by Tom McCarthy
Dy-ing, desir-ing: in grammatical terms, these non-finite verbs belong to the gerund—the form that, in English, also serves as the present participle. The tense, if you like, of Hans Castorp’s eternally arriving soup. Or, to take another high-modernist literary instance, of Addie Bundren’s passage through the novel whose very title contains Blanchot’s gerund: As I Lay Dying. This work contains or concentrates so many of the processes and motifs we’ve been looking at this evening. Not only does Addie, like Wait, slowly and languorously die, but the hiatus mushrooms outwards even after the death-moment: while her family transport her coffin to the burial place she has stipulated, encountering delays at every step, the corporeality that Mann associates with illness is taken to its own zero degree as her rotting corpse draws buzzards from the sky and sends townspeople running gagging from its path. Advancing “with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress,” the family edge towards a flooded river, and Addie’s son Darl muses, in a gesture that will be familiar: “It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality.” He continues: “It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread.” It is into this accretion that Addie’s body threatens to disappear as the flood waters sweep the coffin from the cart. But Darl rescues it—and a few pages later, in the novel’s most extraordinary sequence, Faulkner gives the dead Addie her own monologue; Eurydice, rather than Orpheus, speaks.
She speaks both in and of the negative. “I learned,” she says, “that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at.” Even the word love “is just a shape to fill a lack.” Lying beside her husband Anse, who has tricked her by hiding inside that last word,
I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar.
Anse is, she tells us, dead; her revenge on him consists in not letting him know that, and her marital bond in the fact “that I did not even ask him for what he could have given me: not-Anse. That was my duty to him, to not ask that, and that duty I fulfilled. I would be I; I would let him be the shape and echo of his word.” Her affair with the pastor Whitfield is conducted largely in the hope that the Christian schema of sin and subsequent redemption will act as a funnel “to shape and coerce” the “terrible blood” of existence into a form of presence and equivalence, but since divinity itself is just “the forlorn echo of the dead word high in the air” (and “salvation is just words too”), the affair ends—which places her inside a kind of timelessness in which “to me there was no beginning nor ending to anything.” And occupying this space, this temporality, she tells us in a fascinating turn of phrasing, “I even held Anse refraining still, not that I was holding him recessional …”
These words need some unpacking. Refraining is the more straightforward: I take it to mean that she is holding herself back from revealing Anse to himself as the not-Anse that, to her, he more profoundly is—maintaining him, to use the kind of photographic diction X-ray-clasping Hans Castorp might understand, in false-positive mode by keeping out of sight the actual negative from which this positive is (again and again, an ongoing illusion) printed. Recessional is more complex though. The OED gives recessional as: “1. Of or belonging to the recession or retirement of the clergy and choir from the chancel to the vestry at the close of a service; esp. recessional hymn, a hymn sung while this retirement is taking place. 2. Belonging to a recess (of Parliament).” Recess, in turn, is given (inter alia) as “The act of retiring, withdrawing, or departing … a period of cessation from usual work or employment … a place of retirement, a remote, secret or private place … a niche or alcove … to place in a recess or in retirement; to set back or away …” It is a long entry, spanning architectural, juridical, anatomical and a host of other contexts—not least economic (aren’t we now living through a recession?). If Addie is holding Anse refraining, recessional describes the manner in which she is not holding him, names the inner sanctum into which she is denying him entry (can’t touch this), the time-out-of-time that will never be measured on his clock-face, governed by his legislature—and, in so doing, names the suspended or abstracted beat around whose absence the whole mechanism of the book is orchestrated. As I Lay Dying, for all its entropy and breakdown, is a neatly circular novel in which all actions come back round as the cycle of life rotates: Addie’s son Cash breaks the same leg twice, her daughter Dewey Dell gets screwed over (or screwed) twice, and so forth; and Anse, in the final punch line, marries the woman from whom he borrowed the spade he has just dug Addie’s grave with. The corpse may be disposed of, the cycle restarted, but the recess has staked its claim right at its core, carved out its niche at twelve o’clock of midnight and high noon.
*
A pattern is, I hope, emerging here. If I have been drawing on works that, despite their evident preoccupation with issues of race and gender, were all authored by white men, this is not simply from a placid conservatism. Rather, it is an attempt to tease out (draw into the light, Conrad would say) a rationale, or counter-rationale, working both in and, perhaps, against literature’s very canon. That the texts all come from the high-modernist period is no coincidence either—for isn’t that when an exponentially accelerating industrialization, its accompanying technologies and ideologies, not only consolidated their claim (staked at least a century earlier) as the prime subject of literature and art but also radically reshaped its forms? Perhaps I’m hoping, in some paranoid (Pynchon-influenced) way, for a Eureka! instant; hoping to unearth a codex, a Rosetta Stone that would decode this moment and its legacy, both outside of and within—even as—literature. That, of course, is as much a fantasy as the Romantic/tragic one of owning one’s own death: there is no single codex. But, I’d suggest, the closest thing we’re going to get to one is the corpus of Mallarmé. Not only did he break form down until it reached its own zero degree; he carried out this overhaul as part of an ongoing and active theorization of literature itself. As Derrida points out, whatever else Mallarmé seems to be describing, he is always also writing about the operation of writing, feeling his way around the contours of the book-to-come, the livre to which everything is destined to belong. I’ve argued elsewhere that without Mallarmé there would be no Joyce; and the same could be said of everyone from William Burroughs to John Cage. Barthes summed up twentieth-century literary activity by saying: “All we do is repeat Mallarmé—but if it’s Mallarmé we repeat, we do right.” How much more relevant, then, is the great thinker of the “virtual,” of total legibility and omni-data, to the twenty-first?
A million things could be said about Mallarmé and the subject still be barely breached. And we have only a few minutes left—so let’s, by way of sketching out a much, much larger conversation to be had, home straight in on this fact: that Mallarmé is obsessed with the question of the pause, the interval, the recess. In a sketch from Divagations that seems to rehearse, to a T, Conrad’s scene of interrupted labor, he presents workmen, “artisans of elementary tasks,” taking a break from digging, lying around in such a manner as to “honorably reserve the dimension of the sacred in their existence by a work stoppage, an awaiting, a suicide.” In an 1885 letter to Verlaine he writes:
In the final analysis, I consider the contemporary era to be a kind of interregnum for the poet, who has nothing to do with it: it is too fallen or too full of preparatory effervescence for him to do anything but keep working, with mystery, so that later, or never, and from time to time sending the living his calling card—some stanza or sonnet—so as not to be stoned by them if they knew he suspected that they didn’t exist.
An extraordinary form
ulation: the poet, occupying the interregnum, is dead—by implication, since he’s differentiated from “the living” to whom he sends his calling card (the work). But, in so doing, he refrains from giving the lie to the pretence of their existence—in other words, and at the risk of being not just once but twice dead (stoned, martyred), the poet plays the role of Addie Bundren. Plays it from the recess: another passage in Divagations pictures Villiers de L’Isle Adam, his great tome forever kept from sight, withheld, reserved, knocking at the front door “like the sound of an hour missing from clock faces”:
Midnights indifferently thrown aside for his wake, he who always stood beside himself, and annulled time as he talked: he waved it aside as one throws away used paper when it has served its function; and in the lack of ringing to sound a moment not marked on any clock, he appeared …
Yet this timeless appearance, “from the point of view of History,” is not “untimely” but “punctual”—for, Mallarmé continues, “it is not contemporary with any epoch, not at all, that those who exalt all signification should appear”; they are both “projected several centuries ahead” and “turned toward the past.” Both poetry and history demand such an appearance, and at the same time find themselves quite at a loss to locate it within their own parameters, their bounds or measures. In Action Restrained this situation takes on a distinctly political hue. We are, Mallarmé tells us, as he sketches a Pynchonesque scenario of rapid transit though some great metropolis, approaching a tunnel, “the epoch,” a “forever time”:
time unique in the world, since because of an event I have still to explain, there is no Present, no—a present does not exist … Lack the Crowd declares in itself, lack—of everything. Ill-informed anyone who would announce himself his own contemporary, deserting, usurping with equal impudence, when the past ceased and when a future is slow to come, or when both are mingled perplexedly to cover up the gap … So watch out and be there.
There is, in the offing, lurking, “pulsing in the unknown womb of the hour,” an event—yet one that cannot name itself, nor even find a solid time-platform to arise and stand on. No wonder Badiou turns to Mallarmé when he wants to elucidate his core or signature concept: the event, which, standing on the edge of the void so as to interpose itself between the void and itself (another doubling accretion), has “no acceptable ontological matrix.” Calling up the “eternal circumstances” of the shipwreck in A Throw of the Dice, Badiou calls Mallarmé “a thinker of the event-drama, in the double sense of the staging of its appearance–disappearance”:
every event, apart from being localized by its site, initiates the latter’s ruin with regard to the situation, because it retroactively names its inner void. The ‘shipwreck’ alone gives us the allusive debris from which (in the one of the site) the undecidable multiple of the event is composed.
Fine. But what would Mallarmé’s un-named event be? Political revolution? Poetic epiphany? As Badiou points out, the central verb in A Throw of the Dice, the one around which the whole text turns, is hésite: the master’s dice-clasping hand, poised above the waves, holds back (like that of Blanchot’s judge) from leaping into action, from descending to unleash the decisive cast. The only name that we could really give this “undecidable multiple” is Wait.
Derrida, too, turns at a key point in the trajectory of his thinking to Mallarmé—specifically, to the short text Mimique (which has been variously translated as “Dumb-show,” “Mime,” “Mimicry” and “Mimesis”). There, contemplating a mime-artist whose degree-zero corporeality renders his body both tool and subject of his performance, Mallarmé claims that what is illustrated is
but the idea, not any actual action, in a Hymen (out of which flows Dream), tainted with vice yet sacred, between desire and fulfillment, penetration and remembrance; here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false appearance of a present. That is how the mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice in the mirror: he thus sets up a medium, a pure medium, of fiction.
Derrida, of course, homes straight in on the between, hearing in Mallarmé’s entre the antra of a cave or grotto, the antara of an interval. “What counts here,” he writes, “is the between, the in-between-ness of the hymen”—symbol of marital union (Addie’s and Anse’s, for example) and membrane denoting separateness, through which “difference without presence appears, or rather baffles the process of appearing, by dislocating any orderly time at the center of the present.” It is this baffling dislocation that sets up the “pure medium of fiction.” Fiction would not be un-truth, as in Wait’s lie or double-lie, or Addie’s systematic pretence; nor would it be story, in Mann’s sense of the unfolding of a narrative around temporal flow; rather, it would be recessionality itself. Fiction would be Hammertime.
Between. In A Throw of the Dice, in the long pause initiated by the master’s frozen gesture, a figure appears, feather—or pen—in cap: Hamlet, Western literature’s most celebrated avatar of hesitation. Everyone and everything in that play is suspended: between order and execution, word and deed, heaven and hell. Even death is recessive: Hamlet wishes for its consummation but sees only continuity, the gerund—which, of course, gives him pause; Polonius’s body starts to rot and smell under the staircase; the passage of Ophelia’s into the ground is interrupted. Re-reading it recently, I was struck by the number of times Julius Caesar was knowingly alluded to within its pages (an unusual move for Shakespeare)—which, in turn, sent me back to Brutus’s complaint about his own restless delay:
Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,
I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
Acting, here, means (once more) the precise opposite of action: it means the conception of the action to be done, and the foundation of the baffling interim that both conjoins this to and separates this from its consummation, its “first motion.” Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream. Tool-downage, implements (instruments) idle, waiting. In this most political of plays, this recess is called council, and man’s being a state … a little kingdom. Yet what’s truly revolutionary (in all senses of the word) here is not the putative end goal, the murder of the Emperor or overthrow of state; it is the interim itself. Then is the time where insurrection lurks: then … then—he says it twice, the temporal qualifier doubles or accretes, as though to open up and ground its referent: the interim, interim-time. And that, as we know, is the time of fiction.
“Obsessed with buffering”
Questions to Tom McCarthy
Elisabeth Bronfen
We’re going to see whether we have some questions.
Good, I don’t even have to break the ice.
Audience
The icebreaking fits well because I think I have another work for your collection: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge. It’s a voyage to the South Pole—so hence the ice—but I was thinking of the fact that Coleridge frames the story that the ancient mariner tells with a sinful act. That sinful act is of course shooting the albatross. This then brings on the suspension of time which moves the ship into the Doldrums. Nothing moves anymore, everybody dies and then the ghost ship turns up with Death and Life throwing the dice for the soul of the ancient mariner. Death loses so the ship continues with the whole crew who are basically zombies: dead bodies that are moved around by supernatural creatures. The ship sales back to England and the moment it reaches the harbor, everybody drops dead, the ship falls apart and the only person who survives is the ancient mariner who is now condemned to tell his story.
Tom McCarthy
“He stoppeth one of three” outside a church where a wedding is going to happe
n.
Audience
That’s right, he stops them on the way to the consummation of the wedding. Do you agree that this fits the general narrative of your talk?
T.MC.
Yes, absolutely. There’s another wonderful ship moment in Dracula as well on the Demeter: they’re dead or they’re all going to die—or more precisely, they’re transporting death, undead death (Dracula), in a coffin, just like Addie Bundren. I always think this is somehow about September the 11th: the last ones to die crash the ship into the harbor; with their last strength they just tie themselves to the steering wheel and head straight for the town rather than the designated parking space—which on September the 11th would be the airport. There seems to be something very prescient about this death ship driven by someone who is already effectively dead.
