My Struggle, Book 6
Page 48
What they actually comprise becomes clear in the way the American writer William Faulkner exploits the name. In his novel The Sound and the Fury names are presented without accompanying information as to those they denote, who are taken for granted, hardly a characteristic or note of origin to go with them; Faulkner’s names leave us utterly in the dark.
In her essay on the name in literature Ingeborg Bachmann writes about Faulkner, and her examples are telling: one minute we’re reading about someone calling for Caddie, the next about someone called Caddy, no information is given, one is associated with the verb “hit,” perhaps we’re dealing with a golfer calling his caddie, but something else is triggered by this too; later the name Caddy appears, the time is another, the connection unclear. Then a character named Quentin is introduced, and one minute the name refers to a woman, the next to a man. In a way, Faulkner goes further than Joyce in his approach to reality, attempting to describe the world the way it appears to his characters and making no effort at all to describe the characters to us, their gazes are as such unconveyed, and in that lies the realism. Reading The Sound and the Fury is like going into the house of a family you don’t know, where everyone’s talking about their relations and paying you not even the slightest attention; all you get is a number of names connected to various events and occurrences everyone knows about except you, which is why they are never related in their entirety but merely alluded to. Or rather, no, it’s like going inside the mind of one of those sitting there and being party to the way he or she experiences the conversation, the allusions and references being even more oblique; no one explains to themselves what they already know. The names are closed to us, but not in the same way as in Kafka, where they are relieved of their surroundings and history; on the contrary, in The Sound and the Fury the names are woven into the surroundings and history, and since both are closed to us, the names too are closed. The lack of openness points directly inward toward the core of the novel, the fulcrum around which it revolves: something happened once, something no one can talk about, not even think about, but which nevertheless is present in the various streams of consciousness. It cannot be conveyed, it cannot be confronted, it must be concealed. The word incest appears, apparently it has to do with that. Incest is one of the oldest of all taboos, and the whole novel, the mood it creates, does indeed have something archaic about it. In Faulkner the past is like a void and unclear, differing radically from Joyce’s past, which above all is the past of culture, that which is devised and created, Odysseus and Circe, Dante, and Shakespeare, a past to which one relates through the intellect, whereas the past in Faulkner’s work is nameless and without language, and may only be sensed or felt. The difference is reflected too in the titles. Both are intertextual, Joyce finding his in Homer, Faulkner in Shakespeare, but while Joyce uses a name, Ulysses, and brings a culture to life, Faulkner uses a phenomenon of the world, sound/noise/commotion, and another from the domain of the human, fury/rage/anger, both timeless. The name does not address the archaic, but the social. The distance between the archaic and the social is brought about by Faulkner through the unfamiliarity that is infused into the name, the rejection of familiarity. Thus, an existential depth is invoked, which neither Joyce nor Kafka are anywhere near. This is not about the presence or absence of the contemporary, and the idea of “existential depth” is perhaps misleading, since the archaic is not behind anything, and not inside anything, the difference being not a matter of rungs, but of the eye, and through the eye the experience, which is unreachable by language and therefore must be evoked. While the secret is not in itself unreachable in The Sound and the Fury, it cannot, for social and psychological reasons, be named, much as in Ibsen’s plays, the only difference being that there it rises to the surface to be perceived and recognized in a kind of culmination alien to Faulkner’s own characters. Faulkner’s, Joyce’s, Flaubert’s, Proust’s, and Kafka’s books inhabit the social domain, the novel is its literary form, concerned with interpersonal relationships and how the reality we make up and by which we are surrounded is communicated. This is the case even in Dostoevsky; the fulcrum of his novels is never the spiritual or the religious in itself, but the reactions to it of the surrounding world. This is the novel’s basic constraint, chained as it is to life in the social domain, the way people are to each other, and the minute the novel departs from that human world and ventures into the nonhuman or the beyond-human of the divine, it dies. As long as Dante is writing about an inferno populated by people, his epic poem lives; as soon as he proceeds upward to heaven to depict the divine, it withers away in his hands. Music can express it, and painting too, since their forms are wordless, their language another and nameless, as removed from the I that employs it and the I that perceives it as figures in a mathematical formula. Reading a novel after having listened to Bach’s cello suites is like leaving a sunset to descend into a cellar. The novel is the form of the small life, and when it’s not it is because it’s being deceitful and is no true novel at all, since no I exists that isn’t small too. The only literary form that can exceed it is the poem. The poem is akin to the song and exists somewhere between music and the word, which is to say that it is capable of reaching beyond the word and thus to break out of the social, which is another term for the world as we know it. This means poetry is related also to religion, which has always been rooted in the human domain, staring out at the nonhuman, in whose icy winds we are unknown and strangers to all, not just to each other, but also to ourselves.
A poem of Rilke’s begins like this:
They had, for a while, grown used to him. But after
they lit the kitchen lamp and in the dark
it began to burn, restlessly, the stranger
was altogether strange.
The situation is the washing of a corpse, and the poem concludes thus:
And one without a name
lay clean and naked there, and gave commands.
The name is what joins the body to our social life, the name collects all judgments and assumptions as to a particular personality, and what happens when a person dies is that the name is no longer connected to the body, which decomposes and disappears, whereas the name lives on in the social world.
Can we imagine a person without a name?
It would certainly say something quite different about being human. Without a name the human would be a locus for the beating of a heart, the wheeze of lungs, the tumult of thought, its identity residing in the unique moment, which is to say akin to animal.
But we are that, too.
Rilke’s corpse had always been strange, in the sense of unknown, but only when dead and nameless could it be seen as such. And the commands it gave were commands to life outside the social world, commands of flesh, earth, water.
That perspective is ever present in Rilke’s poems, not without reason was he a pupil of Hölderlin’s, the poet of the divine perspective, for whom the social world does not exist; in Hölderlin everything is existential, and the fact that at the end he abandoned the social context completely in his life, vanishing into madness, beyond the grip of the self, is hard not to understand as a consequence of the worldview expressed in his poems. Rilke is closer to the social, his poems wash in and out of the two different worlds, and the fact that he wrote so often about angels must be seen in that light, angels being the very connecting figures between the divine and the human. In one of his Duino Elegies he writes:
For it seems that everything
hides us. Look: trees do exist; the houses
that we live in still stand. We alone
fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half
out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.
The poem moves between what is, the silent, nameless world, and we who see it. That the silent world tries to hide us means that it knows us; and it does so because we issue from it, which in turn is to say we have left it, yet at the same t
ime we continue to belong to it, our hearts beating without word, and I believe it is that very movement he is describing, inward toward our being, outward away from it again. Religion strives inward toward being, and art strives toward that same place. Religion and art combine in the angel. “Every angel is terrifying,” Rilke also writes. Why is the angel terrifying? Because its presence renders the human figurative in the same way as death. Yes, the angel looks at us with the eyes of death. Rilke’s angels have nothing to do with Christianity. In Christ man was made God, and what he opened up to us he opened up in the social world: your neighbor is you, turn the other cheek, everyone is of equal worth. The social world is about establishing and maintaining differences. In one swoop he annulled them. Forgiveness is the uniformity of the divine implanted in the human. It is as if the gaze is turned from the stars to the eyes.
But as hard as it is for us to exist in the uniformity of the divine, it is quite as hard to do so in that of forgiveness. We are too small, we creep and crawl in and out of our houses and through our streets, terrified for a moment by the vacuum of death yet shaking off our fears to keep on crawling, in and out of our houses, up and down our streets, with a vitality we cannot hope to make shine in the way of the all-obliterating light of the good, no matter that this is what we wish, for our vitality hits a wall, is thrown against a ceiling, hurled toward a floor, it steers us this way and that, in the small and intermittent dislocations that characterize not only the human body, but also its soul and mind.
We lose ourselves, and we lose ourselves in each other.
* * *
When I read Rilke’s poem it was Dad I thought about, the time I saw him lying dead on a table in the chapel in Kristiansand, in the summer of 1998.
They had, for a while, grown used to him. But after
they lit the kitchen lamp and in the dark
it began to burn, restlessly, the stranger
was altogether strange.
That was what I saw. Not that he was a stranger, but that he had always been a stranger. If I had spoken his name then he would not have reacted, it would have glanced off him, for it was no longer his. He was a corpse and as such outside the name. His body had slid out of its name and lay there without, nameless. For the remainder of that week I saw in short glimpses everything else around me in the same way, outside the name. It was a secret world I saw, and if I did not understand it then, I understand it now, the kinship of death and art, and their function in life, which is to prevent reality, our conception of the world, from conflating with the world.
* * *
So much of Dad was collected in his name. He spelled it differently when he was young, and changed it sometime in his forties, and as he lay there dead and nameless, the name the mason chiseled into his headstone was spelled incorrectly. The stone is still there, in the cemetery in Kristiansand, with its misspelled name, on top of the interred urn containing the ashes of his body. And when, ten years later, I began to write about him I was prohibited from referring to him by name. Before that I had never given a thought to what a name was and what it meant. But I did so now, accentuated by the events that followed in the wake of the first book, and I began to write this chapter, first about the name itself, then about various names of literature and their function there, starting out with a piece of thinking I found in the writing of Ingeborg Bachmann concerning the decline of the name in literature, contained in a short essay in a book published a few years ago by Pax. The essay on the name began on a right-hand page. On the left-hand page were some lines of a poem my eyes absently scanned when at some point during the spring I sat down with the book in front of me, intending to see if anything of what I had written had been unwittingly drawn from Bachmann’s essay.
So
there are temples yet. A
star
probably still has light.
Nothing,
nothing is lost.
These were the words I read. I guessed they were from a poem of Paul Celan, knowing that Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann had been friends and furthermore enjoyed a certain literary kinship. This is the kind of thing one knows without it necessarily having any bearing on anything, a relationship of some sort that is simply there. That Paul Celan knew and corresponded with Nelly Sachs, for instance, and that Nelly Sachs fled to Stockholm during the war and remained there for the rest of her life. Both were Jewish, and both wrote poetry that had to do with the extermination of the Jews. Both lived in exile, Celan in Paris, Sachs in Stockholm. I had never read any of their poems, apart from Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” which I found astonishingly beautiful when I was introduced to it as a nineteen-year-old student in the writers’ academy in Hordaland. “Svart morgonmjølk me drikk ho um kvelden,” as Hauge’s Norwegian translation went, “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown,” and “døden er ein meister frå Tyskland,” “death is a master from Germany.” It was a poem I would later feel shame at having found such beauty in, since its theme was not the exquisite and the sublime, but the exquisite and the sublime’s antithesis, the extermination of the Jews.
I skimmed back a few pages in Bachmann’s book. Indeed it was Paul Celan. The six lines cited at the end of the essay were from a poem called “Engführung,” or “The Straitening” as it is called in one celebrated English translation. I had not heard of it before, but I did have a collection of Paul Celan’s poetry in Øyvind Berg’s Norwegian translations, it had remained unread on my bookshelf since sometime in the midnineties and I found it immediately. Something in those six lines had appealed to me. Perhaps it was the sequence “Nothing/nothing is lost” that seemed so positive at first sight, only then to turn itself almost inside out and become the opposite; “nothing is lost” can mean that everything goes on as before, if one reads the words in their most immediate sense, meaning that nothing has been lost, but if they are read in the sense of “nothing” being what is lost, the poem then opens out toward something else entirely, since “nothing” is not simply nothing, it is also the end point of all mysticism – the Kabbalists wrote that God resides in the depths of his nothingness. The idea that God is nothing belongs to negative mysticism; by saying what God is not, the divine may be approached without reduction. I had no idea if Paul Celan’s poem had anything at all to do with such things, but in the preceding lines temples were mentioned, the houses of religion, and a star, which is only there in darkness. “A/star/ probably still has light,” it said. Why “probably,” why “still”? The existence of the temples too was qualified by a “yet.” Did it have something to do with Rilke’s poem? He too used the word in a sense that seemed to deviate from the expected, when he wrote “the houses/that we live in still stand.” All this made the poem potentially very interesting, but the most important reason for me picking it out and skimming through it was because I was looking for something I could use in my essay about the name. I found it.
The place where they lay, it has
a name – it has
none.
I read.
Something had a name, but what this name might be wasn’t mentioned, and then the fact of it having a name was taken back.
With that in mind I noted there wasn’t a single name in the entire poem. Not of a person, not of a place, and not of any time.
Why would that be?
Whatever the reason, I found myself drawn in by it, for this was not a world in which the reason for the name not being mentioned could be that it wasn’t important, which is to say not the nameless essence of reality, the world beyond language, true and authentic; this seemed rather to be a world in which the name more simply could not be mentioned. It was as if the very foundation of the name was broken.
What was the foundation of the name?
In what way was it broken?
I read the poem, understanding nothing, it was closed to me, almost completely mute. This was no infrequent experience of mine. I couldn’t read poetry, and had never been able to. At the same time I had always, fr
om when I was nineteen and had been introduced to the leading modernist poets at the writers’ academy, considered poetry to be the pinnacle. What poetry was in touch with was something I was not in touch with, and my respect for poetry was boundless. This is no exaggeration. I have written about it earlier too, in this novel, the way the poem, which I took to be the highest form of expression, refused to open itself to me. When I grew older I became familiar with all the names of the poets and knew enough about them to be able to mention them in what I was writing or talking about, as with the example of Paul Celan above; he was from Romania, his parents died in a German concentration camp, he lived in Paris, wrote in German, and committed suicide sometime in the sixties by drowning himself in the Seine. His poems were mysterious, belonging in a way to the same tradition as Hölderlin and Rilke, but at the end of it, because with Celan the language came apart.
I knew who they were, but not what they had written.
Could it really be the case that poets and readers of poetry comprised some esoteric sect? Surely not only the initiated could read poems?
For some reason that was exactly how I had perceived it. The sense of others possessing insights I have no idea about, of everyone else being able and knowledgeable, has pursued me all through my adult life, in almost every respect. And, I think to myself now as I sit here at the age of nearly forty-three, most likely with justification. I suspect there are vast areas of human erotic life about which I know nothing and which I associate with darkness and fervency, an almost limitless sophistication into which other people, though by no means all, are initiated. When I meet people I often think this to myself, that to them I must come across as naïve and innocuous, a bit like a child. The same applies to poetry. Poetry expresses the innermost secrets of life and the world, some people relate to it with the greatest of ease, others are excluded. That I got nothing out of the poetry I read merely confirmed this to be true. It was as if poems were written in code. I felt excluded by many other languages too, that of mathematics, for instance, yet the language of mathematics did not possess the aura for me of leading to the grail, was not shrouded in such dim mists, with half-turned faces, derisive sneers, scornful eyes. This feeling, of being outside what was important, was degrading, since it made me simple and my life shallow. The way I tackled it was to ignore it and pretend it didn’t bother me. The deep secrets of erotic life and the esoteric insights of poetry were meant for others, whereas I, constrained by the stupid thinness of my life, struggled to accept that life was just that, stupid and thin. At the same time, something happened when I entered my thirties, in that some semblance of confidence came to me in the way I engaged with literature, though it was difficult to pin down, most of all a feeling of being able to see that little bit further, think that little bit further, and that what previously had been closed to me suddenly seemed possible to prize open. Though not unconditionally; I could read The Death of Virgil by Broch with some return, but not The Sleepwalkers by the same author, a novel of which I still hadn’t the faintest understanding. It was at that time I got a job working as a consultant on the Norwegian revision of the Old Testament, and since I had no grounding in the linguistic, cultural, or religious aspects that were involved, I had no option but to work hard and meticulously, nothing was going to come to me on a plate, and what revealed itself then, when I went through the first sentence of the creation word for word, for instance, was the way in which entire worldviews might be encapsulated in a comma, in an “and,” in a “which,” and, with those insights, how different the world becomes if its description is coordinate with rather than subordinate to the metaphor, for example, or the way a word not only has lexical meaning, but is also colored by the contexts in which it appears, something the writers of the Bible exploited to the full, for instance by allowing a word at the beginning to apply to the sun’s relation to the earth, and then to let that same word many pages on apply to man’s relation to woman. The word is merely there, in the two different places, and the connection is as good as invisible, yet decisive. People have been reading the Bible as holy Scripture for a couple of thousand years, and every word it contains has been considered meaningful, a dizzyingly tight mesh of different meanings and shades of meaning have thereby arisen, which no single human can ever possibly command. What happened when I started working on those texts was that I learned to read. I began to understand what it meant to read. Reading is seeing the words as lights shining in the dark, one after another, and to engage in the activity of reading is to follow the lights into the text. But what we see is never detached from the person we are; the mind has its limitations, they are personal, but cultural too in that there is always something we cannot see and places we cannot go. If we are patient and investigate the words and their contexts carefully enough, we may nonetheless identify those limitations, and what is revealed to us then is that which lies outside ourselves. The goal of reading is to reach these places. This is what learning is, seeing that which lies outside the confines of the self. To grow older is not to understand more but to realize that there is more to understand. Yet the secrets of the Old Testament were to begin with so remote as to be unthreatening. The secrets of erotic life and poetry were menacing, in contrast, having to do with my identity, and what kept me outside was not the alien nature of their culture but the chasm within my own, which was to do with the very remoteness of such things. I realize this probably comes across as somewhat hysterical, and I don’t know how to put it in order to make it clear just how inhibiting it is to feel excluded from that which is significant. To me this was exactly the aura in which Paul Celan’s poetry was shrouded. His poems canceled out what was given about the words, and thereby what was given about the world. As such, it was not so much existence that was on the line as identity. The name had to become visible in the nameless, much as the all became visible in the nothing, so I imagined on the basis of the four words, “nothing/nothing is lost,” which I had read and puzzled over. And that surely was how it was with regard to the poem as a whole. It was not composed of mysteries, but of words. So all that was required was to read them. To note down all possible meanings of the first word, then the next, and then consider the connections between them.