Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, by Rosemarie Waldrop. Wesleyan University Press, 2003. $17.95.
State of Siege [El Sitio de los Sitios], by Juan Goytisolo. City Lights Books, 2002. $13.95.
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, by Stewart Home. Canongate Books, 2003. $13.00.
Obsession, like theory, requires an object. Through detritus and distraction, each rationalizes its desire and a viewpoint to formalize the connection. What constitutes this relation and permeates the chain of commitments is the subject: author, character, individual, the dense singularity declaring itself in the pursuit of its interests. Futility lingers at the edges of this subject because of the difficulty or impossibility of sustaining its grasp. Modern literature attests to this paradox; so too most lovers of literature, who tether their own desire to the enigmatic conditions of the literary text that furiously pitches forth its intended relations, desires, and functions. In the end, such works gather up an incandescence that burns with failure, the occasional epiphany, and transitive joys. Only certain haute-y critics presume that these aspects lie askew to our appreciation and are lodged in a secret anatomy unexpressed to the common reader, in a zone of concealed interpretation to be extruded and damningly denuded. Let’s politely refrain from their high-minded self-regardings and remind ourselves that aporia is in the model and the making, not the epistemological dissection and the discourse shouted from beyond. Theory is complicit, though with nary a confession of its own limits, in the virtual non-alignment of subject and object — a discordance that in fiction becomes an expression of human and literary fragility and achievement, enduring conditions inside and outside that surround, engulf, and often inflict the blunt-force trauma of reality.
These three volumes attest to the wounds of the word and the world. Their formulation of identity exposes their patent weaknesses and the forms of their repose disintegrate quietly. All depend, in their different visions, on non-attainable objects; in each these are texts and bodies who are absent and present, unreachable and unrecoverable, recessive in memory and emergent as conscious dream. They are known only as fragments, x-rays, and ciphers of intelligibility and invisibility. But this is sufficient for their diverse concerns. Identifying the object becomes a relentless method and a hopeless case. An awareness of the inadequacy of the procedure and the suffering it induces brings clarity to their projects: communicating unease and solace as partners on the chase for certainty and rebuffed at the gates of ambiguity, fictions as a form to extrapolate the living encounter with dead meanings and inassimilable experience. From these tensions emerges the momentum of narrative as an intelligible device for handling the ineffable; insufficient, it doubles back on itself as meta-narrative, mimicking its ordeals, finally becoming non-narrative: an exploded mosaic. The economy of these tensions and movements highlights the exquisite pinpoints of self-preserving instinct as it acquiesces in the bereaved knowledge of its incompetence. In The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa bemoans and exults in the wounds afflicted in this effort: “The fiction follows me, like my shadow. And what I want is to sleep.”
Egyptian-born, French-based writer Edmond Jabès (1912-1991), the subject of poet/translator Rosemarie Waldrop’s meditative essay, wrote several disquieting books that share Pessoa’s penchant for truncated observation, interrogations of textual matters, and the self-referencing capitalization of the Book, evoking authority and enigma, the sacred and mysterious: The Book of Questions, The Book of Resemblances, The Book of Limits. Jabès’s work and life are the subjects of Waldrop’s text as they evade and intrude on her understanding of her longtime friend and literary collaborator. It is a work of love and collaboration, posthumous only in the sense of his literal passing. His words inform hers, and together, they perform a recapitulation of the man and the work, encircling, mirroring, and occasionally interrupting one another. As homage and hermeneutic, this intertextual dialogue befits the finest autobiographical model of a writer. The intimate nature resembles memoir — of both Jabès and Waldrop, with their words accruing intimacies and difficulties of their own, sharing and separating from the life of these individual authors in their desires for a poetic language in which to live.
The imperative of finding a home in the world and the language shape this present volume and all of Jabès’s work. A Jew displaced from Nasser’s Egypt, Jabes sought refuge in the word, a provenance to be settled even by the exile, allowing the writer to create and be created without incursion. Here is where Jabès found a territory felicitous to his needs, a space to question and inhabit, repose and inscribe. “The Jew has for centuries questioned his truth,” Jabès tells Waldrop, “which has become the truth of questioning.” The imaginative space that Jabès was after is never beyond the book — it is the book itself. His attentiveness to the materiality of the Word, the pages turned or torn, the graphic signature denoting and denying a stable presence beneath the gaze and beyond it, are tangible articles of faith that represent an arrest of despair, rather than an arrival at certainty. The book then offers a way of undertaking the profanations of the world by distilling them in a more legible form, a text in which to encounter, but not disperse, their effects and the currencies of language which might redeem them. Neither meaning nor the self are affirmed, for Jabès is intent on exploring the fragments that issue from their displacement and their inscriptions from the book of life, whose inversion in the text refuses identity projects or consoling practices. What can be found there is a voice alighting itself in a realm of possible answers, riddles, and questions, raising itself above the quandary of existence and the din of silence, raising itself to understand itself.
But from the start, lying in secret, is the wound: “Mark the first page of the book with a red marker for in the beginning the wound is invisible.” This wound is the obstacle of origins, the otherness of suffering, the difference of individuated humanity. Its pain is the elusiveness of the pain’s source, objectless because devoid of causality, irremediable because it is a prime constituent of the human order. The wound of the text reproduces this pain, concentrates it, and relates it back as a lexicon whose alphabets are legible, but not fully so. There is no authoritative subject (neither author, character, or collective humanity) to be invoked or created, because such a presence would assume that interpretation of the wound is possible, that an interpreter could prevail, whereas too little of the known is known, or can be reasonably articulated. The ensuing absence is merely an echo of the original mystery that resumes its authority and lets no other compete. Waldrop’s book is truly lavish in celebrating Jabès and underscoring the central ethos of his life’s work.
While Jabes’s pages are runes on which to spread the mystery wider, Juan Goytisolo’s State of Siege compresses the mystery of his fiction into the actuality of 1990s Sarajevo. Once again, even an ostensible singular subject is indecipherable, longed after, and yet forbidden. A traveler, only known by the initials ‘J.G.,’ has been shot in his hotel room by a sniper. The body is recovered and then lost. The questions of who J.G. is and where he is now lies with a notebook left in his room and communiqués of a presiding general. The notebook contains sketches, stories, and poems, all apparently by the dead author’s hand. However, the poems, political and homoerotic in content, prove identical to a Medieval Arab poet, Ben Sidi Abu Al-Makarim. Identities loom then dovetail without certitude, anonymity links the dead with the dead, and Spanish, Arabic, and Yugoslavian cultures collapse in the brutal concentrics of brutal history, past and present. The text that doubles itself should convey some knowledge of the catastrophe in Sarajevo and its dual creators. Instead, it only confirms each subject undefined and makes infinite and repetitive its historical meanings and the possible characteristics of the writers of its words.
Goytisolo masters the atmosphere of modern war by complementing its visceral grid with the elegiac summons of memory. When violence erupts, it releases the force of historical memory with an abrupt cri de couer, not locatable in either this cry or heart entirely, arising as the pleading utterance of a nameless humanity. This communal spirit usurps the individual subject, whose narration is absorbed into its character: “Was he witnessing — or participating in? — the gradual extinction, the slow consumption of objects, bodies, and souls? His own immateriality was summed up in what his own gaze revealed: whiteness and devastation.” This convergence of the immaterial and eternal in the immediate spectacle of a woman shot in the street does not suggest the mere slippage of a subject elaborating itself; rather, the elision of subjective presence underscores Goytisolo’s attempt to fuse consciousness with conscience, and conjoin the participant of the nameless, present narrator with the historical victims, with whom he is apart and to whom he shall return. The reader is also asked to contemplate this conjunction and accede to the call of witness it serves. It is a collaboration of commitment. Describing the same murder later, one is asked to consider this selfless proposition: “The bullet has gone through her neck, blood is running out and dyeing the snow red. The past is being repeated and reprinted in the present: no one escapes fate and its natural cruelty. The delicate hands clutching the bag exist only in your mind. You do not need to open it to know what is inside. You will never hear the notes being played on the piano again.” This centering of “You” here is a non-accusatory moral summons, erasing the boundaries surrounding “I” and “They.” Employing “reprinted” in the service of historical reminder, Goytisolo enshrines his historical fiction with its textual reality. The book becomes a chronicle of atrocity and remembrance. The memento mori , then, is no single identity and established in no one place; the mourning is all encompassing and spoken over all. It is the book itself.
The tribalism that fostered the despicable events in Sarajevo had little to do with class politics. Complicity in the violence depended on a sectarian cast of cultural orientation and, quite possibly here, the reviled bourgeoisie — legitimate scapegoat for many of our worldwide ills — is more or less off the hook. Or at least should be treated with some leniency. In literary terms, this is not usually the case. Intellectuals decry the bourgeois subject in fiction, centered amid disruption, conventional in outlook and wisdom, spouting pieties and prosaic sophistries, written by an author who shares the subject’s confidence in his worldview. Imaginative art should transgress this realm of middle-class tedium and get on with the project of creating worlds, rather than reflecting them too honestly. I agree with the sentiment, while challenging its assumption that modern fiction has been derelict in this advancement. The bourgeois subject gets deflected quite often now, perhaps not in the banal, middlebrow books that pass for quality these days, but often enough.
I, too, may have my qualms about the approach of most literature to the nature of its subjects, and the spate of incorrigible Average Joe/Josephines paraded about as examples of convincing real-life characters and experience, instead of, what they most often are: types without embodied gravity and symptoms of a narrow frame of reference. However, my scorn cannot match the bilious heights of Stewart Home’s condemnations. 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess is a wicked critique of the bourgeois subject, an assault that turns into onslaught (“Alan had been raped by those who’d forced himself to constitute himself as a bourgeois subject…”). The twenty-year old narrator, Anna, meets a man who “no longer called himself Callum,” a bibliophile named Alan, who has written a book entitled 69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess. He seems intent on ending his life and engaging in polymorphous sex with Anna, random Scottish hitchhikers, and a ventriloquist’s dummy. As he lambastes contemporary authors and holds forth on theoretical issues, he and Anna visit ancient stone circles in the North of Scotland. In the course of discourse, there is intercourse and, in the course of intercourse, revolutions of rhetoric that complement the revolutions around the stones. Part criticism, travelogue, polemic, and pornographic treatise, Home’s rant of a book combines these genres into a fiction exposing the fragile casing called subjectivity (“He wanted to lose his subjectivity, wreak crystal revenge, but his fatal strategy hadn’t reached fruition yet”) and the inevitable crisis of subject, tending to either egoist self-absorption and extinction, or a scattering of its shards across its cultural expanse.
The dead princess is the redundant Princess Di, whose corpse symbolizes, or presages, the extinction of traditional literary practices: “The body of a dead princess as a metaphor for literature. Works of condensation and displacement. Living out the death of these fantasies in blasted and blistered night, we were consumed by the turning of the page…” Whether Home counts himself among the disposable is unclear. However, this book’s premise at least guarantees him mercy. Like Jabes, Waldrop, and Goytisolo, his obsession is the text, the text as metaphor for the body, both text and body evading meanings even while creating them. For all the credit given to modern theory and its cachet of terms to point the way, the writing on the wall was there all along, which is to say the texts themselves. These three very disparate works reveal this truth remarkably.