Je n’ai jamais pu trouver cette lettre. Du Chas l’a peut-être fabriquée de toutes pieces. Elle est assez ‘à la maniere de …’pour être apocryphale. Mais cela n’a aucune espèce d’importance. Ce sont les réactions chasiennes qui nous concernent. Il précise la nature de son dégoût:
‘Qu’il ne puisse se moucher le dimanche matin avant six heures, c’est une chose qui me semble assez naturelle. Mais après ce supplice de clarifications je n’y comprends plus rien. Au diable avec ses explications! Il n’y a que les tics justifies qui soient indécents. La folie, Dieu merci, est indivisible.’
On pourrait tirer une variété de conclusions du manifeste des Concentristes tel que du Chas l’a ébauché dans son Journal. C’est une de ces énonciations qui se laissent volontiers réduire en assez d’obscénités pour satisfaire l’aspiration de chacun de nous vers les régions d’ordre et de clarté. Vous pourriez, par exemple, interpreter ce Discours de la Sortie comme l’expression artistique des evasions qui précèdent le suicide, et ‘cordon s’il vous plaît’ comme l’unique acte définitif de l’individu qui se fait enfin plus que justice. Ce serait un ‘cogito ergo sum’ un peu sensationnel. Et le concierge, celui qui laisse sortir? Tout ce que vous voudrez, Dieu ou la fatigue, petite attaque ou clairvoyance racinienne. Decomposition des joyeux qui descendent en colimaçon. Et vous voila. Clair et consequent comme les syllogismes de Monsieur Chauvin. Ou vous pourriez considérer tout cela sous la lumière de la physiologic Ce serait plus égayant. Mais ce qui est certain, c’est que, si vous insistez à solidifier l’Idée, Celle dont il parle, à concréter la Chose de Kant, vous ne ferez que dégrader en vaudeville de Labiche cet art qui, semblable à une resolution de Mozart, est parfaitement intelligible et parfaitement inexplicable.
4. Dream of Fair to Middling Women
a. Supposing we told now a little story about China in order to orchestrate when we mean. Yes? Lîng-Liûn then, let us say, went to the confines of the West, to Bamboo Valley, and having cut there a stem between two knots and blown into same, was charmed to constate that it gave forth the sound of his own voice when he spoke, as he mostly did, without passion. From this the phoenix male had the kindness to sing six notes and the phoenix female six other notes and Ling-Liun the minister cut yet eleven stems to correspond with all that he had heard. Then he remitted the twelve liŭ-liū to his master, the six liŭ male phoenix and the six liū female phoenix: the Yellow Bell, let us say, the great Liu, the great Steepleiron, the Stifled Bell, the Ancient Purification, the Young Liū, the Beneficient Fecundity, the Bell of the Woods, the Equable Rule, the Southern Liū, the Imperfect, the Echo Bell.
Now the point is that it is most devoutly to be hoped that some at least of our characters can be cast for parts in a liŭ-liū. For example, John might be the Yellow Bell and the Smeraldina-Rima the Young Liū and die Syra-Cusa the Stifled Bell and the Mandarin the Ancient Purification and Belacqua himself the Beneficient Fecundity or the Imperfect, and so on. Then it would only be a question of juggling like Confucius on cubes of jade and playing a tune. If all our characters were like that — liŭ-liū-minded — we could write a little book that would be purely melodic; think how nice that would be, linear, a lovely Pythagorean chain-chant solo of cause and effect, a one-fingered teleophony that would be a pleasure to hear (which is more or less, if we may say so, what one gets from one’s favourite novelist). But what can you do with a person like Nemo who will not for any consideration be condensed into a liū, who is not a note at all but the most regrettable simultaneity of notes. Were it possible to oralize say half-a-dozen Ling-Liun phoenices arising as one immortal purple bird from the ashes of a common pyre and crying simultaneously, as each one saw fit, a cry of satisfaction or of disappointment, a rough idea of the status of this Nemo might be obtained: a symphonic, not a melodic, unit. Our line bulges every time he appears. Now that is a thing that we do not like to happen, and the less so as we are rather keenly aware of the infrequency of one without two. Dare we count on the Alba? Dare we count on Chas? Indeed we tend, on second thoughts, to smell the symphonic rat in our principal boy. He might just manage, semel et simul, the Beneficent Fecundity and the Imperfect; or, better still, furnish a bisexual bulge with a Great Iron of the woods. But ping! a mere liŭ! We take leave to doubt it. …
The real presence was a pest because it did not give the imagination a break. Without going as far as Stendhal, who said — or repeated after somebody — that the best music (What did he know about music anyway?) was the music that became inaudible after a few bars, we do declare and mantain stiffly (at least for the purposes of this paragraph) that the object that becomes invisible before your eyes is, so to speak, the brightest and best.
b. The night firmament is abstract density of music, symphony without end, illumination without end, yet emptier, more sparsely lit, than the most succinct constellations of genius. Now seen merely, a depthless lining of hemisphere, its crazy stippling of stars, it is the passional movements of the mind charted in light and darkness. The tense passional intelligence, when arithmetic abates, tunnels, skymole, surely and blindly (if we only thought so!) through the interstellar coalsacks of its firmament in genesis, it twists through the stars of its creation in a network of loci that shall never be co-ordinate. The inviolable criterion of poetry and music, the non-principle of their punctuation is figured in the demented perforation of the night colander. The ecstatic mind, the mind achieving creation, take ours for example, rises to the shaft-heads of its statement, its recondite relations of emergal, from a labour and a weariness of deep castings that brook no schema. The mind suddenly entombed, then active in an anger and a rhapsody of energy, in a scurrying and plunging towards exitus, such is the ultimate mode and factor of the creative integrity, its proton, incommunicable; but there, insistent, invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface. That was the circular movement of the mind flowering up and up through darkness to an apex, dear to Dionysius the Aeropagite, beside which all other modes, all the polite obliquities, are the clockwork of rond-de-cuirdom.
c. Pride of place to our boys and girls. Ah these liŭs and liūs! How have they stayed the course? Have they been doing their dope? The family, the Alba, the Polar Bear, Chas, that dear friend, and of course Nemo, ranging always from his bridge, seem almost as good as new, so little have they been plucked and blown and bowed, so little struck with the little hammer. But they will let us down, they will insist on being themselves, as soon as they are called for a little strenuous collaboration. Ping! they will no doubt cry with a sneer, pure, permanent lius, we? We take leave to doubt that. And far be it from us to condemn them on that account. But observe what happens in that event, we mean of our being unable to keep those boys and girls up to their notes. The peak pierces the clouds like a sudden flower. We call the whole performance off, we call the book off, it tails off in a horrid manner. The whole fabric comes unstitched, it goes ungebund, the wistful fabric. The music comes to pieces. The notes fly about all over the place, a cyclone of electrons. And then all we can do, if we are not too old and tired by that time to be interested in making the best of a bad job, is to deploy a curtain of silence as rapidly as possible.
At the same time we are bound to admit, placing ourselves for the moment in the thick of the popular belief that there are two sides to every question, that the territorials may behave, at least to the extent of giving us some kind of a meagre codetta. May they. There is many a slip, we all know that, between pontem and fontem and gladium and jugulum. But what that consideration has to do with our counting on members of the Dublin contingent to perform like decent indivisibilities is not clear. The fact of the matter is, we do not trust them. And why not? Because, firstly, of what has gone before; and, secondly, and here is the real hie, the taproot of the whole tangle, of our principal boy’s precarious ipsissimosity.
Consequently, we are rather anxious to dilate briefly of these two things: one, the lius that have let us down; two, Belacqua, who can scarcely
fail to keep on doing so.
d. Such a paraphrased abrégé would seem to indicate, unless there be some very serious flaw in our delirium, that the book is degenerating into a kind of Commedia dell’Arte, a form of literary statement to which we object particularly. The lius do just what they please, they just please themselves. They flower out and around into every kind of illicit ultra and infra and supra. Which is bad, because as long as they do that, they can never meet. We are afraid to call for the simplest chord. Belacqua drifts about, it is true, doing his best to thicken the tune, but harmonic composition properly speaking, music in depth on the considerable scale is, and this is a terrible thing to have to say, ausgeschlossen.
e. Much of what has been written concerning the reluctance of our refractory constituents to bind together is true equally of Belacqua. Their movement is based on a principle of repulsion, their property not to combine but, like heavenly bodies, to scatter and stampede, astral straws on a time-strom, grit in the mistral. And not only to shrink from all that is not they, from all that is without and that in its turn shrinks from them, but also to strain away from themselves. They are no good from the builder’s point of view, firstly because they will not suffer their systems to be absorbed in the cluster of a greater system, and then, and chiefly, because they themselves tend to disappear as systems. Their centres are wasting, the strain away from the centre is not to be gainsaid, a little more and they explode. Then, to complicate things further, they have odd periods of recueillement, a kind of centripetal backwash that checks the rot. The procédé that seems all falsity, that of Balzac, for example, and the divine Jane and many others, consists in dealing with the vicissitudes, or absence of vicissitudes, of character in this backwash, as though that were the whole story. Whereas, in reality, this is so little the story, this nervous recoil into composure, this has so little to do with the story, that one must be excessively concerned with a total precision to allude to it at all. To the item thus artificially immobilized in a backwash of composure precise value can be assigned. So all the novelist has to do is to bind his material in a spell, item after item, and juggle politely with irrefragable values, values that can assimilate other values like in kind and be assimilated by them, that can increase and decrease in virtue of an unreal permanence of quality. To read Balzac is to receive the impression of a chloroformed world. He is absolute master of his material, he can do what he likes with it, he can foresee and calculate its least vicissitude, he can write the end of his book before he has finished the first paragraph, because he has turned all his creatures into clockwork cabbages and can rely on their staying put wherever needed or staying going at whatever speed in whatever direction he chooses. The whole thing, from beginning to end, takes place in a spellbound backwash. We all love and lick up Balzac, we lap it up and say it is wonderful, but why call a distillation of Euclid and Perrault Scenes from Life? Why human comedy?
f. ‘Black diamond of pessimism.’ Belacqua thought that was a nice example, in the domain of words, of the little sparkle hid in ashes, the precious margaret and hit from many, and the thing that the conversationalist, with his contempt of the tag and the ready-made, can’t give you, because the lift to the high spot is precisely from the tag and the ready-made. The same with the stylist. You couldn’t experience a margarita in d’Annunzio because he denies you the pebbles and flints that reveal it. The uniform, horizontal writing, flowing without accidence, of the man with a style, never gives you the margarita. But the writing of, say, Racine or Malherbe, perpendicular, diamante, is pitted, is it not, and sprigged with sparkles; the flints and pebbles are there, no end of humble tags and commonplaces. They have no style, they write without style, do they not, they give you the phrase, the sparkle, the precious margaret. Perhaps only the French can do it. Perhaps only the French language can give you the thing you want.
Don’t be too hard on him, he was studying to be a professor.
g. ‘Get thee to a stud,’ said Belacqua.
‘Your vocabulary of abuse,’ said the Mandarin, ‘is arbitrary and literary, and at times comes close to entertaining me. But it doesn’t touch me. You cannot touch me. You simplify and dramatize the whole thing with your literary mathematics. I don’t waste any words with the argument of experience, the inward decrystallization of experience, because your type never accepts experience, nor the notion of experience. So I speak merely from a need that is as valid as yours, because it is valid. The need to live, to be authentically and seriously and totally involved in the life of my heart and …’.
‘Have you forgotten the English for it?’ said Belacqua.
‘My heart and my blood. The reality of the individual, you had the cheek to inform me once, is an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently. And now you demand a stable architecture of sentiment.’
The Mandarin shrugged his shoulders. There was no shrug in the world, and not many shoulders, like the Mandarin’s.
‘You misunderstand me,’ said Belacqua. ‘What you heard me say does not concern my contempt for your dirty erotic manoeuvres. I was speaking of something of which you have and can have no knowledge, the incoherent continuum as expressed by, say, Rimbaud and Beethoven. Their names occur to me. The terms of whose statements serve merely to delimit the reality of the insane areas of silence, whose audibilities are no more than punctuation in a statement of silences. How do they get from point to point. That is what I meant by the incoherent reality and its authentic extrinsecation.’
‘How,’ said the Mandarin patiently, ‘do I misunderstand you?’
‘There is no such thing,’ said Belacqua wildly, ‘as a simultaneity of incoherence, there is no such thing as love in a thalamus. There is no word for such a thing, there is no such abominable thing. The notion of an unqualified present — the mere “I am” — is an ideal notion. That of an incoherent present — “I am this and that” — altogether abominable. I admit Beatrice,’ he said kindly, ‘and the brothel, Beatrice after the brothel or the brothel after Beatrice, but not Beatrice in the brothel, or rather, not Beatrice and me in bed in the brothel. Do you get that,’ cried Belacqua, ‘you old dirt, do you? not Beatrice and me in bed in the brothel!’
h. ‘I shall write a book,’ [Belacqua] mused, tired of the harlots of earth and air. ‘I am hemmed in,’ he submused, ‘on all sides by putes, in thought or in deed, hemmed in and about; a giant big man must be hired to lift the hem — a book where the phrase is self-consciously smart and slick, but of a smartness and slickness other than that of its neighbours on the page. The blown roses of a phrase shall catapult the reader into the tulips of the phrase that follows. The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement, between the flowers that cannot coexist, the antithetical’ (nothing so simple as antithetical) ‘seasons of words, his experience shall be the menace, the miracle, the memory, of an unspeakable trajectory.’ (Thoroughly worked up by now by this programme, he pushed himself off the bulwark and strode the spit of the deck with long strides and rapidly.) ‘I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo. I think now … of the dehiscing, the dynamic decousu of a Rembrandt, the implication lurking behind the pictorial pretext threatening to invade pigment and oscuro; I think of the Selbstbildnis, in the toque and the golden chain, of his portrait of his brother, of the cute little Saint Matthew angel that I swear van Ryn never saw the day he painted, in all of which canvases during lunch on many a Sunday I have discerned a disfaction, a désuní, an Ungebund, a flottement, a tremblement, a tremor, a tremolo, a disaggregating, a disintegrating, an efflorescence, a breaking down and multiplication of tissue, the corrosive ground-swell of Art. It is the Pauline cupio dissolvi. It is Horace’s solvitur acris biems. It might even be at a pinch poor Hölderlin’s alles hineingeht Schlangengleich. Schlangen gleich! … I think of Beethoven, his eyes are closed, the poor man he was very short-sighted they say, his eyes are closed, h
e smokes a long pipe, he listens to the ferns, the unsterbliche Geliebte, he unbuttons himself to Teresa ante rem, I think of his earlier compositions where into the body of the musical statement he incorporates a punctuation of dehiscence, flottements, the coherence gone to pieces, the continuity bitched to hell because the units of continuity have abdicated their unity, they have gone multiple, they fall apart, the notes fly about, a blizzard of electrons; and then the vespertine compositions eaten away with terrible silences, a music one and indivisible only at the cost of as bloody a labour as any known to man’ (and woman? from the French horn) ‘and pitted with dire stroms of silence, in which has been engulfed the hysteria that he used to let speak up, pipe up, for itself. And I think of the ultimately unprevisible atom threatening to come asunder, the left wing of the atom plotting without ceasing to spit in the eye of the physical statistician and commit a most copious offence of nuisance on his cenotaphs of indivisibility.
‘All that,’ conceded Belacqua, postponing the mare’s-nest and the stars to another occasion, ‘is a bit up in the rigging. If ever I do drop a book, which God forbid, trade being what it is, it will be ramshackle, tumbledown, a bone-shaker, held together with bits of twine, and at the same time as innocent of the slightest velleity of coming unstuck as Mr Wright’s original flying-machine that could never be persuaded to leave the ground.’