then Gorchakov gestures vaguely towards abolish national borders in order to overcome this difference.
I should add that Gorchakov is sexually drawn to Eugenia. She knows it. She berates him. Perhaps nostalgia also designates a desire for the security of family life.
Nostalgia, then, for what is lost – for Mother Russia, the unity of culture, the security of a wife and child. Nostalgia for the places of men and women, and for human beings who can kneel.
Why is Gorchakov fascinated by Domenico? The latter is indomitable, possessed of his beliefs, uncompromising. He will protest against what the world has become. It is his madness which allows Domenico to dream of transforming his society through his act of self-sacrifice. How futile! Yet he fascinates Gorchakov. Here, too, there is nostalgia, which one can understand from Tarkovsky’s remarks in an interview:
I am convinced that “time” in itself is no objective category, as “time” cannot exist apart from man’s perception of it. Certain scientific discoveries tend to draw the same conclusion. We do not live in the “now.” The “now” is so transient, as close to zero as you can get without it being zero, that we simply have no way of grasping it. The moment in time we call “now” immediately becomes the “past,” and what we call the “future” becomes the “now” and then it immediately becomes “past.” The only way to experience the now is if we let ourselves fall into the abyss which exists between the now and the future. And this is the reason “nostalghia” is not the same as mere sorrow over past time. Nostalghia is a feeling of intense sadness over the period that went missing at a time when we forsook counting on our internal gifts, to properly arrange and utilize them,… and thus neglected to do our duty.
Tarkovsky invokes nostalgia for the future, retrieving its sense, its promise from the deathly repetition of the past. Nostalghia would incite hope in us, a hope against hope, a hope to shore against what hope has become. But this is possible only when we put ourselves in the place of Gorchakov in his fascination with Domenico. Is this possible?
Tarkovsky has hopes for the artwork itself:
An artistic discovery occurs each time as a new and unique image of the world, a hieroglyphic of absolute truth. It appears as a revelation, as a momentary, passionate wish to grasp intuitively and at a stroke all the laws of this world – its beauty and ugliness, its compassion and cruelty, its infinity and its limitations. (Sculpting in Time, 27)
Truth? One might think Tarkovsky is nostalgic for the old place of art in a cosmos where human beings could look up to the stars and discover a source of the divine law mirrored in their souls. Musn’t one acknowledge that those stars have fallen, and there is no place for human beings in the cosmos? This is what Nostalghia reveals to me: the old laws have gone. It is no more possible to disappear into the world of the women at the church, of Domenico, than it is to become an animal, dwelling in nature as water does in water. The world, the whole world, can strike us as meaningless, as without sense or direction. But perhaps there is hope here – hope in the face of those who still believe in the great political projects through which freedom will arrive as a result of collective work, of shared labour. A hope implicit in what in a kind of resistance in things themselves, and in the relations between us, any of us, all of us. This is what Gorchakov’s wandering, his inability to complete his tasks or to resolve on any course of action, his sublime weakness suggests to me.
Blindness
‘I’ve seen your film four times in the last week. And I didn’t simply go to see it, but in order to spend just a few hours living a real life with real artists and real people…. Everything that torments me, everything I don’t have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light or warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me – it’s all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror. For the first time ever a film has become something real for me, and that’s why I go to see it, I want to get right inside it, so that I can really be alive.’
Tarkovsky recalls the work that went into editing Mirror, in which the structure of the film was altered and the sequence of the episodes changed. It would seem the film would never find its form, that too much was missing. And yet, one day, he writes, ‘the material came to life; the parts started to function reciprocally, as if linked by a bloodstream; and as that last despairing attempt was projected onto the screen, the film was born before our very eyes’ (116).
Somehow, the two hundred shots of Mirror came together. Tarkovsky writes of a ‘time pressure’, in which the scenes have to come together to preserve a consistency of time, in the same manner one joins water pipes of a different diameter. The criterion that guides editing is life, according to Tarkovsky – life as it is ‘constantly moving and changing’, allowing each person to ‘interpret and feel each separate moment in his own way’ (118).
What is essential is that the audience experience a time that is uncoerced by the director; yet, as Tarkovsky writes: ‘There is still an apparent dichotomy: for the directors sense of time always amounts to a kind of coercion of the audience, as does his imposition of his inner world. The person watching either falls into your rhythm (your world), and becomes your ally, or else he does not, in which case no contact is made. And so some people become your ‘own’ and others remain strangers; and I think this is not only perfectly natural, but, alas, inevitable.’ (120)
I am intrigued about the notion of taste at issue here: the idea that, somehow, the director’s experience of time would resonate with one’s own, to the extent that one is possessed, or, perhaps, dispossessed by the work. Better still – there is the notion that this play of possession and dispossession is at issue in every moment of our lives, and particular when we give ourselves to drifting or to idleness, or when our attention is captured for a moment by something that is mundane and surprising.
What is essential is to cross the bridge from the opening to the work to life. This is not an opposition. Perhaps the bridge leads into the work itself. It is never a question of the representation of the world in the film. The film, sculpted from time, resonates with the rebirth of the world. ‘In a word, the image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as a drop of water. Only in a drop of water!’ (110) A drop of water: an event, banal but world shaking, ordinary but extraordinary insofar, in a moment, it captures us and holds us still. A drop of water – the image is sufficient unto itself, but so too is the event. We live our lives at one time in terms of our desire to complete tasks, to finish projects, but at another – and in the same moment – in the fascination when we are unable, any longer, to be able, to assemble ourselves such that we are capable of anything at all.
‘Everything that torments me, everything I don’t have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light or warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me it’s all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror.’ – Everything is in the film. But this is because the film answers to the movement within things as they give themselves to be experienced and as we give ourselves over to them. Everything is there because it attests to a kind of ‘push’ or pressure that inhabits things, that is their movement in time, their constancy, their flowering or their withering which escapes determination. This is what resonates in me as I watch the film; I am claimed not by director’s vision, or even his experience of time, as Tarkovsky suggests, but by time itself.
Mirror is not the film in which one recognises oneself, or recognises one’s childhood. I cannot contemplate Mirror – I am not the spectator; the work does not lay itself before me. Above all, it does not let me see myself. Alexei, the child of the film is fascinating because I am seized by the fascination that seizes him as he gazes into the mirror. It is then that he allows us, too, to gaze at the film as into the mirror in which we can no longer see ourselves. At that moment, we are no longer capable of seeing, of assuming a distance from what we see. We see the film with the blindspot which permits our sight – with the incapacity from which everything we are capable issues and to which it must return.
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