The Attraction of Things

by Roger Lewinter

  While leafing through now, in the late afternoon, in Mercanton’s book, the essay on the Duino Elegies — not knowing whether Duino was a young man or a place —, a fragment that he quoted from the first elegy, “Beauty . . . beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,” amplifying in its echo what I had put at the beginning of the aphoristic novel, “Art . . . dazzling them in order that they see, the horror of the beautiful,” struck me; so that in the evening, beneath the Kashmir shawl hung in the alcove in the spot formerly occupied by Cupid and Psyche, an engraving by Godefroy after the painting by Gérard, purchased for 50 francs from Leuba five years earlier, and discarded two weeks ago — that morning, after the poetry collection, a small eighteenth-century pastel, for 200 francs, at the stand of a secondhand dealer who had come that day, had stood out: on a background of dark slate gray, in half length, at an angle, face straight ahead, the infant Eros, not dainty but an angel who, by his expression, recalled his command: an arrow in his right hand, pointed toward the nest, in the form of a heart, of a turtledove, resting on the crook of his elbow, against his left breast, bared by a blue tunic, he disclosed the intended target of some hoped-for love —, a field whose radiation had forced me to rest, throughout the night, lying no longer on my side, curled up, as usual, but on my back, motionless as a statue; in the complete poems, into which, stopped by the bookmark, I had not pushed ahead since November, searching now for the Elegies, overpowered by the Kashmir shawl I fell into vertigo.

  February 1980 – February 1982

  La Argentina

  IT WAS IN FEBRUARY 1980 that I first heard of La Argentina, even if the name, like a myth, had always been familiar: Florence had seen at the theater festival in Nancy an old Japanese dancer who, onstage, in a deconsecrated church, depicted, with some summoning gestures, as one invokes the descent of the spirit, La Argentina, whom he had seen only once, a half century earlier, at a recital in Tokyo; more precisely, whom he pieced together having seen, since he was seated in the last row of the upper tiers of an amphitheater, thus touched without his even suspecting her brilliance, which now, like a seed that suddenly germinates when the ground at last permits, had overpowered him to the point that he dedicated himself henceforth to the evocation of that blind vision of a beauty whose aura, in brushing him, had held him in its grip and which he sought consequently to transmit, not as it could have been physically — not even consulting its tangible traces: photographs, recordings, fragments of films — but in its essence, his body given up to the spirit that made it its medium.

  At the time I was working on Groddeck’s Lectures, the second book of which had just come out; but before beginning the third book, from March to July I had to stop, because I was replacing, for the summer semester, Roger Kempf, who held the chair in French at the École Polytechnique de Zurich; the four courses were about different modes of invasion of the body in passion: by love and sickness, madness and seduction, in the work of Madame de La Fayette and Groddeck, Diderot and Marivaux; and these months were, in effect, dedicated to my mother — her wish, unfulfilled, had been that I pursue an academic career — in a fervor in which, so as to withstand the intensity that was overwhelming me as, oddly, I had the sense of being bled dry, by the absence, it seemed to me, of an echo to a voice addressed entirely to the hereafter, I was soon forced to live like a recluse: after the break at Pentecost, an inflammation suddenly struck my lower back following an abrupt movement during the first hour, never to let go; and, held rigid in this state, always extemporizing on my feet, I taught the classes, Monday and Tuesday from five to seven, but, on my return to Geneva, I just managed to ensure the daily routine at my father’s, each morning, resting in the afternoon and evening, at home in bed, in the hope that the inflammation would subside, mentally preparing the classes, now become stations at which, because of the shooting pain that gripped me, withdrawn from all other company, I acceded to my mother in her absence.

  In July, one Saturday at the flea market, at Julmy’s, I found a book, by Suzanne F. Cordelier, devoted to La Argentina, who had died suddenly at the height of her fame a few months before its publication, in 1936; an impassioned threnody of gratitude for the revelation of her beauty, in which, through the fervor with which the words thrilled, the presence that had caused such bedazzlement became palpable in its nobility: La Argentina, whose vision by its sheer strength had revived Spanish dance, which at the time had nearly fallen into obsolescence, must, in her pure brilliance, have embodied grace; and it wasn’t particularly surprising that, now once again, she could so enrapture an aging Japanese dancer: in the realm of art, the distinction between life and death loses its relevance, the one taking place in the other, both equally done away with for the spirit that, through beauty, signals the profound transition.

  Now that the courses were finished, I wanted to return to the Lectures; but the stranglehold that gripped my lower back, which became inflamed as soon as I concentrated, was preventing me, undoubtedly owing to a bad posture in which, my body freezing up, energy was unable to circulate correctly from the sacrum to the brain and find expression there; and I considered yoga: more precisely, the lotus, the position often depicted on the cover of manuals, intrigued me, as a means to move forward and finish; however, having never practiced yoga, nor physical exercise, I couldn’t see how this position was possible, and at times even doubted that it was real; when one evening, around eleven o’clock, following several fruitless attempts during the course of the week, when I had already taken my mix of sleeping pills and was again considering the lotus, suddenly the technique appeared simple to me, and, impulsively, I got up to execute at once the movement I had visualized — I sat down in the hallway, next to the oil heater, beneath a primitive tanka from Nepal, the gift that the publication of the second book had earned me, which I would look at each time I passed by it, but which now, oddly enough, I blocked out — : in effect, you had only to relax the ankle and knee joints, to open the bottom of the pelvis, at the hip joint; and it was then possible to bring the right foot inside the left thigh, on top of the fold of the groin; and, by crossing the left tibia over the right tibia, the left foot inside the right thigh, on top of the fold of the groin: the posture barely attained, I had to undo it; but its effect brought about, in one breath, relief: the body instantly reorganized on its axis, like a planetary system harmoniously entering into gravitation; an inexhaustible source opened, each evening from that moment on sought after, from which I drew; so that the most tangible immediate consequence was that, while it had taken me two years for the first book, and one year for the second book, in six weeks I completed the third book: begun, four years earlier, during the inundation of the Musset, in disintegration, the Lectures, with the help of the lotus, which had been essential, ended in a structuring of energy that afforded its control, sustenance for something else that had drawn me to undertake it.

  Groddeck had first struck me in Paris, in 1963, during the Christmas vacation: Eric, a neighbor at the Swiss House, the son of a minister with whom I had studied humanities, had lent me The Book of the It, published some months earlier under the title Au fond de l’homme, cela; supposing that it would interest me, since I exhibited a taste for psychoanalysis in which, however, I right away sought not orthodoxy but alternative approaches; and this book, in the evening, on the train between Paris and Lausanne, illuminated me: if all sickness had to be understood as an oracle, the human body ceased to be materially an object and became, essentially, the space the mind takes in its sights: its field of instruction; and I wanted to read the text now in German, although it never occurred to me to buy the new edition that had just come out; so that in June 1964, while in Zurich for a few days, I found not the first but the second edition, from 1926, in the appendix of which appeared an advertisement for Groddeck’s first book — I hadn’t known of its existence —, Le chercheur d’âme, a “psychoanalytic novel,” whose detailed table of contents, manifestly dizzying, was reproduced: while thro
ugh the Fränger, which I had begun in January, were transmitted the terms of the relationship in which the master gives direction to his instrument, here suddenly was revealed a target worthy of my discipleship; and the publication of the Fränger, in 1966, cleared the way into Groddeck: I agreed, in order to suggest by way of compensation Le chercheur d’âme — which I still hadn’t managed to find at any bookseller’s, German, Swiss, Dutch —, to translate some Binswanger, and as it happened there was also an anthology of work by Groddeck pending, which I enthusiastically took on, even before beginning the Binswanger and before, through the German editor — in 1968, when I was becoming involved in the excesses of the Complete Works of Diderot —, a copy of the novel finally reached me.

  I was imagining something amusing, it was a leap into an unendurable struggle that I couldn’t fathom; but although I would repeat, to anyone who wanted to listen, that the book was untranslatable, nevertheless it didn’t alter my internal commitment, through an act of faith, clearly blind — where the apparent reality simply won’t sink in —, to translate it, whatever the cost: in fact, at no point had it been in my power to decide; it was vital, like predestination, to which one can only acquiesce; left to personal judgment was only the discovery of the means to respond, within the agreed-upon schedule, to life’s requirement.

  When the edition of the Complete Works of Diderot was finished, in 1972; after, in the essay on paradise, in 1974, I had made the connection between the kingdom of Bosch and the body of Groddeck; and when in 1976 the compromise that, in the essay on the presence of death, in the form of a thesis, I was hoping to maintain fell through, the idea had come to me, already in 1975, to ask Margaretha Honegger, the legatee of the work of Groddeck — I had first made contact with her in 1969, after the publication of La maladie, l’art et le symbole —, for the Lectures, the typed manuscript, which I hadn’t thought of reading earlier, the publication of which now seemed to me indispensable: I saw in them the way into The Book of the It — which was, on reflection, of no interest at all to me, precisely because that book was accessible —; in translating them, however, I discovered what they had been for Groddeck, who, ten years earlier, in 1906, had composed Le chercheur but, not succeeding in giving it a satisfactory form from which he could break away, had had to leave it unfinished, until the exercise of the Lectures, embarked upon by chance in 1916 and sustained until 1919, had taken him back to Le chercheur, a beginning to which, by its completion, he put an end: blindly I had remade Groddeck’s path within his labyrinth, in order to find the way out, impossible to find from the outside, locating it within, a suprahuman presence looming at the heart of a subject.

  While waiting now for the details of the contract for Le chercheur to be worked out, I began, in September, on an impulse, to translate Le pasteur de Langewiesche, a short feuilleton written by Groddeck in 1909, after the first version of Le chercheur — in which the hero, not having known how to prevent the sale of a wooden Christ figure by the villagers for whom he was responsible, in a moment of illumination, on the dispossessed Cross, to return to it its human weight, crucifies his own body —; and, this diversion finished, at the beginning of December, as I was finally starting Le chercheur, which seemed to me ever elusive, I received from Florence, by way of a New Year’s greeting, the essay that she had written on Kazuo Ohno in his performance as La Argentina: looking at his photo, which I’d never seen before, I had a feeling of repulsion, because this was obviously not La Argentina in all her bravura but, dolled up in a velvet dress with a train and a hat with an ostrich feather, like the mummy of the fetishized mother in Psycho, by Hitchcock, played by Anthony Perkins in drag, a worn-out body that, exposing itself to invasion, was surrendering its degradation as the final appeal for clemency.

  It had been a year now since, in breaking things off, I had declined the choice made for me by my mother before her death; as she had been doing every two months, however, Michèle had called, and we were supposed to see each other that Wednesday, December 17: to begin with, I wanted to show her the second Kashmir shawl that, just at the end of Le pasteur, I had found at the flea market — a Marseille jacquard square that had nevertheless fascinated me at once, since it constituted the necessary counterpart to the Rose Garden, setting against its sixteen dispersive swirls on the outside a concentrated sphere on the inside, of red tracery, floating in a diamond of metallic-gray ether itself set in a green-and-black square that incorporated into its corners sections of the central globe —; turning away from it, Michèle observed, “I don’t get the radiance of your Kashmir shawl”; and we went to the station buffet where, toward the end of the meal, officially in our engagement period, she announced to me that she had a new boyfriend; giving me, by this fait accompli, formal notice, if I wanted to proceed, to make my own choice; and so when we parted at midnight, I returned home full of a feverishness that the sleeping pills increased, so that, around one thirty, I got up and went out, to go to the public toilets, on place Saint-Gervais, in the basement, where for years I persisted in looking for what, already stunning me in the stench of the public urinals in Paris, at age twelve, evading my grasp, captivated me — before Pentecost, returning home from the classes in Zurich, around one in the morning, I had encountered someone there who didn’t appeal to me but whose waiting affected me, not realizing that he was drunk and that, in this state, I was intruding upon him with my aimless concentration, whose misbehavior, the next evening, when I saw him again, in the guise of sudden passion at first moved me deeply, when, without segue, he called out to me in German, “Why are you so stupid?” then made me freeze when he continued in French, “You belong to me, I want your body, I want your soul”; and I had driven him away, only to attempt, several days later, to find him again, in vain, a hallucination to which I refused access in reality —; while now, a reeling lout suddenly looming up, seeing me, fell to his knees at my feet.

  He had spoken to me about withdrawal, about an empty bottle of whiskey on the ground there, and about a brawl in which he had torn the sleeve of his anorak; and when we arrived at my apartment — outside, we had had to wait a quarter hour for a taxi, during which, in fits, in order not to fall, he had hung on to me —, he had flopped down on the bed, asking me, before sinking under, not to forget to wake him at five o’clock: when the telephone rang, I wasn’t sleeping, but he was unconscious; rubbing his face with a towel moistened with cold water, I finally managed to pull him from sleep: he looked at me; then, slowly putting together what had happened, he came around, suddenly ecstatic, in a trance enveloping me in a worshipful embrace within which I remained, stunned: it was seven thirty when he recalled that he was supposed, at six o’clock, to have opened the bistro where he had been working for only three days, and telephoned his boss to ask him to find someone to fill in, saying that he would be there as soon as he had found a taxi — outside, it was snowing —; but, now, he couldn’t manage to unknot the laces of his putrefied Clarks, which I had pulled off him to put him to bed: I took them in my hands then, and at the moment when, detecting their odor, which at its most extreme — unbearable — was an invading force that suddenly made me hyperventilate, I knelt down at his feet, he released in one breath, “I will marry you, you have only to say the word, wherever you want, whenever you want”; and when, at quarter past eight, having finally gotten a taxi, a rendezvous having been set for that evening at nine at the Colibri, a bistro downstairs from his place, unable in the entryway to pull himself away, he kissed me, beside himself — “I love you and I worship you, and I am very jealous, and if you betray me, I will kill you” —, I discovered to my elation that, while this was what I had wanted to experience, convinced that there had to be a difference, there was none, between man and woman, none whatsoever, since it is negated for the body that in its fulfillment is escaped.

  During the month that followed, I saw him only when he was drunk: he would telephone then without warning, in the middle of the night — every time, whatever the hour, that
he called, he pulled me from the unconsciousness of the most profound sleep, even though I otherwise remained, as usual, awake —, and, from the bistro he hung around at, taking a taxi, he would suddenly appear ten minutes later at the door, a genie released from his bottle, gaze piercing, body luminous; without my seeking — even though he insisted, at first, that I intrude — ever to have a hold on him, making me realize, and this filled me with an acute exultation — which, three weeks earlier, as I was throwing myself into Le chercheur, had finally made me buy the Psalms of David, by Schütz, the joyous intensity of which, at first hearing, years earlier, had enthralled me, without my having, until now, dared to listen to them —, that, for him, I didn’t exist in reality outside of drunkenness; the asceticism consisting in being only this, which made of two bodies brought together the mere stopping-off point in an impersonal connection that, through the necessary surrender to his arbitrariness ravishing my body, was draining me completely through this dissipation, about which, by telephone, at the end of January, in response to a remark I made to him about his increasing discontinuity, he stated abruptly, “Hollywood, it’s over.”