Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  It is difficult for me here, too, to make a general or comprehensive statement about M. Blanchot, just as it is not easy to summarize what actually goes on in a novel of his, but one can identify certain recurring themes.

  Absence is one of those themes, and it has figured largely not only in the narratives of his fiction, and as an element in his literary criticism, but also in the central biographical conundrum of M. Blanchot’s existence—his bodily absence, his unwillingness to present himself to others except in letters and phone calls, his unwillingness to be depicted visually. That this is such a well-known and outstanding fact about him does not diminish the puzzle of it: that a man so warmly connected to his friends should live in such retirement, in such retreat, though after all it is perfectly consistent with what he has written. And so, does it become oxymoronic (or simply somewhat moronic) to say one will miss Maurice Blanchot now that he is truly gone? And yet how much more removed he is, now, than he was already by the increasing weakness of old age, by his habit of invisibility, by the accumulating years of epistolary silence (in my case and that of other correspondents).

  He was reputed by those who did see him face-to-face in his less retiring days—in the days, some decades ago, when he would rendezvous with a friend, for example, in a pretty church square (Saint-Sulpice) and repair with him to a nearby café; or meet a friend at a train station at midnight in order to solace this friend’s troubles with a late supper—to be, in his humility, generosity, and simplicity, like Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin. Certainly in the letters that he wrote to me over the years and that I am rereading now, he is always elaborately kind, thoughtful, and without apparent self-interest. When solicited, just once, to express a desire, he is modest, though perfectly clear; when, on another occasion, he voices an objection to a fait accompli (a book cover), he expresses it gently in the perfect conditional—I would have preferred the face to remain the invisible into which it had faded away—and then softens it with a most characteristic observation: But the invisible remains nevertheless. He replies to some of my news with the gently and quietly effective Permit me to answer in my thoughts.

  In these letters, he is concerned about what is happening—usually not good—in the world (in 1981, apropos of Ronald Reagan: Thus far, everything seems to have gone well for him, but a time will come when, without realizing it, he will find himself confronting the abyss; ten years later came the Gulf War, with its cruelties, its barbarities). He offers a gift of sympathy when he calls university teaching a painful ordeal (rude épreuve). He then goes on to describe Georges Bataille’s manner in the classroom: His lectures were interrupted by long, and by interminable, silences; it was distressing but for that very reason enriching. He adds, in a subsequent letter, that Bataille could remain silent as though meditating without his listeners experiencing anything but the sense of the anguish that was his. There is a constancy, over the years, in his preoccupations, in his memories, in his references to friends, of whom he speaks most warmly, and three of the closest of whom he lost in quick succession in 1990 and 1991—Robert Antelme, Michel Leiris, and Edmond Jabès (mort inattendu).

  Of course he is to some degree present again, or still, in his writings, and especially so in his letters. The letters spoke, at the time he wrote them, from out of his absence when he was no more than geographically remote, and by habit invisible; they speak as distinctly now that he is truly gone, though what is also gone now, as it was not then, is the possibility of replying to him, except in one’s thoughts.

  2003

  A Farewell to Michel Butor

  September 14, 1926–August 24, 2016

  When you hear that a writer you first came to know in your youth, decades ago, is still writing in his advanced old age, you are at first surprised, as though he has risen from the tomb to write the poem you are reading. Then, once you absorb this fact, you go on to believe, quite illogically, that he will not die—after all, he has not died thus far. Certainly he will not die soon, in any case.

  For me, those two responses happened just this year: in the spring, Michel Butor was asked by the organizers of the Albanian Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale if he would contribute a poem for an album of songs on themes of migration and displacement. After he sent it to them, they asked me if I would translate it. And then, on August 24, just a few months after I sent in my translation, Michel Butor died. I was startled and saddened: How could he leave so abruptly, when for me he had just, in a way, returned?

  That Butor would, at the age of nearly ninety, respond to the Biennale’s request with a poem so emphatic and moving as “Squandered Bullion,” which opens, “The bank has gutted itself / like an old-time samurai / practicing seppuku / and the safes’ entrails / spread through the street,” should not really come as a surprise, considering his long, productive writing life, his ever-renewed formal innovation, his strong political and social convictions, and his wide-ranging interests.

  My own active involvement in his work occurred at three neat points in my life—early, middle, and late (or should I hedge and say, instead: early, middle, and recent).

  * * *

  In college, at the age of twenty or so, I chose as thesis topic the writers of the so-called New Novel (le nouveau roman)—a label that Butor himself resisted. In the paper, I discussed Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, perhaps Duras, and Butor. While the other authors interested me intellectually but did not touch me emotionally, I found Butor’s Degrees (read in Richard Howard’s English translation) entrancing.

  Degrees was Butor’s fourth novel. His third, La Modification (A Change of Heart), tightly structured and unusual in form—it is written entirely in the second person, its action confined to a single train compartment—had won him the Prix Renaudot, France’s most prestigious prize after the Goncourt. This “fragile and ephemeral notoriety,” Butor later wrote, allowed him to settle in Paris and embark on a book that would be still more formally audacious.

  A substantial book at 450 pages, Degrees recounts the lives and studies of teachers and students in a Paris lycée as told by three different narrators in succession, beginning with a teacher whose ambition it is to bring together into a coherent and rational whole, for the benefit of his nephew, the different courses of study in the upper-grade curriculum. What I appreciated was, for one, the patient and unstinting detail—somewhat akin to the more factual sections of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or perhaps Moby-Dick’s more technical chapters; the embrace, within a work of fiction, of various bodies of knowledge—which I relished also in Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet; the extensive and frequent quotations from the works the children were studying—one critic at the time complained that the reader drowns in a sea of them; and the mathematical fascination of author and narrators (and, of course, reader) with the complex interrelations, familial and other, among the characters (which now remind me of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, confined to the population of a single apartment building—as was Butor’s first novel, Passage de Milan).

  I’m sure it also appealed to me because I was still very close, in those years, to my own equivalent of the lycée experience. At the time, I imagined Degrees to be an established classic, not realizing that it had first appeared in French only in 1960, some seven or eight years before I read it. (It was published in English the following year, with remarkable promptness, thanks to the translator Howard and the publisher Simon & Schuster.)

  While its structure and literary aims are sizable, and its plot will develop to become strangely obsessive, the book opens with a calm familiarity that allows one easy access. Its setting shares that of the opening of Madame Bovary—the French schoolroom, teacher presiding, students ranged before him:

  I walk into the classroom, and I step up on to the platform.

  When the bell stops ringing, I take out of the briefcase I have just laid on the desk the alphabetical list of the students and that other sheet of white paper, on which they themselves have indicated their se
ats in this classroom.

  Then I sit down, and when all the talking has stopped, I begin to call the roll:

  “Abel, Armelli, Baron…,”

  trying to fix their faces in my memory.

  It was a collection of travel essays that next brought me into a working involvement with Butor’s writing, when, in 1985, the adventurous and discriminating Marlboro Press (essentially Austryn Wainhouse’s one-man operation) hired me to translate the first volume of Butor’s suite of five “travel autobiographies or geographical meditations,” as he called them, titled Le Génie du lieu (The Spirit of the Place).

  This book, which we titled The Spirit of Mediterranean Places, opens with an essay on Cordova (“Its network of white streets,… its walls the color of sand or lime … the coolness of the precise shadows it cast, triangles or trapezoids changing proportion according to the day and the hour, the memory of my patient but too brief efforts to read it”); and continues with Istanbul, Salonica, and Delphi; Mallia, Mantua, and Ferrara; and, finally—the entire second half of the book—Egypt, ending with the question “When will I return to Egypt?”

  Later volumes of this series became more formally innovative. Visiting the United States in the 1960s, particularly New York City, Butor was convinced that he was discovering something that had yet to reach France, that he was, in a sense, looking into the future. He felt that he should inform himself as best he could about the country. This led him to write the prose-rhapsody Mobile, subtitled Study for a Representation of the United States. Other travel books included the experimental stereophonic novel called, in English, Niagara (the original French title, more mysterious and eccentric, could be translated as “6,810,000 Liters of Water per Second”), using three typefaces and three margins.

  In addition to his novels and travel books, Butor wrote literary criticism and art criticism—he said that he loved painters’ studios and their conversation; poetry, including translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Lukács, Shakespeare, and others; a work of fiction that incorporated verse; and a series of collections of invented dreams based on his own and others’ real dreams. He taught in many institutions, in France but also in Thessaloniki, Egypt; the United States; Manchester, England—the latter providing him the material for his second novel, Passing Time—and, for many years, Geneva.

  Butor was honored during his lifetime with many prizes besides the Prix Renaudot, among them the Prix Apollo, the Prix Mallarmé, the Prix Fénéon for Passing Time, and, from the Académie française in 2013, the Grand Prix for his life’s work. He was born in 1926 in Mons-en-Barœul, near Lille, spent the later part of his life in the Savoyard village of Lucinges, in southeastern France near Geneva, and died not far from there in Contamine-sur-Arve. His wife, Marie-Jo Mas, teacher and photographer, died in 2010; together they had four daughters. He grew a snowy white beard after he became a grandfather, and preferred to dress in overalls.

  He was not a writer who gradually faded from view, but one who gave generously to the extent of his capacity right up to the end. The poem that Butor sent earlier this spring was one he had written in 2014 for his artist friend Jacques Riby. It ends on a cautiously optimistic note, suggesting the power of the individual to rescue a thing of value, something that could “galvanize” our lives, from the catastrophe of economic corruption and collapse: “The rare pearl ripens / in its wasteland exile / awaiting its discoverer.”

  2016

  Michel Leiris’s Fibrils, Volume 3 of The Rules of the Game

  In his massive autobiographical project, La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), Michel Leiris anticipated certain works very much of the moment in our twenty-first century: this is a writer’s ruthlessly honest, multivolume examination of himself that admits into its arena the banal and quotidian as well as the dramatic and rare. But beyond the fact that Leiris’s work was begun some seventy-five years ago, there are a couple of other critical considerations: Leiris, by the time he began La Règle, had rejected fiction and embraced realism—he called what he was doing not a “novel” but an “autobiographical essay.” And, second, the project extended over thirty-five years—begun when he was barely forty and completed when he was in his seventies—so that it had the scope and endurance to contain his reflections and objectives as they changed over time: we are fully brought into his mind, and we accompany his thinking as it matures.

  As he was writing volume 1, Leiris evidently foresaw a second volume, but not more. Similarly, in Fibrilles (Fibrils), the third volume, published in 1966, he appears, from the tone of his conclusion, not to have anticipated volume 4. After that one, was the work finished? Not quite, since the fourth was followed by separate but related work in 1981. He had more to say; he was speaking in order to speak, he offered, ironically and not quite truthfully. Le Ruban au cou d’Olympia (The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat)—which takes its title, and one of its continuing subjects, from Manet’s painting of a recumbent prostitute clothed in little else but a black ribbon—centers on the expressive power of fetishism in a broader, not merely erotic, sense. (It includes, for example, a brief text on the act of writing as hurling a lasso, and another about the urgent desire to smoke when one is already smoking.)

  In addition, extending the scope of the project backward in time, the four volumes of La Règle were in fact preceded not by a trial run, but by a first exploration into the territory of himself, this one concentrating specifically on his sexuality: L’ge d’homme (1939). Published in English, in Richard Howard’s translation, as Manhood in 1968, it depicts the full range of sexual obsessions of a man—or this man, in any case—as he grows into manhood: daydream, masturbation, impotence, celibacy, homosexuality, prostitution, marriage.

  * * *

  Michel Leiris was born in 1901, within a comfortable bourgeois family in Paris. He was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly (in philosophy), the Sorbonne, and the École pratique des hautes études. After a tentative sortie into the study of chemistry, he cast his lot in the world of writing and art, specifically gravitating to poetry and the idea of becoming a poet, as he describes in the present volume. When he was not yet twenty, he met Max Jacob, and through him became involved in a circle of Dadaists and surrealists, identifying himself as a surrealist until he broke with the group in 1929. A somewhat emotional decision, in 1931, to take part, as secretary-archivist, in a two-year ethnographic expedition across sub-Saharan Africa led, after further and extensive study, to a career as professional ethnographer. He continued that career, occupying a post at one division of Paris’s natural history museum, the Musée de l’Homme, until late in his working life, pairing it with his equally full career as writer.

  Throughout his long life, prolific and productive until close to his death at age eighty-nine, Leiris wrote a variety of works in different genres: essays on jazz, the theater, literature, and art; volumes of poetry and poetic prose; the vast, rich journal that resulted from his African expedition—L’Afrique fantôme (Phantom Africa); an eccentric dictionary of personal definitions evolving from wordplay and private associations called Glossaire: J’y serre mes gloses (a punning title for a punning work—one inventive equivalent in English is James Clifford’s Glossary: My Glosses’ Ossuary); the surrealist novel Aurora; a collection of his dreams and his dreamlike waking experiences called Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour (translated by Richard Sieburth into English under the title Nights as Day, Days as Night); essays and book-length studies in the field of ethnography; prefaces and catalog texts; book reviews; political texts; and, most regularly, appreciations of artists and writers, particularly within the wide circle of those he knew personally—among them André Masson, Miró, Raymond Roussel, Francis Bacon, Raymond Queneau, Picasso, Michel Butor, Sartre, Duchamp, and Giacometti.

  In was in the midst of this other writing activity, in the early 1940s, that Leiris embarked on what was to be his masterwork, the work on which his enduring literary reputation would rest: the autobiographical essay—as he later described it—call
ed The Rules of the Game. Most of the first volume was written during the German occupation of France; the final volume was completed in 1975. He was henceforth to divide his life among his continuing autobiographical project; his multifarious other writing; his editorial activities; his political activities; his family and friendships; his travels; and his ethnographic work.

  * * *

  With Biffures (Scratches), volume 1 of La Règle, Leiris began his extended project, the objectives of which fully emerge only over the successive volumes—to write in order to see more clearly into himself, to work out his personal identity; at the same time to unite the two tendencies in himself between which he felt divided: on the one hand, poetry, the attraction to the over-there, to myth, to timelessness; and on the other, morality, knowledge, the right-here, lived reality; and to formulate a definitive “golden rule,” the rule that, he hoped, would both govern his ars poetica—his poetics—and be a rule for living, a savoir-vivre, an ethics, the code by which he would live.

  He opens the book with one of his continuing central preoccupations, language in all its aspects: language as the raw material of poetry; the mysteries of language; the sounds of words, taken in themselves; the elusive and personal meanings of these sounds and of words themselves; private language versus shared language; language as connection to others; the discoveries possible through language; the failure of language. Cataloging, or inventorying, his memories from various periods of his life, but especially from his childhood, he begins the book with the mystery he found in language when he was a child, in his misunderstandings of names, songs, scraps of speech—misunderstandings that created for him an alternate universe of things, people, customs, emotions. In this volume, he comes to define the literary use of speech as a way of sharpening one’s consciousness “in order to be more—and in a better way—alive.” The relationship, then, is reciprocal: the writer lives in order to write, but also writes in order to be more fully alive.