Homo Irrealis

by André Aciman

  The Proustian lover, like the Proustian narrator, has come to define his being-in-the-world as a series of acts of insight and compulsive speculation. His way of being, of acting, is to speculate—to write—to write speculatively. As a jealous narrator, he is proscribed from the world of action, of plot, of trust, of love and derogated to the role of observer and interpreter. In writing the way he does, he has already established his demotion from the role of active participant to passive observer, from beloved to jealous lover, from zealous lover to indifferent lover. Writing itself now is embroiled in the intricacies of jealousy.

  Proustian writing reflects a sensibility that is thwarted in both the world and the present. It says, Any tense but the present! The Proustian narrator, like the Proustian lover, avoids truth and resolution for the very reason that resolution invites deeds, actions, certainty, and decisions and might, therefore, wrench him out of his safe and private epistemophilic cocoon where writing and speculating have acquired the status of life and promise and may indeed confer rewards and satisfactions that rival those of life. This is exactly how the Proustian search manages to perpetuate itself: by giving to written life the status of life, to literary time the status of real time.

  But because a consciousness capable of such an intellectual ploy must be conscious of this fundamental inauthenticity vis-à-vis life and time, it must constantly show that it is unsatisfied with the answers that writing provides: this not only allows it to keep searching, to keep writing, but also prevents it from losing sight of the fact that it should never presume to displace the primacy of lived life.

  Thus Proustian writing perpetuates its search not only because it finds its raison d’être in writing, but, paradoxically, because it knows that it should not find its raison d’être in writing and wants to show that it knows this. Error—say, the knocking at the wrong window in an access of jealousy—not only reflects the demotion the jealous narrator feels he deserves in his role as a bungling speculator lost in a world where men act and cheat on other men, where men of insight are always resourceless, where writing turns against men of writing and makes fun of their attempts to substitute literature for life, but also serves as a reminder that the world of writing, of fiction, in which the jealous narrator sought refuge, is, paradoxically again, no fictitious realm at all: it is so real that it can be as merciless and cruel with the jealous lover as is the very world he flees.

  BEETHOVEN’S SOUFFLÉ IN A MINOR

  In her classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child explains how to prepare a soufflé. The trick is to mix in beaten egg whites without deflating it, and she is very specific: first you must lay the billowy mounds on top of the milky yolk mixture. Then, “using your rubber scraper, cut down from the top center of the mixture to the bottom of the saucepan, draw the scraper quickly toward you against the edge of the pan, and up to the left and out. You are thus bringing a bit of the mixture at the bottom of the pan up over the egg whites. Continue the movement while slowly rotating the saucepan, and cutting down, toward you, and out to the left, until the egg whites have been folded into the body of the soufflé.”

  The whipped egg whites, in case the chef was not clear, are nothing more than trapped air. What Julia Child has in mind is a sort of oscillating, figure-eight movement of the rubber scraper, which takes the mixture to the top, folds it back toward the bottom, then takes what was just folded to the top again. Call this layering—not moving forward or backward, just stationary wrist motions—the equivalent, say, of treading water without budging in a swimming pool. What was at the top is folded to the bottom, then folded sideways and back up again. Think of a sentence with zigzagging parallel clauses, each feeding off the former.

  And this, to stretch a point, is pure Beethoven. Toward the end of a quartet, a sonata, a symphony, Beethoven takes a string of notes, whatever string it is, repeats it, folds it in, again and again, not going anywhere with it, yet always careful never to deflate it, and, summoning up all his creative genius, plays for time until the end—except that when he reaches the end, he will find some way to uncover newer musical opportunities, if only to keep on folding and refolding again. You thought I was done and expected a resounding, clamorous close, he says, but I halted the process, kept you suspended for a very short while, and then came back with more, sometimes much more, and made you wish I’d never stop. The endings of many pieces have these moments of mounting repetition, a sudden arrest that feels like the announcement of a closing cadence, only for Beethoven to utter a new promise, folding again and again, until the listener longs for perpetuity—as though the purpose of all music is not to seek closure but to come up with new ways to put it off.

  At the level of plot, literature tries to do this all the time. A detective novel or a serialized novel is dilatory at its very core. It creates opportunities for hasty resolutions, only to surprise the reader with deceptive clues, mistaken assumptions, unexpected deferrals, and cliff-hangers. Suspense and surprise are as essential to both prose and music as are revelation and resolution. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is punctuated by endless setbacks and unforeseen delays. Jane Austen’s Emma, on the other hand, could so easily have ended midway, when it became clear to the reader that Emma Woodhouse had a crush on Frank Churchill and that he too was seemingly stricken. This would have been an acceptable ending, and the first time I remember reading the novel, I was entirely persuaded that this is where the novel was indeed headed. I was wrong, and Austen, rather than finish with the marriage of these two would-be lovers, decided to reject this plausible ending and instead went in search of another and, having proposed this other ending, discarded it for yet another.

  Music is far more adept at this, because it can fold and refold numberless times. Literature cannot. Barring plot, however, there are similar stylistic instances in literature, and I would like to mention two: Joyce and Proust.

  Among the most beautiful and most musical passages in the English language are the closing pages of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” They are the most musical, not only because of their cadence—when read aloud, they’ll persuade anyone of the stunningly lyrical, anaphoric beauty of Joyce’s prose—but because the story itself does not end when it should. The story, in fact, has already ended before it ends, except that Joyce wasn’t quite done yet and, like Beethoven, simply kept going, withholding the full stop, folding one clause into the next, again and again, as if in search of a closure he wasn’t finding but wasn’t going to give up on, because the search for closure and cadence was not incidental to what he was writing but had always been its true drama, its true plot. Rhythm, in this instance, is not subsidiary to the story of Gretta and Gabriel or to the portrait of the elderly aunts on the Feast of the Epiphany; it becomes the story. If every reader recalls “The Dead,” it is precisely because the rhythm of its closing pages totally transcends what would have simply been the longest and chattiest tale of Dubliners. I’ve always suspected that Joyce had no idea how to close “The Dead”—a seemingly rudderless tale—and stumbled on its final segment simply because he had waited for something to happen and had the genius to make room for it, to leave open spaces for it, even when he didn’t know what might come to fill those spaces or where the story might take him once he had indeed filled them. All he knew perhaps was that closure would most likely have something to do with snow. He had the audacity not to give up waiting. Waiting for something to happen, avoiding hasty completion, deferring the period, opening up space for the unknown visitor, trying out seemingly pointless clauses provided they adhered to a particular rhythm—this was genius. Call it, if not folding, then padding, or to use Walter Pater’s word for it, surplusage, or, in keeping the soufflé analogy, trapping air. Real meaning, real art, does not necessarily reside in the nitty-gritty, bare rag-and-bone shop of the heart; it resides just as easily in the seemingly superfluous, in the extra, in the joy of folding and refolding air, in creating space for the unexpected visitor, the extra who, in this case, happened to be a young
man called Michael Furey, who shows up almost adventitiously at the tail end of the story.

  Taking one’s time, folding and refolding with no clear sense of where, exactly, one might be headed, trapping air bubbles, making extra room for things that have yet to come brings up another metaphor: the nineteenth-century Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who invented the periodic table of elements and was able to arrange the elements of our planet by their weight, valence, and behavior. Mendeleyev created several columns in his table and proved that elements layered under the same column might have different atomic weights but would still share the same valence and hence react to other elements in similar ways. Thus lithium, sodium, and potassium, with atomic numbers 3, 11, and 19, might have different atomic weights but all share a valence of +1, while oxygen, sulfur, and selenium, with atomic numbers 8, 16, and 34, have a valence of −2. Mendeleyev was so sure of his discovery—and this is the purpose of the analogy here—that he left empty “boxes” in his table for those elements that had yet to be discovered.

  Mendeleyev’s table not only attributes an unavoidable, rational sequence to what might otherwise have seemed a random arrangement of elements on planet Earth, it also offers something more than an unavoidable, rational sequence: it offers an aesthetic design. Design itself transcends the sequence, transcends the elements of chemistry, transcends melody and counterpoint, transcends the story of Joyce’s dinner on the Feast of the Epiphany. Design and rhythm themselves become the subject of the sequence. In the creation of empty, tentative boxes in the periodic table, or in the endless, exploratory folding and unfolding of musical phrases or verbal clauses, the chemist-composer-writer is, in fact, operating under the spell of three things: design, discovery, and deferral.

  By folding and refolding, layer after layer, art hopes to restore order on the fringes of chaos. And if restore is the wrong verb, then let’s say that by folding and refolding, art tries to impose or, at best, to invent order. Art is a confrontation with chaos—the revelation and construction of meaning through form. By folding and refolding, artists create the opportunity for invoking a deeper layer of harmony, one that goes further yet than the original design artists were so pleased to have created. The joy of discovering design by dint of waiting for it, not just at the level of plot but at the level of style, is perhaps the pinnacle of artistic achievement. Art, as said earlier, is always about discovery and design and a reasoning with chaos.

  And here, perhaps, we should turn to Marcel Proust, who, exactly like Joyce, was not only devoted to music but was a master stylist himself. Proust’s sentence is recognizable because it operates on three levels: the start is frequently a muted afflatus, a moment of inspiration or uplift, an insight or idea that needs to be elaborated upon and examined and that sets the course of the sentence. The end of the sentence, however, is entirely different. A Proustian sentence normally closes with a fillip, what in French is called a pointe, or, in Latin, a clausula, to use the critic Jean Mouton’s word: a burst of revelation, a short, almost lapidary dart that uncovers something altogether surprising and unforeseen and unsaddles every expectation the reader might have had. The middle of the sentence is where folding occurs. Here Proust allows the sentence to tarry and swell with intercalated material that proceeds ever so cautiously, sometimes forced to fork and to fork again while opening up subsidiary parenthetical clauses along the way, until, after much deliberation, unannounced, having acquired enough air and ballast along the way, the sentence suddenly unleashes the closing fillip. Proust’s sentence needs this middle zone. Like a huge wave, it needs to swell and build momentum—sometimes with totally negligible material—before finally crashing against the shoreline. Proust’s clausula reverses and capsizes all that preceded it. It is the ultimate product of continued folding and refolding, of the persistent trapping of air. It is how Proust seeks out the possibility of a miracle. It’s also how he holds out for what he does not yet know, cannot yet see, and has no sense he’ll even end up writing.

  All artists labor to see other than what’s given to be seen; they want to see more, to let form summon up things that were hitherto invisible and that only form, not knowledge or experience, could have discovered. Art is not just the product of labor; it is the love of laboring with unknown possibilities. Art is not our attempt to capture experience and give it a form but to let form itself discover experience, to let form become experience.

  And in this I am reminded of what is probably Beethoven’s most beautiful piece of music: the “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart,” composed after a close bout with sickness and death. The “Song of Thanksgiving” is a handful of notes, plus a sustained, overextended hymn in the Lydian mode, which the composer loves and doesn’t wish to see end, because he likes repeating questions and deferring answers, because all answers are easy, because it’s not answers or clarity, or even ambiguity, that Beethoven wants. What he’s after is deferral and distended time, a grace period that never expires and that is all cadence that staves off the scariest chaos awaiting next door, called death. Beethoven will keep repeating and extending the process until it is reduced to its barest elements and he’s left with five notes, three notes, one note, no note, no breath. The fullness of the absence after the final note is the whole point, and he’s fearless in making us hear it. And maybe all art strives for just that, life without death. The greatest art—Beethoven’s soundless last note, Joyce’s snow, the Proustian sentence that enacts the paradox of time—peers squarely into the unfathomable: the mystery of not being there to know we’re already absent.

  ALMOST THERE

  I am an almost writer.

  Almost is almost a useless word. Sometimes it serves no purpose but to add rhythm, cadence, and two extra syllables to a sentence, like that guest we invite at the last minute to fill an empty seat at a dinner table. He doesn’t talk too much, won’t annoy anyone, and he disappears as quietly as he’s arrived, usually with an older person he’s kind enough to escort to the first taxi he is able to hail. And yet no word is useless or should be allowed to die simply because it casts a long shadow and perhaps is just that: all shadow. Almost is a shadow word.

  A quick and random sweep through a few of my manuscripts reveals the following uses of almost: almost never, almost always, almost certainly, almost ready, almost willing, almost impulsively, almost as though, almost immediately, almost everywhere, almost kind, almost cruel, almost exciting, almost home, almost asleep, almost dead. She said to him: “Don’t even try” almost before his lips touched hers.

  Did they kiss?

  We don’t know.

  Indeed, in Goethe’s Elective Affinities we have this: “The kiss her friend had given her and which she had almost returned brought Charlotte to herself.” (Translation: R. J. Hollingdale.)

  We know what almost means. Dictionaries, however vaguely they define the word, agree on this: that almost means something between “short of” and “sort of.” Almost is an adverb, but it is also a stringer, a filler. Two extra syllables, like blush after makeup, just that requisite fuzziness, like ambiguity in an instance of candor. A halt in mid-speech, an extra tap on the piano’s pedal, a suggestion of doubt and degree, of resonance and approximation, where straight, flat surfaces are the norm. “By using almost,” says the writer, “I’m saying there is ‘less than’; but what I mean to suggest is that there is possibly ‘more than.’”

  Yes, but did they kiss?

  Hard to tell. Almost.

  “We were almost naked” says we weren’t quite without clothes but couldn’t wait to be, which might easily mean “we couldn’t believe we were almost naked.” Almost naked is more charged, more erotic, more prurient than totally naked.

  Almost is all about gradations and nuance, about suggestion and shades. Not quite a red wine, but not crimson, not purple either, or maroon; come to think of it, almost Bordeaux. Almost can be a polite, understated way of screening definitive certainties. It withholds the obvio
us and dangles it just long enough. Almost is about uncertainty soon to be dismissed but not quite dispelled. Almost is about revelation to come but not entirely promised—i.e., almost promised.

  Almost mollifies certainty. In butchers’ language, it tenderizes certainty. It is anti-conviction and—by definition, therefore—anti-omniscience. Fiction authors use almost to avoid stating an outright fact, as though there were something blunt, crass, too direct in qualifying anything as definitely this or that. It is how novelists—as well as their characters—open up a space for speculation or retraction or for suggesting something that may not be but that poisons the mind of the jury.