Chapter 12

The Unforeseeable

It was a viva at the Sorbonne, serious business in those days of doctorates weighty as destinies. The thesis director was Professor Jean-Jacques Mayoux, a man I venerated, noble and implacable, stern as Saint Just, who called himself J-J in secret in order to share in the rages and indignations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, something I only heard about later, an upright man, probative as a surgeon's scalpel, a master who made his disciples feel the cutting edge of his knife, fond of laughter, a chaste lover of literary genius, thus it was that in the final days of his life in a hospital room, on the brink of agony, he bore up with a volume of Blake, a member of the Resistance naturally, though this I was unaware of almost to the day of his death – he wasn't one to boast.

Curmudgeonly, feared, sublime, and therefore, of course, loyal, a man of absolutes, knight of the realm of literature, knight of the faith, nothing could shake him. As for the shaking that Parkinson's disease had plagued him with his whole life long, he never conceded it so much as an inch of his mental life.

For him literature, in the folds of reality literature was the supreme reality.

In those days he was in the middle of old age, it seemed to me, that's how I saw him, me thirty-five, him having gone past eighty without slowing down.

The candidate was a nincompoop one of those dogged but utter duds capable, in time, of gangrening a professor's existence.

In those days of the old-fashioned State Doctorate there were some borderline cases: the candidate who spends twenty or thirty years not-writing his thesis right up to the day

Jean-Jacques Mayoux decided that wherever the nincompoop was he hogged all the oxygen, he never lacked the words to vent his disgust and lassitude.

The inflexible professor and the wishy-washy disciple had gone grey together.

At last.

On the thesis committee, two young professors, J. Aubert and myself. Besides which two indifferent old gentlemen, members of the Establishment, aged sheep who would follow the ram.

Joyce was the object of our lucubrations. I was a believer. I believed in literature, justice, rule of law, truth, I believed in their necessity and their fragility. In the name of these absolutes, I took the inane chapters of the nincompoop apart, piece by piece. J. Aubert was another just man. We deliberated. That's when J. Aubert and I discovered that Jean-Jacques Mayoux was giving every benefit of the doubt to the character he had been railing against for twenty years. I expostulated.

‘I myself am the most flabbergasted of all. I take back everything I said. I abjure and be damned’, says Mayoux. ‘Here and now I become my opposite. And the reason or the cause is that I have gone over to the other side. From where I am the world looks different, what was important to me does not matter anymore. I see it all.

‘Everything is simple, here where it is old, only life and death change places. What do I care about judgements, values, careers, ambitions? This poor fellow exists for a degree. Let him have it. It won't kill anyone. The universe won't even notice. All men are equal, as Genet would say, let all be equal. Let him have First Class Honours.’

And so it was: two Jacques and I against three, the ram and the sheep.

I liked Jean-Jacques Mayoux and I respected him.

So, I pondered, once one is round the bend, one can turn into one's opposite? Since that day I have never stopped wondering: when shall I turn into my opposite?

I'll never know who Jean-Jacques Mayoux was, was he J, or J.J. was he one or the other or both who didn't he want to be who will he turn out to have been in fact?

I have nothing in common with Jean-Jacques Mayoux except our love of literature, I'm sure I'll never turn into my opposite, I tell myself but each time I say ‘I'm sure’ my friend Jacques Derrida responds: don't say I'm sure I myself am not so sure you are sure of being sure nor that it is safe to be sure.

Who can swear never to leave herself behind, never to contradict herself, foreswear herself in the twinkling of an eye? In his Carnets, Proust, the great poet of epistolary flight and flighty beings, is reading a book about Ralph Waldo Emerson, someone just like himself

Emerson page 68 I'm leaving wife brother, I trust that this isn't just a fantasy. I have prisoners of my own to set free. If I blame myself for anything it is not for dreaming it's because my dreams have not yet taken my barn and house. Page 73 and 74 against visits. p. 114 every man is an orb endowed with infinite centrifugal force and only keeps his individuality at this price.1

In other words to find oneself one must run away from oneself or to put it another way one saves oneself only by running away from oneself. Who loves me flees me.

Have I ever turned into my opposite overnight? Was I centrifugal at the moment of being centripetal? More than once, alas.

I never thought I'd turn into a cat lover. But this has happened. Not that I was a hater or phobic. I had my reasons. I didn't want cat love not in my life. Similarly I wanted not to have children, I wanted none of them right up to the day I wanted them, nothing in the world could have made me want not to have them. My reasons had their reasons. One has no choice. One keeps up with oneself. One runs away from oneself. Things get decided. Especially the destined things. The ones that make life turn left instead of right. Things get decided. And by whom? By what? By whom by what it's just because.

By other forces which (are) lodged within us doze and dozing dream dreams which slyly take us where we swore not to go. Those forces: those reminiscences half repudiated half exhumed

in brief the foibles and weaknesses we inadmit to ourselves

What I want to do I end up not doing, so should I say I didn't want to do what I wanted to do? I'm not convinced, there was a struggle and I got the worst of it or rather it got the best of me is how it feels. Should I not want to do what I want to do so as to do what I want to do in spite of myself?

In 2001 I wanted above all to write a story and be done with the ghost of a book I'd been calling The Story for thirty odd years and which, each time I tried to sneak up on it, vanished into thin air, each time a substitute turned up in its place, thus more than once I had to lay volumes the size of empty tombs or cenotaphs in the trace of the vanished ghost, but that spring I had everything arranged so The Story would not get away, from top to toe I was equipped, I had a notepad in my breast pocket, I had my brother his right arm around me, coming off the plane I headed straight for my desk, instead of which I took the Certes Road with my brother, that was a day of unspeakable suffering, every step of the way I went in the opposite direction to my desire, I walked as if I had my feet on backwards, I clung to my brother so as not to put a primitive bullet through my head, I struggled, I fought myself off, I stumbled, I pushed myself away, Certes was the last place I wanted to go and I was going there, I wanted above all to go to the Secret which had been getting away from me for thirty years, there I was going and I didn't see it, I was dragging myself, I got a grip on my tongue and I pulled myself in spite of myself with all my strength where I didn't see I wanted to go, I have always done what I didn't want to do, I scared myself, therefore I have always done what the other willed, I told myself, I was telling the truth and didn't know what I was saying, thus I have always wanted to do what my unwill willed me to do I told myself. It's hell or its opposite and its opposite is me, I am drawn and quartered, I let myself be driven out of myself on the other side of myself, we'll go wherever you like my brother was saying, if only you knew! I told myself

and it is I nonetheless therefore an other who is doing this to me I thought the personal pronoun has been betrayed I came here to finally write The Story, as the book that is slipping out of my grasp has been called [. . .] I find myself in reality on the road to Certes to the left of my brother like a madwoman, like some hostility come out of my back, a wicked angel puts me in my place legs unsteady leaning on my beloved brother I drag myself to the rack without admitting it, it's not that I am giving in to my brother it's worse than that, murkier, I myself lock myself up outside myself, I make myself flee, [. . .] I don't even do what my brother wants but what my contrary wants [. . .] my brother isn't forcing me, when I said as we arrived in Certes: I don't want to go to Certes he responded tactfully: we'll go wherever you like. We took the road away from Certes, towards the Ocean. Where the road crossed the highway I said: let's go to Certes. And my brother took the direction opposite to the Ocean. He was happy to do as I wished, but the sin was already sinning in all directions again, against me against my brother, against my will.2

the truth is I was doing exactly what I wanted to do but I couldn't see that, I thought I was avoiding myself, getting myself off the track, things could hardly have been better plotted

I was betraying myself

Always I've done what I had no desire to do. Therefore I thought I have always given in to the other desire, hence I have always wanted to do what my unwill wanted to do. Every time I had no desire to love I've entered into love with the person I wouldn't have loved. I took the Certes road to not give in to what I resist. I have always emphatically resisted my resistances. I've stood up to myself and won.³

For the unforeseen to happen it has to get around all our best-laid plans, all hint of vigilance. One must be expecting nothing, no one

Make oneself blind. Itwantsblind.

Nothing foretells the tragedy. War is declared a long time before it is declared. One sees it coming. Tragedy, on the other hand, strikes out of the blue and in the back. It is a beautiful day. Suddenly, up pops destiny. Later that moment of mildness without a hint of a threat will keep replaying itself, the world was innocent the Ocean infinitely pure not a cloud so far as the eye could see. Not even a road. And yet a turn. At the turn of a familiar phrase, everything blows up. One was having a peaceful walk in one's thoughts and suddenly here one is, stuck in the middle of an impenetrable thorn bush, which therefore one could not have penetrated, there's the rub, this bush grew here all of a sudden just after and around me.4 Who would have thought it? What are you doing in the middle of the thornbush, the guard shouts. I'm not doing. It's the bush that's doing. Needless to say, for a thing like this to happen it had to be impossible, that one dropped one's pince-nez, that one can't find it, that one is half blind.

So how does the prickly unforeseen thing get there?

It didn't fall out of the sky or spring from the earth. This eruption is caused by a walk, tired of the peace and quiet, the bush was waiting for Kafka at a turn in his thoughts, his own bush, his own mental cruelty always about to catch him up, give him a shake, all he has to do is look away for a moment. The pince-nez was only there to mask the essential blindness.

There was a turn in fate. One missed it. All of a sudden, as if at a bend in the road, one sees. The bend is hard to believe. But all such bends have in common the slightness of the occasion. This slightness is the very essence of tragedy, its landscape, its particular brand of cruelty. All tragedies have for cause and emblem the infinitesimal, derisory, terribly small addition of an imponderable element, a leaf on the shoulder, a slip of the tongue, a moment of distraction, a tear caused by a speck of dust on a contact lens is taken for the tear of a bereaved madonna, the utterance of the word that sets fire to the powder. Without this nothing of a word the powder would have dozed on for hundreds of years. And what is this word which is the cause? A word, maybe a name, nothing special, but the bearer under its banal appearance of a secret, a thorn, a sting, a virus, imperceptible save for the one and only on whom the venom works. The being for whom this poison is destined does not even know before the accident that this or that letter of the alphabet is inimical to him, that this or that syllable means evil or maybe good, too much of a good thing. Only long and repeated experience has taught me that anything can happen when I am least expecting it via the letter and the phoneme G, gee and j'ai, everywhere gee and gene. But there are lots of other signs I still can't read. True, dreams have brought me news of a few virosignifiers. Which doesn't make me a seer or foreseer. It makes me blind in a different way. The scales form a skaleidoscope. All of Proust's narrator's misfortunes all of his luck and consequently the whole work hangs by the thread of a branch of a childhood eglantine and the colour pink. Not a soul to warn the child: Beware of rose! Beware in the garden, if the hose is green it's because the rose is concealed from you, what a shame your ears are asleep.

Day breaks, the sun is about to rise and still one fails to foresee destiny's pounce. Everything is visible and nothing is seen, everything is readable and nothing read. A garden hose, what a laugh, and yet neither more nor less than a bush full of thorns.

It's like for death, Montaigne's mental fiancée. Of her alone he thinks, he awaits her, he's expecting her, he yearns to seduce her, to reduce her, every day he prays against her, she will come, of that, of that alone he hasn't the slightest doubt, but when? he would like to know, knows he will not, all he knows is that she will come from the side or in back without warning, bump into him.

It's like the extraordinary day of his death, dead as in dead, an unthinkable day for a man in the pink of health who is sufficiently set in his philosophy to say – this is in the fabulous essay called ‘Of Exercitation’ – ‘that we only get one go at it, we are all apprentices the day we come to it.’ All the same, it is really to him that death arrives once, an unexpected death, untimely, utterly unforeseeable, and for which therefore he is utterly unprepared, a surprise-death, ahead of time, which does not keep him from dying again later, every time of course for the first and only time.

During our third troubles or second (I do not remember very well which), having gone out one day at a league from my house, who am seated in the middle of all the troubles of the French civil wars, thinking I was in such a safe place and so close to home that I had no need of better equipage, I had taken a gentle but not very firm mount. On my return, I had occasion to make use of this horse to do something that he was unused to, one of my people, a sturdy fellow, mounted on a powerful plough horse that had a desperate mouth, fresh into the bargain and vigorous, in order to show off and get ahead of his companions happened to kick it full speed into my path, and came down like a colossus on the little man and little horse, and overthrew us both with his suddenness and weight, sending us both head over heels: so that the horse lay senseless in one place, me ten or twelve paces beyond, dead, stretched out upside down, face bruised and scratched, my sword which I had in my hand, more than ten paces beyond, my girdle in pieces, no more able to move or think than a log.5

I note the circumstances of this admirable event. As always it is a beautiful day. We are off for a walk. The walk promises the unforeseeable.

My twenty-second birthday was when I gave birth to a neither-here-nor-there child, a child of different sort, where I thought to see my son exactly. One takes up maternity in order to continue humanity all of a sudden it's the other world, life as insurrection. They hadn't told me the unimaginable thing might happen: as I bent over this unforeseen newborn, I was born all of a sudden into a new story and everything had to start up again from zero, with no memory

I never know which dream is going to happen to me. I turn out the lamp, with joy and curiosity. What a joy to have to expect to find myself acted in a play I have not written, to have no idea what my next adventure or misadventure will be, to find myself en route for affairs in doubtful taste, to linger in a motley country where in my waking hours I would never set foot, to be home away from home in buildings as impenetrable as Kafka's bush, where, naturally, I get in trouble, to be grotesque if the dream so desires, to be judged, masked, betrayed, given a second chance, disgraced, to be at the mercy of every sort of demon, to enjoy all the mechanical problems of all means of transportation past and to come, to be unable before falling asleep to make any wish that will be granted, to be tricked rolled shown up dethroned.

Sometimes by day I encounter unpleasantness. There I am wounded, offended, into the bargain it is all going to happen all over again in a dream I tell myself mortified, this time I won't escape it. Whereupon I escape. The scene of my troubles shows up but with a time-lag, a few nights have gone by since the quake, here is the aftershock. But in a watered-down comic version. If I'm hoping for a precious apparition, I can always hope. Only on condition I expect nothing and no one does the dear ghost, against all hope, turn up. My dream does as it jolly well pleases and not me.

I never know which book I shall write. Every summer I go off to write the book I have no notion of. I don't even try to know, it's a waste of time. If I knew, I wouldn't go, wouldn't write.

I know only there's a book I shall write. The book is expecting me. A book. It will turn up in The House.

Last year I wrote a text entitled The Book I Don't Write.6 Every day I think about the book I don't write. I wrote this text for a symposium at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France on the occasion of donating most of my archives to them.

This was my way of laying the book-I-don't-write on the altar of the BNF.

The book of the book I don't write I was beginning to write. What would come of it?

Thus to the archive of the books that have come to me, that have turned up where I least expected them, I added the shadow or ghost of the book I don't write. From the-book-I-don't-write for cause, lineage, substitution, have come the books which have had themselves written by me.

I never know which book I shall write, to which book I shall go each July (when the wind is from the South) – I count on the south wind.

Do I fear the book won't arrive? So far this has never happened. It could presumably happen once.

For the subjectless nameless unprefigured book to arrive I must enter the House. Outside the House the Wind. I describe what is. The book I have no notion of needs three things before it will come: the House, the Wind and my blind waiting. If I have no notion of the book, the book without i.d., I do have an intimation of it. An intimation without an image. A wordless injunction. When the book does start to arrive it is not at all what I might have imagined. In this case sometimes I submit, it is the more powerful. Often I dig in my heels, I rebel, I try to run away, I double back, I take cover, often I try to throw it off, get ahead of it, I decamp, I write like mad so as to take it by surprise, pass it, leave it behind, I plunge into a forest, a city, I get lost in order to lose it, none of this is planned, note, sometimes it's just the opposite, the book squats in a dark corner of the garden in a briar patch with strawberry trees, I know it is there from the way the twigs move, I head into the field, one may attack head on or from the side, charge or steal up on it, fall back a hundred times only to charge again. I think only of it for months it thinks only of me. We are fascinated. One uses Napoleonic tactics and those of the cat. Infinite celerity, infinite slowness, furor and patience. One gets what one gets. A victorious defeat. In any case the aim is not to have done with it but to fight through the night to the first flush of dawn. Then the book shows itself. It is immense, robed in sweat- and blood-tinged fabrics, it fills the horizon, I see it, I examine it, it allows itself to be looked at, I go after it, piece by piece, I discover the scene of it, its offspring, I scan its logs, with scrupulosity, oh! I approve, it has my imprimatur. Once it has been contemplated in its entirety, it curls up and disappears into my den of oblivion. I remember it an instant longer, say a few weeks, three or four, I leave it nameless, velour-wrapped body at my editor's. It fades away. A cock must have crowed. Now it rests.

I was not in fact expecting what took place this past summer, the summer of 2003. Here it is in brief: my Mademoiselle Albertine left. I shall come back to this later.

I said: I wasn't in fact expecting this departure, rupture, a departure par excellence, an absolute and utter departition. I didn't expect it, I swear I didn't. Yet, rereading what I wrote in April 2003 then uttered publicly at the BN in May 2003 one might believe and me too I might have to believe that I had not only intimated or foreseen but perhaps even planned this event, without meaning to naturally, but this would be wrong, a too-hasty over-interpretation. I assure you: everything I did wrote thought about my brother both my real brother and my textual brother in April then said in May 2003 was in no way prophetic or speculative. I was in good faith and without a shadow of a doubt about our immemorial friendly alliance and our two-branched destiny, the real union and the literary one. If there was one life of which I was certain it was that of my brother-and-me. My uncertainty kept watch entirely over the other tower, ours, Montaigne's, that of my beloved and me. There in our antique body I was secretly in fear and trembling. You recall the death of Saint-Loup along with that of Albertine, and the bereaved amazement of the narrator that their lives should have been so brief? She and he used to tell the narrator, taking care of him: ‘You who are ill.’ And now they were dead. Well all my care and attention was centred on our tower. And it's on my brother's side that death rears its head.

Is it me who doesn't see the end looming up? Or is it death who lures us and throw us off track? During my whole childhood I trembled for fear my mother would die. And it was my father who died in the space of a day. Of course I could tell myself whatever the Analyst would say about that, I could discuss the gambits of desire and fear, added to the murky waters of roles and subjects, hint that my father was my mother maybe, and that the dead or death is not always the one, or what one thinks, who can say that the deceased (dead) is deader than the one alive-apparently, some of the dead have a tremendous power of survival, my father, for instance, I ought also to speak of the inextricably entangled mysteries when it comes to the death of those who are our whole life, of death given to live through and to die from, of dying of death or of life, self-dying, of what dies and what doesn't at the moment of death, never ever shall I shall manage to sort out the fates and destinies for I, like you, am a bundle of contradictions and others.

To come back to that summer's totally unforeseen event. A revolutionary and irreversible event, the by-definition event. Something terrible, which literally took my breath away. As a result I could no longer write. All of a sudden I became my shadow. My Mr Albertine was gone. As we have been aware since the days of Orpheus, we can descend into Hell as often as we like to search for our other half, we can utilise laws and charms reserved for the gods to deny the fatal fact, we shall without fail repeat the loss.

Later I'll have to unveil another reading of the unconsciouses of Orpheus and Eurydice. We'll discover other versions in the story of Tristan and Iseult. Each time it's a matter of interpreting a sail or a veil, of a delicate analysis of the theme of something missing and the secrets of the verb to lack. Imagine the person who was (to me) half your memory, who was two of the four-quarters of Don Quixote Sancho Panza, your secret sharer since kindergarten your trainer your blood- and textual brother, your sword and shield, overnight this being is cut off from you.

This event which turned everything upside down, which played havoc with my confidence, my sense of peace, which ripped up one of my hearts by the roots, severed my most ancient tie, massacred a childhood my brother and I had jointly cultivated for sixty years occurred on 15 August 2003 at 10 o'clock in the morning without warning right in the middle of the bluest of blue infinities and the gods looking the other way, or so it seemed. When the sky is crystal clear and mild, the universe a virgin again, hearts in unison, we should look out. Just as when two allies in love do not stop simulating a violent separation in order to exorcise its terrible spectre, push each other away all the better to cling, flee one another so as to fling themselves into a convulsive embrace, announce the imminence of rupture of divorce every morning in order to utterly reject the funereal gesture and batten our promises we should look out. But what's the point? Wary or confiding, we don't order tornadoes around. Events are bigger than their lightning bolt flash. Nobody notices them building up. Because of a fateful short-sightedness. The cause of all my falls and in their wake all my books like blind attempts to shake the scales from my eyes. Every time I fear the death of my mother and my father dies. Every time I believe in peace war turns up.

‘In the end I shan't write the big book of my brother’, I pronounced in public, ‘and this I regret. What a character!’ I shan't write the book in which my brother would be the main character. I shall not turn a book around my brother I was saying. That was 24 May 2003, I was on stage in the BN Auditorium, or so it appeared, I was reading the lines I'd written a month earlier while my brother took his midday snooze in the basement of the house, what a character, I say, blinded by the powerful whiteness of the BN spotlights I saw no one in the room, I might have been speaking to myself, still I was addressing my brother in the room unaware that he had ‘taken French leave as soon as the lion had his share’ as he recounted two days later. I thought I was speaking to him. The lion's share was a reference, my brother said, to J. Derrida's roy-ale lecture of which he would not have wished to miss a crumb, which he had hailed with the words: ‘the lion has roared,’ upon which, belly full of what he considered a virile meal, my brother took off. ‘What a character!’ I said, thinking him present, my character. My brother had gone, I wasn't informed. ‘At the end of this text’, I was saying, ‘he and I go off to visit Montaigne. “Is it worth re-reading?” he will say to me’ I was saying dazzled. The tenses cross, one isn't aware of it. I thought I was with him. And most extraordinary of all I thought, while reading the text written in April, is that in the end, by virtue of their successive crossings, they give rise to a hybrid time, this bizarre ‘I'm leaving’, a present which is neither a real present nor a future-present meanwhile I know it holds a past, in the end I left we left, he will leave, he had left, the whole question of the I had just been raised in the auditorium, it occurred to me suddenly with a touch of vertigo, this I who exits from our outing to Montaigne without getting out of it I'd noted

– that's what I was thinking while I read the projected tale of the outing I shall make to Montaigne with my brother in order to close the BN text on an lively note. Without seeing the thorn bush pop up, never for a second suspecting I might be about to plant it perhaps I was watering it, urging it along, already it was up around my waist.

If the thornbush is so fearful it's because it is one those situations no author in the world, not even Dante, can get herself out of. Once one is trapped in one of those thickets high as a rampart which one grew oneself as a person drowning gives the drowning a hand the author's goose is cooked. All I can do, wretched writer as I am, is multiply the thorns.

In this text, at the time and place I least expected it, at the BN in the middle of a symposium of which I was a little wary all the same as is proper when one is the target, me an ordinary human being, of a spectacular honour, of which I was similarly a little wary like the experienced reader of Shakespeare who rightly fears the royal robes may be too big, and what does one look like with one's crown down around one's nose and one's sleeves dragging?

thinking myself on my guard

I plunged into the worst bush of my life as an author.

When my brother takes his leave (I cannot assess the damage to and consequences for our story and the whole of the work – some thirty or forty books) in my wish to try and understand what could have gone wrong I wend my way back to the BN.

There right in the middle of the Bibliothèque Nationale, thinking that in three pages I'd have my head in Montaigne's library I was already there, I was taking my brother along a mybrother who takes me along and has been doing so for sixty years in the end these outings with my brother will be all I need. And to think I thought he was in the room my brother in reality. Whereas I was all alone, with the character.

I was all alone with my textual brother as companion for the outing and not my real brother and I knew nothing about it.

Not only was he not in the room any longer, which he had left at I don't know which point in the text, but that was when he left our board forever without warning me, without my foreseeing it. We were inseparable. We are. He takes leave of us. And when I hear about it it will be in stages: 1) two days after the BN symposium he tells me he left after hearing me say the word versatility which I did indeed use to describe him. At the word versatility, he claims to have got up and made his way to the door. 2) Stage two is when I am informed he has resigned. It was therefore during the month of August. At which point I have already written two-thirds of a book in which he plays a main role, when he springs it on me – that he left long ago, that he is no longer part of my story. The shock is so great – terrible, mortal, are the words – that a) I say nothing b) nothing comes to mind in the way of help. I have been amputed and I don't even feel it c) Not until a week after the accident do I suddenly recognise the twin scene to the excruciatingly painful scene of the departure of a being with whom I'd imagined I'd end my writing days. It seems we have just played for real the main part of the sequence that constitutes the turning point between La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue. What has happened to me has the same effect on my heart as the atrocious suffering the sentence ‘Mademoiselle Albertine has gone’ inflicts on the ‘psychology’ of the Proustian narrator. What a sentence! Two volumes are needed to reverberate the explosion, as well as the mystery of the suffering expressed in this famous but tough-to-analysis sentence: ‘How much more deeply suffering probes pyschology than psychology.’ What is horribly true is the more deeply. And this ‘Mademoiselle’ that wrests Albertine from Marcel!

‘Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!’ How much more deeply suffering probes psychology than psychology! A moment ago, engaged in analysing myself, I was thinking that this separation without seeing one another again was just what I wanted, and, comparing the mediocre pleasures Albertine gave me to the wealth of desires she kept me from (and which the certitude of her presence, the pressure of my moral atmosphere, had let fill the foreground of my mind, but which at the news that Albertine had gone were completely out of the running, having evaporated instantly), I found myself extremely subtle, I had come to the conclusion that I no longer wished to see her, that I no longer loved her. But the words: ‘Mademoiselle Albertine has gone’ had just produced such heartache that I felt I could not resist for long: I had to make it cease immediately.7

It is a few days before the scene, hacked in two like a leg of lamb, and which straddles two volumes of Proust under the cut of François's sentence ‘Mademoiselle Albertine has gone’, comes to mind. The memory of it is both a relief and a complicated astonishment. To think I am not the only one in either reality or in fiction to be put to such a test. To think that here we have a human classic. To think I worked for months on these passages in my seminar with my researchers and friends, as if they were part of litereature. I turned the lines every which way in the voluptuousness of reading, I read them, smelt them, imbibed them, without ever thinking that these exquisite nuances these fistsful of quills fine as angels’ hair, which prick you a thousand times, were to penetrate the soul's tenderness in reality. These thoughts bring me the relief that literature can bring to someone struck by misfortune, be it death or illness: you too have felt this. This goes so deep into the heart that trembles in ‘psychology’ that one is instantly projected into another world, one which is accustomed to the outbursts that exceed the bounds of ordinary discourse. In reality one pretends all that doesn't matter. It is litereature which embraces our cataclysms.

However, my real brother is not Albertine, unfortunately I tell myself. If he were Albertine, if I too had lost her, I could weave a magnificent mourning veil. The comparison ends with the chop of the axe, the utter brutality of the disappearance. Fortunately my real brother is not dead. That's something I don't even want to think about. ‘He has only’, I tell myself, ‘secretly killed off a character, a grandiose character whom I love, who promised marvels.’ Now the terms I use are not in the least exaggerated. I did say kill. True there was no blood. But there are other ways to kill: cut off the breath, a river of dry images suddenly, chest caved in, one can kill ghosts, hurt them, make them cry out, that the pain this produces are phantom pains does not diminish grief's intensity in the least. Besides grief is a ghost's torture of choice.

Let me add that in killing off this character it is mainly me he kills of course because this character is half me, when I paint it I am painting myself, when I feel sorry for it I am feeling sorry for myself, and it is also, worse luck or the long arm of fate, a natural disaster or divine punishment, a text already shaped, viable, a real child who's been condemned to death.

I must add that my brother, in reality, has read himself as a character on an outing with good grace, pleasure and ever-renewed assent in many a book over the years.

I've even had numerous occasions to congratulate myself before all kinds of audiences as well as in my heart of hearts, on this fraternal wedding of our destinies.

All of sudden everything is topsy-turvy. The unforeseen itself. And as for the famous bolts-from-the-blue, which have caught the attention of the world in recent years, the 11th of September, say, or the burning of the Château of Versailles, you are at first incredulous and yet the facts are there: of our castle, our towers, only ashes remain. Belief is outdistanced by the facts. A feeling of bad dream seeps into reality and dilates its temporal flesh. You've got a headache. Who could have thought it? And precisely, you've got to believe that it could happen. Imagine a rip in the fabric of the ideal inseparable: Tristan and Iseult leave one another for good is the example that springs to mind. We shan't blame either one of them, there's no rush. At the time one is simply knocked over by the explosion.

Hence what couldn't happen has happened, thus what seemed impossible carried the gene of its own destruction and we never noticed. Not that we are blind but the thing that is destined to perish as a result of inner capital punishment has, for long periods, sometimes years, every appearance of being immortal.

Upon inquiry, it will be shown that everything could have been foreseen, all one had to do was read the illegible to see the invisible.

Everyone knows that I did his best to make Albertine go away believing that that was what I wanted most of all. The size of the surprise is in proportion to the size of the analytical error that I committed: having wanted the person I hadn't seen was his life, his whole life, to disappear.

But in my case if I was blind, the reversal originated with my brother. He's the reverser. You can count on events to repeat themselves.

A change in heart? Why not? Anything's possible.

But I'm galloping ahead. Here I am back where the event takes place without my noticing it: blinded by the spotlights in the BN auditorium, believing myself physically blinded by this harsh flood of light, oblivious to the fact that I am blind in a totally different way, my whole psyche is wearing a blindfold, I am spreaking to my brother and nobody tells me he isn't there any more, that he'll never be there again in a book with me – meanwhile I'm reading aloud from part of a book in which he is with me, and without a soul within me to warn me that mybrother-onoutings, that character, has vamoosed, which he can't do, I shall discover later, without taking half the book's flesh along with him. All of that has doubtless been written down, by the Scribe Up There, but not by me.

How little we know ourselves. I believe I am in the most ancient intimacy, in the most familiar withinness; I am outside.

There I was thinking, and reading, and reading myself it seemed to me that I was on a literary path to getting close to my brother in truth as never before. A person one is close to becomes truer, I was exulting, when, projecting the full light of one's attention on him, one is able to see them as only the theatre of literature allows.

Now, I was telling myself, I'm off to my brother's transfiguration in truth. For I am positive that the book is where the lights come on. In reality the truth doesn't light up.

As I continue, head ringed with visions and philosophical light, a sublime halo hovering in the hard megawattness of the spots, with the feeling I was climbing the stairs of a revelation, I close in all unawares on the word that trips me up. I have an explosive letter in my hand and I am about to be blown up, along with all that is dearest in the world to me, in fifteen lines. I know nothing of this. I quote myself:

‘The more the years go by, the more the character takes shape, at each of our outings he develops his own style and witty turns of phrase,’ I was saying, the more I spoke my thoughts into the room where, seeing not a single face, I imagined a public to come, the more the complexity of my brother seemed to accumulate a force I had never dreamt of at home, a totally unexpected consequence of the symposium, ‘the more the character appears in a Dostoyevskian light,’ I had written – but with the value added that fiction-writing gives, so that by now that struck me as much truer than a month ago – or sometimes on a Shakespearean path, sallet on his head, in disguise, outsized, loud, catastrophic, the sleepwalker whom you must on no account wake.

‘Each time that I walk beside him,’ I was saying – on the one hand into the mike at the BN on the other off with my brother in the story of our last trip to Montaigne, I feel the book take shape, gather speed, but I can't do that to him, reduce him to mere paper, and while continuing to take mental notes I renounce the idea of inheriting him in all his reality, I try to be satisfied with this walk-about character whose versatility however strikes me as unique in the world. What a shame. In my books my brother makes a racket going by. But that's nothing. A mere syllable of the gargantuan book he would make. I was saying.

One writes these things in a little 15-square-metre room, talking to oneself, there's only space for the table the shelves and a couch for the cats. Immediately afterwards, you hear yourself uttering these promises in the middle of a 500-seat auditorium, it's not the same at all.

The words have a different intensity and semantic charge when they go from cell to hall.

As for the word versatility I shall not deny that I said it, first wrote then said. I add that it's a word which rings pleasingly in my ears and mind. I could write a book on versatility. Naturally I would call it Versatilities. Those I love the most are versatile.

‘I don't want to be in your books anymore,’ says my brother, we were walking along the ocean front as if we were the only two in the world, it was the hour of the end of our world the hour you don't think of and which arrives to pull the forest up by the roots, crush beings and time with a great roar. That hour is so lovely to look at, with its rounds of lightning whose fire joins sky to earth, that one can let it take one's mind off the message of death. I was afraid it would rain on our two frail silhouettes.

‘It is very disagreeable to me says my brother that you should call me versatile,’ says my brother. ‘Take off your tennis shoes and listen,’ says my brother; and nothing was literary any more.

It was the beginning of the end. I was late catching up. On the one hand I was listening to my brother's sentences, how they ran into one another, their rise and fall, on the other to the rumbling of a storm. Should we stick it out? I wondered.

I don't know why I hung around in literature when we were in the thick of reality. He didn't want to be in my books any more. The End. The gusts of wind got to me. Did I try to argue? I don't think so. Or maybe perhaps, since he'd just said ‘Find someone else.’ Without my knowing whether it was my real brother or the textual one who was cutting loose, who was speaking.

It reminded me of those impossible conversations in the Bible between some pitiful prophet and the Voice, they don't hear one another, they don't hear what the other one said, they don't dare say: what? they don't hear themselves because of the terrible wind that is deliberately blowing on the mountain so as to prevent all communication, for the end product has to be picked clean as a bone: No. Finished. ‘Get someone else.’ Who says that? In the Bible, it's the prophet. But it could also be God. In reality. Such a little sentence, it twists and turns, a feather on the back of the howling wind.

Instead of thinking about my brother I was thinking about my book of course, I was thinking of my book brother, if (only) it had been (only) a dream I'd have locked myself up in my room for a few days, thinking about it, about the book, searching for a way to salvage it. But I had heard my sentence, it was simple as a mountain of ice, I was faced with an edict.

Be gone.

Enough said. That's it.

I had myself stated and publicly that I wouldn't write the book of my brother, that was the 24th of May. But this needed to be put in a literary context, a complex and by definition versatile one, some discussion of preterition would be in order, there are all those problems of possessives. What does ‘my brother's’ mean? And what is ‘my brother’? What relationship between the brother who is beside me, and in me as well, and ‘my brother’ in the book, what relationships?

Enough said.

Another Possible Version

– You shall not write this book, he says, and this time he is six feet tall.

– But why why I say why. – You shall not write it, says he.

What scares me is the black curtain that falls across the sky's right eye. He's in the right perhaps but the need to taste the taste of my dreams is on my side.

There is no one on earth this August morning 2003 no one on the edge of the universe, your feet leave no tracks in the water, who will know I am going from anguish to anguish accompanied by a yellow angel who is squeezing my throat and walking me to the sound of her ineluctable voice along the marvellous ocean that the gulls have forgotten this morning inundated with the rain that washes evil thoughts away.

Not that I can proclaim either a right or a wrong, how can I say to Hamlet you are killing me without him saying you killed me first to me. It's not the rain that bends me down it is the two anguishes which gore one another and walk all over me. Eat or be eaten.

– Hamlet I say, why do you pour all this froth of soul and chewed-up flesh into my secretary soul each time we go out walking together, the one goading the other one on?

– Because it churns me up so much that volcanically it's natural I should vomit up my entrails which have been enflamed since childhood says Hamlet Cixous. What gets me is I have no way of coming up with an idea that would cure me of the rage of continuing to pour this lava out, I have only you on whom to thunder, hail and rub my wound. You should take off your tennis shoes to listen to me. When you aren't barefoot you don't have the feel of the earth mixing itself up in our business.

I take off my tennis shoes, I look up. He's no longer beside me.

– Are you sure he's not going to change? I ask myself.

– I can only be sure. I can't hold my brother against his will. The author has no right. It's enough already to be fired by a character, of a brother into the bargain. I won't add suspense to the disaster. As for the sister if I were her I'd never ever hope for the reversal of the reversal of my brother

Hamlet flees from me. Whereas I have come to join him so that we can share our apartment and our suffering, he is walking far ahead of me, I see him fifty yards off striding into the underpass, for the world is now a labyrinth of gloomy tunnels, he is walking so fast I can't catch up with him, several times I speed up, I have run for miles, I can't push myself more, I shout at him wait for me, but he's doing it on purpose, he wants to keep his distance he wants me to run after him and to run away from me, I'm worn out, I'm getting annoyed, when we reach the edge of the big forest with stony paths he tells me – without stopping – ‘take the path that goes up on the right, I'll take the left, the overgrown one, and we'll see if they meet up.’ So I take the path on the right, I know perfectly well they're going to meet up, the bare one and the overgrown one, but when I arrive at the crossing no Hamlet in sight. Am I the plague? But I feel he wants to flee from me and so keep me fleeing, as if the verb to flee were a wounded form of the verb to be.

On the phone, while I am on paper like a defeated wrestler, the beautiful voice of the interrupted brother: ‘Hello! Saddam Hussein here.’

The world changed yesterday, the continent I've lived on from the start was brought down by a bad rocket, all that was left was the sky, the earth literally burnt to a crisp under my eyes, the catastrophe occurred so suddenly, we were out walking as usual all of a sudden the lamp of day blinked and went out. We blanched, hesitant, great wavering distances cut us off, and then we were cold, separated. What had been our world only a few hours earlier had fallen so fast so far, how we'd lost it! Struck out. Clearly we had no hope of finding it ever again. Two black seagulls flipped over with heartbreaking cries of anguish fifty yards ahead of us.

If only it was ‘Mademoiselle Albertine’ who had gone I tell myself. One loses part of oneself, one fixes it. Hell lasts for a page. In one page, it is true one can suffer a thousand deaths. But at least the end of the world comes to an end. Right away I start making it come back again, I don't stop telling it to myself and right after that writing it, a hundred times over. She had written a form letter. The letter ended with this phrase: ‘Farewell I leave you the best part of myself. Albertine.’8 How true it was. At first one doesn't know what ‘the best part of myself’ is. Is it the absence, is it Albertine, is it the narrator, is it the author? She left leaving him the best part of herself. Or maybe it's the letter? Or the sentence itself, the last one? Once Albertine has gone along with Mademoiselle Albertine the work acquires unhoped-for scope. The gains of departure are so big that not only me, the narrator, the author but the reader, but the whole world, benefits from it. Imagine, if she hadn't left, those torrents of brilliant observations those millions of brandnew thoughts, those so lovely, so subtle representations of horror, those nervous depths so numerous a century will not suffice to probe them one by one, none of those terrible treasures utterly unique in the whole of literature would ever have existed. I say ‘Mademoiselle Albertine’ I have in mind the original of course. That Alfred Agostinelli what a miraculous invention of life, I tell myself. That plane falling into the Mediterranean, who could ever have thought up such a miracle?

All departures are not equal. Agony, I've got it. Agostinelli, no way for me to enjoy him. My donor lives, fortunately, it's his character who will never be back to write a break-up letter, hitting hard so as to give me a scare

Unforeseeable: who will I be without the person who is life itself to me.

Cf. Each time unique

Cf. The departure of Thessie – Thessie-kept

Never doubting for an instant then?

It's all because of the Secret. That OfwhichIknownothing this Gift which makes me who I am, I mean I can't stop running after the person or thing I am, that I run after urged on by the hope without hope of one day gaining access to my inaccessible. I write as one tries to save oneself in the dark, running and stumbling. Because one cannot not try. How little one knows oneself! And yet one signs.

So far I've spoken of (my myopia) my blindness. But it's not only mine. The unforeseeable is the subject of all tragedies of fate. What we call the unforeseeable, the catastrophe which happens just because our back was turned, eyes closed to what was up ahead. Samson or Oedipus's eyes were put out because they refused to see what stared them in the face, their own structural blindness. No one is to blame. It is just our cruel human powerlessness, the impossibility of seeing one doesn't see. One doesn't know what one is talking about. One hasn't the vision to see what has never yet been seen.

Our blindness is what makes the event. The one that Jacques Derrida has just given rise to regarding the ‘concept of September 11’ a dazzlingly clear analysis. I quote a few lines:

The proof of the event, that which, in it,both opens to and resists experience, is, it seems to me, a certain inappropriability of what has occurred. The event is what occurs and in its occurrence manages to take me by surprise, to surprise and suspend understanding: the event is initially that which I at first do not understand. Better yet, the event is initially that I do not understand. It consists in that which I do not understand; that which I do not understand and first of all that I do not understand, the fact that I do not understand: my incomprehension. This is the borderline, both internal and external, I'd be tempted to insist on here: although the experience of an event, the way in which it affects us, calls for a gesture of appropriation (understanding, recognition, identification, description, determination, interpretation from a horizon of anticipation, knowledge, naming, etc.), although this gesture of appropriation is irreducible and inevitable, there is no event worthy of the name save where this appropriation finds itself stranded, high and dry on some kind of borderline. But a borderline without a front or a confrontation, a borderline that incomprehension cannot come to grips with, for it hasn't the form of a solid front: it eludes our grasp, it remains evasive, open, undecided, indeterminable. Whence its inappropriability, its unpredictability, the utter surprise of it, the incomprehension, the risk of misunderstanding, the unforeseeable novelty, the pure singularity, the absence of horizon.9

Not to recognise is a source of a terror. But as soon as, beyond recognition or non-recognition, the first words come forth, recognising the non-recognition, as soon as analysis arises and calls the shadows by their name of: shadows, from that point I begin to grope at the darkness, to feel myself taken aback, to guess I don't know, that I didn't know that I could have known, that in the future I may again not know, Samson's hair which was the secret of his strength begins to grow back. Without light without eyes one has other ways to (fore)see.

Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic

Notes

1.	Marcel Proust, Carnets (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), p. 79.
2.	Hélène Cixous, Manhattan (Paris: Galilée, 2002), pp. 11–12.
3.	Ibid., p. 34.
4.	Cf. Kafka's tale ‘The Thorn Bush’ [Das Dorngebüsch].
5.	Michel de Montaigne, ‘De l'exercitation’, Essais, Œuvres complètes, eds Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade), 1962), pp. 352–3.
6.	Cf. ‘The Book I Don't Write’, in this volume.
7.	Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu VII: Albertine disparue (Paris: Gallimard (Folio), 1954), p. 7.
8.	Ibid., p. 10.
9.	Jacques Derrida, ‘Auto-immunité, suicides réels et symboliques’, in Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, Le « concept » du 11 septembre (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2004), p. 139.