A Perfect Vacuum (10 page)

Roland Barthes, the author of the now not-so-new essay “Le Degré zéro de l'écriture,” had not an inkling of this (but for all its famous wit, his is a shallow intellect). He did not comprehend that literature always is parasitic on the mind of the reader. Love, a tree, a park, a sigh, an earache—the reader understands, because the reader has experienced it. It is possible, of course, with a book to rearrange the furniture inside a reader's head, but only to the extent that there is some furniture there already, before the reading.

He is no parasite on anything, whose work is real: a mechanic, a doctor, a builder, a tailor, a dishwasher. What, in comparison, does a writer produce? Semblances. This is a serious occupation? The antinovel wished to pattern itself after mathematics; mathematics, surely, yields nothing real! Yes, but mathematics does not lie, for it does only what it must. It operates under the constraint of necessities that it does not invent on the spur of the moment; the method is given to it, which is why the discoveries of mathematicians are genuine, and why, too, their horror is genuine when the method leads them to a contradiction. The writer, because he does not operate under such necessity, because he is so free, can only enter into his quiet negotiations with the reader; he urges the reader kindly to assume ... to believe ... to accept as good coin ... but this is a game, and not the blessed bondage in which mathematics thrives. Total freedom is total paralysis in literature.

Of what are we speaking? Of Mme Solange's novel. Let us begin with the observation that this pretty name may be read variously, depending on the context in which it is placed. In French it can be Sun and Angel
(Sol, Ange).
In German it will be merely the name of an interval of time (so
lange
—so long). The absolute autonomy of language is arrant nonsense; humanists have believed in it out of naïveté—to which naïveté, however, the cybernetics people had no right. Machines to translate faithfully, indeed! No word, no whole sentence has meaning in itself, within its own trench and boundary. Borges came close to this state of affairs when, in his story “Pierre Menard, the Author of
Don Quixote
,” he described a literary fanatic, the eccentric Menard, who after a great number of intellectual preparations wrote
Don Quixote a second time,
word for word, not copying down Cervantes but—as it were—immersing himself totally in the latter's creative milieu. But the place in which Borges's short story touches on the secret is this following passage:

“A comparison of the pages of Menard and Cervantes is highly revealing. The latter, for example, wrote
(Don Quixote,
Part One, Chapter XIX): ‘...truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, the repository of deeds, the witness of the past, the pattern and the caution for the present day, and the lesson for future ages.'

“This catalogue, published in the seventeenth century, penned by the ‘layman genius' Cervantes, is simply a rhetorical encomium to history. Menard, on the other hand, writes: '...truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, the repository of deeds, the witness of the past, the pattern and the caution for the present day, and the lesson for future ages.'

“History as the mother of truth; the idea is extraordinary. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not characterize history as the study of reality but as its source. Historical truth, for him, is not that which has taken place; it is that which we believe has taken place. The concluding phrases—the pattern and the caution for the present day, the lesson for future ages—are unabashedly pragmatic.”

This is something more than a literary joke and poking fun; it is the pure and simple truth, which the absurdity of the idea itself (to write
Don Quixote a second time!)
in no way lessens. For in fact what fills every sentence with meanings is the context of the given period; that which was “innocent rhetoric” in the seventeenth century is, in our age, truly cynical in its meanings. Sentences mean nothing
in themselves
; it was not Borges who jokingly decided thus; the moment in history shapes the meanings of language, such is the inalterable reality.

And now, literature. Whatsoever it relates to us must prove a lie, not being the literal truth. Balzac's Vautrin is as nonexistent as Faust's devil. When it speaks the honest truth, literature ceases to be itself and becomes a diary, a news item, a denunciation, an appointment book, a letter, whatever you like, only not artistic writing.

At this juncture appears Mme Solange with her
Rien du tout, ou la conséquence.
The title? Nothing, or the consequence? The consequence of what? Literature, obviously; for literature to be decent, that is, not to lie, is the same as for literature not to be.
Only
of this is it still possible today to write a
decent
book. The blush of indecency no longer works; it was good yesterday, but now we recognize it for what it is: a common pose, the trick of the experienced stripper who knows that her feigned modesty, her lowered lashes, her fake schoolgirl embarrassment as she removes her panties, excites the house even more!

And so the theme has been defined. But how is one to write about nothing? It is necessary, yet impossible. By saying “nothing”? By repeating the word a thousand times? Or by beginning with the words “He was not born, consequently he was not named, either; on account of this he neither cheated in school nor later got mixed up in politics”? Such a work could have arisen, but it would have been a stunt and not a work of art, rather like those numerous books written in the second person singular; any of them can easily be booted out of such “originality” and forced to return to its proper place. All one need do is turn the second person back into the first. It does no violence whatever to the book; in no way does it change it. Similarly with our fictitious example: remove the negations, all those wearisome nots and nors that like a pseudo-nihilistic smallpox have bespotted the text, the text we invented extempore, and it becomes evident that here is yet another story, one of many, about the Marquise who left the house at five. To say she
didn't
leave—some revelation!

Mme Solange was not taken in by this sort of trick. For she understood (she must have understood!) that one may indeed describe a particular story (a love story, say) with nonevents no worse than with events, but that the first device is merely an artifice. Instead of a print we obtain an exact negative, that is all. The nature of an innovation must be ontological, and not simply grammatical!

When we say, “He was not named because he was not born,” we are, to be sure, moving beyond being, but only in that thinnest membrane of nonexistence that adheres tightly to reality. He was not born, although he could have been born, did not cheat, although he could have cheated. He could have done everything, had he been. The work will stand entirely on that “could have.” Out of such flour one cannot bake bread. One cannot go bounding from being to unbeing using such ploys. It is necessary, therefore, to leave the membrane of primitive denials, or of the negatives of actions, in order to plunge into nothingness, plunge deeply, hurling oneself headlong into it, but of course not blindly; to
enminus
nonbeing more and more powerfully—which must be a considerable labor, a great effort; and here is salvation for art, because what is involved is a full expedition into the abyss of ever more precise and ever greater Nothing, and therefore a
process,
whose dramatic peripeteia, whose struggle may be depicted—so long as it succeeds!

The first sentence of
Rien du tout, ou la conséquence
reads, “The train did not arrive”; in the next sentence we find “He did not come.” We meet, then, with negations, but of what exactly? From the standpoint of logic these are total negations, since the text affirms absolutely nothing existentially; indeed, it confines itself exclusively to what did
not
occur.

The reader, however, is a creature more frail than a perfect logician. So, although the text says nothing of this, there is conjured up involuntarily in his imagination a scene taking place at some railway station, a scene of waiting for someone who has not arrived, and since he knows the sex of the author (authoress), the waiting for the nonarrival immediately carries the anticipation of an erotic encounter. What of this? Everything! Because the whole responsibility for these conjectures, from the very first words, falls on the reader. With not a single word does the novel confirm his expectations; the novel is and remains decent in its method, I have heard some say that in places it is downright pornographic. Well, but there is not a single word in it that would assert sex in any form; and indeed, how could such an assertion be possible when it is expressly stated that in the home there is neither the Kamasutra nor any person's reproductive organs (and those are denied most specifically! ).

Nonbeing is already known to us in literature, but only as a certain Lack—of Something—for Someone. For example—of water, for one thirsty. The same applies to hunger (including the erotic), loneliness (the lack of others), etc. The exquisitely beautiful nonbeing of Paul Valéry is a lack of being that is bewitching for the poet; on such nothingnesses more than one poetic work has been built. But always it is exclusively a matter of Nothingness for Someone, or of nonbeing purely private, experienced on the individual level, therefore particular, chimerical, and not ontological (when I, thirsty, cannot have a drink of water, this does not mean, after all, the absence of water—as though water did not in general exist!). Such unobjective nothingness cannot be the theme of a radical work: Mme Solange understood this also.

In the first chapter, following the nonarrival of the train and the nonappearance of the Someone, the narration, continuing in its subjectless way, reveals that it is not spring, or winter, or summer. The reader decides on autumn, but again only because that last climatic possibility has not been disavowed (it, too, will be, but later!). The reader therefore is constantly thrown back on himself, but that is the problem of his own anticipations, conjectures, his hypotheses ad hoc. In the novel there is not so much as a hint of these. The contemplation of the unbeloved heroine in nongravitational space (i.e., space in which there is no force of attraction), which concludes the first chapter, might seem, it is true, obscene—but, again, only to one who will think
certain things
himself, on his own. The work relates only what such an unbeloved would
not
be able to do, and not what she
would
be able to do, in particular positions. This second part, the suppositional, is again the personal contribution of the reader, his completely private gain (or loss, depending on how one looks at it). The work even goes so far as to stress that the unbeloved does
not
find herself in the presence of any kind of male. Anyway, the beginning of the next chapter discloses, straightaway, that this unbeloved is unbeloved for the simple reason that she
does not exist.
An entirely logical situation—is it not?

Then begins that drama of the diminution of space, of phallic-vaginal space also, which was not to the liking of a certain critic, a member of the Academy. The academician found it to be “an anatomical bore, if not a vulgarity.” He found it, let us note, on his own and by himself, because in the text we have only further, progressive denials, of a more and more general nature. If the
lack
of a vagina can still offend someone's sensibilities, then we have gone far indeed. How can a thing be in bad taste which
is not there at all?!

Then the pit of nothingness, still shallow, begins to increase disquietingly. The middle of the book—from the fourth to the sixth chapter—is consciousness. Yes, its stream, but, as we begin to realize, this is not a stream of thoughts about nothing, old-fashioned, passé. This is a stream of
no thoughts.
The syntax itself remains intact, untouched, inviolate, and it carries us over the depths like a perilously buckling bridge. What a void ! But—we reason—even consciousness that is unthinking is still consciousness, is it not? Since that unthinkingness has limits ... but this is a delusion, for the limitations are created by the reader himself! The text does not think; it gives us nothing. On the contrary, it takes away in succession that which was still our property, and the emotions in reading it are precisely the result of the ruthlessness of such subtraction:
horror vacui
smites us, at the same time entices; the reading turns out to be not so much the destruction of the world of lies of the novel as a form of annihilation of the reader himself as a psychic being! A woman wrote this book? Difficult to believe, considering its merciless logic.

In the last section of the work comes the doubt whether it can possibly continue: it has, after all, been saying nothing for so long! Any further progress to the center of nonexistence seems impossible. But no ! Again a trap, again an explosion—or, rather, an implosion, the caving in of yet another nothingness! The narrator—as we know, there is no narrator; he is replaced by the language, that which itself speaks
by means of him,
like an imaginary “it” (the “it” in “it is thundering” or “it is lightning”). In the next-to-last chapter we observe with dizziness that the negative absolute has now been reached. The business of the nonappearance of some man, by some train, the unbeing of the seasons of the year, of the weather, of the walls of the house, of the apartment, of the face, the eyes, the air, the bodies—all this lies far behind us, on the surface, the surface that, eaten away by our further progress, by that all-consuming cancerlike Nothing, has ceased to exist
even as negation.
We see how simple-minded, naïve, how positively comical it was of us to expect that we would he given facts of some sort here, that here something or other would happen!

It is, therefore, a reduction, to zero only to begin with; later, sinking into the abyss with projections of negative transcendence, it is a reduction also of transcendental entities, since by now no metaphysical systems are possible, and the neantic center still looms before us. A vacuum, then, surrounds the narrative on every side; and behold, there are now its first incursions, intrusions, in the language itself. For the narrating voice begins to doubt itself. No, I put that poorly: “that which by itself tells of itself” collapses and vanishes somewhere; it already knows that it
is not.
If it still exists, it exists as a shadow, which is the simple lack of light; thus are these sentences the lack of existence. It is not the lack of water in the desert, not the maiden's lack of a lover, it is the
lack of self.
Had this been a novel written in the classical, traditional fashion, it would have been easy for us to say what took place: the hero would have been the sort of someone who begins to harbor suspicions that he neither manifests himself nor dreams himself, but is dreamt and manifested
—by
someone, and through hidden intentional acts (as if he is appearing to someone in a dream and only thanks to the dreamer may exist provisionally). From this would have come the rushing fear that these acts would stop, and surely they could stop at any moment—whereupon he would then fade away!