How many times has it already been used there? All the makers of choice
morsels, emasculators, expurgators, butchers, tailors, launderers... little
industrious hands occupied with unstitching the Proustian garment, dry-cleaning
the digressions... And the conservators of literary monuments who have left the
cathedral of Saint Marcel to ruin... the maintenance budget is a black hole; the
grand classical edifices are unheated; the public shivers inside; to protect
against catching cold they are served ladles of tea, stuffed full of little
cakes they promenade in the sun along rows of hawthorns. This is not a cathedral
but a sanitorium, a nursing home.
No, of all the methods for restructuring the role of the little madeleine,
none equals in inevitability, coherence, or simplicity, to mine. In a global
movement where the flux of readers carry themselves unfettered towards maximum
returns on their investments, there cannot be a more liberal solution. Licensing
supernumerary personnel: this course of action will always be raised.
This solution, the only valid one, the only legitimate one, is not capricious
to the gross differences which advocate cutting off financially hemorrhaging
branches of a business. It eliminates clear of subjective prejudice, in
perfectly moral neutrality, according to the infallible logic of the invisible
hand, those entities whose hermeneutic treatment is so costly in memory and
power: namely, people. It is progressive; it might carry its rule to completion
by the pressures of competition. It preserves, and even valorizes, this active
intangibility of business, its mark: branding.
Editors, commentators -- but these are not bureaucrats who apply Colbertism
or Jacobinism concocted by technocrats who have never opened a book, cradled by
structural abstractions, to poetics -- will have to quit the field.
Finally arriving at the end of his story, the narrator of Recherche outlines the
project of his work to come. The novel curls upon itself, biting itself in the
tail, as they say. They also say that the finished work will not be as
previously planned. We have been restored by this magic circle to where it had
started by the point of a double liminal inscription in time. In this century,
there are a plethora of novels which purport to bite their own tails. This
coincidence so confirms our bureaucrats in their theories that they have given
it a name: the 20[th] century novel which bites its own tail is called Oroubos.
You easily imagine the considerations which ensue, its reason for biting its own
tail, and for remaining there once it has bitten its own tail, and how that
biting is done differently when it is a modern writer...
Marcel (if he must be called thus) is not able to orient himself, of which
there are troubling clues within the story of his vocation which point toward
something infinitely more twisted than simple repetition.
One clue and one individual, among many others of which you will not failed
to speak now that I have revealed to you the profound intention, the finality of
Recherche, should suffice to convince the most sceptical Proustian: the
conversation between the narrator and the ingenue Albertine on the subject of
Dostoevsky.
-- But didn't he ever murder anyone, Dostoevsky? The novels of his that I
know of are all called Crime and Punishment. It's an obsession of his, it's not
natural for him to talk about it all the time.
-- I don't believe so, little Albertine, I don't know his life very well.
Certainly, as the whole world did, he knew the sin, in one form or another, and
probably, in one form or another, knew the laws against it. In that sense, he
was a bit criminal like his heroes, who are not quite so, just condemned by
their extenuating circumstances. I am not a novelist though; it is possible
that creators are tempted by certain forms of which they do not personally
approve. I recognize the same thing with Dostoevsky, this preoccupation with
murder is something extraordinary and makes me feel very strange. All that does
not seem beyond possibility to me, unless I possess parts of myself that I
ignore, since each only makes itself realized successively.
Was his confession clear? It certainly contains its share of denials: I am
not a novelist, all that does not seem beyond possibility to me. It's known that
one must think about the second thing to illuminate the first. But the path is
explicitly traced (each only makes itself realized successively), its
destination suggested by the temptations of a life of crime. Is there any other,
form of life, that is, that follows a rule?
Reread the long profession of faith entitled "The Perpetual Adoration"
enshrined at the heart of Time Regained in light of this. Something bothers you,
something you could not miss; a suspicion comes to you that all the volumes are
apocryphal, that the text within has been redacted, falsified. That the
murderous rule, the ultimate end foretold by the subject's vocation has been
disguised as the religion of literature, the crime has been consistently covered
up, the cadavers buried under the flowers of rhetoric. That we may not have
accumulated and lauded so much praise upon manuscripts, preliminary sketches and
drafts to occlude the authentic version of this form of life envisaged by the
author at the threshold of his work. In brief, that the ghostwriters have been
at work, time and again, and that they are the clumsy, yet pointedly able, hand
which is so indiscreet.
Undertake the following test: in this confession of work's foundations, this
vocational axiomatic, systematically replace the word "Art" with Crime, the word
"Literature" with Murder, "Novel" with Assassination, etc. Do this elementary
translation and finally see, poking through beneath the layers of falsification,
sovereign sense:
The authentic work, the work finally brought forth to sunlight, the only work
accomplished by sovereign consequence, is murder. This work, which, in a sense,
dwells most within the criminal, dwells too for an instant within all men. But
they hide it since they refuse to shed light upon it.
This criminal work, of finding and apprehending, beneath matter, beneath
experience, beneath the various different words, is exactly the opposite of the
labours done within us, behind our very backs, by the ghostwriters called
self-love, virtue, education, and habit, while they gather authentic impressions
above us, entirely hidden from us by nomenclatures, by the respectable intrigues
that we falsely call the work. In sum, this simple crime is justifiably the only
necessary crime. It alone allows others in while we reveal our true work to
ourselves, that work which could not be "read" in it, since the signs that are
read need to be translated and often decomposed against the grain, horribly
efface. This labour of having made our self-love, our imitative spirit, our
virtuous education, our habits; it is this work which crime dismantles, it is
the long march in the opposite direction, a return to the womb.
And the rest is all like this... I leave you free to continue the exercise.
In my case, I believe I have demonstrated here conformity to my rule of
murderous reduction from the Proustian text and of my enterprise from its
narrator -- from his proper confession, he is jealous of that which contemplates
and prolongs a beloved body from the temporal order, so jealous as to wish for
its destruction. Assassination, decomposition: those are the final duplicity
encrypted in the nature of the very same Time. The criminal interpretation is
the only probable one: it is the only one that literally and figuratively brings
to light the text.
Q.E.D.
Engage.
All that remains is for me to keep your attention, two chapters, three
chapters, the story of my next murders. It is so easy to get side tracked
though! But no, I pity you dear reader.
