A Perfect Vacuum (15 page)

At this point the letter falls from the hands of Homer Odysseus, who with a cry of “Eureka!” begins to run about the room, which looks out, with its glass windows, upon the blue of the bay. In that moment Odysseus realizes that it is not that humanity has lost forever its geniuses of the first order—the geniuses, rather, have lost sight of humanity, for they have moved away from it. It is not that these geniuses simply do not exist: rather, with each passing year they do not exist
to a greater and greater degree.
The works of unrecognized geniuses of the second category can always be saved. All one need do is dust them off and hand them over to presses or universities. But the works of the first order nothing can preserve, because these stand apart—outside the current of history.

Collective human effort carves out a trench in historical time. A genius is one whose effort is exerted at the very limit of that trench, at its verge, who proposes to his or to the next generation a particular change of course, a different curve of the bed, the angling of the slopes, the deepening of the bottom. But the genius of the first order does not participate thus in the labors of the spirit. He does not stand in the first ranks; nor has he gone a step ahead of the rest; he is simply somewhere else—in thought. If he postulates a different form of mathematics or a different methodology, whether for philosophy or the natural sciences, it will be from a standpoint in no way similar to those existing—no, without a scintilla of similarity! If he is not noticed and given a hearing by the first, by the second generation, it is altogether impossible for him to be noticed thereafter. For, in the meantime, the river of human endeavor and thought has been digging its trench, has gone its way, and therefore between its movement and the solitary invention of the genius the gap widens with each century. Those proposals—unappreciated, ignored—truly could have changed the trend of things in the arts,
Odysseus of Ithaca
in the sciences, in the whole history of the world, but because it did not happen thus, humanity let slip by much more than a particular curious individual with his particular intellectual equipment. It let slip by, at the same time, a particular
other
history
of its own,
and for this there is now no remedy. Geniuses of the first order are roads not taken, roads now completely desolate and overgrown; they are those prizes in the lottery of incredible luck which the player did not show up to claim, the purses he did not collect—until their capital evaporated and turned to nothing, the nothing of opportunities missed. The lesser geniuses do not part with the common stream but stay within its current, altering the law of its movement without ever stepping outside the margin of the community—or without stepping outside it totally, all the way. For this they are revered. The others, because they are so great, remain invisible forever.

Odysseus, profoundly moved by this revelation, immediately sits down and writes a new brochure, whose gist—given above—is no less plain than the idea of the Quest. That Quest, after thirteen years and eight days, has reached its end. It was not a labor made in vain, since the modest inhabitant of Ithaca (Massachusetts), venturing down into the depths of the past with his team of votaries, has found that the single living genius of the first order is Homer M. Odysseus: for the greatest greatness of history can be recognized only by a greatness that is equal to it.

I recommend Kuno Mlatje's book to those who think that if man were not invested with sex there could be no literature or art. As to whether or not the author is kidding, each reader will have to answer that question for himself.

(Editions Denoël, Paris)

 

The novel is pulling back into the author; that is, from the position of the fiction of the
only
reality it retreats to the position of the
origin
of that fiction. This, at least, is what has been taking place in the vanguard of European prose. Fiction has grown odious to the writers; it sickens them; they have lost faith in its necessity and therefore have become atheists of their own omnipotence. No longer do the writers believe that when they say, “Let there be light,” genuine radiance dazzles the reader. (The fact that they speak thus, that they
can
speak thus, is definitely no fiction. )

The novel that depicted its own creation was merely the first step of the withdrawal to the rear. Nowadays one does not write works that show how those works arose, for the protocol account of a concrete creation is also too confining! One writes about what
might
be written. From the infinite possibilities awhirl in the brain one pulls out isolated outlines, and the rambling among these fragments, which never become regular texts, is the present line of defense. Not the last line, it is to be feared, because among the literati the feeling is growing that these successive retreats have a limit, that they are leading by way of retrogressions, one close upon the next, to the place where vigil is kept by the hidden, mysterious “absolute embryo” of creativity—of all creativity—that fecund germ from which could spring the myriad works that will not be written. But the image of this embryo is an illusion, because there can be no Genesis without a world made, and no literary creation without a belles-lettres as its product. “First causes” are so inaccessible as to be nonexistent: to retreat to them is to fall into the error of infinite regress; one writes a book about how one essays to write a book about the wish to write a book, and so on.

Raymond Seurat's
You
is an attempt to break out of the impasse in a different direction, not by yet another retreat-beating maneuver but by a forward charge. To date, authors have always addressed the reader, yet not for the purpose of speaking
about him:
this is precisely what Seurat decided to do. A novel about the reader? Yes, about the reader, but no longer is it a novel. Since to address the addressee has meant to tell him something, to speak, if not
about
something (the antinovel!), then nevertheless, always,
for
him. And therefore, in this way, to serve him. Seurat thought it high time to put an end to this everlasting servitude; he decided to rebel.

An ambitious idea, no question of that. The work-as-rebellion against the “singer-listener,” “narrator-reader” relation? Mutiny? A challenge? But in the name of what? At first glance it seems nonsense: If you, writer, do not wish to serve by narrating, then you must be silent, and, silent, you must cease to be a writer. There is no alternative. What kind of squaring of the circle, then, is Raymond Seurat's work?

I suspect that the further detailing of his plan Seurat learned from de Sade. De Sade created first a closed world—the world of his castles, palaces, convents—in order then to divide the throng locked within into villains and victims; annihilating the victims in acts of torture that afforded the executioners pleasure, the villains soon found themselves alone and, in order to proceed further, were obliged in turn to begin that mutual devouring which in the epilogue produces the hermetic solitude of the most vital of the villains—he who devoured, consumed all the rest, who reveals then that he is not the mere
porteparole
of the author, but the author himself, the selfsame Comte Donatien Alphonse François de Sade imprisoned in the Bastille. He alone remains, for he alone is not a creature of fiction. Seurat turned this account around, as it were. Besides the author, there surely is and must always be a nonfictional someone vis-à-vis the work: the reader. He therefore made this very reader his hero. But of course it is not the reader himself who speaks; any such oration would be a trick only, a ventriloquist's deception. The author addresses the reader—to give him notice.

We are speaking here of literature as spiritual prostitution; prostitution because, to write it, one must serve. One must ingratiate oneself, pay court, display oneself, show off one's stylistic muscles, make confession, confide in the reader, render unto him what one holds most dear, compete for his attention, keep alive his interest—in a word, one has to suck up to, wheedle, and wait upon, one has to sell oneself. Disgusting! When the publisher is the pimp, the literary man the whore, and the reader the customer in the bawdyhouse of culture, when this state of affairs reaches one's awareness, it brings on a bad case of moral indigestion. Not daring, however, to quit in so many words, the writers begin to shirk their duties: they serve, but grudgingly; rather than clownishly amuse, they wax unintelligible and tedious; rather than show pretty things, to spite the reader they will treat him to abomination. It is as if an insubordinate cook were to befoul, by design, the dishes going to the master's table; if the master and the mistress don't like it, they don't have to eat it! Or as if a woman of the street, fed up with her trade yet not strong enough to break with it, were to cease accosting men, cease putting on makeup, dressing up, giving fetching smiles. But what of that, when she continues standing at her place on the corner, ready to go off with any customer, sour as she is, sullen, sarcastic? Hers is no true revolt, it is a simulated, half-measure rebellion, full of hypocrisy, self-deception; who knows whether it is not worse than normal, straightforward prostitution, which at least does not put on airs, pretending to high condition, untouchability, precious virtue!

And so? One must give notice; the prospective customer, who opens the volume like the door of a brothel and barges in with such assurance, confident that here his needs will be attended to with servility, this overgrown pig of a philistine, this lowlife—one must punch him in the mouth, call him every name in the book, and—kick him downstairs? No, no, that would be too good for him, too easy, too simple; he would only pick himself up, wipe the spittle from his face, dust of! his hat, and take himself to a competitor's establishment. What one has to do is yank him inside and give him a proper hiding. Only then will he remember well his former amour with literature, those endless illicit
Seitensprungen
from book to book. And so
“Crève, canaille!”
as Raymond Seurat says on one of the first pages of
Toi
: die, dog, but do not die too soon, you must conserve your strength, for you will have to go through much; you will pay here for your arrogant promiscuity !

Entertaining as an idea, and perhaps even as a possibility for an original book—which book Raymond Seurat, however, has not written. He did not bridge the distance between the rebellious conception and the artistically validated creation; his book has no structure; it is outstanding primarily, alas, even in these days, by virtue of the phenomenal foulness of its language. Indeed, we do not deny the author his verbal invention; his baroque is, in places, imaginative. (“Yes, loose brainsucking leech of a letch you, yes, turdy rot-toothed trull, yes, you candidate you for a whopping decomposition and oh-may-you-molder, be treated you shall to rack and ruin in here, for ruined on the rack, and if you think that all coddly cow's-eyes and cajolery,
you'll
see, I'll cook you your wagon good I will. Unpleasant? No doubt. But necessary.”) And so we are promised tortures here
—painted
tortures. This already is suspect.

In his “Literature as Tauromachy,” Michel Leiris correctly emphasized the importance of the
resistance
which a literary creation must overcome if it is to acquire the weight of action. Thus Leiris took the risk of compromising himself in his biography. But in heaping curses on the reader's head there is no real risk, for the contractual nature of the invective becomes undeniable. By declaring that he will no longer serve and that
even now
he is not serving, surely Seurat amuses us—and so, in this very refusal to serve, he serves.... He made the first step but instantly foundered. Can it be that the task he set himself was insoluble? What else could have been done here? Hoodwink the reader with a narrative that would lead him down whatever primrose path one liked? That has been done a hundred, a thousand times. And anyway, it is always easy for the reader to conclude that the dislocated, mistaken, and misleading text does not constitute a deliberate maneuver, that it is the product not of perfidy but of ineptitude. Any efficacious book-as-invective, to be an authentic insult, to be an affront that carries with it the risk proper to such an act, can be written only with a concrete, single addressee in mind. But then it becomes a letter. By attempting to affront us all, as readers, to tear down that very role—that of the consumer of literature—Seurat has offended no one; he has merely performed a series of linguistic acrobatic tricks, which very quickly cease to be even amusing. When one writes about all, or to all, at once, one writes about no one, to no one. Seurat failed because the only really consistent way for a writer to rise up against the service of literature is silence; any other sort of revolt amounts to making monkey faces. Raymond Seurat will undoubtedly write another book and with it wholly annul this first one—unless he begins going to bookstores and slapping his readers in the face. Were that to happen, I would respect the consequentiality of his action, but only on the personal level, for nothing will salvage the washout that is
Toi.

(American Library, New York)

 

When one takes on a servant, his wages cover—besides the work—the respect a servant owes a master. When one hires a lawyer, beyond professional advice one is purchasing a sense of security. He who buys love, and not merely strives to win it, also expects caresses and affection. The price of an airplane ticket has for some time included the smiles and seemingly genial courtesy of attractive stewardesses. People are inclined to pay for the “private touch,” that feeling of being
intime,
taken care of, liked, which constitutes an important ingredient in the packaging of services rendered in every walk of life.