It was, anyway, laughable to make myself at once a rhetorician and a moralist, to wear myself out in endless subterfuges over vocabulary and grammar all while mustering myself to shape, with a few cuts of the scissors, the ethics that would fit me like a glove. Sterile pottering, from which I will have been deflected neither by my desire for clear-sightedness nor the program that was summed up in these few words, recorded, no doubt, when I began to understand that it would be better to climb down from my position: To produce not a beautiful lie, but a truth that would be as beautiful as the most beautiful lie . To try to achieve through writing something real that would be as fully satisfying as a marvelous fiction—I could have decided that this would be my rule, instead of persisting in my utopian quest. But even though the ambition might have remained lofty, to confine myself to this formula would have been to restrict my perspective too much, to content myself with authenticity (even simple anecdotal veracity) in the guise of truth, and, if my moral code was reduced to this demand alone, to toss the cargo overboard with the excuse of unballasting myself. Yet this note, a rapid indication of a possibility of finding my Good in literature itself, was a recall to order that should have prevented me from losing from sight the fact that in this art as in the other arts, whatever the goal pursued, nothing supreme could exist that was not made, I will not say “as though it were child’s play” or even “as though it were play,” but at least without boredom. Not that boredom, a state of lack from which a spark may leap and a frequent theme of poetic reverie, is too poor a terrain, but because a work (gentle or violent, serious or light) will be a very morose celebration if its organizer is bored to death when he is at work. However, in the complete failure that I am attempting to contain, leaving no stone unturned and searching among the reflections that I have accumulated for the one that would hold sufficiently firm upon examination to offer me a way out, the fact is that I am getting bored. And that is enough to show me how far, wandering in the labyrinth of too hesitant and laborious an account, I have strayed from beauty without managing, where truth is concerned, much more than this negative success: to reject several false ideas that I had thoughtlessly accepted as I went along.
A sulky pessimism, often mutating into the serenity of a comfortably ensconced disabusement, has replaced the harsher pessimism in which, formerly, it seemed to me I was endlessly struggling with myself. I believe, however, that I have not profited from the change, for that youthful pessimism, whose somber but rich colors endowed the composition of an entire imagery, enlivened me rather than paralyzing me. Inseparable from the desire to be a poet, it was (if one may put it this way) a lyrical pessimism or at least one that sought to be lyrical, whereas the pessimism of today, diluted in bourgeoisification and rendered insipid by the almost constant use of a tranquilizing drug, cannot be transfigured but is like an organic disease that one edulcorates with palliatives. Dilution, dissolution, dispersion such that my former pessimism, when I try to describe it, eludes my grasp as though I were wrapped in a fog even more difficult to pierce than the thickness of time, and as though my very wish to bring the past back to life rested on a foundation of mist. Nevertheless, within a sleep haunted by a whole evening’s disappointing work, it seemed to me, during one of these past nights, that the contact was renewed. Momentarily cleared, the horizon has once again been obstructed, but the image by which I was obsessed for a part of that night survives my disillusionment, and I think that, despite its apparent lack of meaning, it speaks more clearly than the sentences I tried turn and turn about before the inglorious retirement to bed to which, abandoning any further resistance, I had resigned myself.
Young, both of them, a man and a woman appeared to me standing and seen from slightly below, which reminded me of the way in which characters are shown in the close-ups of one of the best-known works of the silent cinema, Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc. Face to face, and so close together that they could have touched each other just by reaching out their arms a little, they seemed to me frozen in a pathetic immobility whereas, in truth, moved by an impetus outside themselves, they were turning rapidly on themselves, with a tendency to rise as though they were propelled by a helical movement from which, in the end, no flight resulted. The scene—or rather the tableau, since, except for this spinning, nothing happened—was so unlocalized that it is only when I endeavor to see it again without neglecting any detail that I situate these two beings either in a closed and empty place or in a conventionally limited space (the rectangle determined by the frame of a painting or, another rectangle, a cinematic screen). Concerning the man, as is logical, I have retained scarcely more than the indistinct whirl engendered by his rotation. But I can, on the other hand, draw an approximate portrait of the woman, certainly because it was at her that my interest was directed and because afterward the desire did not leave me to recapture that figure whose features, theoretically, should have been blurred by the rapidity of her gyration. Like the robe of a saint in a color-print with coloring derived from a simplistic symbolic system, she was wrapped in a long garment of a dull red, and I have no doubt that this reddish glow was a concrete manifestation of the “somber but rich colors” to which, in order to characterize my former pessimism, I alluded, reluctantly (for it enraged me not to be able to go beyond that too vague description). Her graceful, but not gracile, body was robust and fleshy. Her quite smooth black hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and her face—a lovely, serious face, full and pale, presented in profile—gazed upward. As I reconstruct it, reviving and combining brief snapshots made and remade in sleep or half-sleep, this figure, part tragic and part voluptuous, of martyr or lover, becomes that of a girl of the southern seas in loincloth or sari and, in order to complete my detailing, I would be tempted to summon up another image gleaned from the world at once perceptible and impalpable suggested by film: the great sunburnt islander played, I believe, by an Arab actress in the film Outcast of the Islands, taken from the novel by Conrad and shown in Paris shortly after the last world war.
The red note that dominated in this vision, where a tension independent of all intrigue expressed love and death, ought to invade me like wine. But what can I do? Already this tint, whose subdued luster only emphasized more fully the protruding bottom and arched spine that it enveloped, has cooled instead of intensifying, since, putting too much effort into bringing it out of its darkness to incorporate it in my interior landscape, I have set it beside other reds, sometimes deep, sometimes worn or washed out, that I keep in my memory: the color of lambrusco, a sparkling wine whose taste of dead leaves I love and which I cannot separate from the largest of the towns in which I have drunk it, the old and lively Bologna, where the struggles between factions have calmed down but whose faded red houses and arcaded streets, after the day’s turmoil, become at night so muffled and silent that one would believe the only creature awake there is the hired assassin hidden in one of the cells which your footstep will expose; the tones, warm but fragmented and attenuated, of the ruins of baths or other constructions of the Roman era of bricks baked and baked again by the sun; the oxblood coating of the walls which, at the center of Peking, still surround the old Imperial City; the pompous decor of so many halls where, watching performances of operas, I crammed into myself a sad plenitude which my present-day pessimism, not even black but smoky gray, is no longer capable of attaining, except by chance and by forcing myself a little.
A ruby whose sparkle has dimmed, which does not exist even in the half-reality of a dream but only on the piece of paper where my writing contorts without managing to make itself anything other than writing—this is what I have obtained by confronting the red of the sari, the loincloth, or the robe with these tourist’s or dilettante’s memories. And I arrive at nothing more if I appeal, without changing the region of the specter, to other memories less tainted with aestheticism: the close view, to which will be added, dizzyingly, the touch, of the brown verging more or less on garnet offered by, in certain women, the two small and precious partic
les of the female body which are the nipples augmented by their aureoles; appearing at the distance of a promise or a regret, the palpitating flame, almost orange-colored and of a fruity succulence, which, in the vicinity of the great petroleum installations, I have often observed with a sharp sensation of greed and distress, as though the very image of life had suddenly been offered to me in a summary form that was immediately decipherable.
Still, this weakened color nonetheless has a meaning, which new terms of comparison will perhaps help to specify: the nuances of autumn and of sunsets, whose sumptuousness and melancholy are too well known for there to be any need to insist upon them; situated very far away in my youth and, it seems, at the point where the rue La Fontaine meets the avenue Mozart, the rather old and rather low corner house, neither private home nor “rental property” nor shop with living quarters above, and which, apparently abandoned, owed a part of its mystery to the slightly dirty or tired red verging almost on pink with which it was painted, as might have been, symbolically, a butcher’s shop; in the domain of music, the rumblings of very deep and slightly raspy brasses which, since the Romantic era, can be heard sometimes in the orchestral subbasement of operas and which seem to express a heavy menace (something powerful that is still only brooding but will be unleashed); in that of geography, the volcanic regions and the torrid heat of countries from which one brings back “fevers.”
When I accumulate these reference points, what is most important is not the desire to situate within the range of the senses the imaginary perception that I would like to secure. Close to crimson, the deep red of lambrusco corresponds fairly well to the shade that I have called “dull red” so as to contrast it to the harsh and vulgar reds, those of official honors and prize books, or the red, equally orpheonesque, of the traditional Mephisto. What need, therefore, to stray from the lambrusco to find other reds of which many (the refinery flame, for example, or ancient brick, even if illuminated by a recollection of Pompeian red) differ markedly from the one I am claiming to identify? No doubt their appearance counts less than what they are covering: the value of a certain past emotion, expressed by one of these varieties of red (or by an equivalent sound) but whose analogy with the color of the sari, itself inseparable from the tableau it highlighted, is a matter of feeling rather than a matter of palette. And how can I not see that I am establishing these comparisons in order to insert here and there certain words or pairs of words the way one secretly slips, into a conversation whose circuitous paths will put someone more or less off the scent, the phrase that one would not dare utter straight out but which, from the beginning of a conversation started precisely for this reason, one had resolved to pronounce?
“Sad plenitude” (a term echoed by “greed and distress,” “sumptuousness and melancholy,” which are no more than almost unchanged reminders of its ambiguity), “mystery,” “heavy menace,” and finally resolved into the plural “fever” of the tropics, these two words that I burned to write while describing the eminently sensitive peaks of the double dome of the female chest: “tender burn”—interpreted auspiciously as the fires of love and inauspiciously as that flame whose grasp could only reduce us to ashes—compose the message that I extract from my words, by treating them as the given text whose true content is revealed by a grid with exactly the right cutouts isolating some small fragments of them. But if, passing my vision through a sieve at the risk of ransacking everything, I had analyzed the whole of the scene instead of collecting from it only that equivocal red, I would have read almost the same message, without having to recompose it after dispersing it: the freighted destiny of two beings united but inexorably separated; the avidity and distress attested by their movement and its paradoxical fixity (the spinning of each around the immutable axis of which they were prisoner and the constant suppression of their rise along the two verticals); the mystery hovering over these tall, melancholy figures, the more visibly distracted of whom attained a plenary beauty; the ardor impelling the tender and unfortunate form who was connected by delicate ramifications to, on the one hand, the virgin warrior burning with hope and destined for the pyre, on the other that daughter of the Islands in whom were incarnated faraway places charged with sensuality, heat, and fever.
Inventorying a dream or paying particular attention to one of its details (that red, which, I noticed after a strange delay, is the same red as that of one of my pairs of pajamas, so that on the night when this color appeared to me I had, if not on my skin, at least in the piece of furniture in which my linen is kept the reference that I went so far to look for), I arrive at more or less similar terms, whether because the detail and the whole have, in fact, conveyed this same message, or because I attach such value to these notions that I contrive at every opportunity to bring them into play or that, in speaking of anything whatsoever which has rekindled the too often dormant fire I carry within me, I unfailingly end up coming to them, as though they represented the ultimate expressible truth regarding those emotions without which I feel I live at an animal level.
If, however, I cut short the reading of this dream and return in my thoughts to the period when I mistook for pessimism a spirit of refusal which, in fact, instead of restraining me, pushed me like a goad, I note—and I would really like to be able to laugh about it—that a simple word of two syllables had at that time allowed me to label this state and to say at least as much about it as I did with all the turns of phrase I used afterward each time I ventured to approach what is, for me, the central core: the word fury, exactly in harmony with the shade of red I have so laboriously tried to define. This word, in which, it seemed to me, there came together anger at having been born mingled with a rage (or furious desire) to live, a revolt against society (responsible for bringing me into the world, and the only circle in this world able to hear itself judging), a poetic delirium (or “fury” comparable to Orestes’ at the hands of his Furies)—I had promoted its importance, playing somewhat fraudulently upon its semantic elasticity, as a term appropriate for designating what had to be regarded as the source of the surrealist spirit, one day when, in the Café des Deux Magots (in no way Chinese except for the discreet presiding of two large magots of wood or painted plaster installed on consoles), a few of my companions and I had come together in a sort of commission charged with specifying the relationship between this pillar of fire and that pillar of cloud which were guiding our march toward the Promised Land of surrealism and revolution.
But here my effort breaks off . . . What is this fury that marries horror and greed, resentment and effusion, unbridled lyricism and the desire to establish other customs? Even if it was more than an imaginary point taken abstractly as the center of the tumult of feelings and ideas that I wanted to connect to a single source, my noting the radical ambiguity of this fury—today quite tepid, and whose red has flaked off—will not be the means of my penetrating its core. It is a fact: there exist these moments which seem to me complete, and the latest of them was certainly the one in which, drunkenness having intensified my pain instead of attenuating it, I allowed my old sad fury to rise against me and experienced, in an astonishingly abbreviated form, what may infuse the ample aria sung by a soprano whose throat rhythmically swells, racked by sobs of melody. I loved (since I was capable of dying of it); I rebelled (rejecting, along with my life, a system that had too many impediments); I thumbed my nose at the various degradations caused by aging; deciding on my destiny and thus gaining height, I rose with one leap all the way up to that level from which all things appear gathered in a vast panorama, moving as is, always—in the picture book of common reality—a great urban or seaport setting reduced by distance to the size of a beehive or anthill: New York, which I passed through so quickly that I wanted at the very least to embrace it with a single glance and was taken, at my request, to one of its principal skyscrapers by the beautiful Valkyrie who was piloting me that morning; Barcelona, viewed from the top of Mount Tibidabo (To thee I will give . . . , the Tempter had said to the Son of God, showing
him all the wealth of the world spread out before them); Algiers, which one can see deployed in a fan facing the sea; Genoa, built like an amphitheater and of which one will recall (contemplating it from the esplanade to which the funicular leads) the tangle of stairways and streets overlapping other streets, tunnels, elevators, modern office buildings, churches and palaces (in Baroque style or in Monte Carlo style, as in the Via del XX Settembre, with grandiose arcades), and, at the very lowest point, the, in fact, lowest income neighborhoods, where the disturbing notice off limits, affixed here and there during the American occupation, alternated with the sculpted stone Madonnas sanctifying street corners; the port of Copenhagen when one eats on the top floor of the Kodan Hotel (as I did, one evening, during the last stopover on my return from China); more recently, Tokyo, of which I will not forget the view, very partial but immense, that I had of it from our room, whence one’s gaze, ignoring the tall buildings at the edge of the landscape on the left side, fell upon a public garden formerly included in the Imperial City, then, after shifting to the right and crossing a broad rectilinear avenue that ran all the way to the Tokyo Tower (thinner than the Eiffel Tower, and higher, though this is difficult to imagine, by some ten meters), a spacious avenue whose intense traffic seemed to us strangely silent because of the isolation created by the double window of the air-conditioned room where the norm was that one lived as though in an airtight chamber, upon one of the guard buildings of the palace (whose roof had four ridges raised at their extremities) overlooking the wall of dry stones arranged according to what in Greek architecture would be called, I think, the “Pelasgic system,” that assemblage of blackish blocks carefully squared and adjusted, itself overhanging the great moat where swans navigated before our eyes as though to accentuate the impression of overflowing activity conducted in a spectral silence.
The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3 Page 33
