Towards the end of Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, the stumbling ingénue of a hero Tyrone Slothrop sets off on a commando-raid. The territory he and his cohorts move through is a giant metropolis, a “factory-state” in which capital, technology and power, perfectly co-calibrated, send airships drifting through urban canyons, past chrome caryatids and roof-gardens on skyscrapers that themselves shoot up and down on elevator-cables: a conurbation Pynchon calls the “City of the Future” or “Raketen-Stadt.” The raid’s target, though, is not a building; nor is it a person; it is, rather, time. Slothrop has been dispatched to rescue “the Radiant Hour,” which associates of a villain known only as “the Father” have “abstracted from the day’s 24.” As Slothrop, suiting up and setting out, is handed a note informing him, in matinee adventure style: “The Radiant Hour is being held captive, if you want to see her . . . ,” the bullets zinging past his head “conveniently” give over to a clock face, drifting, like the airships, through the sky.
How do we digest or get a bearing on this bizarre episode? The fact that one of the “Floundering Four” commandos is a “very serious-looking French refugee kid” named Marcel, “a mechanical chess-player dating back to the Second Empire” given to long-winded monologues, might point us towards Proust, inviting us to view Slothrop’s escapade as a reworking of that other raid on lost (or misappropriated) time, stage-managed by a writer who has put something extra in his madeleines. The intention was probably there on Pynchon’s part—yet as I re-read the sequence a few weeks ago, my mind kept drifting (maybe it was the Franco-Germanic mix of Marcel and Raketen-Stadt, the general elevation of the setting) to another scene, another half-occluded precedent; one that plays out in Switzerland.
Thomas Mann’s equally mammoth work The Magic Mountain announces, right from the outset, an obsession with time. As Hans Castorp (another ingénue protagonist) winds his way up through mountains to the Davos sanatorium to visit his tubercular cousin, the space through which his train chuffs starts to take on “the powers we generally ascribe to time.” Numerous temporal meditations follow—on duration, on persistence, continuity, recurrence. As though foreseeing that Davos would become the seat of the World Economic Forum, Mann has one of Hans’s teachers, Naphta, explain the global financial market to him as a temporally-grounded system, a mechanism for “receiving a premium for the passage of time—interest, in other words.” At the outset of a chapter titled “By the Ocean of Time,” the form and very possibility of the book we are reading become similarly index-linked to time, “For time is the medium of narration.” “Can one tell—that is to say, narrate—time, time itself, as such, for its own sake?” Mann wonders. No: “That would surely be an absurd undertaking.” Yet he concedes that any narrative contains two kinds of time: that of its actual time, the time it takes to iterate itself; and that of its content, which is “extremely relative,” such that a narrative that concerned itself with the events of five minutes might take up hundreds of hours, and, conversely, the contents of a moment’s iteration might expand beyond “the extreme limit of man’s temporal capacity for experience.” The latter, expansive instances, he claims, are possessed of “a morbid element” and are akin to opium dreams in which “something had been taken away” from the brain of the sleeper, “like the spring from a broken watch.”
Hans plans to stay at the sanatorium for three weeks; but, himself diagnosed with TB on arrival, is held up there for seven years. His illness not only forces an extended delay, time off from his work as an engineer, a general time-out from his life; it also imposes its own temporality. When you are ill in bed, Mann writes,
All the days are nothing but the same day repeating itself—or rather, since it is always the same day, it is incorrect to speak of repetition; a continuous present, an identity, an everlastingness—such words as these would better convey the idea. They bring you your midday broth, as they brought it yesterday and will bring it tomorrow; and it comes over you—but whence or how you do not know, it makes you quite giddy to see the broth coming in—that you are losing a sense of the demarcation of time, that its units are running together, disappearing; and what is being revealed to you as the true content of time is merely a dimensionless present in which they eternally bring you the broth.
Colored by shades of eternity and entropy or run-down, illness-time is time that is drifting towards death. But it is also, in classic Freudian fashion, time that is homing in on pleasure. Illness “makes men more physical,” Mann notes; racking women’s frames, consumption brings about a “heightening and accentuation” of their curves and outlines, turns them into beings “exaggerated by disease and rendered twice over body.” “Pthisis and concupiscence go together,” remarks Dr. Behrens, while his colleague Dr. Krokowski talks of love, forced underground by “fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure,” reemerging “in the form of illness. Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.”
These lines of thought play out dramatically (as those of you who have read the book will know) in the relation between Hans and fellow patient Clavdia Chauchat (her name, beside denoting femininity and lust, is also that of a make of machine-gun). Hans experiences his desire for her as an extension and intensification of his illness. In a gesture that redeems a romantic cliché by literalizing it, Mann has Hans’s temperature, constantly thermometer-gauged, rise two notches every time he sees her; and, in a similar materialization of chivalric code, he makes him carry around an X-ray of her lungs, pressed tight against his chest: thus she becomes, like Pynchon’s stolen hour, both radiant and negative, abstracted. Though she remains beyond his reach for virtually the whole novel, he mounts a seduction in the book’s central episode, which takes place on Walpurgis Night—a festival or holiday abstracted even from the abstracted life of the sanatorium, time out of the time-out (“almost,” as Hans puts it, “outside the calendar, intercalated, so to speak, a twenty-ninth of February”). The seduction sequence begins with him reenacting (unbeknown to Clavdia) another episode that shaped his childhood when, aged thirteen, he borrowed a pencil from a boy on whom he had a crush. Recalling the childhood incident earlier in the novel has already caused him to be rapt back into the past “so strongly, so resistlessly” that his present body has seemed like that of a cadaver “while the actual Hans Castorp moved in that far-away time and place”; replaying it on Walpurgis Night as he asks Clavdia for her pencil places him, once more, “on the tiled court of the schoolyard.”
Thus a complex, spring-like structure opens up, stretching and contracting such that quite separate moments touch or get embedded one within the other, with a synecdoche or marker for the act of writing (the pencil) running through it all. Lavishing praise on Clavdia’s flesh “destinée pour l’anatomie du tombeau,” Hans asks to die with his lips pressed to hers. Most commentaries on The Magic Mountain interpret the fact that Clavdia leaves the party at this point as a rebuff; yet her words in the doorway—“N’oubliez pas de me rendre mon crayon”—Hans’s pointedly late return to his own room, and Mann’s mention of more words exchanged between them that night at “a later interval, wordless to our ears, during which we have elected to intermit the flow of our story along the stream of time, and let time flow on pure and free of any content whatever” strongly suggest the opposite. If it is the writing implement that opens the approach to death-like pleasure up, though, it is the same one that, in Mann’s hands, places its consummation in a blind spot. Either way, content-time kicks back in the next day, and Clavdia leaves, returning much later as the companion of the older Mynheer Peeperkorn, who, standing between Hans and her, becomes one more of Hans’s surrogate fathers. Peeperkorn will commit suicide, while Hans, discharged, is sent off to the front of World War I, as the novel’s ironic ending sees the long, intimate, death-like intermission of the sanatorium give over to the wholesale mechanized slaughter of historical progression.
•
HANS CASTORP, of course, isn’t the only literary hero with TB. We could all probably name a handful of writers who succumbed to it, and scores more characters. One of this second group whose story doesn’t get discussed so much these days, not least because of the racist epithet in its title, is the hero of Joseph Conrad’s novella The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” The setting (for those of you who need reminding) is a British Merchant vessel sailing back to London from Bombay—a little world, just like Mann’s sanatorium, with its hierarchies and operational rhythms, isolated from the larger one it micro-mirrors, set this time at a degree zero of elevation, on a literal ocean. As the first mate calls the roster prior to casting off, and notes that they are one man short (there is an extra name written down there, but he can’t make it out; it is smudged), he is about to dismiss the crew when a voice calls out: “Wait!” The mate, incensed by the insubordination, demands to know who dared to tell him to wait—whereupon a black man steps out of the shadows, a West Indian sailor named James Wait.
No sooner has Wait announced his presence than a cough leaps from him, “metallic, hollow, and tremendously loud; it resounded like two explosions in a vault; the dome of the sky ran to it, and the iron plates of the ship’s bulwarks seemed to vibrate in unison.” He will spend most of the trip laid up with his coughing; on the rare occasions when he steps out on deck, “a black mist emanated from him . . . something cold and gloomy that floated out and settled on all the faces like a mourning veil.” Conrad heaps funereal symbols (corpses, coffins, shrouds) upon Wait; and Wait welcomes the association, telling the crew he is dying at every opportunity, even seeming “to take a pride in that death.” “He would,” writes Conrad, “talk of that coming death as though it had been already there, as if it had been walking the deck outside, as if it would presently come in to sleep in the only empty bunk; as if it had sat by his side at every meal.” The effect on the crew is complex. Wait’s morbidity fills them with trepidation, while his black face repulses them. At the same time, his plight awakens their humanity. They indulge him; cover for him; bring him meals, even plunder the ship’s supplies to pander to him. Before long, they become loyal yet dread-filled servants, “the base courtiers of a hated prince.” The forecastle in which they lodge him turns into a “church” where men, entering, speak only “in low tones”—or, in more pagan shades, a “shrine where a black idol, reclining stiffly under a blanket, blinked its weary eyes and received our homage.” “He had the secret of life, that confounded dying man, and he made himself master of every moment of our existence.”
But is he genuine? In an exchange with his fellow crew member Donkin, a work-shy syndicalist whose shirking has nothing of the metaphysical about it (Conrad’s novella is decidedly not tailored to a liberal readership), Wait admits to “shamming” his sickness in order to obtain an easy passage. And yet even as he speaks the words, more coughs rattle his by-now skeletal frame. When the captain accuses him of shamming too (as it turns out, from compassion—he, like the rest of them, can see that Wait is doomed), Wait claims to have recovered; the captain confines him to his forecastle, and the crew almost mutiny. Yet the stand-off seems more philosophical than political: Wait’s “steadfastness to his untruthful attitude” (a double-edged term, since Wait is lying twice over: lying about being well, and lying about lying in the first place) “in the face of the inevitable truth had,” writes Conrad, “the proportions of a colossal enigma.” The whole ship teeters on the edge of an abysmal ambiguity; “nothing in her was real.” It drifts into the doldrums, which (since it is sail-powered) delays its onward passage—a hiatus that seems to affirm that “The universe conspired with James Wait,” since he, too, as he drifts deathwards, is borne into “regions of memory that know nothing of time.” “There was,” writes Conrad, “something of the immutable quality of eternity in the slow moments of his complete restfulness.” And, as in The Magic Mountain, lurking somewhere in the depths of this un-clockworked death-space is a half-buried scene of sexual pleasure: in his delirium, Wait mumbles about a “Canton Street girl . . . She chucked a third engineer of a Rennie boat . . . for me. Cooks oysters just as I like . . . ”
After he finally dies and disappears, canvas-wrapped, into the sea, the wind picks up and the Narcissus speeds onwards to London. The last scene sees the crew collect their pay (Wait’s own salary, since he has no claimants, is put aside, retained) in the shipping company’s office just beside the Royal Mint—for a merchant ship’s passage is, after and above all, a move in the great monetary game of industry and trade. Yet, under the name of Wait, a dark aporia has opened up somewhere inside the game-space; a suspension or negation of its logic; a threat, or at least the kernel of one, to its very continuation.
•
AS I WROTE this essay, I kept hearing a tune playing in my head, as you do. It was a particular tune, repeating over and over again: MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.” You know the one: it is built around a single four-beat musical phrase that loops round and round, while MC Hammer overlays the verbal phrases “U can’t touch this” and “Stop! Hammertime.” How logical is the Unconscious. This was no random, meaningless distraction: the song couldn’t have been more germane to the thoughts I was trying to piece together—for doesn’t it, like Conrad’s novella, feature a black man who tells us to wait? A little detective work, the kind you can easily do on Wikipedia, reveals the repeating tune to already be a repetition: MC Hammer has sampled it from Rick James’s “Superfreak,” removing James’s lyrics (“She’s a very kinky girl / The kind you don’t take home to mother”) and inserting his refrain “U can’t touch this” in the little pause, the suspended beat that opens just before the tune loops round again. We get this opening refrain three times; then, in the “break-down” coda separating one verse from the next, its rejoinder: “Stop! Hammertime”—as though, just like Wait, Hammer were baptizing the hiatus with his own name.
•
CONRAD’S NOVELLA was first published, in 1897, with a preface that is generally taken as the author’s overriding literary manifesto. Drawing an analogy between the manual laborer and the writer, Conrad calls the latter a “worker in prose”—but, counterintuitively, links the great literary work not to a labor’s successful completion, but rather to its suspension. “To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and color, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve.” Arrest and pause are the key terms here; also reserved, which conveys the sense of some great bounty or reward that, like Wait’s salary (or Clavdia, or the Radiant Hour), has been withheld, removed to a location beyond normal reach. Conrad’s preface, for all its talk of pauses and arrests, is equally spatial: the writer “descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal.” That the descent into and re-emergence from this dark region “binds the dead to the living” by holding up a “rescued fragment” of truth to the light gives it a thoroughly Orphic character—and turns the entire preface, for me, into a kind of dry run for that seminal twentieth-century literary manifesto that Maurice Blanchot would publish fifty years later under the title “The Gaze of Orpheus.” I have written about this at some length elsewhere, so will confine myself to noting here that Blanchot carries Conrad’s motifs of arrest and incompletion one step further: what’s remarkable about Orpheus, he points out, is not that he manages to rescue the lost radiant object, but that (in looking back) he interrupts and vandalizes even his own labor, bringing back to the light not Eurydice’s presence but rather her absence.
This logic of the negative pervades all Blanchot’s work. As though also thinking of “hands busy about the work of the earth,” he writes: “Take the trouble to listen to a single word: in that word, nothingness is struggling and toiling away, it digs tirelessly, doing its best to find a way out, nullifying what encloses it”—this in an essay called “Literature and the Right to Death.” No writer is more death-obsessed than Blanchot; and, for him, death is intimately tied in with the question of time. His short novella Death Sentence, also utterly Orphic, narrates an encounter between a man and his dead female friend whose corpse he visits, during which visit, despite remaining quite dead, she sits up and chats casually with him—for a while. Its original French title, L’Arrêt de Mort, contains the double sense of a condemnation and a temporary reprieve or suspension (an arrête), as though the judge’s hammer hovered in mid-air above its block. His later, autobiographical essay L’Instant de ma Mort recounts his experience of facing a firing squad during the Second World War—feeling, despite everything, a rush of joy as the soldiers, “in an immobility that arrested time,” pointed their guns at him; then, when the actual shooting inexplicably failed to happen (he would live another sixty years), a perpetual sense of carrying “the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance”—L’instant de ma mort désormais toujours en instance. Writing of death elsewhere, he distinguishes la mort, death itself, from mourir, dy-ing: where the first would be a thing that one could grasp, experience, consume (an unrealizable fantasy—yet one that underlies the entire tragic and Romantic literary traditions), the second is a neutral, uncontainable, unmasterable drifting, a movement of absenting. Thus, for the Blanchot of The Writing of the Disaster, dying is the opposite of death: it is “the incessant imminence whereby life lasts, desiring.”
Dy-ing, desir-ing: in grammatical terms, these non-finite verbs belong to the gerund—the form that, in English, also serves as the present participle. The tense, if you like, of Hans Castorp’s eternally arriving soup. Or, to take another high-modernist literary instance, of Addie Bundren’s passage through the novel whose very title contains Blanchot’s gerund: As I Lay Dying. This work contains or concentrates so many of the processes and motifs we’ve been looking at here. Not only does Addie, like Wait, slowly and languorously die, but the hiatus mushrooms outwards even after the death-moment: while her family transport her coffin to the burial place she has stipulated, encountering delays at every step, the corporeality that Mann associates with illness is taken to its own zero-degree as her rotting corpse draws buzzards from the sky and sends townspeople running gagging from its path. Advancing “with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress,” the family edges towards a flooded river, and Addie’s son Darl muses, in a gesture that will be familiar: “It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality.” He continues: “It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread.” It is into this accretion that Addie’s body threatens to disappear as the flood waters sweep the coffin from the cart. But Darl rescues it—and a few pages later, in the novel’s most stunning sequence, Faulkner gives the dead Addie her own monologue; Eurydice, rather than Orpheus, speaks.
She speaks both in and of the negative. “I learned,” she says, “that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at.” Even the word love “is just a shape to fill a lack.” Lying beside her husband Anse, who has tricked her by hiding inside that last word,
I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar.
Anse is, she tells us, dead; her revenge on him consists in not letting him know that, and her marital bond in the fact “that I did not even ask him for what he could have given me: not-Anse. That was my duty to him, to not ask that, and that duty I fulfilled. I would be I; I would let him be the shape and echo of his word.” Her affair with the pastor Whitfield is conducted largely in the hope that the Christian schema of sin and subsequent redemption will act as a funnel “to shape and coerce” the “terrible blood” of existence into a form of presence and equivalence, but since divinity itself is just “the forlorn echo of the dead word high in the air” (and “salvation is just words too”), the affair ends—which places her inside a kind of timelessness in which “to me there was no beginning nor ending to anything.” And occupying this space, this temporality, she tells us in a fascinating turn of phrasing, “I even held Anse refraining still, not that I was holding him recessional . . . ”
These words need some unpacking. Refraining is the more straight-forward: I take it to mean that she is holding herself back from revealing Anse to himself as the not-Anse that, to her, he more profoundly is—maintaining him, to use the kind of photographic diction X-ray-clasping Hans Castorp might understand, in false-positive mode by keeping out of sight the actual negative from which this positive is (again and again, an ongoing illusion) printed. Recessional is more complex though. The OED gives recessional as: “1. Of or belonging to the recession or retirement of the clergy and choir from the chancel to the vestry at the close of a service; esp. recessional hymn, a hymn sung while this retirement is taking place. 2. Belonging to a recess (of Parliament).” Recess, in turn, is given (inter alia) as “The act of retiring, withdrawing, or departing . . . a period of cessation from usual work or employment . . . a place of retirement, a remote, secret or private place . . . a niche or alcove . . . to place in a recess or in retirement; to set back or away . . . ” It is a long entry, spanning architectural, juridical, anatomical and a host of other contexts—not least economic (aren’t we now living through a recession?). If Addie is holding Anse refraining, recessional describes the manner in which she is not holding him, names the inner sanctum into which she is denying him entry (can’t touch this), the time-out-of-time that will never be measured on his clock-face, governed by his legislature—and, in so doing, names the suspended or abstracted beat around whose absence the whole mechanism of the book is orchestrated. As I Lay Dying, for all its entropy and breakdown, is a neatly circular novel in which all actions come back round as the cycle of life rotates: Addie’s son Cash breaks the same leg twice, her daughter Dewey Dell gets screwed over (or screwed) twice, and so forth; and Anse, in the final punchline, marries the woman from whom he borrowed the spade he has just dug Addie’s grave with. The corpse may be disposed of, the cycle restarted, but the recess has staked its claim right at its core, carved out its niche at twelve o’clock of midnight and high noon.
•
A PATTERN IS, I hope, emerging here. If I have been drawing on works that, despite their evident preoccupation with issues of race and gender, were all authored by white men, this is not simply from a placid conservatism. Rather, it is an attempt to tease out (draw into the light, Conrad would say) a rationale, or counter-rationale, working both in and, perhaps, against literature’s very canon. That the texts all come from the high-modernist period is no coincidence either—for isn’t that when an exponentially accelerating industrialization, its accompanying technologies and ideologies, not only consolidated their claim (staked at least a century earlier) as the prime subject of literature and art but also radically reshaped its forms? Perhaps I’m hoping, in some paranoid (Pynchon-influenced) way, for a Eureka! instant; hoping to unearth a codex, a Rosetta Stone that would decode this moment and its legacy, both outside of and within—even as—literature. That, of course, is as much a fantasy as the Romantic/tragic one of owning one’s own death: there is no single codex. But, I’d suggest, the closest thing we’re going to get to one is the corpus of Mallarmé. Not only did he break form down until it reached its own zero-degree; he carried out this overhaul as part of an ongoing and active theorization of literature itself. As Derrida points out, whatever else Mallarmé seems to be describing, he is always also writing about the operation of writing, feeling his way around the contours of the book-to-come, the livre to which everything is destined to belong. I’ve argued elsewhere that without Mallarmé there would be no Joyce; and the same could be said of everyone from William Burroughs to John Cage. Barthes summed up twentieth-century literary activity by saying: “All we do is repeat Mallarmé—but if it’s Mallarmé we repeat, we do right.” How much more relevant, then, is the great thinker of the “virtual,” of total legibility and omni-data, to the twenty-first?
A million things could be said about Mallarmé and the subject still be barely breached. But we are running out of room—so let’s, by way of sketching out a much, much larger conversation to be had, home straight in on this fact: that Mallarmé is obsessed with the question of the pause, the interval, the recess. In a sketch from Divagations that seems to rehearse, to a t, Conrad’s scene of interrupted labor, he presents workmen, “artisans of elementary tasks,” taking a break from digging, lying around in such a manner as to “honourably reserve the dimension of the sacred in their existence by a work stoppage, an awaiting, a suicide.” In an 1885 letter to Verlaine he writes:
In the final analysis, I consider the contemporary era to be a kind of interregnum for the poet, who has nothing to do with it: it is too fallen or too full of preparatory effervescence for him to do anything but keep working, with mystery, so that later, or never, and from time to time sending the living his calling card—some stanza or sonnet—so as not to be stoned by them if they knew he suspected that they didn’t exist.
An extraordinary formulation: the poet, occupying the interregnum, is dead—by implication, since he’s differentiated from “the living” to whom he sends his calling card (the work). But, in so doing, he refrains from giving the lie to the pretense of their existence—in other words, and at the risk of being not just once but twice dead (stoned, martyred), the poet plays the role of Addie Bundren. Plays it from the recess: another passage in Divagations pictures Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, his great tome forever kept from sight, withheld, reserved, knocking at the front door “like the sound of an hour missing from clock faces”:
Midnights indifferently thrown aside for his wake, he who always stood beside himself, and annulled time as he talked: he waved it aside as one throws away used paper when it has served its function; and in the lack of ringing to sound a moment not marked on any clock, he appeared . . .
Yet this timeless appearance, “from the point of view of History,” is not “untimely” but “punctual”—for, Mallarmé continues, “it is not contemporary with any epoch, not at all, that those who exalt all signification should appear”; they are both “projected several centuries ahead” and “turned toward the past.” Both poetry and history demand such an appearance, and at the same time find themselves quite at a loss to locate it within their own parameters, their bounds or measures. In “L’action restreinte” this situation takes on a distinctly political hue. We are, Mallarmé tells us, as he sketches a Pynchonesque scenario of rapid transit though some great metropolis, approaching a tunnel, “the epoch,” a “forever time”:
time unique in the world, since because of an event I have still to explain, there is no Present, no—a present does not exist . . . Lack the Crowd declares in itself, lack—of everything. Ill-informed anyone who would announce himself his own contemporary, deserting, usurping with equal impudence, when the past ceased and when a future is slow to come, or when both are mingled perplexedly to cover up the gap . . . So watch out and be there.
There is, in the offing, lurking, “pulsing in the unknown womb of the hour,” an event—yet one that cannot name itself, nor even find a solid time-platform to arise and stand on. No wonder Alain Badiou turns to Mallarmé when he wants to elucidate his core or signature concept: the event, which, standing on the edge of the void so as to interpose itself between the void and itself (another doubling accretion), has “no acceptable ontological matrix.” Calling up the “eternal circumstances” of the shipwreck in Un Coup de Des, Badiou calls Mallarmé “a thinker of the event-drama, in the double sense of the staging of its appearance-disappearance”:
every event, apart from being localized by its site, initiates the latter’s ruin with regard to the situation, because it retroactively names its inner void. The “shipwreck” alone gives us the allusive debris from which (in the one of the site) the undecidable multiple of the event is composed.
Fine. But what would Mallarmé’s un-named event be? Political revolution? Poetic epiphany? As Badiou points out, the central verb in Un Coup de Des, the one around which the whole text turns, is hésite: the master’s dice-clasping hand, poised above the waves, holds back (like that of Blanchot’s judge) from leaping into action, from descending to unleash the decisive cast. The only name that we could really give this “undecidable multiple” is Wait.
Derrida, too, turns at a key point in the trajectory of his thinking to Mallarmé—specifically, to the short text Mimique (which has been variously translated as “Dumb-show,” “Mime,” “Mimicry” and “Mimesis”). There, contemplating a mime-artist whose degree-zero corporeality renders his body both tool and subject of his performance, Mallarmé claims that what is illustrated is
but the idea, not any actual action, in a Hymen (out of which flows Dream), tainted with vice yet sacred, between desire and fulfillment, penetration and remembrance; here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false appearance of a present. That is how the mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice in the mirror: he thus sets up a medium, a pure medium, of fiction.
Derrida, of course, homes straight in on the between, hearing in Mallarmé’s entre the antra of a cave or grotto, the antara of an interval. “What counts here,” he writes, “is the between, the in-between-ness of the hymen”—symbol of marital union (Addie’s and Anse’s, for example) and membrane denoting separateness, through which “difference without presence appears, or rather baffles the process of appearing, by dislocating any orderly time at the center of the present.” It is this baffling dislocation that sets up the “pure medium of fiction.” Fiction would not be un-truth, as in Wait’s lie or double-lie, or Addie’s systematic pretense; nor would it be story, in Mann’s sense of the unfolding of a narrative around temporal flow; rather, it would be recessionality itself. Fiction would be Hammertime.
Between. In Un Coup de Des, in the long pause initiated by the master’s frozen gesture, a figure appears, feather—or pen—in cap: Hamlet, Western literature’s most celebrated avatar of hesitation. Everyone and everything in that play is suspended: between order and execution, word and deed, heaven and hell. Even death is recessive: Hamlet wishes for its consummation but sees only continuity, the gerund—which, of course, gives him pause; Polonius’s body starts to rot and smell under the staircase; the passage of Ophelia’s into the ground is interrupted. Re-reading it recently, I was struck by the number of times Julius Caesar was knowingly alluded to within its pages (an unusual move for Shakespeare)—which, in turn, sent me back to Brutus’s complaint about his own restless delay:
Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,
I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
Acting, here, means (once more) the precise opposite of action: it means the conception of the action to be done, and the foundation of the baffling interim that both conjoins this to and separates this from its consummation, its “first motion.” Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream. Tooldownage, implements (instruments) idle, waiting. In this most political of plays, this recess is called council, and man’s being a state . . . a little kingdom. Yet what’s truly revolutionary (in all senses of the word) here is not the putative end-goal, the murder of the Emperor or overthrow of state; it is the interim itself. Then is the time where insurrection lurks: then . . . then—he says it twice, the temporal qualifier doubles or accretes, as though to open up and ground its referent: the interim, interim-time. And that, as we know, is the time of fiction.
2014