Intersigne: at the crossroads of magic and positivism

 

In a conference on his friend, Villiers de l’isle-Adam, Mallarme speaks of “an exceptional story at the extremity of which is a tomb.” This story, for Mallarme, is typical both in its subject and in the “outsider” place of its author: it is “an enlargement of the Shadow”. The story is called L’intersigne.
The Breton folklorist Anatole Le Braz, in La Légende de la Mort (1893), used a similar reference to the Shadow to define intersignes: Comme l’ombre projetée en avant de ce qui doit arrive – “as a shadow projected in front of what must arrive”. Intersignes, in Breton popular culture, are coincidences or strange events that advertised a coming death. “Intersignes announce death. But the person to whom the intersigne is manifested is rarely the person threatened by death.” The person to whom the intersigne is manifested possesses a gift, but not one that can be obtained by teaching. You must have the “gift of seeing”. “Within this privileged category, those who are ranked first are those “who have passed through holy ground and have come out of it before being baptised.” For instance, a baby who is carried over the ground of a cemetery before being baptised will have the gift of an expanded sight. “Those who deny intersignes receive as many as those who have the gift. They deny them uniquely because they don’t know how to see nor understand them; and they don’t want to understand, at all, nor see anything of the other life.”

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam wrote his story, Intersigne, in 1867. It was eventually included in the collection, Cruel Stories, in 1883, with some editorial changes. Villiers was a native Breton, and evidently had received his knowledge of the phenomenon orally.

It is a “weird” tale of  Xavier de la V…,  who feels suddenly compelled to visit his friend in Brittany, l’abbe Maucombe, who lives in a remote parish of Saint-Maur. Xavier de la V., as we later learn, has every reason to stay in Paris, since he is in the midst of an important law suit. But he feels physically compelled to visit Maucombe, who he has not seen for years. He uses the excuse of hunting. Maucombe and his housekeeper welcome V., who finds himself afflicted with an almost epileptic case of vision – he sees the house, his room, even his friend, for brief moments, in a state of extreme estrangement.
« Is this really the house that I saw just a moment ago ? What age denounces to me, now, the long fissures between pale leaves ?  - this building had a strange air - the tiles illuminated by the rays of the agony of the evening burned with an intense light - the hospitable portal invited me with its three steps; but, in concentrating my attention on these grey stones, I saw that some had been polished, and that traces of letters chiselled in them still remained, and I saw that they came from the neighboring cemetery – whose black crosses appeared to me on one side, about a hundred steps away. And the house seemed changed to the point of giving me the creeps, while the lugubrious echoes of the hammer-knocker, that I let fall, echoed, in my trance, in the interior of this place like the vibrations of a funeral bell. “
Part of the genius of this story is the relation between text and title, Intersigne, a strange word to the reader. It is never explained, never even mentioned in the text. It rides the text, rather, as a sort of fate or curse. The title is felt in the story that V. tells, but is never literally within that story. Which, in short, is that V. has been, in effect, summoned to L’abbe Maucombe’s abode in order to see these things, in these moments; and to have a dream, or vision, of a priest handing him a coat. The dream is realized – L’abbe Maucombe accompanies V., who the day after his arrival wants to flee the house (it is here that we learn that he is in the midst of an important lawsuit), out to the road leading him back to the nearest village, where V. has left his coat – and,due to the rain, lends him his, L’abbe Maucombe’s, own coat. A coat that, as V. learns at the end, that accompanied the priest on his journey to the holy land and “touched the Tomb.”
He learns at the end, too, of course, from a letter, that L’abbe Maucombe died two days after his visit, from a cold caught in the rain of the day he accompanied V. to the road. V. was, in effect, not only the see-er of the death, but its proximate cause.

2.

The term intersigne drifts through a certain literature of folklore and parapsychology, and ends up in some interesting places. The philologist and scholar Louis Massignon, who started out as a Christian mystic and ended as an Islamic one, uses it in a few places in his works to designate a mystically charged coincidence. In Massignon’s work, the intersigne is not just an event of some kind prefiguring a death – it is a name for all significant coincidences – correlation without seeming cause. The notion of cause is not, of course, abandoned – rather the causes aren’t seen, because the witnesses lack the gift of seeing. This gives the mystic a neatly outlined historical place – the mystic can sense in the coincidences that present themselves in symbolic circumstances the overall causes – either the work of God, or the work of some transcendental pattern.

Things get interesting, to me, when the intersigne is taken up as a methodological prompt by Roberto Calasso in his great, reactionary book, the Ruin of Kasch. This is a historical “fiction” that adopts the intersigne as the structure underlying the message, which is a very 1980s, end of the Cold War message: our evils stem from the French revolution. It is a de Maistre hopscotch from the guillotining of Marie Antoinette to the Cambodian genocide of Pol Pot.

Of course, Calasso can’t be entirely reduced to the anti-modern paradigm. Like de Maistre, he is full of paradoxes and special information – he is a great knower of the Upanishads and ancient Greek texts, as well as pockets of European, and especially French, history. Like Carlo Ginzberg, he is fascinated by the savage within the European persona. Almost always when the term “the West” is employed, it refers not to the vast mass of urban and rural peasants and their beliefs, but a very minority group of power brokers, adventurers, scholars and writers. This is a highly distorted picture of the many cultures within Eurasia, from Danish sheepherders to Sicilian sulfur miners. What is said about the Nahautl – for instance, the belief that humans can transform into animals – could be said for respectable bourgeois living in Normandy in the 17th century.

In this sense, the fall of the ancien regime was a colonialist project, with the colonized now being the peasant, the shepherd, the tinker and the tailor, ruthlessly enrolled in rationalism’s project. Or Capital’s – although Calasso takes a very reactionary view of Marx.

I love the passage where Calasso shows his hand, embracing a methodology that is reminiscent of Benjamin’s methodology in the passages, through Adorno’s eyes: at the crossroads of magic and positivism.

“A gnostic history, which we lack, is largely made up of “intersignes” (as Massingon called them), unusual warnings, coincidences (as historians call them, to avoid them), erratic forms, buried relics, physiognomic marks, constellations latent in the sky of thought.”

A gnostic history, a jigsaw puzzle, a frolic of dialectical materialism.