There's no estate in sleep
nor does it possess
height nor depth
(clumsy crooner!)
Of the barbarous clangour
that makes up the names of its gods
you cannot transcribe
them with your sublunar diacritics.
The human tongue’s
euclidean vocables
have no purchase on
sleep’s 'evidently'.
Thus, the love letter is
bound to an aesthetic purpose that may not be shareable. Love letters that have
passed into literature, that please people beyond the narrow circle of the
couple, are rarely the most successful love letters in terms of their immediate
purpose.
I came across this love
letter from Paul Nizan to his wife, Henriette, dated 5 November 1939. P.N. is
in the army, at this point, but the war seems “phony” – nothing seems to be
happening. It is one of the rare love letters that delights on the two levels
sketched above. So, I thought I’d translate it. Which is inevitably to distort
it.
Perhaps this gains in
poignancy for me, knowing the end of the story – Nizan’s mysterious death in
the woods six months later, and the way his name was dragged in the mud by
Stalinists for years, and Sartre’s amazing preface to Aden Araby which brought
Nizan’s name back into the light.
“Rirette my dearest. Received your letter of Nov. 1 yesterday evening.
It is so very nice to be able to say, after fifteen years, that we love each
other enough to exchange love letters, and that we have triumphed in the end over
everything that separates people. This stay in the army has reminded me a bit
of my stay in Arabia [About which Nizan wrote his first and most famous book],
but we know more things, we are much more deeply complicit, we have learned to
go beyond mere literature. So that without doubt this time will not be lost, if
it isn’t prolonged up until I have a long white beard and promenade along the
Maginot line in a little tank. Julie de Lespinasse, Juliette Drouet, and other
women only had to hold tight. You know, the legend says that, in order to appease
the combattants and consecrate them exclusively to thoughts of war and the contemplation
of their military destiny, the powers that be put saltpeter or camphor in the
wine, the salt, and the coffee. This legend, I think, is frivolous : if
there were camphor in the wine and saltpeter in the coffee, men with more
sensitive palate would have perceived it, but I have no need for the witness of
taste : it is enough that I read a letter of yours, or write one to you,
that I think of your rose Piana dress, your pleated dress of last winter, of that
return from Prague in December 37 when you could not stop climaxing, in order
for me to have a personal and physical proof that they haven’t put saltpeter in
the wine. So that we shouldn’t have any
worries for my moment of leave, and it
will be enough for me to see your knees, your thighs, that you, without any previous
sign, put your tongue in my mouth for us to arrive at some frank result. Perhaps
it will be wise for you to renounce the vain usage of panties. And there will
be time to talk and to say important things to each other. A propos of the
Talmud, I just read that Eben Haeser prescribes that workers not make love more
than twice in the week, that savants confine themselves to the sabbath, that muleteers
do it once per week, and camel drivers once per month, and only rentiers can do
it every day: I will have to put myself in the last category. Also, I read in
the Talmud, a naughtier books than I thought, that anyone who makes love to a
woman on the bottom will suffer from delirium: ah, but what a wonderful
delirium! I embrace you in this
spirit. »
A brilliant essay by
Henry Sussman, The Phenomenology of Jetlag, Kafka is presented as the prophet
of our time warped era, the era of insomnia and time zone smuggling – that is,
smuggling time zones into other time zones. For instance, my cell phone doesn’t
just tell me the time, now, in Paris, where I live, but also the time in the
Eastern Time zone of the U.S., where I was visiting. And since I also visited Iowa,
which is on Central Time, both of my numbers were off. Kafka, who worked with
worker’s insurance and made it to many meetings in Central Europe to talk to
factory officials and the like, was well aware of the hazards of sleep
deprivation. Its effects could be tabulated in so many injuries, so many
fingers cut off, legs wounded, muscles torn, etc. The effects of tearing away
the natural attachment of our circadian rhythm from the light and night to
which they are primordially coordinate makes for the heavy presence of sleep in
his novels and stories. Sleep as something put off, sleep as something that
occurs in highly inappropriate settings, such as in the Land Surveyor K.’s
meeting with Buergel in The Castle.
Sussman writes: “… the
recovering victim of a significant act of spatio-temporal dislocation and
abuse, otherwise known as jetlag, is, unwittingly, subject to two sets of
spatio-temporal parameters. There is the explicit one, clearly prevalent at the
point of disembarkation in the form of a very loose etiquette defining the business
day, customary periods for dining and rest and other conventional interactions:
and then there is the holdover protocol of what Proust would call habit still
operative in the zone of embarkation. It is surely in the most “jarring” and
subliminal manner, Fraud would call it “unconscious” and Proust “involuntary,”
that the recalcitrant regime operative a the journey-origins asserts itself in
such forms oas sudden involuntary waking in a hyper-attentive state or equally
abrupt onsets of fatigue at the least felicitous moments of the active day. We
associate the sudden-onset phenomena of depth or unforeseen complexity that definitely
establish the activity and output of the
parallel and embedded universe of aesthetic sensibility. Via this particular
circuit of modernist invention we come to learn that K.’s pronounced episodes
of jetlag toward the end of Das Schloss, of a jetlag before the fact, belong to
his own heavily disguised apprenticeship as a performance artist.”
I’m unsure about that
anachronism of “performance artist” in that last sentence – a phrase from a
different embarkation zone than that of K, even if Kafka, as the author of the
Hunger Artist, does come close to embodying, with dream-like precision, the conceptual art theory of the seventies. Sussman’s
larger point, though, is something I can affirm in my own disembarked
experience now: the grogginess that succeeds a night of highly interruptible
sleep on a transatlantic plane flight, and the ordinary surrealism of all the
subsequent manoeuvres in the airport, the seemingly endless corridors and
stairs and escalators, the passage through security, the waiting for your
luggage at the carousel, the barking of the airport security, the awareness of
one’s haggard appearance as one waits for the cab, and the sense that one is
not in a good state, that one has been pickpocketed of something one didn’t
even know one had, i.e. placement in a certain timezone.
Jonathan Crary begins
his book, 24/7, with a story about the white crowned sparrow. The Pentagon is
very interested in the white crowned sparrow. Why? Because this sparrow can
stay awake for up to seven days during the migratory season. The Pentagon wants
to unlock the sparrow and apply its lesson to the human astronaut – the astronaut
human – in order to correct that flaw, our ability and need to sleep. For Crary, “The injuring of sleep is
inseparable from the ongoing dismantling of social protections in other
spheres.”
I’m awake now in the
old world, contemplating the injury – and how much coffee it takes to bandage
it – and wondering if I really was, yesterday morning, in the New World. What
day was that the morning of? And
thinking of the magnificent ending of Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus:
“Night which Pagan Theology could make the daughter of Chaos,71
affords no advantage to the description of order: Although no lower then that
Masse can we derive its Genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they
end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and
mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.
Though Somnus in Homer be
sent to rowse up Agamemnon,72
I finde no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes
open longer were but to act our Antipodes.73
The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first
sleep in Persia.74
But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? or
have slumbring thoughts at that time, when sleep it self must end, and as some
conjecture all shall awake again?”
Like many another whelp of the golden age of the American car, I remember drive in movies. In that toddlerhood which comes back to me in bits, a kind of primeval soup of dreamlike images, I remember suffering the passion of Ole Yeller at some drive in probably located, at the time, in the York Pennsylvania metro area, and now no doubt a parking lot or dump. There the dog faithfully defended its owners, there the dog, in a drizzle of images (sound via a gizmo one attached to the car door – and how my father, psychorigid about all things appertaining to paint scratches and fingerprints on windows, approved this I do not know), lived out the last of his, alas, one dog life, and there we cried. It is an incident, the popcorn, outdoor screen, car, that comes together as a hieroglyph of a certain kind of life, dead now as an Egyptian mummy. I also remember a certain erotic feeling aroused by another film from about the same time, a Disney film called, improbably, The Love Bug – could it have been about a Volkswagen? I’m not looking this up on IMDB. Let personal myth remain personal myth.
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In a novel the paperback version of which I often press on friends (where it is destined to gather dust, no doubt, an alien to be pitched out or traded when the time comes to get rid of the junk in the house), Lookout Cartridge, the narrator is obsessed by an image:
“Or the Landslip Drive-in Movie, whose monumental screen under clean and clement American stars and in front of you and a hundred other cars without audible warning one summer night began to lower, to tilt back hugely and drop as if into a slot in the earth.
The image became yours even more surely by disappearing. It disappeared with a distinguished rumble mixed with what still came out of the speaker draped over the edge of your car window. An actress and actor in the corrected colors of the spectrum had been touching each other’s colossal faces and their breaths kept coming faster and more intimately loud to bring right into your car this whopping slide of mouths and fingers and nostrils inserted into the night-pines and sea-sky above the locally well-known clay cliffs that had just enjoyed their first clear day in two weeks. But now for the first time since before World War II a section of cliff gives way and the famous faces are swept as if by their camera right up off the monumental screen…”
The author, Joseph McElroy, was obsessed, in this stage of his career, with the media-mediated collectivity of images just beyond the proprioceptive zone, images that we barely but distinctly recognize as part of our “experience”, that word no longer denoting our face to face and tactile immersion in what is, but the immersion in what is represented, our, so to speak, zones of interest as subcontracted to the prevailing media regime.
My experience of the drive in was renewed – and Adam’s was initiated – last night in a field outside of Jackson Iowa, easily reached by way of State Highway 71 from the Iowa Great Lakes region. Adam, on this trip to America, has been longing for a drive-in movie, an item on his extensive trip bucket-list. A storm made that impossible in Georgia. Here, though, was an apparently clear evening, so we drove out and Adam got the hotdog, popcorn, fries, coke and ice cream sandwich that lays a ring of sugar and fat around our spectatorship. I warned, just like Dad did long ago, against letting any of that stuff drip onto the car seat. The Drive-in movie screens look a little anamolous out there amidst the corn and soybean fields. The man at the booth told me that there were only 230 left in the whole of the States, and we both agreed it was Covid’s fault. Instead of a gizmo, what you do for the sound is you tune in to a dedicated FM channel. Sweet! And it was thus that we beheld the wonders of Disney’s Haunted Mansion, a remake, as Adam reminded us. It was fun and cheesy and at a certain point the clement sky was overshadowed by clouds and lightning began to play on the horizon – not a bad addition to a haunted house movie. Just as the hero was embracing the heroine in the inevitable ending, the rain began to fall. Thus, in an additional dollop to the memory this will become for Adam, the parents scouted their way cautiously through a cloudbuster of a storm, across various bridges. As a driver, I’m on the spectrum with the Ancient Mariner – so cautious I’m a danger, or at least an irritant, to the poor unfortunate behind me. So we crept the 14 miles to home. And so to bed.
13,000 years ago, the Lake
I look at from the dining room window would have been embodied in an ice sheet,
around 1300 feet thick, the 'Des Moines Glacial Ice Lobe'. A mere millenium
later, the ice wall had retreated north – glaciers have the attributes of
troops on a battlefield, they are always advancing or retreating – leaving the
depression into which water found its way.
The Ice Age! I love that
term, and associate it with the American contribution to geology – via Agassiz.
Who actually hypothesized the ice age in Switzerland.
‘On July 24, 1837, the
Societe Helvetique des Sciences Naturelles ha its annual meeting in Neuchatel
and Agassiz gave his opening addres known as the Discours de Neuchatel, which
is the starting point of that has been written on the Ice-Age.” This I break
off from Albert Carozzi’s “Agassiz’s Amazing Geological Speculation: the
Ice-Age.”
Like many a European
scientist, Louis Agassiz eventually came to the United States – in search of
proof for his glacial hypothesis. Carozzi sees, exactly, the romantic aesthetic
behind Agassiz’s striking proposal.
“During his stay in
America, Agassiz never lost sight of the traces glacial action, which had
caught his attention the moment he land in the fall of 1846. Here is a striking
account of his first impression:
"When the steamer
stopped at Halifax, eager to set foot on the new continent full of promise for
me, I sprang on shore and started at a brisk pace for the heig above the
landing. On the first undisturbed ground, after leaving the town, I w met by
the familiar signs, the polished surfaces, the furrows and scratches... so well
known in the Old World; and I became convinced of what I had already
anticipated as the logical sequence of my previous investigations, that here
also this great agent had been at work.”
We could be reading the
words of Dr. Frankenstein, in search of his great agent.
Hard to believe in ice on
this sunny morning. But I must mention one other great agent in this dimly
rhapsodic string: Marianne Moore. Her poem, the Octopus, is, to my mind, the
most enigmatic of the American attempts to saw the epic into a form fit for the
American tongue. It was one of John Ashberry’s totems, with its bristle of
indirections and the babble of its mysterious citations. No other poem gets so
close to seeing America as a poem, a geological, botanical, political epic,
with all its bloody edits. Eliot might quote Dante; Moore would quote “W. P.
Taylor, Assistant Biologist, Bureau of Biological Survey, U. S. Department of
Agriculture.”
Hard to believe in ice. The
lake bears its speedboats, water skiers, and lilly pads, made of some foamy
material, perfect tabs for young swimmers to leap around on. Last night, in the
storm, it was all bustling with white caps, and today it is placid and flat.
We’ll soon take a boat and dock over at Arnold’s Park and go to the Nutty Bar.
The Ice. It is melting in
the background, the planetary background, even as I type. But I like to think
of Agassiz and Moore today. Vacation is made of blissful, intentional
ignorances.
The fir trees in “the
magnitude of their root systems,”
rise aloof from these
maneuvers “creepy to behold,”
austere specimens of our
American royal families,
“each like the shadow of
the one beside it.”
Leon Edel makes a
shrewd juxtaposition between the fate of Charlotte Verver in the Golden Bowl
and the consequent voyage to America of the hero of his biographical trifecta, Henry James, quoting Fanny Assingham: “I see
the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country. State after State –
which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible.”
Henry James’s travels
in the U.S. in 1904, 21 years after he’d been there last, make up that bundle
of impressions, The American Scene. James is the Silenus of expatriates – we all
bow down to his altar, sooner of later. State after State – this was the great “subject”
he was after, another writer – like Kerouac or Whitman, Mailer or, why not,
Jane Smiley – in search of the real American thing, a story to pull out of the
terrible vastness. On his first day, disembarked in New Jersey, James could
already feel it:
Nothing was left, for
the rest of the episode, but a kind of fluidity of appreciation a mild, warm
wave that broke over the succession of aspects and objects according to some
odd inward rhythm, and often, no doubt, with a violence that there was little
in the phenomena themselves flagrantly to justify. It floated me, my wave, all
that day and the next ; so that I still think tenderly for the short backward
view is already a distance with "tone" of the service it rendered me
and of the various perceptive penetrations, charming coves of still blue water,
that carried me up into the subject, so to speak, and enabled me to step
ashore.”
What expat come home
has not surfed on that wave? Has not felt some lost familiarity in its motion
and temperature? Some intervening distance that puts one on one side, the stranger
at the party?
But Charlotte Verver
and Henry James came home from a Europe that was truly distant – when distance
was the experience of days and tossing currents, not of today’s menu of movies
and tv shows and jet lag – an utterly new experience of time. I arrived in
Atlanta a little sick, but soon cast off the threatened cold and plunged as directly
as I could, with a casting off of newspaper headlines, into the “subject”. It is
a plunging that requires cars, and getting used to vast, cathedral like grocery
stores all over again. For Adam, the New Jerusalem is all about his bucket list
of fast food places, as well as going, in Atlanta (and Athens, visiting his
cousins), to comic book stores and parks and even visiting the King memorial
down on Auburn Street. We are in Iowa now, and the bucket list consists of swimming for three hours a day in Lake Boji and amusement park rides in Arnold’s Park.
Myself, I am pretty
amazed by the unconscious affluence here, the cheapness in the Walmart and the
expensiveness of the restaurants; I’m tickled by the voices, by the way that
the grocery store clerk can decide to tell you the story of her dog’s funny
habits while ringing you up, just because; and I’m amazed at feeling so very
American myself, as through bursting through the thin layer of the French quotidian.
Feeling American does
not mean feeling kin to the official face America shows the world, or the unofficial
American buzz on social media. I know that’s there. That’s always there. But
that is not the wave. The wave is what I am interested in, more, at the moment.
1.
Truism, under the pressure
of such intelligence, an intelligence that I would suggest is “modern”, reveals
itself as unheimlich, uncanny. It brings out, so to speak, the truth’s
unconscious lie, in bringing out the system in which the truth operates.
I mentioned Kraus, but
I could mention Swift. Swift is, of course, an odd liminal figure in the rise
of the modern, being committed as he was to the ancient. But the tools he employed,
from picaresque satire to the essay-prank to the adventure novel, are all very
modern – as is his prose, a prose that could have been recommended by the
historian of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat. As a complete social fact, a
surroundsound of all possible circumstances, the modern can only be fought, by
the reactionary – and Kraus falls in
this character often enough – by taking
up shock, the most modernist stylistic device. It is a style that begins to
diffuse through cultures that, for one reason or another, contain massive
demographics that are existentially offended by the modern.
I diverge, I diverge
from the question I meant to pose at the very beginning, the question about the
truism about the true: by what measure is the truth stranger than fiction? In
fact, the formalists say that making strange, estrangement, is one of the great
devices of art to advance the “true” – in the sense of the authentic. Truth,
here, emerges from the particular to the level of the entire circumstance, or
the Gestalt. Skhlovskii defines that
strangeness as a form of de-routinization. A part of the world – a tree, say –
is given a presence that seems to depart from the routines to which trees in
the human world are subject – chopping them down, planting them in groves or
along streets, cooling ourselves in their shade, etc. The tree in Tolstoy’s
short piece, Three deaths, for instance, is given a more tragic and meaningful
death than the two human beings who also die in the sketch, even though the
tree is in no way anthropomorphized.
And is this only a
fictional device? Isn’t it rather one of the great devices of journalism? Here
is a field where, surely, the claim that fiction is less strange than truth is
abundantly verified by the truths that pour off the newspaper page or, now, the
cable tv – internet!
Yet these outrageous,
scandalous or simply weird truths gain that quality partly through the aids of
fiction, through being mediated by devices that are, in their nature,
rhetorical. The ancestor of the news, that unwelcome primitive at our table, is
rumor. And rumor, as any glance at the recent history of the U.S. – or any “Western”
country – will show, is a mighty force still, not a vanquished oral phenomenon
of the villages. The blood of the serfs runs within us.
2.
There are the truths
that we know, and the truths that we fear.
Although rumor is
characteristically “word of mouth”, the letter and the vocable are not so
easily divided, one from the other.
In B. Janine’s “memories of a private detective”, published
in Police Magazine in 1935, there is a story about a detective agency in Paris
that drummed up business by sending anonymous letters to various likely
clients, and then sending advertisements for the agency that mentioned, among
the agency’s specialties, the tracking down of the truth of anonymous letters.
This strategy was
eventually exposed by the police, with the help of another private detective: “This
singular agency had to close its doors. Its director confessed that by this
little game, he had garnered 100,000 francs per month.”
France has a strong
culture of the anonymous letter. Poison pen epistoliers even have a nickname: corbeau –
crow – from the movie by Clouzot, which was based on the famous case of Angele
Laval, who between 1917 and 1921 flooded
her village, Tulle, with 13,000
inhabitants, with a constant stream of anonymous
denunciations – at least one hundred letters have been counted - that caused a panic. “ The apotheosis of this
odious campaign was achieved in 1921, when a large poster was pasted up on the
door of a local theater, on which were listed the names of 14 illegitimate
couples, which is, at that time, evidently of the nature to provoke a scandal.”
When Angele was put under investigation, she really showed her true psycho
colors: she « convinced her mother
to commit a double suicide with her in a local pont. But everything indicates
that, in reality, she never had any intention of putting the quietus to her
life. Her mother drowned herself under Angele’s eyes who watched her drown
without ever immersing herself totally in the water.”
Surrealism, as we all
know, was just realism in France.
Rumor by letter has a
voice – or a distinct graphology. A criminologist named Edmond Locard became a
celebrity for, among other things, his graphological detecting – notes,
letters, jottings all revealed their authors before his eyes. The slant of the “t”,
the capital letter “E” – these, given a larger writing sample, would sort
themselves out prettily, leading to the perpetrator.
In one of his famous
interwar cases, he intervened in another corbeau-esque panic in 1933 in Toulon. In this
case, the accused was again a woman – Germaine Pouliot – and Locard pursued her
relentlessly through the “buckles of her Ts”. These letters apparently lead to
Germaine – although she had an odd defender in Aux Ecoutes. Aux
Ecoutes fascinates me: that Maurice Blanchot edited this scandal sheet, known
for publishing rumors and for orienting itself to an audience of stock market
punters, is rather like Maurice Blanchot editing National Enquirer in its glory
years. Alas, in Blanchot scholarship, attention has fixed on his essays in the
paper, his columns, rather than the context.
In the Toulon case,
the “corbeau” was particularly malevolent with the wife of a well known lawyer,
Madame Septier, accusing her of adultery and general lasciviousness. The
journalist from Aux Ecoutes takes as his starting point, oddly enough,
that Toulon is a veritable Sodom, where bourgeois families go to church and
then the local brothel together – etc. What really infuriates this anonymous
journalist, however, is the supposed method of the famed Locard.
“Dr. Locard, in his
report, claimed that all the buckles of the T were always shortened in the
anonymous letters, as in the letters of the accused. To the courtroom Madame de
Rous showed him one of the threatening letters, which contained 26 instances of
the letter T. 17 times the “always” of Dr. Locard is wrong.”
In spite of this,
Germaine Pouliot was condemned – although the sentence was only a suspended six month sentence. But as Aux Ecoutes noted,
in 1934 – by which time Blanchot was the editor – the sentence was overturned
when it was discovered in Pouliot’s dossier some documents containing certain words resembling those of the poison letters
that were definitely not Pouliot’s letters. The judge of the appeals court agreed,
as did the prosecutor. As the newspaper noted: “Rarely has the problem of the
responsibility of experts and the reform of expertise been posed in terms as
troubling as this!”
3.
In the intersection
between rumor and text culture, between the courtroom and the mailbox, it is
true: the methods of truth are as strange as the methods fiction. Or, to quote
from the “Postman of the Truth” concerning letters, purloined or not – a matter addressed by the great masters, from Poe to Lacan to
Derrida - “it belongs to the structure
of the letter to be capable, always, of not arriving…”
