“Hey,” Oliveira said, “where’s that passage about the single word you liked so much?”
“I know it by heart,” Étienne said. “It’s the conjunction if followed by a footnote, which in turn is followed by a footnote which in turn is followed by another footnote. I was telling Perico that Morelli’s theories are not entirely original. It’s his way of saying them that makes him intimate, the strength with which he tries to describe, as he says, to earn the right (and earn it for everybody) to enter the house of man once more with his best foot forward. I’m using his very words, or ones that are very much like them.”
“We’ve had enough of surrealists for a while,” Perico said.
“It’s not a question of the job of verbal liberation,” said Étienne. “The surrealists thought that true language and true reality were censored and relegated by the rationalist and bourgeois structure of the Western world. They were right, as any poet knows, but that was just a moment in the complicated peeling of the banana. Result, more than one of them ate it with the skin still on. The surrealists hung from words instead of brutally disengaging themselves from them, as Morelli would like to do from the word itself. Fanatics of the verbum in a pure state, frantic wizards, they accepted anything as long as it didn’t seem excessively grammatical. They didn’t suspect enough that the creation of a whole language, even though it might end up betraying its sense, irrefutably shows human structure, whether that of a Chinese or a redskin. Language means residence in a reality, living in a reality. Even if it’s true that the language we use betrays us (and Morelli isn’t the only one who shouts it to the four winds), wanting to free it from its taboos isn’t enough. We have to relive it, not reanimate it.”
“It all sounds most solemn,” Perico said.
“It’s in any good philosophical work,” Gregorovius said timidly. He had been thumbing entomologically through the notebooks and seemed half-asleep. “It’s impossible to relive language if one doesn’t start by intuiting in a different way almost everything that makes up our reality.”
“Intuit,” said Oliveira, “is one of those words that can be applied to sweeping just as easily as to scrubbing. Let’s not attribute to Morelli the problems of Dilthey, Husserl, or Wittgenstein. The only thing clear in everything the old man has written is that we still utilize language in its current key, with its current finalities, we shall die without ever knowing the real name of the day. It’s almost stupid to repeat that life is sold to us, as Malcolm Lowry said, that it’s given to us prefabricated. Morelli is also a little stupid when he insists on that, but Étienne has hit the nail on the head: the old man shows himself by the way he does it and he shows us the way out. What good is a writer if he can’t destroy literature? And us, we don’t want to be female-readers, what good are we if we don’t help as much as we can in that destruction?”
“But afterwards, what do we do afterwards?” Babs asked.
“I wonder,” said Oliveira. “Until about twenty years ago there was the great answer: Poetry, silly, Poetry. They would gag you with the great word. Poetical vision of the world, conquest of a poetical reality. But then after the last war, you must have noticed that it was all over. We still have poets, nobody can deny that, but no one ever reads them.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Perico. “I read tons of poetry.”
“Of course, so do I. But it’s not a question of poetry, you know, it’s a question of what the surrealists were announcing and what every poet wants and searches for, that well-known poetical reality. Believe me, my dear boy, since nineteen-fifty we’ve been right in the middle of a technological reality, statistically speaking, at least. Very bad, a pity, it makes you want to tear your hair, but that’s how it is.”
“I don’t give a hoot for technology,” Perico said. “Fray Luis, for example …”
“We’re in the year nineteen-fifty and something.”
“I’m aware of that, coño.”
“It doesn’t look like it.”
“But do you think I’m about to put myself in the position of a meat-beating historicist?”
“No, but you ought to read the newspapers. I don’t like technology any more than you, it’s just that I feel the world has changed in the last twenty years. Any guy who’s past forty has to realize it, and that’s why Babs’s questions back Morelli and the rest of us up against the wall. It’s O.K. to declare war on language turned whore, literature, as it were, in the name of a reality we think is true, that we think we can reach, that we think is there somewhere in the spirit, if you’ll pardon the expression. But Morelli himself sees only the negative side of his battle. He feels he has to wage it, like you and like all of us. So?”
“Let’s be methodical,” Étienne said. “Let’s leave your ‘so?’ out of it. Morelli’s lesson is enough as a first period.”
“You can’t talk about periods without presupposing a goal.”
“Call it a working hypothesis, anything you like along those lines. What Morelli is looking for is to break the reader’s mental habits. Something very modest, as can be seen, nothing comparable to Hannibal’s crossing the Alps. Up till now, at least, there isn’t much metaphysics in Morelli, except that you, Horacio Curiacio, are capable of finding metaphysics in a can of tomatoes. Morelli is an artist who has a special idea of art, consisting more than anything in knocking over the usual forms, something every good artist has in common. For example, the Chinese-scroll novel makes him explode. The book read from beginning to end like a good child. You’ve probably noticed already that he gets less and less worried about joining the parts together, that business of one word’s leading to another … When I read Morelli I have the impression he’s looking for a less mechanical interaction, one less caused by the elements he works with; he feels that what has already been written just barely conditions what is being written, especially since the old man, after hundreds of pages, doesn’t even have a clear memory of what he’s done.”
“According to which,” Perico said, “it turns out that a midget on page twenty is six feet tall on page one hundred. I’ve noticed that more than once. There are scenes that begin at six in the afternoon and end at five-thirty. A bore.”
“And haven’t you ever wanted to be a midget or a giant according to the state of your mind?” Ronald asked.
“I’m talking about the soma,” Perico said.
“He believes in the soma,” Oliveira said. “The soma in time. He believes in time, in the before and in the after. The poor fellow hasn’t found some letter of his written twenty years ago in a drawer, he hasn’t reread it, he hasn’t noticed that nothing is sustained unless we prop it up with a crumb of time, unless we invent time so we don’t go crazy.”
“That’s all part of a trade,” Ronald said. “But behind it, behind …”
“A poet,” Oliveira said, sincerely moved. “Your name ought to be Behind or Beyond, my dear American. Or Yonder, that’s such a pretty English word.”
“None of it would make any sense if there weren’t a behind,” Ronald said. “Any author of best-sellers writes better than Morelli. The reason we read him, the reason we’re here tonight, is that Morelli has what Bird had, what all of a sudden Cummings or Jackson Pollock have, anyway, so much for examples. And why so much for examples?” Ronald shouted furiously, while Babs looked on admiringly and drinking in every one of his words in one gulp. “I’ll quote anything I goddam please. It’s easy to see that Morelli doesn’t complicate life just because he likes to, and besides, his book is a shameless provocation, just like anything else that’s worth something. In this technological world you were talking about, Morelli wants to save something that’s dying, but in order to save it, first it has to be killed or at least given such a blood transfusion that the whole thing will be like a resurrection. The mistake of futurist poetry,” Ronald said, to the immense admiration of Babs, “was wanting to comment on mechanism, believing that they’d be saved from leukemia that way. But we won’t understand reality any bette
r by talking in a literary way of what’s going on at Cape Canaveral, it seems to me.”
“And it seems right,” Oliveira said. “Let’s keep on looking for the Yonder, there are plenty of Yonders that keep opening up one after the other. I’d start by saying that this technological reality that men of science and the readers of France-Soir accept today, this world of cortisone, gamma rays, and the elution of plutonium, has as little to do with reality as the world of the Roman de la Rose. If I mentioned it a while back to our friend Perico, it was in order to make him take note that his aesthetic criteria and his scale of values are pretty well liquidated and that man, after having expected everything from intelligence and the spirit, feels that he’s been betrayed, is vaguely aware that his weapons have been turned against him, that culture, civiltà, have misled him into this blind alley where scientific barbarism is nothing but a very understandable reaction. Please excuse my vocabulary.”
“Klages has already said all that,” said Gregorovius.
“I don’t pretend to hold any copyright on it,” Oliveira said. “The idea is that reality, whether you accept the version of the Holy See, or of René Char, or of Oppenheimer, is always a conventional reality, incomplete and divided. The surprise some guys show in front of an electronic microscope doesn’t seem to be any more fruitful to me than the one concierges show at the miracles of Lourdes. Believing in what they call matter, believing in what they call spirit, living in the Emmanuel or taking courses in Zen, considering human destiny as an economic problem or as a complete absurdity, the list is long, the choice is multiple. But the very fact that there can be a choice and that the list is long is enough to show that we’re still in prehistory and in prehumanity. I’m not an optimist, I doubt very much whether someday we’ll find the real history of real humanity. It’s going to be hard going to get to Ronald’s famous Yonder because nobody will deny that the problem of reality has to be established in collective terms, not just in the salvation of a few of the elect. Accomplished men, men who have taken the leap outside of time and have become integrated in a summa, as it were … Yes, I suppose they have existed and still do. But that’s not enough; I feel that my salvation, supposing I can reach it, must also be the salvation of all, right down to the last man. And that, old man … We’re no longer in the fields of Assisi, we can no longer hope that the example of a saint will sow the seeds of sainthood, that every guru will be the salvation of all of his disciples.”
“Come on back from Benares,” Étienne advised. “We were talking about Morelli, I think. And to connect with what you were saying, it occurs to me that this famous Yonder cannot be imagined as a future in time or in space. If we continue holding to Kantian categories, Morelli seems to say, we will never get out of this blind alley. What we call reality, the true reality that we also call Yonder (sometimes it helps to give a lot of names to a partial vision, at least it prevents the notion from becoming closed and rigid), that true reality, I repeat, is not something that is going to happen, a goal, the last step, the end of an evolution. No, it’s something that’s already here, in us. You can feel it, all you need is the courage to stick your hand into the darkness. I feel it when I’m painting.”
“It might be the Evil One,” Oliveira said. “It might be a mere aesthetic exaltation. But it might be the other too. Yes, it might be the other too.”
“It’s here,” Babs said, touching her forehead. “I feel it when I’m a little drunk, or when …”
She let out a raucous laugh and covered her face. Ronald gave her a tender shove.
“Not it’s here,” said Wong very seriously. “It is.”
“We won’t get very far on this road,” Oliveira said. “What does poetry give us except that partial vision? You, me, Babs … The kingdom of man was not born out of a few isolated sparks. Everybody has had his moment of vision, but the worst part is falling back into the hinc and the nunc.”
“Bah, you don’t understand anything unless it’s in absolute terms,” Étienne said. “Let me finish what I wanted to say. Morelli thinks that if the lyricists, as our Perico has said, did open the way through petrified and unstable forms, whether a modal adverb, a sense of theme, or whatever you want to make it, they must have had something useful for the first time in their lives. Doing away with the female-reader, or at least severely damaging him, would help all of those who in some way are working to reach the Yonder. The narrative technique of types like that is simply an urge to get out of the rut.”
“Yes, only to fall into the mud up to his neck,” said Perico, who at eleven o’clock at night was against anything.
“Heraclitus,” Gregorovius said, “buried himself in shit up to his neck and cured himself of dropsy.”
“Leave Heraclitus in peace,” Étienne said. “I’m already beginning to feel foolishly sleepy, but in any case I’m going to say the following, two points: Morelli seems convinced that if a writer keeps on being dominated by the language they have sold him along with the clothes he’s wearing and his name and nationality, his work won’t have any other value except the aesthetic, a value which the old man seems to despise more and more. He’s rather explicit in one place or other: according to him, nothing can be denounced if the denouncing is done within the system that belongs to the thing denounced. Writing against capitalism with the mental baggage and the vocabulary that comes out of capitalism is a waste of time. Historical results like Marxism and what have you will be produced, but the Yonder is not precisely history, the Yonder is like fingertips sticking out of the surface of history, looking for something to cling to.”
“Bullshit,” said Perico.
“And that’s why the writer has to set language on fire, put an end to its coagulated forms and even go beyond it, place in doubt the possibility that language is still in touch with what it pretends to name. Not words as such any more, because that’s less important, but rather the total structure of language, of discourse.”
“For all of which he uses an exceedingly clear language,” Perico said.
“Of course, Morelli doesn’t believe in onomatopoeic systems or in lyrics. It’s not a question of substituting automatic writing or any other current fraud for syntax. What he wants to do is transgress the total literary deed, the book, if you will. Sometimes the word, sometimes what the word transmits. He works like a guerrilla fighter, he blows up what he can, the rest follows in its path. Don’t get the idea that he’s a man of letters.”
“We should think about leaving,” said Babs, who was sleepy.
“Say whatever you want,” Perico insisted, “but no real revolution has ever been made against form. What counts is content, man, content.”
“We’ve already had dozens of centuries of literature with content,” Oliveira said, “and look at the results. By literature, you understand, I mean everything that can be said or thought.”
“Without realizing that the distinction between form and content is false,” said Étienne. “Everybody’s known that for years. Let’s distinguish, rather, between the expressive element, or language as such, and the thing expressed, or reality becoming awareness.”
“Whatever you want,” Perico said. “What I would like to know is whether the break that Morelli is trying for, I mean the breaking of what you call the expressive element better to reach the expressible thing, really has any value at this time.”
“It probably wouldn’t be good for anything,” Oliveira said, “but it does make us feel a little less lonely in this blind alley at the service of the Great-Idealist-Realist-Spiritualist-Materialist-Infatuation of the West, Inc.”
“Do you think somebody else might have been able to open a way through language until he came to touch it at its roots?” Ronald asked.
“Maybe. Morelli doesn’t have the required genius or patience. He points out a path, he takes a few digs with a pickaxe … He leaves a book behind. It’s not much.”
“Let’s go,” said Babs. “It’s getting late and the cognac’s all gone.”
“And there’s something else,” said Oliveira. “What he’s pursuing is absurd to the degree that nobody knows anything except what he knows, that is to say, an anthropological circumscription. Wittgensteinly speaking, problems link themselves together in a backward direction, that is to say that what a man knows can be the knowledge of a man, but he no longer knows what he ought to know about the man himself, so that his notion of reality would be acceptable. The gnoseologists brought up this problem and even thought that they had found solid ground from which they could continue the race forward, towards metaphysics. But the hygienic retreat of a Descartes appears partial and even insignificant to us today, because at this very moment there is a Mr. Wilcox in Cleveland who with electrodes and other apparatus is proving that thought and an electromagnetic circuit are the same thing (things that he in turn thinks he knows very well because he knows very well the language that defines them, etc.). Add to that the fact that a Swede has just put forth a very impressive theory on cerebral chemistry. Thinking is the result of the interaction of certain acids, the name of which I do not care to recall. Acido, ergo sum. Put a drop on your meninges and there you are, maybe Oppenheimer or Dr. Petiot, the eminent murderer. You can see then, how the cogito, that Human Operation par excellence, is nowadays located in a rather vague region, somewhere between electromagnetism and chemistry, and probably not as different as we used to think from things like an aurora borealis or a picture taken with infrared rays. There goes your cogito, a link in the dizzy flow of forces whose steps are called in 1950, inter alia, electrical impulses, molecules, atoms, neutrons, protons, positrons, microbitons, radioactive isotopes, grains of cinnabar, cosmic rays: Words, words, words, Hamlet, Act Two, I think. Without considering,” Oliveira added with a sigh, “that it’s probably just the opposite, and the result is that the aurora borealis is a spiritual phenomenon, and then we really are what we want to be …”