Six Memos for the Next Millennium (14 page)

A grotesque drollery with moments of frenzied desperation is
characteristic of Gadda's vision. Even before science had oflBcially recognized that observation intervenes in some way to modify the phenomenon being observed, Gadda knew that “conoscere e inserire alcunche nel reale; e, quindi, deformare il reale” (to know is to insert something into what is real, and hence to distort reality). From this arises his invariably distorting way of representing things, and the tension he always establishes between himself and the thing represented, so that the more the world becomes distorted before his eyes, the more the author's self becomes involved in this process and is itself distorted and confused.

The passion for knowledge therefore carries Gadda from the objectivity of the world to his own irritated subjectivity, and this—for a man who does not like himself, and indeed detests himself—is a fearful torture, as is abundantly demonstrated in his novel
La cognizione del dolore
(Acquainted with Grief). In this most autobiographical of his books, Gadda explodes into a furious invective against the pronoun “I” and indeed against all pronouns, those parasites of thought: “l'io, io! … il piu lurido di tutti i pronomi! … I pronomi! Sono i pidocchi del pensiero. Quando il pensiero ha i pidocchi, si gratta come tutti quelli che hanno i pidocchi … e nelle unghie, allora … ci ritrova i pronomi: i pronomi di persona” (I, I! … the filthiest of all the pronouns!… The pronouns! They are the lice of thought. When a thought has lice, it scratches, like everyone with lice … and in your fingernails, then … you find pronouns: the personal pronouns).

If Gadda's writing is determined by this tension between rational exactitude and frenetic distortion as basic components of every cognitive process, during the same period another writer with a
technical-scientific training, Robert Musil, also an engineer, expressed the tension between mathematical exactitude and the imprecision of human aflFairs, employing a completely diflFerent kind of writing: fluent, ironic, and controlled. MusiPs dream was of a mathematics of single solutions:

Aber er hatte noch etwas auf der Zunge gehabt; etwas von mathematischen Aufgaben, die keine allgemeine Lo-sung zulassen, wohl aber Einzellosungen, durch deren Kombination man sich der allgemeinen Losung nahert. Er hatte hinzufugen konnen, dass er die Aufgabe des menschlichen Lebens fur eine solche ansah. Was man ein Zeitalter nennt—ohne zu wissen, ob man Jahrhunderte, Jahrtausende oder die Spanne zwischen Schule und Enkel-kind darunter verstehen soil—dieser breite, ungeregelte Fluss von Zustanden wurde dann ungefahr ebensoviel be-deuten wie ein planloses Nacheinander von ungenugenden und einzeln genommen falschen Losungsversuchen, aus de-nen, erst wenn die Menschheit sie zusammenzufassen ver-stiinde, die richtige und totale Losung hervorgehen konnte.

In der Strassenbahn erinnerte er sich auf dem Heimweg daran.
(Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
, 1.358)

But there was something else he also had had on the tip of his tongue, something about mathematical problems that did not admit of any general solution, though they did admit of particular solutions, the combination of which could bring one closer to the general solution. He might have added that he regarded the problem set by every human life as one of these. What someone calls an age— without knowing whether he should by that understand centuries, millennia, or the span of time between schooldays and grandparenthood—this broad, unregulated flux of
conditions would then amount to much the same thing as a chaotic succession of unsatisfactory and, when taken singly, false attempts at a solution, attempts that might produce the correct and total solution, but only after men had learned to combine them.

In the tram going home he remembered this.

For Musil, knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibility of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude—or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality—while the other he calls soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos. Everything he knows or thinks he deposits in an encyclopedic book that he tries to keep in the form of a novel, but its structure continually changes; it comes to pieces in his hands. The result is that not only does he never manage to finish the novel, but he never succeeds in deciding on its general outlines or how to contain the enormous mass of material within set limits. If we compare these two engineer-writers, Gadda, for whom understanding meant allowing himself to become tangled in a network of relationships, and Musil, who gives the impression of always understanding everything in the multiplicity of codes and levels of things without ever allowing himself to become involved, we have to record this one fact common to both: their inability to find an ending.

Not even Marcel Proust managed to put an end to his encyclopedic novel, though not for lack of design, since the idea for the book came to him all at once, the beginning and end and the general outline. The reason was that the work grew denser and denser from the inside through its own organic vitality. The network that links all things is also Proust's theme, but in him this net is composed of points in space-time occupied in succession by everyone, which brings about an infinite multiplication of the
dimensions of space and time. The world expands until it can no longer be grasped, and knowledge, for Proust, is attained by suffering this intangibility. In this sense a typical experience of knowledge is the jealousy felt by the narrator for Albertine:

Et je comprenais Pimpossibilité oil se heurte l'amour. Nous nous imaginons qu'il a pour objet un etre qui peut etre couche devant nous, enferme dans un corps. Helas! II est Pextension de cet etre a tous les points de Pespace et du temps que cet etre a occupe et occupera. Si nous ne pos-sedons pas son contact avec tel lieu, avec telle heure, nous ne le possedons pas. Or nous ne pouvons toucher tous ces points. Si encore ils nous etaient designes, peut-etre pour-rions-nous nous etendre jusqu'a eux. Mais nous tStonnons sans les trouver. De la la defiance, la jalousie, les persecutions. Nous perdons un temps pr6cieux sur une piste ab-surde et nous passons sans le soupgonner à côté du vrai.

And I realised the impossibility which love comes up against. We imagine that it has as its object a being that can be laid down in front of us, enclosed within a body. Alas, it is the extension of that being to all the points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy. If we do not possess its contact with this or that place, this or that hour, we do not possess that being. But we cannot touch all these points. If only they were indicated to us, we might perhaps contrive to reach out to them. But we grope for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.
^*

This passage is on the same page in
The Captive
that deals with the irascible deities who control the telephone. A few pages later we are present at one of the first displays of airplanes, as in the volume before
(Cities of the Plain)
we saw cars replacing carriages, changing the ratio of space to time to such an extent that “Part en est aussi modifie” (art is also changed by it). I say all this to show that, in his awareness of technology, Proust does not fall short of the two engineer-writers I mentioned earlier. The advent of modern technology that we see emerging little by little in the
Remembrance
is not just part of the “color of the times,” but part of the work's very form, of its inner logic, of the author's anxiety to plumb the multiplicity of the writable within the briefness of life that consumes it.

In my first lecture I started with the epic poems of Lucretius and Ovid, and with the idea of a system of infinite relationships between
everything
and
everything else
that is to be found in two such different books. In this lecture I think that references to literature of the past may be reduced to a minimum, with just a few to show that in our own times literature is attempting to realize this ancient desire to represent the multiplicity of relationships, both in effect and in potentiality.

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various “codes,” into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.

One writer who most certainly placed no limitations on the ambitiousness of his projects was Goethe, who in 1780 confided to Charlotte von Stein that he was planning a “novel about the universe.” We know next to nothing about how he intended to lend substance to this notion, but the very fact that he chose the novel as the literary form that might contain the whole universe is itself a fact laden with significance for the future. At more or less the same time, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote: “I think that a poem about empty space would be sublime.” The universe and the void: I shall return to these two terms, which often tend to become one and the same thing, but between which the target of literature swings back and forth.

I found these quotations from Goethe and Lichtenberg in a marvelous book by Hans Blumenberg,
Die Usbarkeit der Welt
(The Legibility of the World, 1981). In the last few chapters the author follows the history of this literary ambition from Novalis, who sets out to write the “ultimate book,” which at one moment is a sort of encyclopedia and at others a Bible, to Humboldt, who with his
Kosmos
actually achieved his aim of writing a “description of the physical universe.” The chapter in Blumenberg that concerns my subject most directly is the one called “The Empty Book of the World,” which deals with Mallarme and Flaubert. I have always been fascinated by the fact that Mallarme, who in his poems succeeded in giving a uniquely crystalline form to nothingness, devoted the last years of his life to the project of writing the Absolute Book, as the ultimate goal of the universe: a mysterious work of which he destroyed every trace. In the same way, it is fascinating to think about Flaubert, who on 16 January 1852 wrote to Louise Colet, “ce que je voudrais faire, c'est un livre sur rien” (what I'd like to do is a book about nothing), and then went on to devote the last ten years of his life to the most encyclopedic novel ever written,
Howard and Pecuchet.

Bouvard and Pecuchet
is truly the ancestor of the novels I shall mention this evening, even if the pathetic and exhilarating voyage through the seas of universal knowledge taken by these two Don Quixotes of nineteenth-century scientism turns out to be a series of shipwrecks. For these two self-taught innocents, each book throws open a new world, but the worlds are mutually exclusive or at least are so contradictory as to destroy any hope of certainty. However much effort they put into it, the two scriveners are lacking in the kind of subjective gift that enables one to adapt ideas to the use one wishes to put them to, or to the gratuitous pleasure that one wishes to derive from them, a gift that cannot be learned from books.

There is a question as to how we should interpret the end of this unfinished novel, with Bouvard and Pecuchet giving up the idea of understanding the world, resignation to their fate as scriveners, and the decision to devote themselves to the task of copying the books in the universal library. Should we conclude that in the experience of Bouvard and Pecuchet “encyclopedia” and “nothingness” fuse together? But behind the two characters there is Flaubert himself, who in order to nourish their adventures chapter by chapter is forced to acquire a knowledge of everything that can be known and to build up an edifice of science for his two heroes to knock down. To this end he reads manuals of agriculture and horticulture, chemistry, anatomy, medicine, geology. In a letter dated August 1873 he said that with this aim, and taking notes all the while, he had read 194 books; in June 1874 the figure had risen to 294; and five years later he was able to announce to Zola: “Mes lectures sont finies et je n'ouvre plus aucun bouquin jusqu'a la termination de mon roman” (My readings are finished and I won't open another old book until my novel is done). But in his letters shortly afterwards we find him coming to grips with ecclesiastical texts and then turning to
pedagogy, a discipline that forces him to start out on the most diverse branches of knowledge. In January 1880 he wrote: “Savez-vous a combien se montent les volumes qu'il m'a fallu absorber pour mes deux bonhommes? A plus de 1500!” (Do you know how many volumes I've had to absorb on behalf of my two worthy friends? More than 1500!).

The encyclopedic epic of the two self-educated scriveners is therefore
doublee
by a parallel and absolutely titanic effort achieved in the realm of reality. It is Flaubert in person who is transforming himself into an encyclopedia of the universe, assimilating with a passion in no way inferior to that of his heroes every scrap of the knowledge that they sought to make their own, and all that they are destined to be excluded from. Did he toil so long to demonstrate the vanity of knowledge as exploited by his two self-educated heroes? (“Du defaut de methode dans les sciences” [On Lack of Method in the Sciences] is the subtitle Flaubert wanted to give his novel, as we see from a letter of 16 December 1879.) Or was it to demonstrate the vanity of knowledge pure and simple?

An encyclopedic novelist of a century later, Raymond Que-neau, wrote an essay to defend the two heroes from the accusation of
betise
(their crime was being “epris d'absolu,” in love with the absolute, allowing no contradictions or doubts), and also to defend Flaubert of the oversimplified accusation that he was an enemy of science. “Flaubert est
pour
la science,” says Queneau, “dans la mesure justement ou celle-ci est sceptique, reservee, methodique, prudente, humaine. II a horreur des dogmatiques, des metaphysiciens, des philosophes” (Flaubert is
for
science in exactly the extent to which it is skeptical, reserved, methodical, prudent, human. He has a horror of dogmaticians, metaphysicians, and philosophers).