divagation after Herschel Farbmann

“The end, the end.”—Paul Griffiths, let me tell you.

In the late nineteenth century, the psychophysicist Gustav Theodor Fechner speculated thus about immortality: Before birth, our life in the womb is nothing but sleep; during life, we alternate between sleep and waking, though sleeping less and less as we age; therefore after death, so Fechner reasoned, our immortal life can consist of nothing but endless waking. Fechner’s insomniacal eternity is at once horrible and comic: a blaze of nonstop alertness, a gibbering manic restlessness without end.[1] Nonetheless, in Fechner’s vision, beyond the alternation of sleep and waking, beyond the opposition of life and death, what obtains is not their admixture (grogginess? quasi-animation?), but something that goes on after the end. If death had long been pictured as the brother of sleep—a darker, longer sleep—Fechner revealed a profound uneasiness in that endless night.

There is no reason to think that Beckett or Blanchot ever read Fechner, but it is as if they had continued Fechner’s work, refining his idea by freeing it of its trammeling teleological schema. Their writings uncover something watchful that goes on waking or dreaming, speaking or writing, after the end.[2] But they don’t locate this watchful something only after death; their writings uncover it in the heart of night, and even beneath the calm of day. In Death Sentence, the narrator notices that J’s sleep has “the strange trait of scattering in an instant,” so that “behind her sleep” J “seemed to remain awake” (45/26). Shortly before the second of her two deaths, J wakes in just this way: “though her eyelids were lowered…she went on waking [elle veilla],” the narrator says, a phrase that suggests nothing punctual (on the order of “she woke up”), but something durative, ongoing: elle veilla, as if to say, she waked the night through, she kept watch, she went on “vigiling” behind her sleep (47).[4] A similarly unending restlessness is evident in Beckett’s The Unnamable, in the book’s endless ending, the oft-quoted “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Out of context, this phrase tends to sound heroic, in a Man of La Mancha mode, a pledge that this narrator will never say die. But from the book’s first page it is clear that The Unnamable’s restlessness is an impersonal one, evident in the tightly compressed and polysemic “off it goes on” (premier pas va) (291/7). “Off it goes,” it’s underway, but also: its first step (premier pas) puts an end to going (pas va); “off, it goes on”: behind sleep, J goes on waking; unable to lift his hand to write, the unnamable can only go on writing.

[1] Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode, (Insel-Verlag zu Leipzig, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/44575/44575-h/44575-h.htm ) Kathryn Davis, in her novel Labrador, could almost have been writing about Fechner’s ideas when she described insomnia as “the wish to be immortal, granted by an ass.” But where did I get the Fechner anecdote? Kittler? Rickels? 

[2] This formulation, and this insight, and indeed this whole post, are indebted to Herschel Farbman’s book on Beckett and Blanchot, which calls the watchful something “restlessness.” 

[3] Scene/summary distinction and Davis’s translation.

[4] Or, more common-sensically, “she lay awake,” as Lydia Davis’s translation has it. But “keeping watch” is also an important sense of “veillir.”

[5] Reference Farbman and the Beckett passage. 

From the start of The Unnamable, as the unnamable watches Beckett’s fictional character Murphy pass by, we are tempted to call this relation between a narrator and his “vice-existers” a reflexivity; it’s the text’s self-awareness. Awareness and reflection, mirrors and knowledge, the classical terms of mise-en-abîme, may not be the best description of the unnamable’s dream of a semblable—subjective and objective genitive combine: the dream a semblable has; one’s dream about a semblable.

Late in The Unnamable, the unnamable is speculating that “they” might come to coax him out—out of where he is, out of his immobility, into their world. He can’t go and won’t go, but this refusal is passive. Should “they” come, they won’t find a stalwart resistant, holding out: “let them come and get me, they’ll find nothing, then they can depart, with an easy mind.” But they might not all show up at once; they might send only a representative (they have their “vice-existers” too, it seems):

“And if there is only one, like me”—if they send only one—“he too can leave without remorse, having done all he could, and even more, to achieve the impossible and so lost his life, or stay here with me, he might do that, and so be a like for me [ça me ferait un semblable], that would be lovely, my first like, that would be epoch-making [ça ferait date], to know I had a like [me savoir un semblable: to know myself a semblable], a congener, he wouldn’t have to be like me, he couldn’t but be like me [il n’aurait pas besoin de me ressembler, il me ressemblerait, forcément],"

Their vice-exister would not “be” a like for the unnamable, or not only: ça me ferait un semblable means both “that would make a like for me” and “that would make a like of me.” The translation, too, reverses something in the French, the unnamable’s knowledge: “to know I had a like” is me savoir un semblable: to know myself a semblable. Far from knowing he has a like, the unnamable knows himself a like. But this self-knowledge, too, is something other than the classical "know thyself." It's an unknowing, an unconscious, a dream: 

he’d dissappear, he’d know nothing either, there we’d be the two of us [there; having disappeared, they would be there], unbeknown to ourselves, unbeknown to each other [chacun à son insu, à l’insu l’un de l’autre], that’s a darling dream I’ve been having, a broth of a dream [c’est un beau rêve que je viens de faire là, un excellent rêve]. And it’s not over. [Et qui n’est pas fini.]

An involution: because the dream is not yet over, the dream the unnamable has been having (or the dream he has just now “made,” in the French text) now comprises the narration as well—narration of the dream, narration of the whole novel, the writing of all that the unnamable writes that he cannot lift his hand from his knee to write, all this is folded into the dream. We could call this reflexivity, a self-aware text, but the figure the unnamable brings before us is not that of knowing: “each to his unknowing” [my own translation of chacun à son insu], unbeknown, the one to the other [à l’insu l’un de l’autre].

Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” contrasts the collective wisdom (counsel, Rat) once found in stories with the communicated information found in modern novels. Only at the end can a novel point beyond its limitations, namely, its lack of counsel, but the novel can only point. Of L’Education sentimentale’s ending, Benjamin writes: “The novelist… cannot hope to take the smallest step beyond the limit at which he invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing ‘Finis’” (page). 

Having no counsel about life, modern novels can proffer only the protagonist’s death, as if the novel’s invitation—‘Finis’—were always written on a dying character’s forehead: Benjamin again: “What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” 

In Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying, one of the speakers in the dialogue, Vivian, hyperbolically praises the warmth a fictional death yields: “One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.” 

Can't really keep up this silly august academic tone. Though I don't have another.

Stoekel, in his intro to his translation of The Most High, writes as if Blanchot's novel is about the Sunday of life, the end of history--as if it were the novelization of Kojeve's reading of Hegel.--I'm sure I meant something by this, meant to go somewhere. It'll come back to me. 

I couldn't say, with Vivian, that the deaths of J in Death Sentence are among the greatest tragedies of my life. At least, not the way Vivian seems to mean it. Vivian goes on to say that Balzac created life, he did not copy it. But on the other hand, yes, those tendernesses in Death Sentence, the outbursts of anger, the struggle, my real fidelity to the quasi-fictional oath that comprises the suppressed ending of Death Sentence (the post-script about the task of the reader)--those haunt me. 

Me, too, Viv. Me too. 

Une scène de théâtre montrant ce qui arrivait après la fin.—Volodine, Terminus radieux. 

“the voice is failing… that’s how it will end again, I’ll go silent, for want of air, then the voice will come back and I’ll begin again. My voice. The voice. I hardly hear it any more. I’m going silent. Hearing this voice no more, that’s what I call going silent. Then it will flare up, a kindling fire, a dying fire. … I’m going to stop, that is to say, I’m going to look as if I had, it will be like everything else” (The Unnamable). 

Is this fibrillating around the end the same thing as the “after the end” in Terminus radieux? (“Terminus radieux”: scabrous inversion of the communist paradise, the lendemain radieux.) Well, there’s no lack of “fibrillating” in Terminus radieux, and by fibrillating I mean the flare of a kindling-dying fire, or the way that going on after the end looks like everything else: Terminus radieux is full of mort-vivants, irradiated dream life, and the Second Soviet Union (also fallen). 

There’s a Kafka-like fable in The Unnamable (though it’s not a “Kafka-esque” fable, if that means to be caught in pitiless and absurd bureaucratic machinations [“That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else should be asked of me? But the absurd!”]):--This is the fable: word of the end will come, or rather, word that the last word has already been said will come, if it comes at all, via messenger. That messenger has gone to his master in the desert. (A bit before the fable properly begins, we get the figure of the master in the desert: “And if there is only one, he will depart all alone, towards his master, and his long shadow will follow him across the desert, it’s a desert, that’s news… Oh, it’s not necessarily the Sahara, or Gobi, there are others…”) And until the messenger returns from the desert with the master’s verdict (ver-dict) on what’s been said, the voice goes on, its pauses looking like endings, its resurgences looking like continuations. 

In Volodine, there’s a sense of the story's having begun long after a historical catastrophe: which catastrophe, though, and whose history, the history of what civilization, that remains unknown or unknowable. 

“We gain our knowledge of life in a catastrophic form. It is from catastrophes that we have to infer the manner in which our social formation functions. Through reflection, we must deduce the ‘inside story’ of crises, depressions, revolutions, and wars. We already sense from reading the newspapers (but also bills, letters of dismissal, call-up papers and so forth) that somebody must have done something for the evident catastrophe to have taken place. So what then has been done and by whom? Behind the reported events, we suspect other occurrences about which we are not told. These are the real occurrences. If we knew these incidents, we would understand. Only History can inform us about these real occurrences – insofar as the protagonists have not succeeded in keeping them completely secret. History is written after catastrophes. The basic situation, in which intellectuals feel that they are objects and not subjects of History, forms the thought, which they can display for enjoyment in the crime story. Existence depends upon unknown factors. ‘Something must have happened’, ‘something is brewing’, ‘a situation has arisen’ – this is what they feel, and the mind goes out on patrol. But enlightenment only comes, if at all, after the catastrophe. The death has taken place. What had been fermenting beforehand? What had happened? Why has a solution arisen? All this can now be deduced.”—Bertolt Brecht, ‘On the Popularity of the Crime Novel’ (quoted in Ernest Mandel, Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story)[via Cartographies of the Absolute]

“The mind goes out on patrol.” In The Unnamable, the mind that has gone out on patrol (or the mind that has stayed in on patrol, in a room, in a jar)—that mind has company, in the form of the voice, or the noise (“there is I, on the one hand, and this noise on the other, … I and this noise…”), or the vice-existers (“Perhaps it is Molloy, wearing Malone’s hat. … To tell the truth, I believe they are all here, from Murphy on, I believe we are all here, but so far I have only seen Malone”). 

That’s not what I meant.

In The Unnamable, the mind goes out on patrol, or stays in (“with what would I patrol?” one can hear the unnamable asking), but nothing can now be deduced, contra Brecht’s paraphrase of the crime novel’s narrative poetics: “All this can now be deduced.” It may be that we underestimate Beckett, in understanding the unnamable’s predicament as an epistemelogical one, one that satirizes philosophizing (“if only they’d stop committing reason”); it’s also a literary predicament: a bare, an excoriated state of being-fictional: 

“he feels me in him, then he says I, as if I were he, or in another, let us be just, then he says Murphy, or Molloy, I forget, as if he were Malone, but their day is done, he wants none but himself, … it’s always he who speaks, Mercier never spoke, Moran never spoke, I never spoke, I seem to speak, that’s because he says I as if he were I, I nearly believed him, do you hear him, as if he were I, I who am far..”

I seem to speak, that’s because he says I as if he were I... My own mind has perhaps gone out on patrol, or is carousing with the rest of the arrière-garde, perhaps when it comes back something better will be written. 

Je finirai peut-être par être très entouré, dans un capharnaüm.—Beckett, L’Innommable.

Life emerges from non-life, but at the cost of an unexperiencable death (a trauma, writes Caruth). Life cannot assume that death, not even by dying (writes Brassier). At the same time, the unassimilable death is not in a forever receding future—it’s here, it’s inside (a dead and scarred-over ‘vesicle,’ writes Freud; it’s the remnant of monocellular life that sacrificed itself in the furnace of unassimilable experience). As such, the impossible death happens, despite its being impossible; happens all the more, recurs: “Oui, nous sommes liés au désastre, mais quand l’échec revient, il faut entendre que l’échec est justement ce retour. Le recommencement, comme puissance antérieure au commencement, c’est cela, l’erreur de notre mort (Blanchot, L’Éspace littéraire).

The anterior is lost: there is no emergence and no beginning, only a continuing. This is the logic that animates (or re-animates) the fictions of Beckett and Blanchot. Molloy doesn’t know how he came to the room; neither does Malone; and as for the unnamable, not only does he begin (or continue) by asking where now, who now, when now, but the beginning of his narrative is lost to him, too: “Can it be that one day, off it goes on, that one day I simply stayed in, instead of going out, in the old way, out to spend the day and night as far away as possible, it wasn’t very far. Perhaps that is how it began.”

Writing emerges from non-writing, wakes up with its “death” already behind it—unconscious, unassimilable experience of death—and also inside it, a recurring end. For Friedrich Kittler, the nature of that non-writing is determined by the media age: around 1800, poetry emerges from the pure “O” of expressivity, the O that is the soul’s call; around 1900, writing emerges by differing from nonsense, from a kind of machinic/echolaliac stutter (think Dada, think Christian Morgenstern, though what registers as ‘nonsense’ in Europe around 1900 tends to be Africa or the New World: “Der Architekt jedoch entfloh/ nach Afri- od- Ameriko.” Or a better example, Stevens’s “Yillow, yillow, yillow,” in the poem “Metamorphosis.”)

In neither case—the O of expressivity, the jibber of nonsense—is it a matter of writing’s opposite. The differentiation that produces writing also exceeds it,* and the name of that excess might be O, might be nonsense, might be “persecutory prehensilism,” the hand that grasps and halts the writing hand (Blanchot). Or, in the case of Beckett’s unnamable, narrative emerges from and repeatedly terminates in the capharnaüm: “Je finirai peut-être par être très entouré, dans un capharnaüm,” considers the unnamable at the beginning of the novel. The English translation has “throng”: “perhaps I shall smother in a throng.” But the capharnaüm is not only a throng (a mass of unrelated, disunited persons); it’s also a place of massed, unrelated, useless things. The definition from Reverso—“endroit en désordre, où s'entassent de nombreux objets, l'ensemble de ces objets”—sounds like nothing so much as Benjamin’s descriptions of the Baroque stage, littered with ruined objects in a state of decay.

*[this isn’t quite right, oracular and vague, and “excess” is all wrong] 

Life emerges from non-life, but at the cost of an unexperiencable death (a trauma, writes Caruth). Life cannot assume that death, not even by dying (writes Brassier). At the same time, the unassimilable death is not forever receding future—it’s here, it’s inside (a dead and scarred-over ‘vesicle,’ writes Freud; the remnant of monocellular life that sacrificed itself in the furnace of unassimilable experience, overwhelming stimuli.) The anterior is lost: there is no emergence and no beginning, only a continuing. This is the logic that animates (or re-animates) the fictions of Beckett and Blanchot. Molloy doesn’t know how came to the room; nor does Malone; and as for the unnamable, not only does he begin (or continue) by asking where now, who now, when now, but the anterior is lost to him, too: “Can it be that one day, off it goes on, that one day I simply stayed in, instead of going out, in the old way, out to spend the day and night as far away as possible, it wasn’t very far. Perhaps that is how it began.” In Blanchot’s Death Sentence, the lost anterior is the text of the story that is present in the world of the story—but present as absent, as destroyed or lost, commanded to be burnt or locked away: “I must not forget that I once managed to put these things into writing. … Inactive, in a state of lethargy, I wrote this story. But once it was written I reread it and destroyed the manuscript.” 

In the first part of Death Sentence, the written story exists in the world of the story, but as absent: as destroyed, abandoned, or forbidden.

“Plusieurs fois déjà, j’ai tenté de leur [les évènements] donner une forme écrite. » But the attempts are abandoned : the narrator destroys the manuscript he has just written. Aussitot j’étruisit cet manuscrit.  But it also exists, not just as destroyed, but as locked away and forbidden : « I have kept “living” proof of these events. … I hope those who love me will have the courage to destroy it, without trying to learn what it means.”

At the outset of the second part of Death Sentence, the written story exists in the world of the story: “After these events, several of which I have recounted—but I am still recounting them now…” Everything said in Blanchot, as in all literature, is writing. Still, this written story exists in the world of the story primarily as an absence: “The only strong point was my silence” and

“…I who am now speaking turn bitterly to those silent days, those silent years, as to an inaccessible, unreal country, closed off from everyone, and most of all from myself, yet where I have lived during a large part of my life, without exertion, without desire, by a mystery which astonishes me now.” 

Writers

At 3:AM Magazine, a review of Volodine's newly translated Writers.

The review mentions The Unnamable, but the real Beckett intertext for Writers might be Krapp's Last Tape: "Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas. Getting known."

Getting known. In Beckett's French translation La Dernière bande, which came after: "Dix sept exemplaires de vendus, dont onze au prix de gros à des bibliothèques municipales d'au-delà les mers. En passe d'être quelqu'un."