The latest that has arrived is Quim Monzó’s Gasoline, translated from the Catalan by Mary Ann Newman. My interest was immediately piqued over breakfast when the book arrived by reading the interview with Monzó that accompanied it : “In art, without humour—a subtle and invisible humour—there is nothing worth keeping”, says Monzó.

Gasoline is, on one level, a book about the process of producing art: one protagonist/artist is unable to produce anything; the other is prolific. There is a subtle link made between the production of art and desire. Heribert Julià, protagonist of the first half of the novel and celebrated artist, is unable to paint, unable to successfully make love, unable to hop on a train with the intention of going anywhere, but “decides to get off at the sixth stop. ‘Because six is an insignificant number, a petty number. It’s not brilliant like three, or pleasant like two, or magical like seven, or independent like one, or…’” (26). It seems he cannot muster desire: even in the face of a rapidly approaching and important exhibition, he wanders the streets, contemplates windowsills without managing to suffer a sense of urgency.

Heribert’s doppelganger-esque successor, Humbert Herrera, does not seek insignificance, nor, it seems (at the point of his life which the novel explores) does he leave much to chance. Humbert quite deliberately takes the place of Heribert, desiring all that he perceives Heribert desires: he marries Heribert’s wife and stalks his mistress. His first major exhibition takes the place of one planned for Heribert. And all of this comes about after he has followed, plotted to encounter and introduced himself to Heribert’s wife, Helena Sorrenti:

“Helena Sorrenti seemed to hold the key to the situation. Not only did she run the gallery that had launched Julià and established his dominance, she also seemed to be his wife. At the restaurant where he worked, Humbert asked to work only the lunch shift for a month. He followed her. He studied her habits [...]

“On the fourth Tuesday, he made up his mind. That morning he withdrew all his savings—a pittance—from the bank. At noon he swept his studio, dusted, put fresh sheets on the bed, and lined all his paintings up against the walls. That afternoon he showered, shaved, put on a clean shirt, a jacket and tennis shoes. That evening, as he walked toward the Blarney Stone, he couldn’t stop thinking that maybe that night he wouldn’t be going home alone. Outside the restaurant, he stopped for a moment to work up his courage: he opened the door, crossed the room with determination, and sat down at the table where Helena Sorrenti was sitting, all by herself” (97).

Later, dissatisfied with his life with Heribert’s wife, Helena, Humbert pursues the woman who was Heribert’s mistress at the height of his career: Hildegarda (yet another name beginning with H). Tracking her down takes a couple of attempts. At the first attempt, he successfully seduces a woman (whom he imagines “in Heribert’s arms, soft and warm. He gets an erection”, 106) only to find that she is not Hildegarda, that he has made a mistake. He immediately loses interest. It would seem that the only things that Humbert desires are those he perceives Heribert to desire, or to have desired. This, then, is a novel about coveting, about the perception of an other’s desire, and the projection of this perceived desire. This takes living vicariously a step further. The irony is, as we know from the first part of the book, that Heribert does not in fact desire anything at all. Humbert is victim to a fantasy and it is this fantasy that allows him to produce and publicise his art.

This novel also brought to mind the novels of Michel Houellebecq – perhaps through the casual description of Heribert’s visit to an adult shop in his attempt to experience desire, perhaps by its slightly laconic, witty, masculine tone. In Platform, Houellebecq describes the wife of Tom Cruise’s character in The Firm as someone (and I get the impression he is speaking here about a particular type of woman) “who was not content simply to be loved; she wanted to be the sexiest, the most desirable woman in the world (90).” This is something like the predicament of Humbert, who is rather satirically depicted as feeling the need to note everything down in case he fails to make something of the more brilliant ideas that occur to him regularly. He decides that he wants to make a film, “write the script, build the buildings (ah, architecture, how often it, too, had tempted him!) and compose the score, as Charlie Chaplin did. Like Charlie Chaplin, he would act in it, too [...] And novels: [...] how he will shame all the other writers!” (128).

…”But his activity cannot be limited to the arts; the entire world will be his field of action; he will have all of humanity interpret one sole performance” (128). Here, I suspect, is the novel’s target: the artist who desires to make the world succumb to his vision, and beyond that: to find the world as he envisages it. Yet the alternative Monzó offers is bleak: the absence of artistic drive.

For all of this, the novel is engaging, made vibrant by a subtle and perceptive humour that makes the characters almost endearing. There are pronounced echoes of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and strongly surreal elements (foreshadowed by the novel’s opening line: “Once again, he feels as if he were asleep and awake at the same time”), that I have not had time to do justice to here, but that raise, among other things, questions about whether dreaming constitutes an absence or an excess of desire in the life of the dreamer. Plagued by the need to become adept at everything, Humbert unsurprisingly finds himself an insomniac. Unable to desire in reality, Heribert is unsure as to whether he is dreaming.

Holmes is not himself adverse to pulling such tricks upon his audience.  He will often make an impossible observation, state the seemingly unknowable (‘You have just come back from France’; ‘I see you are thinking of investing in the stock market’; ‘Your fly is open’ …perhaps that one’s not so miraculous), and the characters surrounding Holmes will gasp in astonishment.  In the very first case they work together (A Study in Scarlet), Holmes at first refuses to describe his entire deductive process, momentarily withholding his suspicions about the murder in question and thereby propelling the plot.  As he explains to Watson:

‘You know a conjurer gets no credit once he has explained his trick and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all.’

However, this is precisely what Holmes goes on to do, repeatedly, for the remainder of his time with Watson, solving seemingly impossible conundrums, but always taking time to explain his methods, insisting that anyone else could do the same – if they too bothered to look.  As he states himself in ‘The Adventure of the Dancing Men’, describing the trick he uses to strike wonder into his audience:

‘[I]t is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple enough in itself.  If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and present’s one’s audience with the starting point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious effect.’

And it is only when Holmes then goes on to lay out the intuitive leaps and logical reasoning that lead up to his pronouncements that we readers applaud.  Indeed, it is precisely this inclination toward explaining his gimmicks that makes Holmes such a wonderfully fun character, rather than a condescending prat.

It should come as no surprise then that with such a devotion to the rules of an ordered and logical universe Holmes’ most frequent bugbear (quite in contrast to his creator Doyle) was the willingness of those around him to entertain metaphysical explanations for the world’s mysteries. The world could be – must be – quantifiable, and so there is a recurring theme throughout the Holmes tales of confronting and exploding superstition and mysticism.  In one such example, ‘The Sussex Vampire’, Holmes immediately banishes the fantastic from consideration, instantly dismissing the notion that a supernatural being could be dwelling amongst suburbia (in this instance a mother suspected of having vampiric tendencies):

‘But are we to give serious attention to such things?  This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain.  The world is big enough for us.  No ghosts need apply.’

Over the course of the story, Holmes therefore dissects this false hypothesis, unmasking the ‘vampire’ by revealing the mystery to be a product of altogether too human emotions: petty jealousies, paranoia, and blinding affection.

Similarly, in The Hound of the Baskervilles (a great read I can’t recommend highly enough), Watson is sent off into the gloomiest landscape imaginable to be stalked by a creature of gothic horror: the titular hound and its deathly curse.  It is only when Holmes turns up two thirds of the way through the story that he can drag the whole proceeding back toward the light of coherency.  All the mythical, mystical wonders that blight this landscape are dragged from out of the shadows, again to be cast down at the audience’s feet, the products of mere shadow puppets and paranoia.  In this sense, Holmes is the ultimate Victorian-Era Scooby-Doo, unmasking the irrational and mystical in order to expose the creepy-old-janitor-under-the-werewolf-mask of the coherent, objective world.  …Or, if anthropomorphised, mystery-solving cartoon dogs aren’t your speed: these narratives effectively operate as Socratic dialogues, exposing the metaphysical to be but a misapprehension of the plainly apparent.

The great irony of this endeavour is that it is precisely in his attempt to rid the world of mystery and mysticism that Holmes himself becomes all the more fantastical.  To return to Holmes’ own conjuring analogy, in his denouncement of the metaphysical he is the magician who takes you through the process of the illusion: he puts on a show so that you can be stupefied, then explains the trick so you can share in the conspiratorial glee, finally being wowed again by thinking back on how the ordinary was made to seem impossible.  Holmes makes the rational world, by virtue of its tediously unremarkable logic (not in spite of it), seem astonishing.

On a larger scale, what makes Doyle a fantastic author is that he performs exactly the same function in his narratives: almost going out of his way to notify his audience of the trickery he is using to hoodwink them.  Doyle dazzles his reader with his audacity, and it is for this reason that he can get away with one of the most audacious acts in literary history: bringing his most beloved hero back from the dead.

p.s. – Sorry, I should have said: SPOILER ALERT.  I forget not everyone knows that Scooby-Doo is a dog.

Paradoxically, in directing the gaze of the fictional work away from the reality of the external world – in exploring and fulfilling its own aesthetic demands – the work provides a critique of the external world itself. The work seeks to transform, through the novel’s form, if not reality, at least our conception of what constitutes reality: “[i]f our knowledge of the world is seen to be mediated through language, then literary fiction (worlds constructed entirely out of language) becomes a useful model for learning about the construction of reality itself” (Waugh 3).

      This is why:

I attribute Literature the power that I deny religion. I find in Literature the clues to understand past and present. I think of Literature as “bridge from man to man” with an existential affinity.

I demand of Literature that it obliterate the general sense of alienation and exploitation that I experience in my own historical context. I believe in the power of Literature to change the world, to be revolutionary and to be of relevance to everything standing beyond its shores. (This is not to say that I believe Literature should be in the service of insert cause here; “political commitment is, for the writer, the full awareness of the present problem of his [her] own language” (Robbe-Grillet 41)).

Great Literature – playful, radical, avant-garde and philosophical literature – fulfills the expectations that I have of it. It makes me think. It breaks me down.  It challenges the real: It breaks Reality.

In “Mallarmé and the Art of the Novel” Blanchot defines the ideal work to be “as impenetrable and as clear as the world itself; subject to an order as visible and as ironically hidden as the order of the world” (45). This is Literature becoming reality. Where the reality of realism is supplanted by the reality of new ways of thinking: the expression of the inexpressible, the search for and creation of other worlds and other possibilities.

In the preface to Open Letter’s recent translation of Macedonio Fernández’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) Adam Thirlwell states: “It is one of the oldest avant-garde wishes, after all, to make a novel which is in fact a reality: that art only has value in so far as it stops being art” (ix).

How is it that after decade upon decade of critical thinking, of experimental literature, of political opposition, the dominant form is still that of the readerly (mimetic) text steeped in verisimilitude? How is it that Breton’s critique of the conventions of the realist novel, in the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924), is still revolutionary?

The text that openly acknowledges its own conventions, the critical meta-fictional text, is a violent response to reality, and an attempt to surpass it. What better reason to read, to write, and to experience Literature?

References

   Blanchot, M. “Mallarmé and the Art of the Novel” (1943). In Holland, M. (ed) The Blanchot Reader. UK: Blackwell Publishers. 1995

   Robbe-Grillet, A. “On Several Obsolete Notions” (1957). In Robbe-Grillet, A. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. USA: Grove Press. 1965

   Thirlwell, A. “A Preface for Macedonio Fernández” (2010). In Fernández, M. The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel). USA: Open Letter. 2010

   Waugh, R. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. USA: Metheun. 1984

Heidegger reiterates Nietzsche’s return as the whole of the experience of being, or rather as the permanent but ungraspable totality of being which stabilises the becoming, evolving, empirical motion of being. For Heidegger the experience of being as expressed by Nietzsche is the will to power, which is becoming – not static and definable, but ever-evolving—“willing, and thus becoming” (1979, 19).  For Heidegger, the return must be thought alongside the will to power, for this becoming (as the individual experience of the empirical world) only exists in relation to a permanent whole of being. Heidegger characterises this whole as the eternal return: “We observe that being, which as such has the fundamental character of will to power, can as a whole only be eternal return of the same” (1991, 210).  The return, for Heidegger, is the metaphysical being that connects and encompasses all beings.  “The movement of the world,” he claims, “thus arrives at no final state that might exist for itself, assimilating becoming, as it were, like the Delta and the River” (1991, 210). Heidegger’s return is an endless recycling.

Derrida objects to Heidegger’s reading of the return as a totality (66). For Derrida, this conception is symptomatic of Heidegger’s preoccupation with unity, and problematic in that, in order to establish his thesis, Heidegger exerts “metonymical violence” on Nietzsche’s writing by not quoting his aphorisms in their entirety (68). Fair enough. But I wonder if Heidegger’s conception has more resonance when thinking about writing. The idea of recycling is itself consistent with the practice of redefining the return that Heidegger undertakes in his Nietzsche.

If we conceive of writing itself as a totality, or at least a unity, existing more in relation to itself than to the world,  its becoming [werden], in Heidegger’s sense, is a fascinating thing to examine (I think that this is what Maurice Blanchot, for one, does).

The quotation, writes Leslie Hill, obeys “the law of necessary infidelity”, but “whatever its nomadic potential, every quotation, or fragment of quotation, remembers at least one of its previous occurrences” (399). Quotations are explicit ways of linking texts to one another, of encouraging texts to speak through, for or against one another. Singular words are themselves implicit quotations and, although their nomadic potential is far greater than that of the quoted phrase or sentence, words echo, recalling other usage.

Any new text transforms the sum total of what has been written into something it was not before the addition of this new work (the body of the written becomes and changes, just as we do), and is at once a  return, in its echo of the language of previous works, and an abolition of those works as they are evoked by the new text, not in their entirety, but through their absence. The literary work, in all its forms, engenders a return to all that has been written before, and a challenge to all that will be written in the future. This peculiarity is visible in the literary work because the literary word lasts. The new work, then, does not exist as an independent totality, but is connected to all other works, past and future.

This thought is not mine; it is really Blanchot’s, as I read him, and as I rewrite him (perhaps getting him wrong). It is Heidegger’s too.

Derrida, Jacques. 1995. “Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger) Two Questions.” In Nietzsche: A Critical Reader. Translated by Diane Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer. Edited by Peter R. Sedgwick. 53-68. Oxford UK; Cambridge USA: Blackwell.

Heiddeger, Martin. 1979. Nietzsche. Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art. Translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: Haper and Row.

———. 1991. Nietzsche. Vol. 3. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi.  San Francisco: Harper Collins.

Hill, Leslie. 2007. “‘A Form That Thinks’: Godard, Blanchot, Citation.” In Forever Godard. Edited by Michael Temple, James S Williams and Michael Witt. 396-415. London: Black Dog.

(Adam Pynacker ‘Boatmen Moored on the Shore of a Lake’  1660)

(Sam Leach ‘Proposal for landscaped cosmos’ 2010)

There are some questions, though, that come to mind, like what if Leach had only ‘cited’ (his word) Pynacker’s distinct branch and placed it on an entirely new background, say a cityscape? Or what if he reproduced ‘Boatmen’ as a Cubist, and not Baroque vision? Or better yet, what if he had gone full Pierre Menard on it – learned 17th Century Dutch, forgotten the intervening three hundred and fifty years of history – and reproduced it stroke for stroke?

What would have been the reaction to such scenarios, I can’t say, but it does raise some interesting issues about what we, Australia, expect of art and artists, which in turn reveals some important points about our current political and cultural thought. I recently read Naomi Wolf writing on the movie Avatar. She sees it as corresponding to a national Freudian psychological unconscious:

just as an individual’s dreams and slips of the tongue reveal his or her repressed knowledge, so a culture’s “dreamwork” – its films, pop music, visual arts, and even in the resonant jokes, cartoons and advertising images – reveal the signs of this collective unconscious. Moreover, a nation’s “irrational dreamwork” often reflects its actual condition more truthfully than its “ego” – its official pronouncements, diplomatic statements, and propaganda.

For me the “irrational dreamwork” that is the public discussion of Leach’s painting reveals the following of our national unconscious: a) Art is more than technique; clearly Leach’s technique – his ability to put paint on canvas with precision – is amazing. Art is still for us about notions of ‘originality’, ‘vision’ or as I think these concepts point to, the individual – this is why we are offended by his act of ‘copying’, because it betrays our notion that art is individual expression. We still expect our artists to be gifted visionaries who see in a different way from the majority of people. Our idea of the artist, then, does a few major things to prop-up the Australian (capitalist, consumerist and individualist) ideology: it privileges the individual but, importantly, does so by enforcing the normativity of the majority, and all the while seeking a version of reality that transcends the everyday. b) We either do not like or do not have access to ideas about art, if we did, we would know that appropriation, citation and out-and-out theft are themselves legitimate strategies. It was a long time ago that we, as artists (writers, painters what have you) realised that we don’t wear blinkers, that we wear our influences on our sleeves. Admittedly, it wasn’t that long ago that such ideas came to form the basis of our practice, but this was still a wide-spread and important development that you would think still had some sway in thinking about art. I don’t need to cite the countless works of Modernism that rely on the same kind of ‘citation’ that Leach makes use of. But, as with many other progressive ideas from the period (like class politics, the retreat of religion etc.) we have lost that part of the 20th century from our collective consciousness, and conservatism again dominates our cultural and political landscape.

I like Leach’s painting – there is something contemplative in its washed-ness (not actually as washed as it appears above) and the balance that removing all trace of human life achieves. Viewed next to the original this is ever more apparent, and it makes a chilling Utopia to look out over.

It was because of the glasses. And because I had to keep jostling them up my nose, hearing them ‘tink’ against my regular lenses. I got thinking about the mechanics of the whole process: about how these marvellous images get made. From what little I understand they use two separate but fixed cameras that mimic the binocular process of human sight, capturing two images from two different angles, which, when projected almost simultaneously, are then processed in the mind to construct the appearance of a three-dimensional image. Two viewpoints, two separate angles, which when read together appear to fill in the gap between them and unify the contradiction into a cohesive whole: a ‘real’ world image. Now, obviously two-visions-becoming-one is the larger metaphor of the movie – human and alien seeing each other’s viewpoint; uniting; working together; making out – but that’s too obvious and boring. (And I’m not sure the human caricatures of greed and brutality depicted in the film can really be considered a legitimate opposing viewpoint…) Instead, I want to draw a much flimsier analogy by using this premise to explore the world of England’s greatest detective, and the narrative structure that is so central to his success.

The Holmes stories are defined by their narrative structure, and a necessary self-referential mechanic that is built into every facet of the tale. Firstly (famously) Doyle employs the construct of the witness narrator: Watson, the eager, deferential observer, is swept along in Holmes’ wake like a leaf. This localising of the viewpoint is, of course, a delaying tactic, central to the slow reveal of the mystery: as readers we must await elucidation along with Watson, must go along with his presumptive tangents and misdirection while we wait for Holmes to set him right. Through Holmes’ eyes Doyle could not hold off from telling the reader what each clue he has spotted means at the moment he spies it (although curiously Doyle did write some very late stories through the viewpoint of his detective – they’re not his best); through Watson’s vision however, Holmes can point out a peculiar floor covering, a brand of cigarettes, a seemingly trivial idiosyncrasy, all without naming precisely why these details should be kept in mind until he is ready to disgorge the whole sequence of events in his concluding revelatory purge.

Secondly, Doyle’s stories are propelled by expositional dialogue. Characters describe their back stories, discuss their theories, often they even declare their own actions or what they are seeing in front of their face. Clients frequently drop by the Baker Street lodgings to offer Holmes their stories. Despite specifically declaring themselves not to be story-tellers, they each sit to offer the attentive Holmes an expansive, florid description of their woe, recounting the events of their misfortune with an uncanny dramatic flair. And during these embedded narratives, Holmes inevitably perceives some fragment of pertinent information that leads him, finally, to unravel the whole plot.

On a larger scale too, Watson is constantly referring to his own act of writing and publishing these stories: he notes that he has changed ‘real’ names to avoid scandal; speaks of writing particular adventures in order to correct the public record and respond to rumours in the press; indeed, Holmes is a celebrity in these stories precisely because of Watson’s publication, and he consequently offers critiques of Watson’s writing style and tendency for exaggeration, arguing that his friend gets a little carried away in his praise. In the first paragraph of ‘The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb’, Watson even discusses the effect he is trying to create by meticulously capturing Holmes’ methodology in prose. This narration is more striking than reading an account of a crime in a newspaper, he says, because ‘the facts slowly evolve before your own eyes, and the mystery clears gradually away as each new discovery furnishes a step which leads on to the complete truth.’

This evolution of the story, from flat, second-hand mystery to complex, murderous plot exposed, is entirely dependent upon the role Holmes plays within the text – not as a detective, but rather as a voice of opposition – a parallel but alternate point of view. Holmes is not so much the subject of these tales as their frontline audience. At every level these short stories operate as narratives in a state of flux, and Holmes becomes, in effect, an editor of sorts, seeking revisions, correcting proofs, asking the speakers of each narrative to adhere to the logic of the world in which their fiction exists. He challenges the singular viewpoint of the presented events by pointing out their contradictions, poking at the seams and exploring each unresolved tangent from another angle until the two visions align.

Holmes then lays out this overarching sequence of events before the stupefied Watson, who finds he has been led, bewildered, through two conflicting narratives that are finally unified into a third, cohesive whole. Rather than merely chasing down leads, engaging in dramatic shoot outs, or interrogating criminals (some of which does occur) for the most part Doyle’s detective plays the part of a corrective meta-narrator, somewhat sanctimoniously directing his audience (the client; Watson; the incompetent police; we the readers) to note the self-evident hole in their account of events. As a direct consequence of this dialogue – bringing cohesion through contradiction, synthesising at least two contrary viewpoints – the character of Sherlock Holmes himself seems to rise up and out of the page before us, a three-dimensional character with a life and experience as multifaceted as our own.

…Well, certainly with more depth than that crazy scar-faced General guy in the robot suit. What the hell was that all about?

Early April 1744 is awash with tremors and trembling for Swedenborg. A narrative of spiritual awakening through suffering and temptation is played out in his dreams as he closes in on April the 6th. Interestingly enough the closer he comes to this date the more impaired is his capacity to distinguish between states of waking and dreaming. The text reflects this also: April’s record begins in Swedenborg’s usual manner, each date pertaining to a dream or series of dreams with sporadic lines of interpretation by the author. He flew on horses, searched through the rooms of an unnamed house for “him”; King Charles sat in a darkened room speaking indistinctly. Riding once more he noticed a wagon behind him that he could not elude until the horse drawing it grew tired and “became like a slaughtered, bloody beast, fallen down” (19). He stepped from a carriage being driven into water, he folded a large umbrella. He was threatened by unknown beings: “One of them came to me and said that they intended to inflict a punishment on me next Thursday before Easter, unless I made my escape. I did not know how to get out, but he told me he would show me the way. I awake. It means that I, in an unprepared and untidy hut, had invited the highest beings to visit me, and that they had found it untidy and that I ought to be punished, but I was most graciously shown the way by which to avoid their wrath” (19).

Swedenborg’s spiritual anxieties increase in the coming days and his sleep becomes erratic: “I experienced nothing the whole night [3rd-4th April], although I repeatedly woke up; I thought everything was past and gone, and that I was forsaken or driven away. Towards the morning it seemed to me I was riding, and the direction was shown to me, but when I looked it was dark, and I found I had lost my way on account of the darkness. But then it lightened up and I saw that I had gone wrong; I saw the road and the forests and groves to which I should travel, and behind them the sky. I awoke. There came then a thought, as it were spontaneous, about the first life, and, in consequence, about the other life, and it seemed to me everything was full of grace” (20). For me it is here that Swedenborg’s spiritual awakening truly begins, with a curious blurring of the waking and dream state: the above quoted entry begins with descriptions of sleeplessness which transition directly into the phrase – “it seemed to me I was riding”. Sleep and dreaming are assumed when he later states “I awoke”; but perhaps the textual confluence evoked by this “seemed” evidences a destabilisation of the distinction between perceptual states: dream|awake, unconscious|conscious, insanity|sanity. Carl Jung has much to say on this matter, including the following concise summation: “To say that insanity is a dream which has become real is no metaphor” (241).

In this “seemed” I see a sliding between realities. I once asked Anthony Mannix about his experience of the sanity|madness transition: “Is there a descent into psychosis? Is there a gradual sense of inevitability about the mental shift that is occurring?” “No,” he said, “there’s nothing gradual or inevitable about it, psychosis comes like a shove in the back. I’m shoved into psychosis – you look around to see what has pounded you in the spine and realise you are on the other side of the real – you’ve entered the irreal, again.”

Swedenborg spends the night of April 4th-5th in a dreamt hymn. During April 5th-6th the real and the dream coalesce further with unspecified “temptations” occurring during the day, accompanied by trembling. Sleep brings dreams of “a crouching dark-grey snake” that Swedenborg realises is in fact a dog with which he becomes locked in battle: “finally I got hold of him by the jaws and squeezed him hard, and also by the nose which I squeezed so that the venom burst forth” (23).

Whilst the entirety of April thus far seems charged with a sense of the spiritual, the 6th-7th of April is described as particularly significant. Not only are the experiences escalating in intensity but they increasingly occur when Swedenborg is awake: “and the whole day I had been graciously permitted to be in profound spiritual thoughts, as profound and beautiful as I had ever experienced, and this during the entire day, which was the work of the Spirit, whom I found to be with me” (26). Evening brings with it the final bodily ‘shove’ into the madness of visionary illumination: “At ten o’clock I went to bed and felt somewhat better. Half an hour afterwards I heard a noise beneath my head and I then thought the tempter had departed. Immediately there came over me a powerful tremor, from the head and over the whole body, together with a resounding noise, and this occurred a number of times. I found that something holy had encompassed me. I then fell asleep, but about twelve, one, or two o’clock in the night there came over me a very powerful tremor from the head to the feet, accompanied by a booming sound as if many winds had clashed against one another. It was indescribable, and it shook me and prostrated me on my face. In the moment that I was prostrated I became wide awake, and I saw I had been thrown down. I wondered what it meant, and I spoke as if I were awake, but still I found that the words were put into my mouth, and I said, “Oh, Thou Almighty Jesus Christ, who of Thy great mercy deignest to come to so great a sinner, make me worthy of this grace!”” (26).

A moment follows in which Swedenborg “was sitting at His bosom and beheld him face to face” (27). He wakes with tremors “into such a state that in my thoughts I was neither sleeping nor awake” (27). For Swedenborg it was the “Son of God Himself” that materialised to fill this space between perceptual states; speaking to and through him. Mannix draws less from Christianity and more from shamanism, the occult and psychology to shape his visionary manifestations:

each night i am confronted with diaphanous beings, personalities, possessivenesses. Phobia comes one night, Dementia another and Apoplexia and Mania the next and whisper their scream/stare/whisper into me. Its a trance of the low elongated keys, almost beyond the range of human perception, calling again and again. to call it moaning is to ride the Beast sidesaddle. (Journal of a Madman 1994-95 16)

For Mannix such visions are in every way as profound and instructive as those experienced by Swedenborg – and as real. The central figure to appear before Mannix is not the Son of God Himself, but the Beast of the Unconscious: “a beast of every other colour made up of every other beast stands at the threshold with mercurial and sulphuresent eyes. The room SEEMS to be exploding with ignited phosphorus” [emphasis|spelling as in original] (Erotomania 1994-96 12).

Who am I to say that Mannix didn’t see|hear|feel such things, or Swedenborg.

And who am I to say they each weren’t seeing something that actually exists in the delicate zone of SEEMS; that unstable, irreal reality between wakefulness and the mystery that is the dream.

Citations

Jung, Carl. “On the Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia”. The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease. Trans.: R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. 233-49.

Mannix, Anthony. Journal of a Madman 1994-95: The Chasm, Other Stories, Drawings and Other Things…and there Reigns love and all love’s loving parts. Unpublished Manuscript: ‘The Atomic Book’ Digital Archive complied by G.S. Jenkins, 2005-2008.

—. Erotomania 1994-96. Unpublished Manuscript: ‘The Atomic Book’ Digital Archive complied by G.S. Jenkins, 2005-2008.

Swedenborg, Emanuel. Swedenborg’s Journal of Dreams 1743-1744. New York: Swedenborg Foundation Inc., 1977.

The word is uttered. The occurrence of the primal scream is told in the simple past: “there was the birth and the wailing of the infant”. And then begins a reading. We read our own births and our own screams. We write and read ourselves.

I once heard someone say that there was ‘no pip in the fruit’ – but surely it is not the lack of a pip which is of importance (is this even true?) but rather the anomaly of more than one pip (this is definitely true). There is no fruit without a seed. No seeing without an eye and as many ways of seeing as pairs of eyes. Jakobson’s “classical” model of communication: the theorist will choose to examine the context, the author, the reader, the message, the code… “the most powerful critics often have a clear commitment to one element in the circuit of communication, although they also have the ability to include the other dimensions within their theory in a subordinate role” (Selden p2).

All I will say (for now) is this:  There is no primal scream without the sun, the deep crevice of the earth, Heraclitus’ flowing waters. The river runs its course: “We step and do not step into the same river, we are and we are not”.

References

Selden, Raman (ed) The Theory of Criticism: From Plato to the Present. Longman, New York: 1988

Now, am I the only person who remembers the complicity of the US, UK and Australian media (I get my news in English) in the invasion of Iraq? If you have forgotten, here are some choice examples: lies, lies and more lies. Surely we have not purged our media of all the journalists who bought the Bush/Cheney line without question. More fundamentally, surely our media institutions have not now, only years later, overcome the coalition of corporate media and government (see here for evidence) that led to this kind of collusion in the first place. A quick look at the coverage that Australian Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu’s trial in China has received will confirm that bias against the perceived other, selective story telling and media managament by corporations and governments is still the name of the game. And while it is possible to think that these interventions into media run on a sliding scale in terms of badness – that is to say, that Ryszard Kapuscinski is a lying Commie-bastard, China is corrupt and without rigorous legal frameworks, Australian politicians and media are simply trying to ensure Hu (and Rio Tinto) gets a fair trial (get off scot-free), journalists were not culpable for the coverage of WMDs and the invasion of Iraq, were hoodwinked and don’t have blood all over their hands – I tend to think things are a more black and white, and that they are all as guilty as each other – except for Ryszard Kapuscinski who has integrity and is awesome.

Last night I came across a listing for Blanchot’s corrected proofs of L’Entretien Infini (at the price of US$ 29 137.08) sitting at a bookseller’s in Ireland. Its description reads as follows:

“The corrected proofs of L’Entretien infini, one of Blanchot’s major engagements with the complex and ethereal ideas regarding the fictional universe that constituted his chief theme throughout a large and diverse opus, is extensively corrected and revised, with numerous typed revisions inserted throughout and marks in Blanchot’s hand on the majority of pages. Docketed, signed and dated by Blanchot in the year of publication.

“Blanchot was a recluse who preserved almost no record of his literary work. The present may be the only remaining materials reasonably describable as “manuscripts” to have been preserved from among his effects at his death in 2003, and it was only by chance that these survived – they were salvaged from a rubbish bin by a vigilant concierge and brought to the attention of a bookseller.”

When Blanchot, a man who had devoted his life to the service of writing, died his manuscripts were thrown into a dumpster, presumably under the misguided assumption that they were of no import.

Surely those manuscripts that remain belong in a library. Although the BNF has an extensive collection of Bataille’s manuscripts, and a limited collection of Bataille and Blanchot’s letters, this collection would benefit from the addition of the proofs. As would the scholars who would have access to them. One wonders how many manuscripts (not just Blanchot’s) are privately owned for the sake of their market-value, and what detriment to scholarship results from this.

There is certainly an argument to suggest that Blanchot may not have intended these proofs to be circulated and read, but then the idea that he would have intended, or approved of the price-tag seems completely absurd.

I do not personally have the means to recuperate such manuscripts from the marketplace, but perhaps such a recuperation is something to think about. I wonder if it would be possible to raise money by holding conferences in celebration of the work of an author whose manuscript is now exorbitantly priced and by charging an additional registration fee for the acquisition and subsequent donation of this manuscript to a library…