This fury, which I mistook for the original motivation, thus escapes my grasp and I am, as I confront it, like a theologian reduced to preparing a statement about the divine mysteries without trying to penetrate them, or—closer to my professional area—like a critic before a work that is valuable to the extent that, in fact, it eludes criteria: he may note that it contains something not seen or heard before, may indicate the how and if need be the why, but to analyze it like a schoolchild’s exercise that must be marked could only deflect him from what is most important. What matters, however, is not so much to know whether I was clarifying or only qualifying when I invoked this fury as the source of all that which, in various forms, seemed to me to be poetry. What counts above all else is the determination that moved me—and that still moves me—to be authentically that particular type of writer evoked by the name (too much compromised) of “poet,” the unconditional desire implying that beyond ethical or aesthetic imperatives the crucial act is, for me, this: to project myself into the off limits area where written language will be my thought reified and myself wrested from the vicissitudes of life by a death that gives me the highest intelligence of it, a bridge thrown across the void that encloses me as though within an island, the place, also, in which my own time is abolished (all partitions being struck down between the time I am writing about, the time in which I write, and the time of the person who reads me). It is, without any doubt, a very obscure directive that I may find in this! I will nevertheless retain the idea that to use language thus, a legacy of men of an older time that allows me to be understood by men of today and perhaps also those of later on, is an activity in which I am not the only actor, so that it obliges me to take into account another person. To admit this is both not much and a great deal: in theory a great deal, since it is to recognize that my vocation itself forbids me to behave as though I were the only one who existed; in practice almost nothing, for it indicates to me neither how I ought to act toward others, nor how many of them I must take into consideration (all, or only those with whom I am joined by the community of language). But if the act that is for me also “crucial” because in it I wear myself to a shadow and tear myself apart has the sense of an excess and of a recourse to the invisible presence of those others without whom I would not be able to speak and would not even have to speak, the result of this is that I would be betraying myself just as much by limiting the field of that movement as by not doing anything so that the other person (no matter which other person) might be treated as my equal. Drawn from words that are not mine, and addressed to whatever person will accept them, doesn’t poetry—fundamentally, a blind expansion beyond my frontiers—tie me to the indiscriminate partner who is an other in relation to me, but my kind at the level of the species?
IV
And so, showing that by the practice of poetry one postulates the other as one’s equal, I return to the truth that I had derived in the beginning: to learn that one does not say . . . reusement but heureusement is to learn that language has two faces, one turned toward the inside, the other toward the outside, and when—discovering altruism at the end of two or three volumes devoted to my own person—I declare that a poet cannot dissociate himself from the fate of his fellow man, it is from this twofold nature that I am drawing my argument, as if the most important element had already been included in my old discovery.
And so, here I am, clearly back at my starting point. The circle being a symbol of perfection, I could be proud of having thus looped the loop. But I note with scorn, lassitude, and disgust that after many years spent looking for a way out, I am managing only to deduce the consequences, purely logical and almost without effect, of what I have known from the beginning. For not one of these problems has been resolved: do I emerge from myself if I address, in fact, a tiny fraction who are already more or less persuaded? Opening my mouth to make myself heard, am I not obligated to substitute such words as heureusement for my too singular or abrupt words such as . . . reusement? Am I justified in saying that I write in order to “communicate,” whereas (laziness, difficulty in expressing myself, horror of taking up the pen if I have nothing precise to express) I sometimes do not answer letters even when they seem to indicate that I have obtained my objective? Am I doing a great deal or almost nothing for others when, talking about myself as though about someone who could be another, I help those less sure of themselves to know themselves a little better? Does all free and sincere poetry, even the most detached, contribute to the advent of an age of freedom and truth? If the very nature of poetry requires me to strive to see that everyone should be unanimously recognized, shouldn’t this choice that I am making be my primary theme? Another eloquent speaker, doesn’t the popular advocate go farther than the poet and the Don Juan, since his role is to move, not in order to arouse in another a completely inner flame, but in order to urge those whom he has touched toward a goal with a broad scope? If justice must be done, and if revolution is the sole means to it, can I invoke it without uttering a firmly established opinion concerning the quarrels that divide the revolutionary camp? Fearing violence against myself, do I have a right to accept the fact that revolution uses violence against others, and often without moderation since it goes so far as to strike out against its first architects?
And so, disappointed, dismayed to see that I still have so much on my plate and stuffed too full to run under that impetus that would lead me to get lost in the maze of demonstrations, I confine myself to the little I have gained, this slender certainty at which I have arrived and which remains just as diaphanous when I situate it in relation to a few of the illustrated reference points that I have placed here and there, but to which I do not have the heart to return, except by taking them up again from memory: my furious attachment to the magic that sometimes seems to effect a fusion of the over-there and the right-here does not permit me to reject the arid Peking way, even though misfortunes like that of the bird fallen from the nest may be thorns that no horticulture can eliminate and even though I am spontaneously inclined toward the shadows, the lights, and the baroque folds of the Kumasi way, which is colored by an intimate flush and not a sharp red.
And so I am giving in, with the relief of avoiding the enormous consumption I would have to make, still, of sapless words, if I tackled problems that, scarcely broached, allowed other problems to appear behind them: the “therefore,” “yet,” “besides,” “but,” “nevertheless” that are instruments of connection, the “if,” “because,” “since,” or “given that” with which one articulates an argument, the “however,” “almost,” “quasi,” “hardly,” “at least,” and other convenient means of arranging for oneself a little margin in order not to lay oneself too open.
And so there is no question of my resuming on any new bases my search for a golden rule. Rather than elaborating an art of poetry and a morality, isn’t the important thing to be, to the entire extent that one can, with the means at one’s disposal, that hybrid of sage and madman, of truth-sayer and trickster that is called a poet, and, as for one’s attitude toward others, to conduct oneself with as little narrowness and pettiness as one is equipped to do? No doubt I will even have to succeed, one day, in entirely persuading myself of it: in the game I am playing, even though one ends by winning or losing, there is no rule, and I will win or lose without any martingale permitting me to force chance and without my even knowing whether I am winning or not.
And so, after having given myself the luxury of describing, about halfway through these pages, how I committed suicide (an episode that was perfectly romantic), then having returned to the subject, and having finally decided to stop musing about it, there is nothing more for me to do but to take my bows. This histrion’s gesture: it was when—back in harness—I calculated how odd it would be calmly to put a final period to the work that had been interrupted by that interlude, that I had the idea of it; this, the kind of gesture that ought to be able to accompany the exit that I would make, a half-posthumous exit calling for a slightly spe
ctral feature of the sort that concludes the comedy of the German Romantic Grabbe, at the end of which Grabbe himself, having arisen from the depths of a forest, knocks at the door of the room where his characters are and enters with a lighted lantern. As for me, I have just extinguished rather than lit my lantern, at the end of a long soliloquy and not of a comedy for several characters. This is why, if hamletism is called for here, the fall of the curtain cannot be other than this one: splitting the page in order to bow, the author appears, his glasses on his nose and his Parker in his hand.
And so, let’s say I am fictively performing this enactment of the scene and that it is taking the place of a final period. It remains true—irony of ironies—that I can certainly, after a failed suicide, brave the ridicule of another false exit and, having taken my leave, resume speaking in order to give a significant detail about what my state of mind was even when I was not yet all the way back from China. To review so many things before talking about a stroll that was marked not by any notable event, but by a simple impression, will have been useful for the following: to allow the ripening and ramification of the anecdote whose effect I had not immediately evaluated, but that explains, through a motive much more radical than those whose involvement I alleged, my ambivalent feelings about a country which, I had thought when I was still there, could, if the necessity arose, become mine.
I had arrived in Copenhagen in the afternoon, on a Finnish airplane, and I was going to visit the city with two of my friends from the delegation, a man and a woman. The first was a painter older than I by a few years, who has undertaken to restore its proper qualities to the profession of tapestry making, which has become an art of copying; the second was a literary woman whose husband, a writer I had met several times before the last war, was killed in a unit of the maquis, as though his humanist faith in democracy and the very high importance he attached to the athletic disciplines had led him quite naturally to heroism. The goal of the excursion was to see, in a hotel whose name he had forgotten, a tapestry that was the work of my friend, the only one of us who knew the Danish capital, whose charm lies in what is modern as well as what is old and quaint about this marine city, in which there live together without discord (as I would discover later) the life-size statue of the Little Mermaid from the Andersen tale, placed directly on a bank of rocks, sailors’ clubs and fishermen’s bars, shops rich in imported articles, grand royal buildings, and the model of industrial architecture which is the Tuborg brewery. Our destination, in fact, was scarcely more than a pretext, for hardly had we gone out before we stopped in a bar to drink some aquavit. I am certain that one would not really be able to have any insight into any city or region whatsoever if one did not taste the drink special to it. For instance, in Rome, Frascati wine, which one can describe as easy, as one will say of a tenor that he has an easy voice, and in Guadeloupe punch (vanilla punch especially), whose aroma, at once sweet, spicy, and alcoholic, expresses, it would seem, the complexity of the Antilles, a spot in the world where such diverse races and cultures have mingled. It is no different with aquavit, of which a subsequent trip to Scandinavia finally demonstrated to me its character, in my opinion, eminently “Nordic” (a fragrant dryness comparable to the light in these countries, often very fine at the same time as very hard, and the scale of colors, delicate and neat in general effect, that their landscapes may present). In this quite nice-looking bar, which aimed to captivate the lover of exoticism with its wall decorative mural portraying a comic-opera Mexico, seated on the classic high stools and having before us the little glasses filled with alcohol so transparent as to be almost invisible, we immediately felt very good. The clientele was exclusively male, and—to judge from its behavior, perhaps deceptive, it is true—it did not in the least deplore the fact that besides my friend from the delegation there were no other female human beings except two physically unattractive middle-aged persons installed in a corner; dressed like governesses or schoolteachers for families of the most bourgeois and puritan sort, they were playing, one on the piano, the other on the double bass, tunes from the era of Le Boeuf sur le Toit and singing, now and then, through a megaphone. Delighted by this unexpected reminder of our beautiful 1920s, we continued on our way in the highest of spirits, walking somewhat at random through the shopping streets and looking at the display windows. After two or three stops, each watered by an aquavit (a liqueur so colorless and so light that it seems that, even if one were to drink it in receptacles much larger than the actual thimbles in which it is customary to serve it, it would not affect the organism at all and would only give rise to a cheerful lucidity), we ended by finding the hotel with the tapestry. We exchanged a few friendly words with the correct, smiling, and rather stout gentleman who was its manager, and, of course, we consumed a final small glass. Happy about this expedition, which had been truly relaxing after the exciting but busy weeks we had spent in China, we went back to rejoin our comrades. Then, as it was time for dinner, our small group set off in quest of another hotel known to one of my two companions of that afternoon; he recalled that there was, on one of its highest stories, a restaurant where we could eat excellent fish while enjoying the spectacle of the ships at the quay. After a meal that was very pleasant (even though one dish of especially succulent fish was not available that evening), I returned on foot with one of the other diners for a last stroll. In my daily notebook, I carefully noted the name of the hotel so opportunely situated: Kodan, which I presume is a contraction of “Kopenhagen” and “Danmarck.” This story, which is not even a story, would be too pointless to be worth reporting, if it were not precisely from that pointlessness that it derives its meaning.
A bar with a clientele as prosaically sophisticated as its decor. An outmoded music: fashionable in its time (that of my youth) but with quite a bit of time having accumulated since that time; neither popular enough to seem ageless, nor imposing enough to withstand aging; light music, corresponding to a quickly forgotten phase of a city-life luxury which, had it been less changeable, would not really have been that. Shops in one of which were displayed travel lap robes whose lovely checked patterns made one dream of trips to be taken as an indolent tourist. A restaurant exactly appropriate to people who are making a stopover: seafood and the spectacle of a quay active from morning to night. Ships that were very clean, illuminated, and no doubt about to depart. For a touch of the picturesque, girlie music halls (along with one or two tattoo parlors pointed out by my companion of the afternoon, and which are in the same street, but which I did not find this time). In other words, a bar that was a caricature but also a reminder of places that, for a long time, I had not been able to leave without wishing to return to them, and which, places where people were just passing through and home ports in which strangers and regular customers stood side by side, must be numbered—whether diurnal or nocturnal, made for drinking or for dancing, or filling all functions at once—among the great symbols of our civilization of solitary people who rub elbows; a city more cramped than Algiers, Barcelona, Genoa, London, and others where I am enchanted to feel a little lost, but a city whose Hanseatic appearance was enough to illustrate that word with its smell of merchandise that has come from far off and in which there echoes in a quiet way a universal sound, emporium, that comes to me when, instead of agglomerations so large that their pattern vanishes, I remember the very real Kumasi of the Ashanti country, encircling a marketplace in which there thronged a crowd of Africans of very diverse origins, drawn as much by the brilliance of the fabrics sold on that esplanade as by the more secret joys of the satellite neighborhoods. In Copenhagen, with capitalism in its commercial aspects (internal traffic and long-range commerce that engenders a cosmopolitanism expressed as much by fashions in clothing as by the disposition of places intended for leisure), I had rediscovered my folklore, composed in large part of all that luxury, which I love without believing in it and which I love perhaps all the more because I know how fragile and frivolous it is (whence my multifaceted pleasure in contact with fals
e luxuries more fragile and frivolous even than true luxuries, since being only junk, they do not have even the semblance of seriousness of a successful thing in a completely vain area). Having just barely left Peking (and almost in tears, exchanging goodbyes with those Chinese friends who would still think of me from time to time, I was sure, without saying to myself at that moment what I would say to myself later, namely, that if they did, it would certainly be as one member, among others, of a delegation and not deliberately of me in particular), I was quite happy to plunge once again into the questionably iridescent waters that I recognized as my nourishing milieu.
The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3 Page 34
