Anathemas and Admirations (70 page)

Writing is a provocation, a fortunately false view of reality that sets us
above
what is and what seems to be. . . . To rival God, even to exceed Him by the mere virtue of language: such is the feat of the writer, an ambiguous specimen, torn and infatuated, who, having forsaken his natural condition, has given himself up to a splendid vertigo, always dismaying, sometimes odious. Nothing more wretched than the word, yet it is by the word that one mounts to sensations of felicity, to an ultimate dilation where one is completely alone, without the slightest feeling of oppression. The Supreme achieved by syllables, by the very symbol of fragility! It can also be achieved, oddly, by irony, on the condition that the latter, carrying its demolition work to extremes, dispenses shudders of a god in reverse. Words as agents of an ecstasy inside out. . . . Everything that is truly intense partakes of paradise and hell, with this difference, that the former we can only glimpse, whereas we have the luck to perceive and, better still, to
feel
the latter. There exists an even more notable advantage, on which the writer has a monopoly — that of ridding himself of his
dangers
. Without the faculty of blackening pages, I wonder what I would have become. To write is to get free of one’s remorse and one’s rancors, to vomit up one’s secrets. The writer is an unbalanced being who uses those words to cure himself. How many disorders, how many grim attacks have I not triumphed over thanks to these insubstantial remedies!

Writing is a vice one can weary of. In truth, I write less and less, and I shall doubtless end up no longer writing at all, no longer finding the least charm in this combat with others and with myself.

When one attacks a subject, however ordinary, one experiences a feeling of plenitude, accompanied by a touch of arrogance. A phenomenon stranger still: that sensation of superiority when one describes a figure one admires. In the middle of a sentence, how easily one believes oneself the center of the world! Writing and worship do not go together: like it or not, to speak of God is to regard Him
from on high
. Writing is the creature’s revenge, and his answer to a botched Creation.

22

Rereading
. . .

Translated into German by Paul Celan, my
Précis de Décomposition (A Short History of Decay)
was published by Rowohlt in 1953. When it was republished in Germany in 1978, the editor of
Akzente
asked me to introduce it to the magazine’s readers. That is the origin of this text.

R
EREADING THIS BOOK, which is now over thirty years old, I try to recognize the person I was — a person who escapes me to some degree. My gods were Shakespeare and Shelley. I still frequent the former; the latter, rarely. I cite him to indicate the kind of poetry that intoxicated me. An untidy lyricism matched my dispositions; unfortunately, I discern traces of it in all my efforts of the period. Who can still read a poem like
Epipsychidion?
I used to read it, in any case, with delight. Shelley’s hysterical Platonism repels me now, and to effusion, whatever its form, I prefer concision, rigor, a deliberate coldness. My vision of things has not fundamentally changed; what certainly has changed is the
tone
. The content of thought is rarely modified in any real way; what does undergo a metamorphosis, on the other hand, is the turn of phrase, appearance, rhythm. Growing old, I have noticed that poetry is less and less necessary to me: perhaps one’s taste for it is linked to a surplus of vitality? I have an increasing tendency —
fatigue
must have a lot to do with it — toward dryness, toward laconism, at the expense of explosion. Now, the
Précis
was an explosion. Writing it, I had the impression I was escaping a sense of oppression, with which I could not have continued for long: I had to breathe, I had to
break out
. I felt the need to come to decisive terms, not so much with men as with existence as such, which I would have liked to provoke to single combat, if only to see
which of us
would win. I had, to be frank, a quasi-certitude that I would gain the upper hand, that it would be impossible for existence to triumph. To corner existence, to force it into its last hiding places, to reduce it to nothingness by frenzied reasonings and accents recalling Macbeth or Kirilov: such was my ambition, my intention, my dream, the program of my every moment. One of the first chapters is called “The Anti-Prophet.” As a matter of fact, I reacted as a prophet, assigned myself a mission — a corrosive one, if you like, but a mission all the same. By attacking the prophets, I was attacking myself and . . . God, according to my principle in those days, which was that one should be concerned solely with Him and with oneself. Whence the uniformly violent tone of an ultimatum (not succinct, as it should have been, but verbose, diffuse, insistent), of a challenge addressed to Heaven and earth, to God and to God’s
ersatz
— in short, to
everything
. In the desperate fury of those pages, where it would be bootless to look for a grain of modesty, of serene and resigned reflection, of acceptance and respite, of smiling fatalism, it is the unbridled madness of my youth as well as an incoercible love of denial that attain their apogee. What has always beguiled me in negation is the power of substituting oneself for everyone and everything, of being a sort of demiurge, of
possessing
the worlds as if one had collaborated in its advent and then had the right, even the duty, to precipitate its ruin. Destruction immediate consequence of the spirit of negation, corresponds to a profound instinct, to a type of jealousy that each of us must experience in his heart of hearts with regard to the First Beings, to His position and the idea He represents and symbolizes. However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness, and caprice.

After the Spanish publication of the
Précis
, two Andalusian students asked me if it was possible to live without
“fundamentación.”
I answered that it was true that I had found no solid basis anywhere and that I had nonetheless managed to endure, for with the years one got used to everything, even vertigo. Then, too, one does not constantly keep watch and interrogate oneself, absolute lucidity being incompatible with breathing. If one were at every moment conscious of what one knew — if, for example, the sentiment of foundationlessness were both continual and intense — one would kill oneself or allow oneself to slip into imbecility. One exists thanks to the moments when one
forgets
certain truths; this is because during such intervals one accumulates energy, and it is energy that permits one to confront those selfsame truths. When I despise myself, I tell myself, in order to shore up my confidence, that, after all, I have managed to maintain myself in being or in a semblance of being, with a perception of things that very few could have endured. Several young people in France have told me that the chapter that most attracted them was “The Automaton,” that intolerable quintessence. In my way I must be a fighter, since I have not succumbed to my ruminations.

The two students also asked me why I had not stopped writing and publishing. Not everyone has the luck to die young, was my answer. My first book, with its sonorous title —
On the Summits of Despair
— I wrote in Rumanian at the age of twenty-one, while promising myself never to begin another. Then I committed a second, with the same promise subsequently. The farce has been repeated for over forty years. Why? Because writing, however little, has helped me pass from one year to the next, the
expressed
obsessions being weakened and — halfway— overcome. To produce is an extraordinary comfort. And to publish, another. To have a book coming out, that is your life, or a part of your life that becomes external to you, that no longer belongs to you, that has ceased to torment you. Expression diminishes you, impoverishes you, lifts weights off you: expression is loss of substance, and liberation. It drains you, hence it saves you, it strips you of an encumbering overflow. When you detest someone to the point of wanting to liquidate him, the best thing is to take a sheet of paper and to write on it any number of times that X is a bastard, a fool, a monster, and you ‘will immediately discover that you hate him less and that you are no longer thinking quite so much about vengeance. This is more or less what I did with regard to myself and the world. The
Précis
I drew from my lower depths in order to insult life and insult myself. The result? I have endured myself a little better, as I have better endured life. You look after yourself as best you can.

The first version of the book was written very quickly in 1947 and was called “Negative Exercises.” I showed it to a friend, who gave it back to me a few days later, saying “You have to rewrite the whole thing,” I deeply resented his advice, but luckily I took it. In fact, I rewrote the thing three times, for on no account did I want it to be considered as the work of a foreigner. My ambition was nothing less than to compete with the natives. Where could such effrontery have come from? My parents, who spoke only Rumanian and Hungarian and a little German, knew no French words except
bonjour
and
merci
This was the case with almost everyone in Transylvania. When I went to Bucharest in 1929 for some sort of studies, I realized that most intellectuals there spoke French fluently; this produced in me, who read French and no more, a fury that would last for a long time and that still endures, in another form: since reaching Paris, I have never been able to rid myself of my Wallachian accent. If I cannot speak like the natives, at least I shall try to write like them: this must have been my unconscious reasoning; otherwise, how explain my desperate eagerness to do as well as they and even — insane presumption — better than they?

The efforts we expend to assert ourselves, to measure ourselves against our kind and, if possible, to outstrip them, have vile, inadmissible, hence powerful, reasons. The noble resolutions, on the contrary, issuing from a desire for effacement, inevitably lack vigor, and we quickly abandon them, with or without regret. Everything by which we excel proceeds from a murky and suspect source — from our depths, in fact.

And there is also this: I should have chosen any other language than French, for I have little in common with its distinguished vaunt; it is at the antipodes of my nature, of my outbursts, of my true self and my kind of wretchedness. In its rigidity, in the quantity of elegant constraints that it represents, French seems to me an exercise in ascesis or, rather, the combination of a straitjacket and a salon. Yet it is precisely on account of this incompatibility that I have attached myself to this language, to the point of exulting when the great New York scholar Erwin Chargaff (born, like Paul Celan, in Czernowitz) confided to me one day that for him
only what was expressed in French deserved to exist
. . .

Today, when this language is in full decline, what saddens me most is to perceive that the French themselves do not seem to mind. And it is I, a Balkan reject, who suffer at seeing it go under. Well then, I shall sink, inconsolable, with it!