Saturation? Growing doubt—as I approach the last bend—about my capacity to conclude and even about the advantage of concluding, since the rule that I would like to formulate in a few phrases of the same kind as were offered by the oracles would be, in truth, a clumsy system impossible to build without specious reasonings? Fear of having gone astray, when what had at first been a florilegium of singular facts, and their restitution even more than their study, turned into the thoughtful inventory of what matters most to me and the attempt to deduce from it the law in which would be summed up for me both a savoir-vivre and an art of poetry? Consciousness—and bad conscience [conscience: both “conscience” and “consciousness”]—of having applied this more severe program without rigor and of having too readily confused what I liked to tell with something from which a lesson should be drawn? Disturbance, even thinking of this change of direction, proving as it does (even if it remained purely theoretical) how vulnerable all this work is to time, since its aim, altering along the way instead of preserving a sort of ideal intemporality, has itself proved to be the plaything of the passing years? All these reasons that I may have for marking time, none of which excludes another, are brocaded onto a background of defiance but also of discomfiture, and I rediscover in each the stigmata of that subjection to time from which, by writing, I was trying to escape. Whether too languid an effort leads me to disgust, or whether, greedy for a truth with instantaneous fulgurations, I reject in advance a patiently structured doctrine, or whether, the habit having been acquired, I remain attached to ways of proceeding that I know to be no longer valid, or whether I am disappointed by a project about which I note that it has undergone fluctuations over time, it is the latter that always appears as the tyrant or the nuisance whose intrigues I contrive, without managing to do better than feel their weight a little more, to elude!
An adventure whose setting, during the “phony war,” was South Oran provided me with the occasion for a portrait: the Algerian Khadidja in whom I admired—a moral beauty almost as much as a physical one—her long goatherd’s strides, a vestige (I liked to think) of a nomad ancestry from whom this recluse with her lowly profession might have derived a part of her nobility. It was on the eve of my departure for China that the story of our meeting appeared; the sixteen years that had elapsed had no doubt marked my companion of the Béni Ounif bousbir enough to alter perceptibly her resemblance to the portrait, already retrospective, that was contained in my notebooks. In order to find her again as I knew her, in the splendor and misery of the twenty-three years attributed to her by her prostitute’s card, it is not to this lovingly drawn image that I must refer, anyway, but to the simple word “Sarrasins” [Saracens; also, Saracen corn or buckwheat], which recalls to me—because of the grain and because of the rhyme—one of the treats of my childhood, those round raisin buns [petits pains au raisin] whose crumb, of the same color as that of rye bread, was speckled with black grains, also the treat offered to me, in unclothing herself, by the Clorinda without helmet or breastplate who was my friend, with a demeanor of a completely Saracen boldness, with swarthy flesh darker where the two grapes of her breasts thrust out, and whose slightly sour or spicy aroma she disdained to mask by steeping it in the vulgar bazaar perfumes that were all she would have had available to her.
Now that the “phony war,” which soon changed into a real war, has been succeeded by conflicts—in Vietnam and North Africa—in which it was the turn of the French to be the oppressors determined to break a popular resistance, the adventure that I have told appears to me in a less innocent light, for it seems to me I displayed one of the forms of the colonial spirit most difficult to extirpate (because it is interpreted as merely a sign of subtle receptiveness), by seeing only those aspects of Algeria likely to attract me, in a sublime misunderstanding of the problems that were already tormenting it. Ignoring everything else, was I not sensitive only to the purely picturesque, rendered tangible in that idyll that was so terribly Butterfly, if not Petite Tonkinoise, worthy—if one considers only the hard facts—of the sailor or soldier who, back in his country, will acknowledge, with a tear in his eye, the good qualities of the woman overseas (mousmée, congaie, mousso, vahine, or fatma) whom he turned into his plaything or his wild animal pet, without ever granting her a wholehearted love, or even, as in my case, conceding her only niggardly material profits? Here too, in the contest I am waging against it, time has the last word. Perhaps the description I wrote fixed for me—in an indelible way—Khadidja as she was at twenty-three and embedded itself to the point of making me forget that in this year 1962, which has seen the struggles in Algeria come to an end, its model has double the age which I remember and is no doubt an old woman (for women of her country and her condition fade quickly). But time keeps no less within its power the character one encounters in the book, whose twenty-three years ought to elude all change: to have been depicted as though for eternity has not protected Khadidja—even as heroine of a fairy tale—from the action of the years with its thousand resources, since the perspective that recent events have imposed on me endows this story, so naïvely experienced, with a signification that singularly depreciates the one I gave it in describing my marvelous commerce with that girl at once so servile and so proud whom I will henceforth no longer be able to regard with exactly the same eyes.
Often, naturally, I imagined Khadidja playing a role consistent with the idea I had formed—from the press, the radio, or simply hearsay—of one of the phases of that Algerian war from which France emerged soiled up to the haunches, with its Phrygian cap badly rumpled: the prostitute patriotically refusing her favors to Europeans or, the opposite, removing her veils during the comedy of fraternization that followed the all-too-famous May 13; or a veiled militant carrying a flag of the F.L.N. (in which I rediscover, along with the blood from her ears, which were wounded one evening, the white robe and green turban she had put on as ceremonial dress the morning we took leave of each other); or an already mature woman standing on a terrace still warm from the day’s sun and encouraging with her youyous [ululations] the demonstrators in the Casbah. These, however, were only fleeting thoughts, and even if—the likely sign of a respect that has not diminished—I affixed the traditional veil to her face, which I always knew uncovered, it was the Khadidja of former times, almost intact, who was integrated into these tableaux and not what I could have divined of the Khadidja that in these last few years she must have become, unless a premature death definitively thrust her back into the immutable world of images.
Before inserting her thus, as I might have done in a dream, in scenes whose fabric was furnished by Algeria in revolt, I had asked myself what might have become of Khadidja in another revolution whose fate I take particularly to heart: that of present-day China, which has made the emancipation of women one of its primary objectives. Within the confines of Mongolia, in a long landscape of undulating plain in the far background like a line of Camelidae (one of those landscapes the extent of which the song “The East Is Red” suffices to reveal to me in my thoughts), would she be employed in a pastoral activity, in keeping with the vocation that seemed indicated by her physique of goatherd? Wearing as a veil the little white mask that protects the mouth and nose from dust, would she have worked in a cotton mill, like one I visited in Peking whose workforce was almost entirely female? Or, faithful to herself and rebelling against the reclassification suffered by her peers, would she have emigrated to Hong Kong in order to be free to continue practicing her lifelong profession, in the opiated mildness and the cosmopolitanism of that port, which represents for me an immense Asiatic Kumasi? In these suppositions, modeled and remodeled according to caprice alone, I had, however, a twofold reason to indulge myself: my interest in the reforms accomplished in China and the secret desire to associate with them a figure to whom I remain profoundly attached, in order to connect to the universe of my passions what, despite everything, they retain for me that is abstract; the need to dilute in these apparently serious reflections the
shame that I felt toward Khadidja and her people, also toward the Chinese men and women I knew in the course of my trip (this time without any myth of love or adventure), who remain “comrades” with respect to whom the opinion they might have of me influences my behavior—the belated shame that overcame me when the severity of the struggle in which Algeria was engaged led me to think that, full of bourgeois dilettantism as I was, I had seen from the narrow point of view of a comic-opera intrigue a country most of whose inhabitants were, each in his own way, humiliated and insulted.
The image that I wanted to preserve by enclosing it within a book has, then, been frozen there without escaping from the always active flow of time. If its projection on paper had made it intangible, this intangibility would be that of a sort of Judith or Rachel, a cold figure circulating through successive combinations in which, though identical to itself, it assumes a new meaning each time, as in the deployment of the full deck by a fortune-teller as she groups, in mosaics with unforeseeable and moving patterns, the cardboard rectangles about which I learn—verifying in a dictionary whether the two queens with biblical names are in fact both red, the only color assignable to Khadidja—that an old Italian text situates their origin in the “country of the Saracens,” a discovery that strengthens my parallel between a queen of hearts or diamonds and the image of the friend of whom I have said that, in order to recover a little of her presence, despite the wall interposed by time, “Saracens” is an open-sesame more effective than all my sentences so patiently elaborated.
What passes, today, from that Saracen woman, through some hypotheses issuing from my mood, as well as through some conjunctions, and what could not, even while persisting in its being, stop moving as long as I myself still move, turns out to be, in the end, as conventional as a tarot card or a playing card, and certainly as thin. In order for that image to have substance, which its written formulation is not enough to endow it with, wouldn’t it be necessary, in the first place, that the person involved be able to recognize herself as in a mirror where she would discover herself as into herself at last? Yet supposing Khadidja were able to read me, the story that I have told and the way in which she is shown in it would remain impenetrable to her or, if it were otherwise, would no doubt make her laugh, as much to see such importance attached to ordinary relations between supplier and customer as to find herself promoted from the despised rank of whore to that of magician, midlife infatuation, or angel of death. Thus not shared, and merely subjective, this image—an idol whose constancy will not prevent its signification from being lost—lies in the domain of oneirism for the same reasons as do the reveries to which I abandon myself in connection with it. But would one imagine calling a painted portrait chimerical because the original did not feel it was a good likeness, or because the future viewer would have a different view of it than the contemporary? The negativity in which I end up may derive solely from the absurdity of this requirement: to demand from literature what it is not able to supply, a truth independent of epochs and environments.
To resign myself. To admit that writing, subject as it is to time, cannot be a means of domesticating it, either before or after the term of our life. To practice literature as such, in full awareness of its limits, or else to withdraw from the game, imitating the Abbé de Bucquoy, of whom Nerval relates (in the very fictionalized account that Les Illuminés gives of his adventures) that he apparently gave up the frock because he realized that the ascetic discipline had not made him capable of performing miracles. One of these two solutions—to finish this book as an artisan purely and simply executing his task, or to lower the curtain—ought to be what I arrive at, if it were possible, that is, to give up a game that logically I know is lost but for whose outcome, like the gambler who can’t be stopped from trying his luck again by anything except complete ruin, I hope there will occur providentially the winning toss; if I did not think also that where art is concerned (in that place where mathematical reasoning no longer prevails), an experiment begun is always worth pursuing, even if one must finally topple into what, according to that same reasoning, cannot be taken for anything but a piece of nonsense; if I did not suspect, lastly, that I am raising difficulties a little like a negotiator who questions everything again on the very eve of signing the agreements, or like a woman whose modesty or coquettishness impels her to find an imperious reason for refusing when she has already decided to succumb. Besides, is it fair to liken to an artisan’s work any literature practiced without illusions? Art for art’s sake certainly amounts to something of this sort, but one can, even though writing without deluding oneself, go beyond pure confection. When by means of that writing I tried to derive my laws and my idées-forces, the objective I was pursuing was not superhuman, but merely difficult to attain. And if I faltered, it was when—as the book extended to the point where the parts I had already drafted were melting behind me into a confused mass and my goal was becoming indistinct—it seemed to me that I must expressly bring the present into that divagation, too long not to require the insertion of temporal markers, before the terminal effort, which would consist of attempting to condense into a single block that could be grasped all at once the essential part of what I want to say, beyond all the kinds of changes and events that have supervened at the mercy of the years. It was, in the end, because of a slowness such that my thoughts seemed to crumble away instead of becoming stronger that the idea of time began to occupy me to the point of obsession, while my mad exactingness became firmer with regard to writing, now enjoined to defeat time. I know very well, after all, that a certain taste for the baroque incites me to accumulate embellishments and digressions (as though they participated directly in my research), instead of walking straight to the goal, a way of proceeding that thwarts my desire to finish rapidly. But I know just as well that I could not give it up without distancing myself from my purpose, since that taste represents (whether I want it to or not) one of my tendencies where aesthetics is concerned and since my quest for a truth too tangible not to be inextricably mingled with beauty must go by way of what, in life, moves me or captivates me and by way of what, on a literary level, an invincible attraction leads me to introduce into the game.
To this taste, which includes my often-expressed predilection for Verdi’s operas (baroque in the sense that, in them, a volcanic ardor is miraculously associated with a somewhat academic architecture), must respond, at least partially, not only my way of writing, but more than one of my ways of doing things, and even what I believe belongs to me in my own right within the events that, dazzled and dismayed (as I was in my dream, confronted with a cliff sculpted with multiple figures terribly tall and beautiful), I have been able to consider high points in my life. A taste, certainly, that fluctuates (as demanded by its very object), for if, in Verdi precisely, I love the rich musculature and the distinctly articulated diversity of the commentary brought to the peripetiae of the drama, I also love—and perhaps above all—the dazzling lacerations with which this luxuriance, echoed by the gilding and molding of the hall, even the imagery of the trompe-l’oeil settings, is pierced when the impetuosity of the music (apparently hurled into a panting race to reach a present that is immediately concealed by the fluidity of time) resolves into one of those very plainly lyrical phrases that are great and pure outpourings surging up in the same way as does, out of ornamentation whose abundance jostles the harsh geometry of a building, a certain statue that seems to reproduce the sinuosities of life itself, rather than those of a living body, and captivates the eye all the more because this assemblage of lines with apparently uncontrolled wanderings seems to be the almost peaceful result of the tumult in which the rest is plunged. A taste, therefore, that it would be useless to try to confine within a rigid definition, but which, I am firmly convinced, has its own coherence and is the single source of a number of my behaviors, at first sight disparate: that I direct this book as though a greater or lesser amount of overworking—a superfluity, I could say—were indispensable to me, whatever irrita
tion I might feel about it, in order to avoid a dryness that would be even more repugnant to me than the delays thus caused; that, instead of organizing in traditional ways those of my publications that have to do with pure science, I proceed by “successive explosions of thought,” as was observed, close to thirty years ago now, by an expert in Islam assigned to judge my first Africanist memoir, whose articulation was baroque to the highest degree, the placement of details described with prolixity being substituted for any sort of real plan; that I attach myself in an exaggerated way to the forms of what, in life, is likely to exalt us, and that I act, in love, for instance, in the manner—modernized—of a précieux for whom passion—an essentially romantic affair—is modeled on the rock garden of the Map of Love rather than obeying impulses issuing directly from the heart and the senses; far from considering the totality of an action in which I am involved, that I retain an isolated element of it, an emotional or merely picturesque scene, and that I grant, finally, less importance to the general development than to this dramatic motif; that I elect, in order therein to rediscover my childhood and try to see clearly into my lifelong emotions, a figure not only connected to what was bizarre about the interiors of environments of 1900 but baroque in itself, as was my Aunt Claire, a caryatid, all curves, whose radiant face was so capable (when necessary) of convulsing into tragic mascarons; that in the course of my trip to China I became infatuated with the adventitious and treated as though they represented what was most essential flowers in railway stations or around policemen, bewitching modulations of voices in town as well as on the stage, ingenious architectural combinations, inventions like the vibrating bronze tub and the convex mirror in which the mountain was reflected (piquant fancies like those in certain of our churches, dating back two or three centuries, that cause the leg of an angel to pass over the corniche or a part executed in the round to complete a personage the rest of whom is done flat), all things that are merely rococo trifles which, not surprisingly, were not able to provide me the wherewithal to give a consistent account of the country I had traveled as fascinated visitor; in many cases, lastly, that I am sensitive to something indirectly by way of an irony (preferring, for example, to any other residence a place anachronistic in itself or in certain, at least, of the characteristics of its furnishings, appreciating a certain song or piece of music whose excess of sentimentality amuses me, or, on the contrary, whose gay and simple manner of presenting itself would, nearly, wring tears from me, prizing, more than other lofty gastronomical venues, localities with good plain Third Republic cooking, liking, in a work of art, that such surprising profit should be derived from very anodyne elements or, on the contrary, that there be manifested in it a sudden contempt for all moderation, which means that the great aria of Rigoletto, where, along with the invectives and supplications of the rebuffed buffoon, vehemence and sweetness enjoy themselves to the full, will be par excellence the aria that I would like to be able to sing, but that, in Mallarmé, I will admire the fact that a whole metaphysics springs from a knickknack or a few puffs of tobacco and, in Proust, that he shows as clearly as Freud, though from another point of view, what a world of revelations can be contained in mere nothings).
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