To offer the most disarming enigma because one is absolutely silent (and, furthermore, reduced to a state about which there is nothing to reveal); to be an eye all the less tolerable because, deprived of vision, it is nothing but an eye seen. A potential phantom or zombie, an apparition in any case (since, without thought or gaze, he is a human form who merely appears), the dead person, by his very inertia, occupies the center of the stage. In order to play his character suitably, he has only to maintain a certain style, which is the reason for those more and less complicated measures that may extend to embalming, as though we were afraid that any slovenliness in his grooming would force us to see death in all its obscene nakedness, something of which the majority of mankind has not shown itself capable in any known civilization up to the present. Yet, is it inconceivable to imagine a type of education that would accustom one to regard death as too natural a thing to clothe in such alarming colors as these? And shouldn’t one—for the very reason that death is regarded as tragic by them and represents, in sum, the crucial experience—judge deficient societies in which the norm is to be deceitful about it and to try, as much for oneself as for another, to elude it by means of a lie: belief in immortality or something resembling it, fallacious speeches designed to be employed on ill people for whom there is no hope when one wishes to hide from them the fact that, if they have some declaration in extremis to make, it is high time to prepare themselves to utter their last words?
I myself believe that my persistent incapacity to control my obsession with death prevents me from being altogether a man and even, in some way, from existing: nothing, in my eyes, can be worth my dying since everything, for me, is devalued by the fact that at the end of everything is my death; now, if nothing can make me forget that I must die and if there exists nothing for love—or liking—of which I feel prepared to confront death, I am dealing only with nothingness and all is reduced to zero at the same moment, myself not excepted. Free of all true passion, all vice, and even all ambition, I am, while I am still alive, subject to a torpor similar to that of the museum figures who once intruded into my sleep, and the acts that I perform are scarcely more than the gestures of an automaton or the mechanical works of a zombie, as though fear, by obliterating everything in me, had transformed me here and now into that bodily frame without consciousness that I am so afraid of becoming. The prescience of the sickening moment when everything will vanish—as the ground disappears from under the feet of a person tumbling into the darkness of a secret dungeon—is enough to make me, reduced as I am to the abstraction of a geometric point, the center of a cottony sort of world inhabited now only by vague forms, except for those, all too distinct for my taste, in which I believe I read a threat. In my ears, nothing sings any longer and, for a number of years now, even my nights have very rarely been animated by dreams: it is as though everything not confined within the limits of the serious frightens me, like a sin with fatal repercussions whose aftereffects could only hasten my ruin. Couldn’t it have been the result of too much frivolity that the volcano reduced the inhabitants of Saint-Pierre to ashes after Les Cloches de Corneville and their noisy harmonies echoing the multitudes of laughter rising from one spot or another through the carnivals?
Whether my failure has caused me to acquire, on the other hand—since it is an ill wind that blows no good—a certain ability to see things in an unemotional and positive way, or whether for me, nowadays, everything tends to center upon the pivotal point of what continues to terrify me, or whether the dream to which her silent reproach apposed a paraph is now too distant to move me, the vision that I had of that woman who for some time already had no longer been central to my life and who showed me her bloody heart as the sign of the torture I had supposedly inflicted on her unappreciated love, that anatomical vision of the organ charged with the highest power of signification of all the viscera no longer appeared to me as absolutely as it had at the time to be an image of some sort of remorse (with very shaky foundations, anyway) or some sort of regret, a result of the state of disarray and emotional destitution in which I was then floundering (and about which, let me say in passing, I see no evidence that would allow me to think that at that time it was not mine alone); in that figure—of the same type as those strictly didactic figures that reproduce our internal structure in its most naked reality—I also find a glimmer of one of my old superstitions: the dangerous and always more or less criminal nature of carnal passion, here represented by that organ exposed to view as it would have been by a surgical operation and situated on the plane, less of an emblem of warmth than of a symbol of the macabre, like the glue secreted by the dead people stuck to the dusty floor or the basins that reminded me of what my father had endured in the region of the body where the functions of excretion and reproduction are located.
More than twenty-five years ago, when magic was more accessible to me than science, and hermeticism than plain philosophy, I noted the following reflection in a notebook with beige paper-board binding and a red percale spine in which I kept my journal at that time and which is punctuated, throughout the pages I wrote during that period, with accounts of dreams and observations relating (more naively, perhaps, than I would have intended) to pataphysics.
Our death is bound up with the duality of the sexes. If a man were male and female at the same time and capable of reproducing alone, he would not die, his soul being transmitted unadulterated to his posterity.
The instinctive hatred of the sexes for each other comes, perhaps, from an obscure knowledge that their mortality is due to the differentiation between them. A violent resentment, counterbalanced by the attraction toward oneness—life’s only number—which they try to satisfy through coitus.
Of these lines—whose gravity was not without a hint of humor intended to spare me from looking too ridiculous to myself—I retain, despite the element of confusion within their intentionally dogmatic tone, the idea of death experienced as being tied to the division of the human species into two sexes. Making love amounts, in short, to reverting to a state of indistinctness in order to attempt to remedy the original lesion and would thus explain why the desire a man feels for a woman is necessarily ambiguous: the instruments of that plunge into chaos are the organs of procreation, in other words the very same ones whose existence manifests the duality according to which we are incomplete and transitory beings, who cannot endure but are merely capable of reproducing; nothing surprising, then, about the fact that sexual commerce—an exchange between two bodies more alive than ever whereas the machinery of the lower parts gropes along its course—should be regarded in all latitudes as being of a certain seriousness, as is borne out by the obstacles opposed to absolute license, even among peoples whose mores seem to us the most relaxed; nothing astonishing, either, in the fact that within societies quite distant from ours but where men occupy, as they do everywhere else, a preponderant position, woman—who bleeds every month, and, at irregular intervals, opens painfully to give birth—represents, more than her partner, a sinister element, as though it were clear that by such signs one recognized implicitly in her the one term out of the duality that existed in addition to the first and had consequently—since it was radically other, occurring as an intrusion—to be held responsible for the pernicious dichotomy.
Undecided as to how I should suitably dispose of this note dated October 13, 1924—a Monday (as I see in my journal), and it was at 2 rue Mignet, at the corner of the rue George-Sand at Auteuil, my father having died, my military service ended, as I was endeavoring to write, living without women since my affair had ended, and staying with my mother, relieved of all immediate worry about earning a living, all this at a time when we did not see another war looming on the horizon, when we were not fighting as we are today in Korea while awaiting a carnage closer to home, when I was young, romantic, theoretically in despair and able quite at my ease (without any sort of threat) to speculate on the great theme of death—undecided as to the heading under which I should classify the lines in ques
tion: as a thought that no doubt ultimately deserved to be explored, corrected, and brought out of its fog but could nevertheless be taken as a point of departure; or simply as a document relating to my state of mind at about the time poetry was revealed to me?—I opted, spontaneously, for the first of the two choices and, with the necessary reservations, called these lines a “thought”; I followed them with a rough gloss intended to extract something worthwhile from them, but I know only too well to what extent purely personal reaction is involved in a construction of this kind, of which the least one can say is that it offers only a castle in the clouds, if it does not include a vast, difficult, and tedious examination of real human events to support it! Having derived a representation of reality essentially from my own experience or from my own feelings and having formulated it as a primary truth that was not only my own truth but also everyone’s truth, I had certainly done something rather ill considered. Yet isn’t it one of the most natural aims of literary activity (and that by which writing is differentiated from the other modes of thinking) thus to forge from one’s own experience, using language as one’s tool, certain approximate truths which some people will accept as their own and which, by the very fact of this sharing, will cease to be the idle dreams of a single mind or mere vain appearances? It therefore seems to me that, even granted that I was guilty of an abuse, I can, without deleting or denying anything, correct it adequately if I indicate in passing that I am at least clearly aware of the dubiousness and, in any case, the relativity of what I have just proposed. From the portrait of myself I am painting and from the shreds of more distant truths I endeavor to catch hold of in order to transform them into some species of illumination for this portrait, and at the same time its radiance too, can I not, at least, hope there will arise, someday—and if necessary without my knowledge—some general truth?
What shows me clearly that an old residue of Credo makes me put the act of love in the same category as defilement and perdition whereas I would like to see it only as the most tender of human gestures (and quite simply the last element in a series: talking, holding hands, kissing, embracing) is that I tend not to make love—or, to use a verb with a rather entomological appearance from the literature of the Church, not to “fornicate”—during periods when I am afraid. Not only do I have a tendency, when I am uneasy, to withdraw into myself, to go to ground (to be nothing, so that death will forget me, and perhaps it is also for this reason that the alarms of our epoch tend to distance me from poetry rather than open its sources for me, already so ungenerous, usually, toward me), not only do I feel a need to withdraw that conflicts with any impulse toward effusion, but sexual pleasure, in itself, appears too illicit for me, if I yield to it, not to risk my being chastised, something that does not make much sense in calm times but becomes more clearly meaningful when one knows that a storm threatens to descend on the world and that soon one may be put in the situation of the child who hears himself told: “It’s the Good Lord who has punished you!” if he has misbehaved and is, shortly afterward, the victim of some small misfortune. Far from seeing carnal relations as the most naked expression of human fatalism, at such times I would, on the contrary, be dismayed by the challenge to destiny that they represent and it would be, consequently, not so much their symbolic link with death (death being a disappearance without return whereas the other is only a “little death”) that would paralyze me as what is still scandalously incompatible about them, in my eyes, with serious situations, even quite apart from any libertinage and as though pleasure alone, without any need to imitate the rakes or the Don Juans with more than a thousand and three women, would be enough to make one feel the weight of the Commandant’s fist.
If—as though through a sort of stinginess complementing the prudence that has almost consistently kept me from debauchery—I have never had anything but disgust for what is the natural outcome of—and, if the religious bigots are to be believed, the only justification for—the intimacy between the sexes (to the point of having for a long time made sterility a moral position: the refusal to propagate life, because life is too great an evil), isn’t this rejection due to the fact that procreation, the only means of perpetuating ourselves, illustrates our mortal condition most distinctly? To move to the rank of father means, in effect, that we officially descend one step toward the grave, since we are taking an active part in the mechanism of the continuous renewal of the human stock, a mechanism that requires each generation to be succeeded by another, installment after installment, and that engendering amounts to creating a being whose growth, progressively signifying to us our dismissal, pushes us back toward death as though, through an inexorable play of exchanges, its rise could take place only on condition of our own descent. To move to the rank of father—not of the imprudent procreator scattering children here and there, but of the father of the family who keeps them with him and raises them—also means carrying to its extreme the, by definition, incestuous nature that invests marriage, whose function is to change love relations into family relations and which is fully realized when the husband, domestic variety of the lover, becomes the person who can be described as “the father of my child,” which is equivalent to classifying him as kin (a relation obviously more subject to criticism, where passionate love is concerned, than, at least, that form of incest which is the love of brother and sister, because it is preferable, from this point of view, to forget the blood tie in the flame of pleasure than to let passion—or what would claim to be such—cool down, with the passing of time, into familial affection). To move to the rank of father—either because of the aging that it openly marks or because of that comfy-domestic-incest color it eventually spreads over the shared life of the man and woman, or because of the burden and the responsibility it represents—it is this which has always repulsed me and I don’t think I am such a moral individual that I could grant priority over all these reasons to the idea that it is not charitable to give life, the saddest gift of all those we are entitled to give. It may be yet another hypocrisy if I allege, in support of my horror of paternity, a refusal to assist in the perseverance of a species launched on the most absurd sort of venture; I maintained this point of view until I noticed the following contradiction in myself: I am against procreation but I am in favor of posterity since, without expecting too much from its opinion, I envisage with displeasure the prospect that any destruction—or any form of oblivion—might prevent those writings of mine which certain of my contemporaries have been willing to print from having at least a few readers among future generations (so that I refuse, in sum, to give birth whereas my activity of choice, the one from which I hope for a semblance of survival, is not fully meaningful unless others work at what I condemn and prolong a venture that, moreover, I can’t view as absurd without writing becoming one of the thousands of absurd human endeavors and this would be the case even if I wrote only in order to denounce the absurdity of the world, for to speak of the absurd to an absurd world is necessarily absurd).
So marked a propensity to regard love—whether it bears its fruits or not—as a culpable activity probably testifies to some infantilism with respect to it. Much more than a confusedly metaphysical idea that would make death dependent upon the dichotomy of the sexes, what keeps me in check here is my lifelong terror at the prospect of being a man, a creature free in himself and no longer under the aegis of parents whose role has been to help him and, sometimes, punish him (which is another way of being attentive). Thus, the fears that cause me to surround love with certain taboos are probably accompanied by some nostalgia and express, not so much direct apprehension, as a need, always apt to show itself, to return to the period when I was afraid of being punished and when “forbidden fruit” could scarcely apply to anything but food that had been locked away and perhaps to another’s goods whereas on the other hand the word covet appeared to make of the object of covetousness something more than a simple friandise [tidbit] (such as bêtises de Cambrai [mint humbugs] or other gourmandises [sweetmeats]) and to
join the ranks, instead, of the shifty character curiously known as a prevaricator (or one who betrays the interests he is obliged to uphold if I am to believe my Littré dictionary, which I’ve just consulted).
As sparing of myself as any peasant may be of his pennies; inhibited by fear; reticent in love (perhaps because of that dread of having to pay with my body that also leads me to make myself very small at the idea of pain); liking to play at being a torero but without ever having a real bull in front of me, and at being a Don Juan, without any conquests nor challenge to the Commandant; no longer existing except through writing and, at each instant, attempting to formulate sententious phrases with the distant tone of last words, as though my fingers were already squeezed by the stone gauntlet of death, am I not a proxy unfaithful to the destiny I have dreamed of, in other words am I not that prevaricator? The examination I have made of what is hidden behind my refusal to engender and more particularly the bad faith detectable in one of the explanations for it I proposed (my recourse to rather specious notions about incest) commits me to think so. I would be lying and, therefore, in any case a traitor with respect to my own person were I to posit—as I so often do—as a moral attitude my rebellion against the yoke that is always imposed (in various forms) by belonging to a family when I know that, if I tend to break my ties with my people while everything makes me incline to return to infantile states and to resurrect old memories which I did not experience alone and certain of which are not even my exclusive possessions, it is not simply for the proud joy of putting myself outside the flock; even more, by this deliberate segregation I seek to reassure myself by insinuating that as for me, I am from a different species (a species not subject, like theirs, to ills such as senility, painful diseases, death) and by thus taking refuge in the vague hope of being beyond reach, since, through the negation of my roots and my rejection of a progeniture that would make me the link between what was before and what will come after, I can imagine to myself that I, in my uniqueness, preserved from any succession, remain outside the flow of time.
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