Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, Collaborations With Artists, and Interviews (19 page)

This was Jonah’s greatest problem. If he spoke God’s message, telling the Ninevites they would be destroyed in forty days for their wickedness, he was certain they would repent, and thus be spared. For he knew that God was “merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness.”

“So the people of Ninevah believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.”

And if the Ninevites were spared, would this not make Jonah’s prophecy false? Would he not, then, be a false prophet? Hence the paradox at the heart of the book: the prophecy would remain true only if he did not speak it. But then, of course, there would be no prophecy, and Jonah would no longer be a prophet. But better to be no prophet at all than to be a false prophet. “Therefore now, O lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live.”

Therefore, Jonah held his tongue. Therefore, Jonah ran away from the presence of the Lord and met the doom of shipwreck. That is to say, the shipwreck of the singular.

* * *

Remission of cause and effect.

A. remembers a moment from boyhood (twelve, thirteen years old). He was wandering aimlessly one November afternoon with his friend D. Nothing was happening. But in each of them, at that moment, a sense of infinite possibilities. Nothing was happening. Or else one could say that it was this consciousness of possibility, in fact, that was happening.

As they walked along through the cold, gray air of that afternoon, A. suddenly stopped and announced to his friend: One year from today something extraordinary will happen to us, something that will change our lives forever.

The year passed, and on the appointed day nothing extraordinary happened. A. explained to D.: No matter; the important thing will happen next year. When the second year rolled around, the same thing happened: nothing. But A. and D. were undaunted. All through the years of high school, they continued to commemorate that day. Not with ceremony, but simply with acknowledgement. For example, seeing each other in the school corridor and saying: Saturday is the day. It was not that they still expected a miracle to happen. But, more curiously, over the years they had both become attached to the memory of their prediction.

The reckless future, the mystery of what has not yet happened: this, too, he learned, can be preserved in memory. And it sometimes strikes him that the blind, adolescent prophecy he made twenty years ago, that fore-seeing of the extraordinary, was in fact the extraordinary thing itself: his mind leaping happily into the unknown. For the fact of the matter is, many years have passed. And still, at the end of each November, he finds himself remembering that day.

*

Prophecy. As in true. As in Cassandra, speaking from the solitude of her cell. As in a woman’s voice.

The future falls from her lips in the present, each thing exactly as it will happen, and it is her fate never to be believed. Madwoman, the daughter of Priam: “the shrieks of that ill-omened bird” from whom “… sounds of woe / Burst dreadful, as she chewed the laurel leaf, / And ever and anon, like the black Sphinx, / Poured the full tide of enigmatic song.” (Lycophron’s
Cassandra
; in Royston’s translation, 1806). To speak of the future is to use a language that is forever ahead of itself, consigning things that have not yet happened to the past, to an “already” that is forever behind itself, and in this space between utterance and act, word after word, a chasm begins to open, and for one to contemplate such emptiness for any length of time is to grow dizzy, to feel oneself falling into the abyss.

A. remembers the excitement he felt in Paris in 1974, when he discovered the seventeen-hundred line poem by Lycophron (circa 300 B.C.), which is a monologue of Cassandra’s ravings in prison before the fall of Troy. He came to the poem through a translation into French by Q., a writer just his own age (twenty-four). Three years later, when he got together with Q. in a cafe on the rue Condé, he asked him whether he knew of any translations of the poem into English. Q. himself did not read or speak English, but yes, he had heard of one, by a certain Lord Royston at the beginning of the nineteenth century. When A. returned to New York in the summer of 1974, he went to the Columbia University library to look for the book. Much to his surprise, he found it.
Cassandra, translated from the original Greek of Lycophron and illustrated with notes
; Cambridge, 1806.

This translation was the only work of any substance to come from the pen of Lord Royston. He had completed the translation while still an undergraduate at Cambridge and had published the poem himself in a luxurious private edition. Then he had gone on the traditional continental tour following his graduation. Because of the Napoleonic tumult in France, he did not head south—which would have been the natural route for a young man of his interests—but instead went north, to the Scandinavian countries, and in 1808, while traveling through the treacherous waters of the Baltic Sea, drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Russia. He was just twenty-four years old.

Lycophron: “the obscure.” In his dense, bewildering poem, nothing is ever named, everything becomes a reference to something else. One is quickly lost in the labyrinth of its associations, and yet one continues to run through it, propelled by the force of Cassandra’s voice. The poem is a verbal outpouring, breathing fire, consumed by fire, which obliterates itself at the edge of sense. “Cassandra’s word,” as a friend of A.’s put it (B.: in a lecture, curiously enough, about Hölderlin’s poetry—a poetry which he compares in manner to Cassandra’s speech), “this irreducible sign—
deutungslos
—a word beyond grasping, Cassandra’s word, a word from which no lesson is to be drawn, a word, each time, and every time, spoken to say nothing….”

After reading through Royston’s translation, A. realized that a great talent had been lost in that shipwreck. Royston’s English rolls along with such fury, such deft and acrobatic syntax, that to read the poem is to feel yourself trapped inside Cassandra’s mouth.

It intrigues A. to consider that both Royston and Q. had translated this work while still in their early twenties. In spite of the century and a half that separated them, each had given some special force to his own language through the medium of this poem. At one point, it occurred to him that perhaps Q. was a reincarnation of Royston. Every hundred years or so Royston would be reborn to translate the poem into another language, and just as Cassandra was destined never to be believed, the work of Lycophron would remain unread, generation after generation. A useless task therefore: to write a book that would stay forever closed. And still, the image rises up in his mind: shipwreck. Consciousness falling to the bottom of the sea, and the horrible noise of cracking wood, the tall masts tumbling into the waves. To imagine Royston’s thoughts the moment his body smacked against the water. To imagine the havoc of that death.

*

The Book of Memory. Book Eight.

By the time of his third birthday, A.’s son’s taste in literature had begun to expand from simple, heavily illustrated baby books to more sophisticated children’s books. The illustration was still a source of great pleasure, but it was no longer crucial. The story itself had become enough to hold his attention, and when A. came to a page with no picture at all, he would be moved to see the little boy looking intently ahead, at nothing, at the emptiness of the air, at the blank wall, imagining what the words were telling him. “It’s fun to imagine that we can’t see,” he told his father once, as they were walking down the street. Another time, the boy went into the bathroom, closed the door, and did not come out. A. asked through the closed door: “What are you doing in there?” “I’m thinking,” the boy said. “I have to be alone to think.”

*

Little by little, they both began to gravitate toward one book. The story of Pinocchio. First in the Disney version, and then, soon after, in the original version, with text by Collodi and illustrations by Mussino. The little boy never tired of hearing the chapter about the storm at sea, which tells of how Pinocchio finds Gepetto in the belly of the Terrible Shark.

“Oh, Father, dear Father! Have I found you at last? Now I shall never, never leave you again!”

Gepetto explains: “The sea was rough and the whitecaps overturned the boat. Then a Terrible Shark came up out of the sea and, as soon as he saw me in the water, swam quickly toward me, put out his tongue, and swallowed me as easily as if I had been a chocolate peppermint.”

“And how long have you been shut away in here?”

“From that day to this, two long weary years—two years, my Pinocchio….”

“And how have you lived? Where did you find the candle? And the matches to light it with—where did you get them?”

“In the storm which swamped my boat, a large ship also suffered the same fate. The sailors were all saved, but the ship went right down to the bottom of the sea, and the same Terrible Shark that swallowed me, swallowed most of it…. To my own good luck, that ship was loaded with meat, preserved foods, crackers, bread, bottles of wine, raisins, cheese, coffee, sugar, wax candles, and boxes of matches. With all these blessings, I have been able to live on for two whole years, but now I am at the very last crumbs. Today there is nothing left in the cupboard, and this candle you see here is the last one I have.”

“And then?”

“And then, my dear, we’ll find ourselves in darkness.”

For A. and his son, so often separated from each other during the past year, there was something deeply satisfying in this passage of reunion. In effect, Pinocchio and Gepetto are separated throughout the entire book. Gepetto is given the mysterious piece of talking wood by the carpenter, Master Cherry, in the second chapter. In the third chapter the old man sculpts the Marionette. Even before Pinocchio is finished, his pranks and mischief begin. “I deserve it,” says Gepetto to himself. “I should have thought of this before I made him. Now it’s too late.” At this point, like any newborn baby, Pinocchio is pure will, libidinous need without consciousness. Very rapidly, over the next few pages, Gepetto teaches his son to walk, the Marionette experiences hunger and accidentally burns his feet off—which his father rebuilds for him. The next day Gepetto sells his coat to buy Pinocchio an A-B-C book for school (“Pinocchio understood … and, unable to restrain his tears, he jumped on his father’s neck and kissed him over and over”), and then, for more than two hundred pages, they do not see each other again. The rest of the book tells the story of Pinocchio’s search for his father—and Gepetto’s search for his son. At some point, Pinocchio realizes that he wants to become a real boy. But it also becomes clear that this will not happen until he is reunited with his father. Adventures, misadventures, detours, new resolves, struggles, happenstance, progress, setbacks, and through it all, the gradual dawning of conscience. The superiority of the Collodi original to the Disney adaptation lies in its reluctance to make the inner motivations of the story explicit. They remain intact, in a pre-conscious, dream-like form, whereas in Disney these things are expressed—which sentimentalizes them, and therefore trivializes them. In Disney, Gepetto prays for a son; in Collodi, he simply makes him. The physical act of shaping the puppet (from a piece of wood that talks, that is
alive
, which mirrors Michaelangelo’s notion of sculpture: the figure is already there in the material; the artist merely hews away at the excess matter until the true form is revealed, implying that Pinocchio’s being precedes his body: his task throughout the book is to find it, in other words to find himself, which means that this is a story of becoming rather than of birth), this act of shaping the puppet is enough to convey the idea of the prayer, and surely it is more powerful for remaining silent. Likewise with Pinocchio’s efforts to attain real boyhood. In Disney, he is commanded by the Blue Fairy to be “brave, truthful, and unselfish,” as though there were an easy formula for taking hold of the self. In Collodi, there are no directives. Pinocchio simply blunders about, simply lives, and little by little comes to an awareness of what he can become. The only improvement Disney makes on the story, and this is perhaps arguable, comes at the end, in the episode of the escape from the Terrible Shark (Monstro the Whale). In Collodi, the Shark’s mouth is open (he suffers from asthma and heart disease), and to organize the escape Pinocchio needs no more than courage. “Then, my dear Father, there is no time to lose. We must escape.”