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.