Labyrinths (25 page)

Partial Magic in the
Quixote

It is plausible that these observations may have been set forth at some time and, perhaps, many times; a discussion of their novelty interests me less than one of their possible truth.

Compared with other classic books (the
Iliad,
the
Aeneid,
the
Pharsalia,
Dante's
Commedia,
Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies), the
Quixote
is a realistic work; its realism, however, differs essentially from that practiced by the nineteenth century. Joseph Conrad could write that he excluded the supernatural from his work because to include it would seem a denial that the everyday was marvelous; I do not know if Miguel de Cervantes shared that intuition, but I do know that the form of the
Quixote
made him counterpose a real prosaic world to an imaginary poetic world. Conrad and Henry James wrote novels of reality because they judged reality to be poetic; for Cervantes the real and the poetic were antinomies. To the vast and vague geographies of the
Amadis,
he opposes the dusty roads and sordid wayside inns of Castille; imagine a novelist of our time centering attention for purposes of parody on some filling stations. Cervantes has created for us the poetry of seventeenth-century Spain, but neither that century nor that Spain were poetic for him; men like Unamuno or Azorín or Antonio Machado, who were deeply moved by any evocation of La Mancha, would have been incomprehensible to him. The plan of his book precluded the marvelous; the latter, however, had to figure in the novel, at least indirectly, just as crimes and a mystery in a parody of a detective story. Cervantes could not resort to talismans or enchantments, but he insinuated the supernatural in a subtle ― and therefore more effective ― manner. In his intimate being, Cervantes loved the supernatural. Paul Groussac observed in 1924: "With a deleble coloring of Latin and Italian, Cervantes' literary production derived mostly from the pastoral novel and the novel of chivalry, soothing fables of captivity." The
Quixote
is less an antidote for those fictions than it is a secret, nostalgic farewell.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality; Cervantes takes pleasure in confusing the objective and the subjective, the world of the reader and the world of the book. In those chapters which argue whether the barber's basin is a helmet and the donkey's packsaddle a steed's fancy regalia, the problem is dealt with explicity; other passages, as I have noted, insinuate this. In the sixth chapter of the first part, the priest and the barber inspect Don Quixote's library; astoundingly, one of the books examined is Cervantes' own
Galatea
and it turns out that the barber is a friend of the author and does not admire him very much, and says that he is more versed in misfortunes than in verses and that the book possesses some inventiveness, proposes a few ideas and concludes nothing. The barber, a dream or the form of a dream of Cervantes, passes judgment on Cervantes. . . It is also surprising to learn, at the beginning of the ninth chapter, that the entire novel has been translated from the Arabic and that Cervantes acquired the manuscript in the marketplace of Toledo and had it translated by a
morisco
whom he lodged in his house for more than a month and a half while the job was being finished. We think of Carlyle, who pretended that the
Sartor Resartus
was the fragmentary version of a work published in Germany by Doctor Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh; we think of the Spanish rabbi Moses of Leon, who composed the
Zohar
or
Book of Splendor
and divulged it as the work of a Palestinian rabbi of the second century.

This play of strange ambiguities culminates in the second part; the protagonists have read the first part, the protagonists of the
Quixote
are, at the same time, readers of the
Quixote.
Here it is inevitable to recall the case of Shakespeare, who includes on the stage of
Hamlet
another stage where a tragedy more or less like that of
Hamlet
is presented; the imperfect correspondence of the principal and secondary works lessens the efficacy of this inclusion. An artifice analogous to Cervantes', and even more astounding, figures in the
Ramayana,
the poem of Valmiki, which narrates the deeds of Rama and his war with the demons. In the last book, the sons of Rama, who do not know who their father is, seek shelter in a forest, where an ascetic teaches them to read. This teacher is, strangely enough, Valmiki; the book they study, the
Ramayana.
Rama orders a sacrifice of horses; Valmiki and his pupils attend this feast. The latter, accompanied by their lute, sing the
Ramayana.
Rama hears his own story, recognizes his own sons and then rewards the poet. . . Something similar is created by accident in the
Thousand and One Nights.
This collection of fantastic tales duplicates and reduplicates to the point of vertigo the ramifications of a central story in later and subordinate stories, but does not attempt to gradate its realities, and the effect (which should have been profound) is superficial, like a Persian carpet. The opening story of the series is well known: the terrible pledge of the king who every night marries a virgin who is then decapitated at dawn, and the resolution of Scheherazade, who distracts the king with her fables until a thousand and one nights have gone by and she shows him their son. The necessity of completing a thousand and one sections obliged the copyists of the work to make all manner of interpolations. None is more perturbing than that of the six hundred and second night, magical among all the nights. On that night, the king hears from the queen his own story. He hears the beginning of the story, which comprises all the others and also ― monstrously ― itself. Does the reader clearly grasp the vast possibility of this interpolation, the curious danger? That the queen may persist and the motionless king hear forever the truncated story of the
Thousand and One Nights,
now infinite and circular. . . The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work
The World and the Individual
(1899), has formulated the following: "Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity."

Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the
Thousand and One Nights?
Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the
Quixote
and Hamlet a spectator of
Hamlet?
I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written.

Translated by J. E. I

Valéry as Symbol

Bringing together the names of Whitman and Paul Valéry is, at first glance, an arbitrary and (what is worse) inept operation. Valéry is a symbol of infinite dexterities but, at the same time, of infinite scruples; Whitman, of an almost incoherent but titanic vocation of felicity; Valéry illustriously personifies the labyrinths of the mind; Whitman, the interjections of the body. Valéry is a symbol of Europe and of its delicate twilight; Whitman, of the morning in America. The whole realm of literature would not seem to admit two more antagonistic applications of the word "poet." One fact, however, links them: the work of both is less valuable as poetry than it is as the sign of an exemplary poet created by that work. Thus, the English poet Lascelles Abercrombie could praise Whitman for having created "from the richness of his noble experience that vivid and personal figure which is one of the few really great things of the poetry of our time: the figure of himself." The dictum is vague and superlative, but it has the singular virtue of not identifying Whitman, the man of letters and devoté of Tennyson, with Whitman, the semidivine hero of
Leaves of Grass.
The distinction is valid; Whitman wrote his rhapsodies in terms of an imaginary identity, formed partly of himself, partly of each of his readers. Hence the discrepancies that have exasperated the critics; hence the custom of dating his poems in places where he had never been; hence the fact that, on one page of his work, he was born in the Southern states, and on another (and also in reality) on Long Island.

One of the purposes of Whitman's compositions is to define a possible man ― Walt Whitman ― of unlimited and negligent felicity; no less hyperbolic, no less illusory, is the man defined by Valéry's compositions. The latter does not magnify, as does the former, the human faculties of philanthropy, fervor and joy; he magnifies the virtues of the mind. Valéry created Edmond Teste; this character would be one of the myths of our time if intimately we did not all judge him to be a mere
Doppelgänger
of Valéry. For us, Valéry is Edmond Teste. In other words, Valéry is a derivation of Poe's Chevalier Dupin and the inconceivable God of the theologians. Which fact, plausibly enough, is not true.

Yeats, Rilke and Eliot have written verses more memorable than those of Valéry; Joyce and Stefan George have effected more profound modifications in their instrument (perhaps French is less modifiable than English and German); but behind the work of these eminent artificers there is no personality comparable to Valéry's. The circumstance that that personality is, in some way, a projection of the work does not diminish this fact. To propose lucidity to men in a lowly romantic era, in the melancholy era of Nazism and dialectical materialism, of the augurs of Freudianism and the merchants of
surréalisms,
such is the noble mission Valéry fulfilled (and continues to fulfill).

Paul Valéry leaves us at his death the symbol of a man infinitely sensitive to every phenomenon and for whom every phenomenon is a stimulus capable of provoking an infinite series of thoughts. Of a man who transcends the differential traits of the self and of whom we can say, as William Hazlitt did of Shakespeare, "he is nothing in himself." Of a man whose admirable texts do not exhaust, do not even define, their all-embracing possibilities. Of a man who, in an age that worships the chaotic idols of blood, earth and passion, preferred always the lucid pleasures of thought and the secret adventures of order.

Translated by J. E. I.

Kafka and His Precursors

I once premeditated making a study of Kafka's precursors. At first I had considered him to be as singular as the phoenix of rhetorical praise; after frequenting his pages a bit, I came to think I could recognize his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods. I shall record a few of these here, in chronological order.

The first is Zeno's paradox against movement. A moving object at A (declares Aristotle) cannot reach point B, because it must first cover half the distance between the two points, and before that, half of the half, and before that, half of the half of the half, and so on to infinity; the form of this illustrious problem is, exactly, that of
The Castle,
and the moving object and the arrow and Achilles are the first Kafkian characters in literature. In the second text which chance laid before me, the affinity is not one of form but one of tone. It is an apologue of Han Yu, a prose writer of the ninth century, and is reproduced in Margouliès' admirable
Anthologie raisonnée de la littérature chinoise
(1948). This is the paragraph, mysterious and calm, which I marked: "It is universally admitted that the unicorn is a supernatural being of good omen; such is declared in all the odes, annals, biographies of illustrious men and other texts whose authority is unquestionable. Even children and village women know that the unicorn constitutes a favorable presage. But this animal does not figure among the domestic beasts, it is not always easy to find, it does not lend itself to classification. It is not like the horse or the bull, the wolf or the deer. In such conditions, we could be face to face with a unicorn and not know for certain what it was. We know that such and such an animal with a mane is a horse and that such and such an animal with horns is a bull. But we do not know what the unicorn is like."
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The third text derives from a more easily predictable source: the writings of Kierkegaard. The spiritual affinity of both writers is something of which no one is ignorant; what has not yet been brought out, as far as I know, is the fact that Kierkegaard, like Kafka, wrote many religious parables on contemporary and bourgeois themes. Lowrie, in his
Kierkegaard
(Oxford University Press, 1938), transcribes two of these. One is the story of a counterfeiter who, under constant surveillance, counts banknotes in the Bank of England; in the same way, God would distrust Kierkegaard and have given him a task to perform, precisely because He knew that he was familiar with evil. The subject of the other parable is the North Pole expeditions. Danish ministers had declared from their pulpits that participation in these expeditions was beneficial to the soul's eternal well-being. They admitted, however, that it was difficult, and perhaps impossible, to reach the Pole and that not all men could undertake the adventure. Finally, they would announce that any trip ― from Denmark to London, let us say, on the regularly scheduled steamer ― was, properly considered, an expedition to the North Pole.

The fourth of these prefigurations I have found is Browning's poem "Fears and Scruples," published in 1876. A man has, or believes he has, a famous friend. He has never seen this friend and the fact is that the friend has so far never helped him, although tales are told of his most noble traits and authentic letters of his circulate about. Then someone places these traits in doubt and the handwriting experts declare that the letters are apocryphal. The man asks, in the last line: "And if this friend were . . . God?"

My notes also register two stories. One is from Léon Bloy's
Histoires désobligeantes
and relates the case of some people who possess all manner of globes, atlases, railroad guides and trunks, but who die without ever having managed to leave their home town. The other is entitled "Carcassonne" and is the work of Lord Dunsany. An invincible army of warriors leaves an infinite castle, conquers kingdoms and sees monsters and exhausts the deserts and the mountains, but they never reach Carcassonne, though once they glimpse it from afar. (This story is, as one can easily see, the strict reverse of the previous one; in the first, the city is never left; in the second, it is never reached.)

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem "Fears and Scruples" by Browning foretells Kafka's work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics' vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer
creates
his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
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In this correlation the identity or plurality of the men involved is unimportant. The early Kafka of
Betrachtung
is less a precursor of the Kafka of somber myths and atrocious institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.

Translated by J. E. I.