At the end of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach, a scholar scarcely inclined to making grand statements, praises a book in which he sees not only the supreme crowning of western literature but the promise of a ‘common life of mankind on earth’. Of books dealing in the torments and hopes of humanity in transformation, there is assuredly no shortage. But the one that Auerbach picks out would seem to be far from a great epic of the human condition. In question here is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, whose story is limited to an evening and a morning, both made up of small, insignificant events that transpire in a family circle in an island holiday home. And the passage on which Auerbach comments to justify his statement relates the most trivial of domestic events: the mistress of the house, Mrs Ramsay, is inside knitting a pair of socks for the lighthouse-keeper’s son and trying them out for size on the legs of her own young son.
How might this summery evening among a petty bourgeois family announce the future of humanity? Two chapters earlier the same Auerbach defined the heart of modern novelistic realism, which, as he put it, can represent humans only as inserted in a rapidly changing global political, economic and social reality. This global reality has apparently dissolved within the space of two chapters. But what seems to have also disappeared along with it is that chain of actions forming a whole that comprised the very core of fiction. The accomplishment of western realism hailed by Auerbach strangely resembles the decadence of the realism Lukács had deplored ten years earlier and that he identified with an overturning of the hierarchy between narration and description. The core of authentic realism had, for him, to show things from the point of view of active characters, in the dynamic of their action. The ends they pursued and the confrontations in which they engaged made it possible to grasp the global social movement embedding their action. When, in Lost Illusions, Balzac described an evening at the theatre to us, he did so from the viewpoint of his hero, Lucien de Rubempré, who employs his quill both to promote the show in which his mistress, Coralie, is playing and to cement his own position as a modish journalist. This narrative mode would enable the reader to perceive, through the rise and fall of an ambitious youth, the long hand of capitalism extending at once to theatre and to journalism. But this conjoint dynamic of narrative action and revealing a social process was already lost by the time of Zola. The author of Nana described to us in minute detail all the aspects of the theatre at which his heroine performed: the performance, the audience, the set changes, the work of the dressers and so on. But we were thus provided merely with a succession of tableaus, of ‘still lives’ presented from the passive point of view of a spectator and no longer from that of the characters in action. This losing of novelistic action in passive description subsequently intensified in the works of Joyce and Dos Passos, to the extreme point of a fragmentation of experience in which the inner life of the characters is itself transformed into ‘something static and reified’.1
At first glance, Auerbach takes the same path in going from Old Man Goriot to To the Lighthouse: a path that turns away simultaneously from the constructed arrangement of fictional plots and from the common life of humans. Yet, Auerbach’s interpretation of this development inverts the perspective: Virginia Woolf’s micro-story does not divert us from what is at stake in the human community. On the contrary, it opens onto the future of this community, toward the moment when humanity will live ‘a common life on earth’.2 But if it does so, it is not despite but because it ruins this arrangement of actions hitherto regarded as the very principle of fiction: ‘What takes place here in Virginia Woolf’s novel is precisely what was attempted everywhere in works of this kind (although not everywhere with the same insight and mastery) – that is, to put the emphasis on the random occurrence, to exploit it not in the service of a planned continuity of action but in itself.’3
This statement is extraordinary: the supreme achievement of western realist fiction is the destruction of that ‘concerted chain of actions’ that appears to be the minimal condition of all fiction. This destruction lies in the privilege afforded to the random occurrence, which he also calls the random moment. How are we to conceive of this achievement, which takes the form of radical destruction? And how does the reign of the random moment presage a new common life on earth? Auerbach only answers the above with some banal considerations on the content of these random moments, which concern ‘the elementary things which our lives have in common’.4 But he has said enough about it previously to allow us to perceive that the ‘common’ at stake in the random moment does not concern time’s content but its form. If there is a politics of fiction, it does not arise from the way it represents the structure of society and its conflicts. It does not arise from the sympathy it might arouse for the oppressed or from the enthusiasm it may generate in the struggle against oppression. It arises from the same thing that renders it fiction, that is to say, a way of identifying events and linking them with one another. The treatment of time is the core of the politics of fiction.
After all, this point has been known since Antiquity, Aristotle having given it exemplary expression in the ninth chapter of the Poetics, in which he explains why poetry is more philosophical than history. This is so, he says, because poetry – by which he understands not the music of verses but the construction of a fictional plot – says how things can happen, how they happen as a consequence of their own possibility, where history only tells us how they arrive one after the other, in their empirical succession. Thus tragic action shows us the chain of necessary or verisimilar events by which humans pass from ignorance to knowledge and from fortune to misfortune. Not merely any man at all, it is true, but men who are of ‘great reputation and prosperity’.5 To go from fortune to misfortune, one must belong to the world of those whose actions depend on the chances of Fortune. To undergo this tragic adversity, which is due not to vice but to an error, one must be able to commit errors and therefore to put forward grand designs, the means for realizing which may draw one into error. The poetic rationality of necessary or verisimilar linkages applies to those men who are referred to as being active because they live in the time of ends: those ends that the action puts forward but also that end in itself constituted by the privileged form of inaction called leisure. This time is here clearly opposed to the time of so-called passive or mechanical men, not because these latter do nothing, but because all their activity is enclosed in the circle of means that aim at the immediate ends of survival, a circle in which inaction itself is only ever the rest that is necessary between two expenditures of energy.
Constructed fiction is more rational than described, empirical reality. And this superiority is that of one form of time over another. These two Aristotelian theses formed the dominant rationality of fiction for centuries. They established it on a hierarchy that did not need to be argued for because it belonged to the sort of self-evidences around which a world is structured: the hierarchy of forms of life that distinguish ‘active’ men from ‘passive’ men by their way of inhabiting time, by the sensible framework of their activity and their inactivity. The following question can then be raised: was this hierarchy of forms of time that upheld the rationality of fiction destroyed in the modern age? Did Marxism not turn the game upside down? With Marxism, precisely, the dark world of the production and reproduction of life became the world of causal rationality. Thus defined on the basis of its core – the production of material life – history opposes its rationality to the arbitrary arrangements of fiction and opens, to those who grasp its laws, onto the future of a humanity without hierarchy. But inverting an opposition entails retaining its terms and the structure of their relationship. And even if, in Capital, the game that science and history play is a complicated one, the Marxist science of history reprises at least one principle of fiction for its own account, transmitting it to a posterity that carefully erased its aporia: that of the hierarchy of times. This science is undoubtedly no longer the vain knowledge acquired, albeit too late, by a tragic hero who falls from fortune into misfortune. On the contrary, its possession is supposed to give one a view of global connections and the means required to adjust means to ends. But it does so only by opposing, once more, the time of active men, who grasp the linkage of causes and inscribe their undertakings within it, to the time of passive men, whose material occupation obliges them to remain in the cave, in which things only appear one after another, in a contiguity that nothing ordains, except perhaps the mirage of ideology.
As a form of account, the Marxist science of history remains Aristotelian. And it so happens that whenever it takes literary fiction into consideration, it weds its order of reasons to the old fictional hierarchy. Lukács does just this when he opposes two forms of time: the time of the authentic realist novel, that of ‘complete personalities’ who, by pursuing their ends at their own risk, reveal to us the structure of social reality and of historical evolution; and successive time, the reified time of ‘still lives’ of the naturalist novel or the Joycean fragmentation of experience. The Marxist theoretician of literature thus takes up on his own account the hierarchy that opposes active men to passive men. And perhaps Auerbach senses this complicity even as he links the ‘serious realism of modern times’ to the representation of humans ‘embedded in a total reality, political, social, and economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving’:6 this constantly evolving reality only works to reproduce time and again the separation between those who live in the time of causes and those who live in the time of effects. Hence, perhaps, the oddness of the examples with which Auerbach illustrates his remarks; indeed, all of them are counter-examples, that is examples of places and times in which this ‘constant evolution’ seems to be suspended: the musty dining room in the Maison Vauquer in Old Man Goriot; the ennui of the diners at the Hôtel de la Mole in The Red and the Black; that of the lunches in Madame Bovary’s damp dining room. This apparent contradiction has its logic: ‘serious realism’ is also, and even primarily, one that breaks with the ancient separation dooming the representation of small people to low genres such as comedy or satire. This realism turns them into subjects susceptible of having the most profound and complex sentiments. There is the second major principle that must find its accomplishment in modern literature. And symbolizing this are indeed Julien Sorel, the carpenter’s son out to attack the social hierarchy, and Emma Bovary, the daughter of a peasant out to vanquish ideal passions, both of them ‘serious’ until death sanctions their desire to live a life other than that reserved for people of their social condition. Now, living another life means, first, inhabiting another time. And ennui is the entry into that other time. It is the experience of empty time, a time not normally known to those whose ordinary existence divides between the work that sustains and the rest that restores. This is why it is not simply a frustration; it is also a conquest, a transgression of the division separating humans into two according to their way of inhabiting time.
Just as one awaited their meeting, the two criteria of the realist accomplishment separate. The man of the people asserts the capacity to be the subject of an intense and profound drama only by being detached from the network of relations that would include him in a global reality in becoming. The hierarchy of times and forms of life is not broken on the side of global social reality, but, on the contrary, on the side of its suspension, by the entry of random individuals within this empty time that dilates into a world of unknown sensations and passions. Unknown to the imprudent men and women who scorch their wings and their lives in contact with this world, but foreign, too, to fiction, which discovers here an unprecedented mode of the being of time: a temporal fabric whose rhythms are no longer defined by projected goals, the actions that seek to accomplish them and the obstacles that set them back, but by bodies that move to the rhythm of hours, hands that wipe the mist from windows to watch the rain fall, heads that prop themselves up, arms that fall down again, known or unknown faces that come into view behind windows, furtive or resonant footsteps, a musical air, minutes that glide over each other and melt into a nameless emotion. Such is the time of Emma Bovary, of that ordinary day from which Auerbach excerpted the famous lunch.7 For the heroine, who does not know what awaits her and does not know that this non-knowledge is itself a new pleasure, this is a time of despair. But, in any case, this is a new time for fiction, released from the expectations it knew all too well and introduced, on the contrary, to the infinite multiplicity of minute sensations and nameless emotions making up lives subtracted from the hierarchy of temporalities.
This path is likely that which causes fictional democracy to veer from the grand history in which the science of history naturally saw it located, toward the universe of sensible micro-events. The democratic revolution of fiction is not the grand and sudden emergence of the masses on the stage of History. It is nevertheless faithful to the modern definition of revolution: this latter being the process by which those who were nothing become all. But becoming all, in the order of fiction, is not about becoming the main character of the story. It is about becoming the very fabric within which – through the stitches of which – events hold together. The grand revolution that Auerbach indicates without defining it takes place when the fabric by which events hold together is the very same one by which events happen to those to whom nothing ought to happen, those who are supposed to live in the infraworld of reproductive time, in the cave where things simply happen one after another. The random moment is not simply one of the essential activities in which all humans engage. And the promise of humanity contained in Virginia Woolf’s random moments does not consist in there being everywhere in the world at the same instant women who knit and are busy with their children. It is not time’s content that is overturned but its very form. The time of the representational tradition was two-dimensional, with each dimension defining a form of exclusion. First, it excluded on its horizontal axis, by making each moment disappear into the succeeding one. Second, it excluded on its vertical axis, by separating those who lived in the world of action from those who lived in the infraworld of repetition. By contrast, the random moment is the element of a doubly inclusive time: a time of coexistence in which moments interpenetrate and persist by spreading out in larger and larger circles; a shared time that no longer knows any hierarchy between those who live in it. Illustrative here is another of Virginia Woolf’s novels, Mrs Dalloway, the story of a single day in which the walks around London taken by a worldly woman, her daughter and her former lover experiment with a new space-time, in which the same sensible events spread out step by step, affecting all bodies similarly and notably those that the old order kept at a distance or made invisible.8
But the random moment is not only the indifferent atom of this time of coexistence. It is also the turning point that stands on the precise boundary between the nothing and the all, the moment of encounter between those who live in the time of shared sensible events and those who live in the outside-of-time, in which nothing is shared or able to happen. Thus the circles of the shared random moment woven on London streets in the morning around the elegant Clarissa Dalloway, out to buy flowers for her party, come to a standstill in two limit figures. There is, emerging from an underground entrance as though from the depths of the earth, a trembling form, similar to a rusty pump, whose voice of no age and no sex murmurs an unintelligible song without beginning or end. And there is that young man, dashed in his poetic ambitions and traumatized by the war, whose delirium transforms the fabric of random sensible events into the revelation of a new religion that he must proclaim to the world. This young man, Septimus, will throw himself out of a window to escape from the doctors who want to place him in an asylum. We know that his act prefigures the novelist’s own, since she will also escape from madness and doctors by committing suicide. The proper task of ‘realist’ literature is, then, to transcribe the power of these turning points between the event and the non-event, speech and silence, sense and nonsense, under its two figures: the stupidity of the lack of sense and the madness of the excess of sense. It is to construct with words a common world that includes separation itself, that links the directed time of Clarissa Dalloway’s day and of the passers-by she meets with the frozen time of the ‘old rusty pump’ chanting near the underground entrance or with the disoriented time of Septimus. But this inclusion of the excluded is neither the abolition of differences in a universality transcending them nor the recognition of their peaceful coexistence. It is the violent inclusion in a form of sensible community of the same thing that makes it explode, the inclusion in a language of that which escapes this language. Such is what may be meant by that ‘foreign language within language’ claimed by Proust and commented on at length by Deleuze: the transgression of the ordered division of voices and idioms, that transgression which attains its ultimate point with the inclusion in language of the impossibility itself of speaking.
The random moment, in reality, is not random. Most certainly it can be produced at any instant for any insignificant occasion. But it is also the decisive moment, the moment of turning that stands on the exact boundary between the nothing and the all. ‘It was nothing. Just sound.’ – says Faulkner, speaking, in The Sound and the Fury, of the groan of the idiot Benjy. But he immediately transforms this nothing into an all: ‘It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.’9 To stand on that boundary on which lives that will tumble into nothingness are elevated to a totality of time and of injustice – this is perhaps the politics of literature at its most profound. One would like to see such a politics send combatants off into battle, to accompany the victorious movement of the historical process. But perhaps these stories that seem to stand so feebly in their variance from the grand tumults of History-on-the-march perform a more radical displacement that challenges the temporality within which that battle and its victory are conceived. It fell to Walter Benjamin to give this displacement its political meaning by affirming the necessity to separate the ‘tradition of the oppressed’ from the time of the conquerors with which Marxist theory had united it and to tie the dialectic no longer to the advances of time but to its arrests, its overlaps, returns and conflagrations. But already before him certain literary works had performed these ruptures, which stymie the victories of History by holding onto that edge of time, that boundary of the nothing and the all on which the division between active humans and passive humans is blurred. For this, their authors undertook to condense and dilate times, to fracture them, to recompose and intertwine them, thus reducing the time of conquerors to being only one among others and reducing its necessity to the particularity of one scenario among others, one simply poorer than others.
Thus, reality does not stand counter to fiction, rather fiction stands counter to fiction. And this battle of fictions cannot be reduced to an opposition between a learned literature destined for the elites and the ordinary chronicle of facts. Yet it does take place wherever the issue is to establish the setting of what makes for common reality. During the summer of 1936, the young journalist James Agee was assigned by his magazine to investigate how Alabama sharecroppers were coping with the crisis. The formula required to answer the magazine’s request is familiar: to interweave some small meaningless facts, which prove simply that we are dealing with ordinary lived existence, and signs that make sense, that is to say consensus, by showing the hardship endured by the poor and the way that these sorts of people adapt to it through a combination of resignation and resourcefulness. Things thus fall into place and reality remains the same as itself. But James Agee did something else. During the day, he would unpack the contents of all the sharecroppers’ drawers and show in each pin or in each piece of fabric the all of a way of inhabiting the world. During the night he would listen to the breathing of the sleepers; in this light breathing he hears not only the break that has come after the day’s heavy weariness but the injustice of all the lives that might have been lived; he ties this breathing to the noises of the surrounding night, to the multiplicity of lives that breathe everywhere at the same time, to the softness and the violence of the starry sky and of cosmic respiration. He constructs a ‘conjunction of planets’ that wrests these lives from the verisimilitudes of social reality and from the necessities of globalized time to give voice to ‘all time and injustice and sorrow’. To the time of the conquerors, to this horizontal and continuous time today described as ‘globalization’, the new fiction opposes a broken time, traversed at each instant by these points that raise no matter which nothingness to the height of the all.
At the centre of the fictional topography of Light in August there is a man seated behind his window. He monitors the street, says Faulkner, who has not unintentionally given this watchman the name of Hightower. But what is to be monitored in this ordinarily deserted street? What novelty can he really see through this window buried under vegetation and offering no view other than a half-dozen low-growing maples and a faded sign? What counts about his being behind this window is, first, his motionless position. The position, it might be said, of someone waiting. However, so much time has elapsed since he last waited for a student to come to the art lessons advertised on the sign; so much time since he last sat himself down there, alone, after being chased out of the church, whose pastor he once was, by a long series of scandals: his exalted sermons, which seemed to confound the Saviour’s glory with the cavalcade of an ancestor who had waged war there during the civil war; the misconduct of a spouse, found dead in a seedy hotel room in Memphis; the presence of a black servant alone in the widower’s house; and various other incongruities. From behind his office window, it is not visitors he is watching out for, not the spectacle of passers-by that he is observing, but the sound in the distance: the sound of his church during service – no doubt, for the prayers, the sermons, the songs from which he has been excluded, but primarily for the sound of hatred and death that resonates there. The organ strains burst forth like ecstatic crucifixions, their sound waves ‘pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon’,10 echoing the rumours of hate that cross through the crowd of honest people, gathered there less to honour the Crucified than to ask for more crucifixions: of sinners, of people belonging to that other race and of those who mix with it, and lastly of themselves and the curse that carries them away in a spiral of hatred. From behind the windows, there is nothing to be deciphered and nothing is able to surprise. There is only a tonality to be felt. From afar, the watchman hears the muffled murmur of the continued curse. He sees in spirit the crucifixions to which it never stops giving form.
But if he listened from afar for the sound of hatred only, there would be no story. For there to be a story, the immobile man must have visitors pass by his door, bringing the drama to a place that, in normal times, only rumour can reach. The visitors in question are not simply any old visitors, but those through whom the scandal, and therefore the story, happens. But the scandal is split into two. First, there is the ordinary weakness of the flesh, to which the country girl, Lena Grove, succumbs, seduced in her lost hamlet in the darkest depths of Alabama by one of those light-hearted journeymen who travel from place to place renting out their arms and knocking up girls. To find the man she cannot imagine a liar, she sets out on the road, on foot, heavy with the child about to be born. This scandal, easily resolvable with a good marriage, is introduced into Hightower’s office by a good man, the Good Samaritan Byron Bunch, who imagines himself a Saint Joseph. But the more radical scandal that emerges comes not from the weakness but from the hatred of the flesh: hatred of the sinful temptress, hatred of those who, through this fault, are born of impure blood. As the cart that welcomed Lena and the child in her womb arrives in Jefferson, a glow of a fire lights up the sky: a house is ablaze. It is Miss Burden’s, that lover of Blacks and daughter of a carpetbagger, murdered by her young lover, the octoroon Joe Christmas, whose blackness was not to be seen on his face but the secret of whose curse the orphanage’s dietician divulged to him after he inadvertently caught her in the act of making out with a colleague. From his window, Hightower is unable to see the fire’s glow. But he will see the drama’s actors come in through his door one after the other: first of all, shown in by Byron, Joe’s grandfather, the imprecator who took from his daughter her new-born Joe and placed him on the orphanage doorstep, born as this child was of a sinner’s impious fornication with a man of the Devil, namely a quadroon who managed to pass off his brown skin as that of a Mexican; and lastly, entering by force, Christmas comes in, the accursed child who inherited his father’s black blood, his mother’s weakness for the flesh and his grandfather’s hatred of the guilty flesh of woman. In Hightower’s residence this white-camouflaged negro will not only be killed but emasculated by the executant of decent people’s fury, National Guard member Grimm, himself frustrated that the world war came too early for him. This is how the story or, rather, the two crossed stories enter into the immobile watchman’s house.
One might say that this is not a good way of telling things. The solitary Hightower has nothing to do with the ordinary misfortune of Lena Grove or with the monstrous destiny of Joe Christmas. And this latter might have been caught and killed absolutely anywhere else. But we must take things the other way around and ask why the novelist wanted these two fates, which no reason bid to cross each other, to cross where they had no need to, in the house of the motionless watchman. Indeed, the novelist multiplies the tours de force so that the fallen pastor can be placed centre story, even as he appears in it only at distant intervals. Thus does his accredited visitor, the very discreet Byron Bunch, inform him in all improbability of the crime and the investigation, leaving the reader to wonder how Bunch himself had learned about them. Everything transpires as if the narration ought, at the price of verisimilitude, to be arranged around this motionless point; that is, the zero point of the story, that of the man to whom nothing can happen any longer and who simply hears the background noise of old-time stories, the sound of the ancient and ever young curse. What ties both stories together is not their common character, Lena’s fleeing lover who becomes Christmas’s accomplice; it is the existence of this motionless point at which their destinies cross. Both destinies have a common point: both happen to the kind of individual to whom, in the fictions of yesteryear, nothing ever happened. But the ways in which they break with this normal destiny of immobility and invisibility are diametrically opposed. Lena’s story is a story of modern times. She belongs to that new age in which the most minuscule of beings, things and events have acquired a fictional dignity, not because novelists have a particular tenderness for the little people but because their minuscule stories permit fiction to play on the quasi-imperceptible boundary between the nothing and the something. Lena’s sin of sleeping with a travelling worker and her misfortune in falling pregnant result from no defiance or attraction to evil, but simply from a careless mistake and rotten luck. What eventuates is not a curse, but merely the decision to set out on the road and ensure her child has a father. And Lena’s story can be entirely summed up by this overland trip, which is modest but nevertheless rather incredible to her. She who, though initially destined never to move and aware she was bound to remain wherever she arrived for the rest of her days, at the end marvels at having made the journey from Alabama to Tennessee in only a few months.
Fictional democracy takes this first form, the minuscule story or Lena’s simple furrowing in a straight line, similar to the cart, whose apparently motionless movement the first pages of the book describe. And there is, by way of Christmas, the other story of democratic times. Here, it is not the novel that approaches the almost nothing of ordinary existences; it is these existences that show themselves worthy of the stories of sound and fury that, in old times, only struck princely families. But if they can do this, it is because added to the ancient malediction of accursed races and enemy families is a modern form of curse which very especially affects the poor: indeed it strikes those who have veered from the well-worn path of popular existences and sought to live the life reserved for those who found themselves on the other side – the daughters of peasants who, like Emma Bovary, sought to experience an ideal and passion-filled life, or sons of the people who, like Septimus in Mrs Dalloway, wanted to become poets and lettered. As for Christmas, he wanted very little; he wanted only, at five years of age, to taste the dietician’s toothpaste. However, his bad luck meant that he was in hiding in her room right when she yielded to her colleague’s advances. The error is most certainly fairly minor, but the line it crosses is more redoubtable than the separation of classes and enjoyments. Without wanting to, the little Joe violated the only principle capable, as the old servant Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury would have it, of ensuring the salvation of black children: do not get mixed up in the affairs of the Whites; keep your distance from the matters of hatred and fury that are the lot of those despoilers who took the land of the Indians and subjugated the Blacks. Now, this principle is not one that the small child cannot fail to transgress for the simple reason that he does not know himself to be black, which is something he will learn when, for his punishment, he is chased from the paradise of white orphans. But the error, of course, had preceded him, with the sin of his mother, the curse of his grandfather, the long history of despoliation and hatred in the South and, at the end of the chain, the curse that had always befallen men for having wanted to lay their hands on the knowledge of good and evil reserved for divinity.
Such are the two intersecting stories of poor people: one that reduces the melodramas involving seduced and abandoned common girls to almost nothing; and the other that, conversely, summons the entire chain of curses afflicting the human race. This cross-over clearly entails a particular poetics. The novelist – who has read Flaubert and Conrad and knows that there is now an interest in recounting the most obscure life – doubts, despite it all, that the straight line drawn by little people like Lena Grove can provide enough for a novel rather than a simple novella. He doubts that the novel can abandon the ancestral formula of fiction as a passage from fortune to misfortune. And he knows that the time of the moderns, a time that is readily said to be condemned to the freneticism of speed, is, on the contrary, too slow, too attentive to the weight of each second, to ensure the brutality of that passage. However, even the latter is no longer what it was in Aristotle: a paradoxical chain of causes and effects born of a simple error. It has returned to being what it was before him: the inevitable curse weighing on a family or a race. This line is another straight one but one that, from the outset, runs headlong toward the expected catastrophe.
For there to be fiction, the lowly story of innocent Lena Grove must cross the ignoble story of Joe Christmas – who, like Oedipus, is guilty even before being born – at the risk of the former, in turn, opposing her quiet minimalism to the immemorial stories of hatred and murder. Everything transpires as if Whites and Blacks had switched stories, and as if Lena had adopted the wisdom of the old Dilsey, the wisdom of not mixing. But their stories must also meet in the residence of a man who is motionless at his window. Forty years earlier, a writer of whom William Faulkner indeed seems to have been aware, Maurice Maeterlinck, encapsulated the revolution of fiction in a simple opposition. The old stories of filiation, love and hate – jealous husbands killing their wives, fathers immolating their sons, sons murdering their fathers, assassinated kings and raped virgins – seemed to him to reflect the unrefined conception of the world of another age. New drama, as he saw it, was conversely embodied in the silent attitude of an old man ‘sitting in his armchair, simply waiting beneath his lamp, listening, without realizing it, to all the eternal laws which rule over his home, interpreting without comprehending what there is in the silence of doors and windows and in the small voice of the light’.11 Faulkner made a decision to reject that opposition between old and new fiction, too unschooled in the modern violence of filiation and race whose inheritor he knew himself to be. He nevertheless retained the figure of the man who listens seated at his window. But he turned him into one who hears not the silent murmur of destinies but the sound of hatreds and curses that form the basis of every story. And he combined the new fiction with the old, by making the motionless man’s armchair the meeting point between Lena Grove’s modest voyage and Joe Christmas’s journey unto death.
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is known by two essential traits. The first is the complexity of its temporal structure, which comprises disordered comings and goings that occur on three days in 1928 and one day in 1910. In keeping with this temporal disorder is the story’s being split between four narrative voices: one objective account and three subjective narrations, one of which is confided to the student Quentin Compson, who is living his last day before his planned suicide, and two others to his brothers, the cold calculating Jason and the idiotic Benjy. Benjy’s narration, we know, opens the novel and lends it its tonality. The role given to the idiot is the second of the book’s notable traits. The question that thus arises is: how are we to understand the apparently paradoxical relation between the complex and sophisticated temporal structure of the novel and the weight taken in it by the brute speech of an idiot, of a man supposed to be living in the immediacy of a present bereft of background. To answer this we must dismiss the interpretation according to which the privilege given to the idiot is a literalization of the famous line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth from which the book gets its title: ‘Life is a story told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ On this interpretation, Faulkner simply took the sentence at face value by putting the narration in the mouth of a born idiot who is unable to understand what he sees or coordinate what he feels. And it is this lived reality of a being affected only by sensible shocks devoid of reflection that the narration allegedly espouses.
This ‘face value’ is nevertheless trickier than it would appear. Indeed, one thing catches the reader from the first sentence. The present in which Benjy lives is straightaway separated from him. The idiot speaks in the past tense and he speaks not about what he sees but about what he could see in what was his meadow in times past and what is today a golf course: ‘through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting’.12 From the first sentence his position is that of someone who recounts, someone who parts with his present by recounting it. And in the space of a single page, he will recount three different scenes situated at different moments. Admittedly, it could be said that this time of separation is, from another point of view, a mark of inseparation. The preterite would then function as a language pertaining to a confusion of tenses, a language of an unending past. And the commonly done thing is to reduce this past to the primitive scene and the es war of the unconscious. But the preterite used in the first person by Benjy comes from another source. Faulkner himself put us on the trail by saying that his novel is the work of a reader who discovered only by writing what he owed to authors he’d read long ago without thinking further of it: Dostoyevsky, Conrad and Flaubert. He uses a preterite that incorporates into the English language, as Conrad had already done, a tense that does not exist in it. This preterite incorporates the Flaubertian imperfect, a tense which the French novelist himself had diverted from its grammatical function and turned into a mood apt to blur the distinctions between moods, by homogenizing the course of observed events with that of states of consciousness.
This import at the same time contains an essential deviation. In Flaubert, homogenization had one condition. It could only take place in the third person, which it transformed into the impersonal voice of narration: the stupid voice that expresses what there is without reason, like a swirl of dust in the wind; the ontological stupidity of a universe that does not pursue any end. Flaubert contrasted this ontological stupidity with ordinary stupidity: the self-importance of wily operators, who always find reasons for that which has none and deem themselves masters in being able to make these reasons serve their own ends; that is, like Homais, enlighten the ignorant, or, like Rodolphe, seduce idiots. Even if the voice of the ‘reasonable’ man Jason recalls Homais’s wisdom, Faulkner’s dramaturgy cannot be one of an opposition between two stupidities. For fatality, with him, is not, as it is in Flaubert, pure chance, the pure ‘stupidity’ of a whirling of atoms; it is a causal linking that always refers to an older damnation. Benjy’s idiocy is part of the same heritage as his father’s alcoholism, his mother’s hysteria, his uncle’s parasitism, his sister’s and his niece’s sexual addiction, the incestuous fantasies of his eldest brother and the sly reasoning of his other brother. On the other hand, the idiot’s voice does indeed come to be inhabited, in the first person, by the Flaubertian stupidity of the impersonal voice. How else are we to understand the singularities of his monologue? How might we even understand the simple fact that the idiot faithfully retranscribes the words being exchanged around him, words he ought not to understand, including those that tell of his being deaf and dumb? The deaf and dumb person who speaks is the voice of impersonal writing that takes into its homogeneous tissue the moans and groans of the idiot at the same time as the words that turn around him. His monologue, as one can easily note, has many traits in common with that of his brother, Quentin, the Harvard student, whose sentences are sometimes ampler and more ornate but sometimes also even more disjointed than his. Quentin describes to us what he ‘could see’ in a parataxic way as well. His monologues also comprise an inextricable confusion between present and past, perception and memory, the speaker’s voice and that of others. Benjy’s speech does not stand out in this sense from the monologue of ‘normal’ people. Besides, this is why his narration must regularly be supplied with practical indications that remind us that the person speaking is, in the literal sense of the term, an idiot: a physically disabled individual who needs someone to hold his spoon when eating soup, an intellectually disabled person who expresses his sensations only through groans or cries of rage. But this recalling can only be done at the price of recreating distance between the subject of the narration and the animal of which it speaks.
Far from the novel borrowing the voice of the mute idiot to state the absurdity of life, it conversely grants another sort of mutism to the one who does not talk. It grants him the ‘mutism’ formerly denounced by Plato, the voice of impersonal writing that removes from speech any directed course and denies all hierarchy among speaking beings. This enables the novel to lend articulated speech to the unintelligible chant of the ‘old rusty pump’ on which, in Virginia Woolf, the happy circuit of the shared sensible moment founders. It is not a matter of saying through an idiot that the world is idiotic. It is a matter of transforming, through writing, the idiot’s sound into human speech. The novel’s work as a whole might be encapsulated by two sentences found in its last part, in which the narration is objective, so that, naturally, Benjy does not speak, because objectively a deaf and dumb idiot does not speak. He groans, at most. And this is indeed what the narrator tells us here by relating to us the groan that Benjy makes heard. ‘It was nothing’, he tells us, ‘just sound’. But the following sentence transforms this nothing into the virtuality of a whole: ‘It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.’13 In this simple sentence are simultaneously condensed and put into question the two major oppositions that have served to hierarchize humans on the basis of their ways of being and speaking, the oppositions formulated in parallel in Aristotle’s Poetics and in his Politics. There is the opposition between two times: that of the chronicle, which only says how things occur one after the other, and that of fiction, which says how they can occur. And there is the equally famous opposition that founds the political community by separating two uses of the vocal organ: the animal voice that signals the pleasure or pain being experienced, and the human logos that enables the just and the unjust to be made manifest and put up for discussion. This totality of normally silent injustice, which is voiced for an instant, evokes those dramaturgies of politics in which the beings held to lack speech gain a voice, not only to tell of their suffering but to affirm their capacity to speak – and to speak about justice. An exemplary scene of this sort is the secession of the Roman plebeians on the Aventine Hill, as rewritten by Ballanche during the modern revolutionary era. To make the justice of their claims heard, the plebeians first had to make it heard that they spoke. They had to make it heard by the Patricians – for whom this was a physical impossibility: what came out of plebeian mouths contained no speech but only, as one among the Patricians said, ‘a fugitive sound, a sort of bellowing, a sign of need and not a manifestation of intelligence’.14 Faulkner’s two sentences about the idiot’s groan provide us with a sort of original scene of literature, one symmetrical to the original scene of politics as figured by the story of the plebeian secession. Symmetrical and dissymmetrical simultaneously. For, clearly, to prove that he speaks, the idiot will not take up speech ‘himself’. It is the writer alone who sets himself the task of uncovering ‘all time and injustice and sorrow, become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets’.
This is the specific form of dissensus that literature enacts with its words. Politics enacts dissensus in the form of speech collectively taken by those who intend to provide the proof that they speak. Literature, for its part, gives singular speech to those who cannot evince it, to those who are absolutely unable to speak. The speech that the novel lends to Benjy is not the brute speech of the idiot – speech about his pain; it is a voiceless speech, speech about a more profound and more distant justice. By identifying the voice of the mute with that of silent writing, Faulkner’s novel enacts its own justice. It constructs the sensible world in which this complaint is understood as discourse: a sensible world that includes its contradiction. What the paradox of the idiot’s writing entails is indeed not a simple compassion for the victims. It is the existence of this common time and of the common world that Auerbach saw heralded in Woolf’s random moment. And Auerbach undoubtedly speaks about it in an overly simple way. For the common is in fact always a tense relation of the common and the non-common, of the shared and the unshareable. Claiming to be the same for all, the time of the victors thus works ever so effectively to drive to its margins and into its asylums all those ill-adapted to its rhythm. As for the fiction of the idiot, it advances another articulation of the common and the non-common. On the one hand, it lends the idiot the enriched, deeply multiplied time that stands opposed to the monochord time of the clever. On the other, it maintains, like a wound at the heart of the common world, the irreducibility of the separation between idiots and normal people.
In this tension between the common and the non-common, the singularity of the idiot’s monologue is articulated with that of the plurality of stories. Echoing the idiot’s monologue from afar, which is to say in the North of educated people, is the student Quentin’s monologue, which contains the same confusion of times and voices. Contrasting with this are two straight-line narrations that cannot comprehend his speech. There is the objective narration that only hears him as moaning and groaning, and there is Jason’s monologue, that of the third brother and reasonable man who works to provide for his family basically by engaging in dubious short-term speculations on the money market with money that is not his own. Jason is the man who does not confuse times, the man of economic rationality and history’s linear progress, in which idiots and the ill-adapted more broadly – all those who are unable to adapt to its rational march – are shoved out the exit door. The individual voice of Jason is the other Flaubertian stupidity, the voice of Homais-type rationalizers. At the end of Madame Bovary, the reader will recall, Homais’s great concern is to have the blind man sent to the asylum, his hideous face and soliciting presence on the public way being an insult to the progress of civilization. The time of Jason is also extended to the moment at which each person will occupy the place handed down to him: at which Jason will finally be a master in his own home and the idiot will occupy the place that quite naturally awaits him – the asylum. The complexity of the novel’s narrative structure, with its splitting of voices and times, serves to delay indefinitely the moment when he will be able to carry out this wish. It serves to retain the idiot in a common time and world and, along with him, all those that the time of the economy and power, the time of victors, to reprise Benjamin’s words, pushes continually to the margins, to spaces outside place and times outside time.
The splintered time of writing delays the linear time of History, the time belonging to the Rodolphes, the Homaises and the Jasons, the time that increases the resources of rentiers, hands out honours to publicists and sends the disabled to the asylum. This is where the modest and timid politics of new fiction is played out. Fiction does not put forward solutions to cure the disabled. But it does arrest the hands of those who send them to the asylum. It keeps the disabled present by indefinitely delaying, through the time of writing, the time of reasons which sends them to the place where they will be locked up. The ‘random moment’ is not only the moment of condensation unique to the infinite resonances that, during the times of Chekhov or Maupassant, the novella isolated, like a window half-open onto a world of ignored lives and emotions. It is also this power of splintering, the power of multiplication that causes dominant time – that of the victors – to explode at the very point of its most assured ‘victory’: at the edge of the nothing, to which it relegates those who are outside speech and outside time.
‘This is the story: a little boy went.’15 Thus begins the first of João Guimarães Rosa’s First Tales: with a boy who takes a plane to go and see the construction site on which, in the semi-wilderness, the great city was being built. The tale is called ‘The Thin Edges of Happiness’. In the twenty-first story, titled ‘Treetops’, we again discover this ageless and nameless boy taking the same journey. The story comes quite naturally to an end with the plane’s landing as it returns. ‘We’re here at last’, says the uncle accompanying him. ‘Oh no, not yet’, replies the boy, as if desiring to remain an instant longer in the time of the story, to delay what comes at the journey’s end: ‘And life was coming.’16
Everything thus seems to occur in the narrow interval that separates the story from the point from which it comes and to which it returns: life. And yet the story befalling the boy affords us barely any spectacular events. What ordinarily comprises the subject matter of stories is here thrust to the margins, transformed into a simple cause of, or pretext for, the journey: in one case, the future of the great city’s building; in the second, the mother’s illness, on account of which the child is sent away. With each occasion the journey itself is condensed into a moment’s bedazzlement: in the first story, there is the ‘edge of happiness’ – the joyous shore – afforded by the sight of a turkey prancing about in the courtyard, a joy soon quashed since the animal was there only to meet a more trivial satisfaction, that of the guests invited for a birthday dinner. And, in the second, there are the treetops, the happiness provided by a toucan who, for about ten minutes at exactly six o’clock each morning, comes to splash the dawning day with colour and thus to announce not that the mother is cured but that she had never been ill, that she had been ‘borne safe and sound’.17
We must not be misled about the meaning of the story: the point is not to contrast the childlike taste of the marvellous with the prosaicness of ordinary life. For that matter, the turkey in the courtyard and the toucan in the tree are effectively more real than the urban projects or telegrams relating the mother’s news from afar. But nor is the point to contrast small lived facts with grand events. It is a matter of defining the gap through which stories arise, through which the story is written as differing from, but also as belonging to, life and composed of its materials.
The ‘First Tales’, or stories, could mean exactly that. Indeed, these stories are not the first ones that João Guimarães Rosa wrote. And he would not hesitate to publish his ‘Third Tales’ despite his second tales never having existed. No more than he would hesitate to call one of his stories ‘The Third Bank of the River’, even though a three-banked river seems inconceivable. The third bank, in fact, is rather its middle, but it is a singular middle that has become an immobile bank, the middle of a pond-river that heads out to no sea. The first stories are to be understood in this way. They are the edges of stories, quasi-stories that draw the edges of any story, the moments when life is separated from itself by being recounted, by being transformed into a ‘true life’: a life that has precisely no edges and that thus contravenes the Aristotelian principle of fiction – to have a beginning, a middle and an end and to be guided from the first to last sentence by an organized succession of causes and effects. João Guimarães Rosa does not aim to contrast traditional fiction with some supposedly modern autotelic logic. More than anyone else, he holds fiction to be a function of life – and especially, he says, of that life of the sertão, in which, once livestock and crop requirements are met, nothing else is to be done in some fazenda separated from its neighbour by several leagues than to make up stories.18 But, rightly, the life of the sertão – without history, populated with stories – must have been lived to know that life is not made fiction in the Aristotelian manner. And perhaps it is necessary to have some ‘critical tales’,19 some quasi-stories or experimental fables of the nothing and the almost nothing, of someone and no one, of the event and the non-event, to show how life is imperceptibly and radically separated from itself, how it becomes ‘true life’ by crossing the limit that separates what happens from what there is. The gap, precisely, is not what one habitually believes to be that which usually gives rise to the story. For this reason the first form – the simplest one – of the critical story involves a story that is expected but does not eventuate. An ‘expected’ story is one deduced from a situation and from the characters to be found in it. In ‘Famigerado’ (‘Notorious’), for example, the narrator is asked for his ‘opinion’ by a horse rider who, with a forbidding face and arms ready for a fray, comes accompanied by three henchmen.20 Upon hearing this horse rider state his name, a name known for leagues around to belong to a pitiless killer, there are grounds to fear the worst concerning the sort of opinion he is after. Yet the reason for the consultation is purely linguistic: this violent man wants to know whether he should feel insulted by a young, greenhorn government fellow who has qualified him as ‘Notorious’. And he will leave in good spirits after the narrator assures him, before his three witnesses, that the word simply means celebrated, famous, well known and carries no pejorative connotation in and of itself. The subject of the quarrel, the subject of old-style stories in which one killed to avenge oneself for an insulting word, is thus defused. Now it is resolved through the opinion of a linguist.
In ‘The Dagobé Brothers’, by contrast, a bloody outcome seems unavoidable. The eldest of a gang of four evil brothers is to be buried. He was killed by an honest man in an act of self-defence, but that changes nothing as to the violence to be expected from the three others. In life, one anticipates what will happen next in a story insofar as one knows how far individuals can go in accordance with what they are. So, when the honest murderer, to prove his good faith, suggests that he might be the fourth pallbearer, those present can only deplore the madness of this young man, who has just further provoked the how far, as if ‘what had already happened’ was not enough.21 The story is thus built upon the common formula of suspense, the question being to know at what moment that which one knows must happen will actually happen, a moment that narrative art consists in delaying to enable the tension to reach its peak. In this story, this moment arises when the body is in the grave and the three brothers are at last free to employ their arms for other things. Yet, at this point the event is brushed aside. The eldest of the survivors simply says what happened to be the case: their brother was a devil. And therewith the three of them take their leave of this site of tales and move to the big city. The story of the ‘Dagobé Brothers’ will have been an exemplary non-story: a liquidating of old-style stories – not simply of matters of endless vengeance but of stories in which there are situations and characters that hold within themselves a future that can be known.
‘True’ stories are therefore those in which the game is no longer about linking what is anticipated and what happens. The very subject of the tale here enters into contradiction with the necessity, which is anyway its own, to extend itself between a beginning and an end. It is carried out in an outside-time, the time of the unbegun, which, by definition, cannot be stopped. These tales around the almost nothing, which form the core of First Tales, may evidently be read as containing so many philosophical or religious allegories. Negative theology and learned ignorance, Franciscan starkness and the mystical union of contraries, all constantly suggest their interpretative lenses to the reader’s mind. Commentators have not forgone recourse to them. And on occasion João Guimarães Rosa holds out his hand to the exegetes by granting them the plainly clear Christian analogy of a young man dressed in white, appearing in the aftermath of a major earthquake and performing a few discreet miracles and blessings before re-ascending to another fatherland.22 But if this highly cultured man bore so well in mind all the doctrines that his stories were prone to illustrate, he clearly also bore in mind traditions of tales, fables and legends. And what his stories talk to us about is fiction itself, fiction and the suspension that it entails: not simply the suspension of disbelief – the simplest one, all-too-simple – but the suspension of that which had sustained belief itself; that is, the usual order of time, the customary way of occupying a space, of identifying oneself as an individual, of inscribing oneself in relations of filiation and of relating to forms of use and to objects of possession. The reference to the sertão as a place of natural fabulation ought not to mislead us: fiction is not the treasure that simple beings pass down from age to age along with family heirlooms and traditions of the land. It is the capacity to begin, time and again, the leap into the unbegun, to cross anew the edge and enter into spaces where an entire sense of the real is lost along with its identities and its points of reference.
This space is, for example, the fazenda, which serves to frame the novella exemplarily titled ‘No man, No Woman’. The justification of this title is twofold. First, none of the story’s characters has a name; but it may also be that they have never existed except in the head of the person seeking to reconstitute a story that seems to him to have occurred in a faraway house in times past, but to whose truth no witness can attest. The very identity of this ‘recollecting’ character is doubtful: throughout the story he is named ‘the boy’ in the third person, before he himself adopts the first person at the last moment – that of his return to the family house from which we never saw him leave – making him the indistinct narrator of his memories. And the characters whose – possible – story he recounts themselves have no proper names: around the boy there are – or allegedly were – the man, the young girl – apparently the daughter of the man – the young man (where from?) who is in love with her and the old bedridden woman around whom the story is built. She is ‘Nenha’, the one whose negative name says only the absence of name, identity or even precise place within the generational order. Indeed, no one knows any longer for how long this old lady, who does not recognize anything or anyone, has been there, lying in her bed like a child in a crib; no one knows whose mother, grandmother or great-grandmother she is or was. If the young girl is presented as the legendary princess in her tower, the old lady, for her part, is a princess in the castle tower who has returned to childhood, by dint of never having been woken up. She is a pure existence, extravagant, irresponsible, ‘visibly enduring beyond all the purlieus of ordinary life and old age, in perpetuity’.23 And this immobilized life prohibits the normal, happy end point of the tale: that the young girl marry the young man whom she loves and by whom she is loved. This young man’s desire is the normal desire of a ‘simple man’ eager to ‘live an ordinary life, using his own resources and following plain roads’.24 To this desire, the young woman opposes hers, which is also her duty: to remain alongside the old woman, in whom life has been forgotten, to remain steadfast to a life not subject to change, immobile to the ultimate immobility of death.
This life, in which nothing happens, is not simply the desire of a young woman remote from the world; it is the paradoxical place of fiction, the place without history in which stories may unfold. The young woman is the guardian of fiction, the guardian of this true life whose possibility must always be preserved within ordinary living itself, but whose line of separation must also be indefinitely redrawn. Joining up at this point are the story of the boy seeking to remember and the story of impossible love whose object it is. There has to be a life in which everything mingles and in which nothing is forgotten. There has also to be a time in which the boy, who has become a ‘person’, enters with the other characters into one and the same indistinct life. But ordinary life obeys a law of separation and forgetting. ‘No Man, No Woman’, in short, sums up in a few pages the moral that In Search of Lost Time unfolds over seven volumes: forgetting is the sole condition of memory; the absence of love is the place at which stories of love unfold; and true life is that which exists only in the margins of life, through a rupture of the temporal relations in accordance with which individuals depend upon one another.
‘No Man, No Woman’ ends with the boy’s emitting a cry of fury at his parents, whose lives unfold in the time of ordinary life and who mundanely want to know if he has carefully looked after his belongings and brought them back: ‘You don’t know anything, anything, you hear. You have forgotten everything you ever knew.’25 However, in ‘The Third Bank of the River’, it is the father himself who, though a sound and calm man, heads out in a canoe he has built for the purpose to the place where one forgets forgetting. In ancient mythology, Lethe was the river of forgetting across which the souls of the dead had to travel to be able to shed the memory of their previous lives and prepare themselves to enter into a new body. But literature is not mythology. It does not have you pass from one bank to another. It holds itself in the middle, in an interval that is itself without an edge. The unthinkable third bank of the river is this middle where the passage itself no longer passes. One day, without explanation – except perhaps one given to a witness who, of course, has disappeared – the father takes the path of this paradoxical middle. The problem is not whether it is possible to survive in a canoe in the middle of the water. Ancient religions would place means for survival in the barque of the dead, and the son discreetly deposits foodstuffs on the shore to serve this same function. But the father has not left for the bank of the dead. He has gone to the middle of the river, the middle at which that which comprises the very reality of every river is cancelled out: the fact of flowing into another river that, in turn, flows into the sea. For this barque, invisible most of the time, always reappears in the same place. The middle of the river is the inexistent point where Heraclitean paradoxes are refuted by a superior paradox, the point at which the river does not flow. Such is the unthinkable event, overwhelming, that the tale relates: ‘what had never been before, was’.26 The father chose to remain ‘in that stretch of the river, halfway across’. This driftless excess, this immobile crossing of the law of ‘what there is’, stands as an enormous question mark over those who, like the simple young man from ‘No Man, No Woman’, engage in ‘ordinary living’, as that which flows from the past toward a future. Such are here his daughter who gets married, becomes a mother and runs away with her husband far from that father of hers who does not want to see his grandson even from afar; then his wife who ends up going off to live with her daughter. It is the son, the narrator, who remains alone on the bank of ordinary living beings ‘with all life’s cumbrous baggage’,27 as the guardian of one who has withdrawn to the middle, to the outside-time. Accomplishing his role as a guardian, however, requires even more of him. He is obliged to become the inheritor, the successor, of one who, by going to take up his place in the middle of the river, has rejected all filiation. This is the exchange that, standing on the bank, the son suggests to the father seated in his canoe. The father seems to accept it, but the son, when the time comes, shirks from enacting it at the last instant. The story is thus doomed to end on a twofold absence. The father disappears for good, the son remains at the shore. He is ‘one who never was’, one who will henceforth ‘remain silent’, remain in the silence.28 ‘True life’ does not know itself; it is destined to remain in the interval between absence and silence, between two lost inexistences and at the bank of the river that flows ever to separate them.
To draw as far as the edge of silence, the edgeless edges of that absence – that is the work of fiction. This is the work it accomplishes and simultaneously renders imperceptible by confiding it to its characters, the reasonable and methodical mad people whose extravagances calmly undo ordinary life’s points of reference. In ‘Nothingness and the Human Condition’ this work is accomplished by the man ‘no one really knew’, the fairy-tale-like king hidden behind the appearance of the character least fitting to fiction’s enchantments: a wealthy and honest landowner. Upon his wife’s passing, Uncle Mam’Antônio withdraws ‘into ambiguous spaces and moments’.29 But he does not go as far as the interval nor shut himself up in any secret room. His project, on the contrary, is to completely clear an area of which his property is the centre, which ultimately means to make a space without property. Encapsulating this is the maxim that he adopts as his catchphrase, that he presents to his daughter’s painful questions about life’s vicissitudes, and that he always uses as an explanation to the workers carrying out his project: ‘faz de conta’. ‘Make believe’, says the translation. But at issue is not consenting to a semblance, suspending disbelief to one’s own advantage. Once again, what must be suspended is the belief in ‘what there is’. What the father’s extravagance suggests is the creation of the de-familiarized, de-domesticated space of true life: a space extending to the peaks, a space to which a gaze can go when it faces no obstacles – in short, the space of the tale. To this end, Mam’Antônio mobilizes roadworkers and gardeners to flatten the mountains, and destroy the clumps of trees and flower beds that the reasonable, deceased spouse had once enjoyed. His daughters indeed come to find themselves excluded from this space, quickly married off to sons-in-law who will take them to live far away. But Man’Antônio will also exclude himself from it, as little by little he gives all his possessions to those who gravitate around him – servants of all skin colours, field hands and cowboys – before vanishing himself, his body becoming ashes in the final bonfire that devastates the house. Fiction thus devours its impossible place, at a distance/in the middle, consuming the extravagant characters that it brought to exist for a moment.
Not that there cannot be happy fictions nor felicitous ways of figuring its work, that is to say the nothing that separates our condition from itself. Contrary to the lover rejected by Nenha’s guardian is the young man of ‘Cause and Effect’. In a moment of self-evidence, this young man finds the love that he did not seek but that was nonetheless waiting for him in the dwelling of a Sleeping Beauty of whose existence he was unaware, led there by one he was following most prosaically: simply a fleeing cow, a cow that knew, for her part, exactly where she was going – to her former owners. Following the small cow who was ‘surpassing her destiny’ meant taking the chance to enter into ‘the unbegun, the undecided, the disoriented, the necessary’.30 This moment of encountering the unbegun is intensified in another story. In ‘Substance’ it becomes the very temporal texture itself – a love story that is as improbable as it is happy between the timid fazendeiro Sionésio and the miserable Cinderella, daughter of a leper and of a woman of easy virtue, who is employed in the court of the fazenda to do the tough work of breaking the hard cassava, with its eye-dazzling white flour, on the slab. The cassava’s glaring whiteness is all that is needed for the prince to recognize the princess in the servant and for both of them to come together, advancing where they stood still, in the place and time suited to the happiness of true life – of fiction: the event of the non-fact and of non-time, ‘living at the vanishing point and never stopping’.31
The limitless point, the immeasurable moment, of course, extends its infinity only as close as possible to the end point at which every story told must end. Not because the sad reality of life gives the lie to the illusions of fiction. But because the end itself is a means of paying tribute to the capacity of fiction through which life infinitizes itself. Every story is, then, two things at once: a leap of the infinite into the finite and a passage from the finite into the infinite. Two stories, rather different in their tonalities, encapsulate this: ‘Hocus Psychocus’ and ‘Soroco, His Mother, His Daughter’. The first tale is about a secondary school, where, excited at being chosen to perform in the play at the school fete, some boys are busy rehearsing under the direction of a teacher. Other boys are curious to know what the play is about, so in order to keep it a secret, the chosen boys invent and spread a false story, the upshot being that the jealous boys make up a third story. Performance day arrives and an unexpected incident obliges the prompter, who is also the narrator, to assume the lead role, and so the teacher has to retreat to the prompter hole to take his place. As this happens, the troupe’s loose cannon begins to act out the wrong story, the one made up by the jealous boys, to which the protagonist and his partners respond, of course, by playing out their own ‘wrong story’, made up to keep the teacher’s story a secret. The vertigo of this battle of stories overcomes the audience and the actors on stage who, having forgotten who they were, are ‘transformed’ beyond all belief,32 taking flight in love, in words, in the very equivalence of these latter – that is ‘true life’ – until the point at which the hero becomes gripped by anxiety: how to end this time that no longer goes by? The unending happiness of words cannot put an end to the unending happiness of words. A single solution remains: to walk while talking to the front of the stage, to the edge of the edge, and somersault into the audience. After which point the world stops; after which point, tomorrow, the usual games resume: the battle of fists to find out which story was the best.
Contrasting with the secondary school farce, seemingly, is the lament of ‘Soroco, His Mother, His Daughter’. Here there is no dramatic expectation or being surprised by extravagant behaviour. The drama has already been played out. And no ‘madman’ has to impose his scenario of true life and arrested time. The madwomen here are ‘real’ madwomen, Soroco’s mother and daughter; and for them, arrested time, time without beginning or end, is simply what awaits them in Barbacena, the city of the lunatic asylum, to which they will be taken by a train carriage with barred windows. The account thus seems to be merely the story of an end without beginning, the effect of a misfortune that, for these sorts of people, has always been. It seems it can be reduced to the anonymous crowd’s farewell ceremony to these nameless unfortunates. But something more happens. Almost nothing. Her arm aloft, the young madwoman begins to sing: a tune with neither a right key nor precise lyrics; a song similar, then, to the rusty pump noise emitted by the ageless and sexless creature from Mrs Dalloway, as well as to the idiot’s moan in The Sound and the Fury, namely, the nothing that the novelist forthwith transformed into a whole. Now, this false tune that no one can identify, this senseless concentrate of time and injustice that seems definitively to confine the young woman in her madness, will, in João Guimarães Rosa’s story, produce entirely the opposite effect. It will spread from mouth to mouth as if on an opera stage. At the moment of departure, it is taken up again by the mother, with a voice that slowly grows stronger, accompanying her granddaughter in an interminable song; those present will not become clearer about the lyrics but they will be able to recognize a story of ‘the great vicissitudes of this life, which can hurt you for any reason at all, anywhere, early or late’.33 Then, after the wagon has moved off, Soroco suddenly takes it up on his own, before the crowd also joins him like a choir in unison and sees him to his empty house. ‘We were going with him, as far as that song could go’, says the last sentence of the story. But as it happens there is no limit to this ‘as far as’. The senseless song, the song of misfortune shared across the line separating rational people from the insane and those who are still there from those who will never again be there, now extends endlessly into the interstice of the random occurrence. By blurring the division between human song and the sounds of beasts or things, it holds those who are no longer there forever in a common world. The madwoman went beyond anything that might have been expected of her, and the crowd’s solidarity followed her by going beyond its expected forms, by beginning to sing the song that it was unaware of, by becoming this song itself. Fiction is that by which the as far as is exceeded. The choir of anonymous individuals accompanying the lone man to his empty dwelling is there to remind us: fiction’s excess is not the illusion that consoles in the face of reality, but neither is it the exercise of the virtuosity of the clever. It belongs to the capacity that life has, among the humblest and most common people, to be carried beyond itself in order to take care of itself.
Literature reaffirms in its specific way the capacity to invent belonging to each person: to the madwoman who makes up her song, to the sertanejo who makes up his stories, and to the writer who makes up their stories. Those who say that ‘the literature of writers’ is pointless, since the people of the sertão will not read it, simply mean to say that nobody ought to recount stories, that everyone should simply believe what there is, simply hold fast to what is. The writer’s article of faith is that the sertanejos would cease to tell stories if he ceased to tell their stories. This article of faith is one that no cultural sociology can investigate in order to verify. This is why the writer himself must verify it, and there is only one way to do this – by writing.