Father Foucault would not go to Paris. Already this provincial town, and no doubt even his own village, seemed to him inhabited by the erudite, fine connoisseurs of the human soul and users of its common currency, which was written; teachers, door-to-door salesmen, doctors, even farmers, all knew, signed, and decided, with varying degrees of boastfulness; and he did not question that learning, which others possessed in so flagrant a fashion. Who knows, perhaps they could name the date of their deaths, those who knew how to write the word, “death.” He alone understood nothing, hardly decided anything; he could not bear that vaguely monstrous incompetence, and perhaps with good reason; life and its authorized annotators had certainly made him well aware that to be illiterate, today, was some kind of monstrosity, and to admit to it, monstrous. What would it be like in Paris, where every day he would have to repeat that admission, without a young, obliging employer at his side to fill out the famous, formidable “papers”? What new disgraces would he have to swallow, ignoramus without equal, and old, and sick, in that city where even the walls were lettered, the bridges historic, and the merchandise and signs in the shops incomprehensible? This capital where the hospitals were parliaments, the doctors the most learned in the eyes of the learned doctors here, the lowest nurse a Madame Curie? What would he be in their hands, he who could not even read a newspaper?
He would stay here, and die of it; there perhaps, he could be cured, but at the cost of his shame; above all, he would not have atoned for, magnificently paid with his death for his crime of not knowing. That view of things was not so naïve; it helped me to understand myself. I too had hypostatized learning and letters into mythological categories, from which I was excluded; I was the forsaken illiterate at the foot of Olympus where all the others, the Great Authors and Difficult Readers, read and made child’s play of incomparable pages; and the divine language was forbidden to my rough tongue.
I also was told that in Paris awaited me, perhaps, a kind of healing; but alas I knew that if I went there to offer my immodest, parsimonious writings, my bluff would immediately be called; they would see that I was, in some way, “illiterate.” The editors would be to me what the implacable typists would have been to Father Foucault, pointing with a marble finger at the vertiginous blank spaces on a form; guardians of the gates, omniscient Anubises with their long teeth, editors and typists would have disgraced us both before devouring us. Under the imperfect trompe-l’oeil of the letter, they would have guessed that I was steeped in a lack of knowledge, chaos, profound illiteracy, an iceberg of soot of which the visible part was only a decoy; and they would have denounced the charlatan. For me to judge myself worthy of confronting Anubis, the invisible part too would have to be polished with words, perfectly frozen like the unalterable diamond of a dictionary. But I was alive, and since my life was not a dictionary, since the words of which I had wanted to be constituted from head to foot always escaped me, I thus lied in claiming to be a writer; and I chastised my imposture, demolished my few words in the incoherence of drunkenness, aspired to mutism or to madness, and aping the “hideous laugh of the idiot,” I delivered myself up, still lying, to a thousand sham deaths.
Father Foucault was more a writer than I was: in the absence of the letter, he preferred death.
As for me, I hardly wrote; nor did I dare to die; I lived in the imperfect letter, the perfection of death terrified me. Like Father Foucault however, I knew that I possessed nothing; but, like my aggressor, I had wanted to please, to live voraciously with that nothing, provided that I could conceal the void behind a cloud of words. My place was very much beside the show-off, of whom I had so justly declared myself the rival, and who, having thrashed me, had consecrated our equality.
I left the hospital shortly thereafter. I do not know if we said goodbye to one another; we were both fleeing; he was ashamed of his public confession, although he would not have had to wait long for the cancer to destroy, along with his vocal chords, any confession rising in his throat; I was ashamed of avowing nothing, whether it be through publication, death, or resignation to silence. Then too, on that last day, my face was still deformed by the wound; I feared being disfigured; I was harsh with Marianne, who tried tenderly to reassure me; vaguely wrathful, I took with me the Gilles de Rais, the vision, still, of the great trees, and Father Foucault’s silence.
The disease would do its work; he would become mute in the fall, before the red lindens; in those copper hues tarnished by evening, all speech confiscated by advancing death, he would be more faithful than ever to Rembrandt’s ruined old men of letters; no pathetic writing, no poor claim scribbled down on paper would corrupt his perfect contemplation. His amazement would not diminish. He would be dead with the first snows; his last look would recommend him to the great white angels in the courtyard; a sheet would be drawn over his face, as astonished by the insignificance of death as it had been by the insignificance of life; the mouth that had never opened much would be closed for good; and stilled forever, virginal, closed around the void of the slow metamorphosis into which it has now disappeared, that hand, which never traced a letter.
The Life of Georges Bandy
to Louis-René des Forêts
In fall 1972, Marianne left me. She was rehearsing for a second-rate production of Othello at the theater in Bourges; I was spending several months at my mother’s house, stupidly aspiring to the grace of Writing and not receiving it: bedridden or high on various drugs but constantly inattentive to the world, indolent and furious, a demented stupor riveting me satisfied to the barren page without requiring me to write a single word. Moreover, how to write, when I no longer knew how to read? At worst, miserable science fiction translations, at best ingratiatingly flashy American titles from the 60s and heavily avant-garde French ones from the 70s were my only sustenance; but as low as my reading sank, these models were still too difficult for me to imitate. Mesmerized by inertia, I became rooted in failure, and in deception as well; my daily letters to Marianne shamelessly lied; I gave accounts of brilliant pages, miraculously inspired; I was the Fabulous Opera and each night was Pascalian to me, the heavens moved my pen, filled my page. This boasting was bathed in a mixture of crude lyricism and sentimental cunning. I could not reread my words without laughing and I despised myself passionately; I wonder if my style has changed since those inaugural letters to a deceived reader.
Marianne was no reader of novels; there was no nobility in deceiving her; each day she sent me impassioned letters, she had faith in me, she had only agreed to this separation, so painful for her, so that I could write. She had supported me in my plans to escape Annecy where I was writing nothing (she did not know, though I guessed, that awaiting me in Mourioux was just as blank a page, which no journey or pedantic retreat is enough to fill), and where I had spent a disastrous winter; in that easy-going city, right for the romantic effusions and garish grind of winter sports, I fretted and fumed more than in larger cities where misery is more bearable for being constantly in evidence, and shared. Then, since Marianne had joined a local theater company, I had fool-hardily accepted a minor position with the local arts center; the close relations I had to maintain with those good apostles dedicated to their civilizing mission and state employees with lots of hobbies, constantly competing in their devotion to creativity, exasperated me. I remember certain literary evenings; above, they talked about poetry and desire, the ineffable pleasure, they called it, of writing books; below, having found the key to the basement with its stock of beer for the center’s small bar, I got shamelessly drunk. I remember the snow, all light blossoms in the halo of the street lamps, and black and heavy around the building, trampled by so many feet and tires, where I would have liked to fall. I remember, with tears, the strained smile of the painter Bram Van Velde, invited one evening and lost there in his too-long trench coat from another era, his fedora, which he held awkwardly the whole time he remained sitting exposed to the enthusiasm of his admirers, gentle, kindly old man, taken aback as a stylite at the foot o
f a maypole, ashamed of the stupid questions he was being asked, ashamed of only knowing how to answer them in monosyllables of feigned assent, ashamed of his work and the fate the world holds for everyone, the ludicrous talk it inflicts upon the talkers, the ludicrous silence into which it abolishes the mutes, the shared vanity, which is the shared misfortune of talkers and mutes alike.
That was what Annecy was for me, which I left one morning in January or February. The sun had not yet risen, the cold stung; we lived a long way from the station, I had many suitcases, stupidly cumbersome, heavy with the books that followed me around like a convict is followed by his ball and chain. Marianne and I each had a moped. We had secured the luggage to them as best we could; I was angry and unhappy, I was cold, sleep made Marianne’s features ugly; she had hardly gone a few meters before the bags she was transporting fell. I detested my poverty, our mittens and our balaclavas, the pathetic strings cutting into the thin cardboard of the suitcases, our awkwardness in the terrible banality of it all; I was one of Céline’s characters leaving on vacation. I threw my moped into the ditch, the scattered suitcases burst open, the detested literature lurched into the mud. Under the black trees by the black lake, my silhouette gesticulated, infinitesimal and demented; I cried in the christus venit, insulted my companion like a laborer setting off for work in bad shape from the night’s drinking, whose wife has forgotten to pack his lunch; I wanted to be one of those insensible, overturned volumes I was stamping on. Marianne began to cry, trying to replace the clumsy packsaddle of books, her sobs making it difficult for her; her poor face, disfigured by the balaclava, the cold and chagrin, tore me apart; it was my turn to cry, we kissed, we were as tender as children. At the station, she ran along the platform for a long time, beside the train that carried me away, awkward and radiant, clownishly miming me messages, so mawkishly delicate despite the sobs that had to be catching in her throat, trotting along so ridiculously and with such admirable hope, that I cried for a long time afterwards in the overheated train car.
My journey in the train was terrifying; I was going to have to write, and I could not do it; I was backing myself up to the wall, and I was not a mason.
In Mourioux, my hell changed; it was to this one I had to submit henceforth. Each morning I placed the blank page on my desk, and waited in vain for divine benevolence to fill it; I presented myself at the Holy Altar, the ritual implements were in place, the typewriter at my left hand and the sheets of paper at my right; through the window, abstract winter named things more surely than profuse summer would have done: tits flitted about, waiting only to be said, the skies varied, its variation reducible to two sentences; come now, the world would not be hostile, reset in the stained-glass window of a chapter. Books surrounded me, benevolent and contemplative; they were going to intercede in my favor. Divine Grace surely could not resist such good will; I had prepared myself through so many macerations (was I not poor, contemptible, destroying my health with stimulants of all kinds?), so many prayers (did I not read everything that could be read?), so much posturing (did I not have the air of a writer, his imperceptible uniform?), so many picaresque Imitations of the Life of the Great Authors, that it must come soon. It did not come.
Arrogant Jansenist that I was, I believed only in Grace; it did not fall to me; I disdained condescending to Works, convinced that the labor required to accomplish them, as relentless as it was, would never raise me above the condition of obscure, industrious lay brother. What I demanded in vain, in increasing rage and despair, was hic et nunc the road to Damascus or the Proustian discovery of François le Champi in the Guermantes library, which is the beginning of Remembrance of Things Past and at the same time its end, anticipating the whole work in a lightning flash worthy of Sinaï. (I understood, too late perhaps, that to go to Grace through Works, as to Guermantes through Méseglise, is “the loveliest way,” the only way at least that allows you to reach your destination; thus a traveler who has walked all night hears a church bell at dawn inviting a still distant village to mass, which he, the traveler, hurrying in the clover wet with dew, will miss, passing the porch at the cheerful hour when the choirboys, their robes put away, are clearing the cruets and laughing in the sacristy. But have I truly understood that? I do not like walking at night.) Having, like so many unfortunate simpletons, taken as dogma the juvenile boasting of Rimbaud’s Letter of the Visionary, I “worked” to make myself like that, and awaited the effect of the promised miracle; I awaited a beautiful Byzantine angel, descended in all its glory for me alone, to extend to me the fertile pen plucked from its remiges, and, in the same moment, to spread both its wings for me to read my finished work, written on the back of them, dazzling and indisputable, definitive, unsurpassable.
This naïveté had its reverse side of twisted greed; I wanted the martyr’s wounds and his salvation, the saint’s vision, but I also wanted the crook and miter that impose silence, the episcopal word that drowns even the word of kings. If Writing was given to me, I thought, it would give me everything. Dulled by this belief, absent in the absence of my God, I sank deeper each day into impotence and anger, those two jaws of the vise that holds in its grip the howling damned.
And, turn of the screw redoubling that grip, necessary sidekick and voyeur of infernal tortures, doubt arrived in its turn, wresting me from the torment of my vain belief to inflict an even darker agony, saying to me, “If Writing is given to you, it will give you nothing.”
Lost in these pious stupidities, I smelled of the sacristy (I do not believe that the odor has left me even today); things fell away; I had forgotten creatures, the little dog that so simply watches Saint Jerome writing in a painting by Carpaccio, clouds, and people, Marianne in her balaclava running behind a train. And of course literary theory repeated to me ad nauseam that writing is there where the world is not; but what a dupe I was; I had lost the world, and writing was not there. Those seasons in Mourioux passed like a dream, and I saw nothing more than an occasional irritating ray of sunlight when it crossed the blank white page and dazzled me; I did not notice the spring and only knew it was summer because, during my inglorious escapades, the beer was fresher then and more natural, more pleasantly intoxicating. In those disastrous months while I was seeking Grace, I lost the grace of words, of simple speech that warms the heart that speaks and the one that listens; I no longer knew how to talk to the modest folk among whom I was born, whom I still loved and had to flee; the grotesque theology that I uttered was my only passion, it drove away all other speech; my rustic relatives could only laugh at me or remain uncomfortably silent when I spoke, afraid of me when I did not.
I only escaped Mourioux to go on binges in various towns, which increased my absence in the world tenfold, but also obligingly dramatized it; leaving the station, I dove into the nearest café and drank with determination, progressing from bar to bar until I reached the town center; I only shirked from this task to buy books or randomly grab a willing female. Each drunken bout was a dress rehearsal for me, drivel from the fallen forms of Grace; because when it was time, Writing, I thought, would come in the same way, exogenous and prodigious, indubitable and transubstantial, changing my body into words like drunkenness changed it into pure self-love, grasping the pen no greater an effort than raising the arm; the pleasure of the first page would be like the light thrill of the first glass to me; the symphonic fullness of the completed work would resound like the brass and cymbals of massive drunkenness, when glasses and pages are beyond counting. Archaic method, crude subterfuge of a rustic shaman! I imagine that the terrified bipeds of the Cyclades, the Euphrates, or the Andes, thousands of years before the Revelation, likewise drank themselves into oblivion, in pure loss, to simulate His coming; and it was not so long ago that the last of the Great Plains Indians died of it, perhaps waiting for the firewater to provide a Messiah or inspire in the weakest among them an Iliad or an Odyssey.
Marianne came to Mourioux once, at the very beginning of my stay there, in March, and it was beautiful weathe
r. I must do myself justice; though little touched by Grace, I retained my hope for it, and had moreover written a chapter or two of a wild, devoutly modern little text, in which a cumbersome, formal “remembrance” adorned some armored knights out of Froissart or Béroul; but I was pleased with it, wanted her to read it, and the memory of Marianne in the winter sun enchants me. She got out of the taxi, beautiful, radiant and talkative, made-up; in the corridor I caressed her; I remember with as much emotion as at the time when a brutal gesture revealed her to me, her pale flesh in black stockings, her words that my hand set trembling. We walked among the moss-covered rocks, in the grass, each blade like a sweet, so delicately coated with frost; once we saw the morning sun rise out of the mist, awaken the forests, add Marianne’s laughter to the thousand shards of laughter which, according to the psalm, make up God’s chariot; her rosy face, her breath in the cold, her radiant eyes are still with me; never again would we experience together hours like these; and as I have said, the seasons of that whole year escaped me, except for those few winter days given to me by Marianne.
Our subsequent meetings could be told by one of Faulkner’s painful idiots, the ones haunted by loss and the desire for loss, and then the dramatization of and driveling on about the loss: in Lyon (we met when she happened to be on tour there) where I drank away – or lost – in one day the little money for my visit; I climbed toward Fourvières with legs of lead; I no longer even desired to lay hands on Marianne; I stretched naked on my back and waited for her to straddle me, like a child lets himself be tucked into bed. In Toulouse, where she watched as I pursued a childhood friend I rediscovered there, and spoiled my memory of her. Finally in Bourges, where there is a refreshment bar in the bishop’s palace gardens; Bourges, near Sancerre, where Marianne had driven me, anxious to distract me from my grim thoughts, she the enthusiastic one, still hopeful, and I, who would not let her see past that sad day, declaiming between glasses, shouting at the bewildered tourists, and the immense amphitheater in the valley descending to the glorious Loire giving me the laughable illusion of composing Ajax drunk or Pentheus, when I was a meager Falstaff. Weary, faithful audience, Marianne had begun to see all too clearly that I interpreted these same roles incessantly and atrociously.
Small Lives Page 12