Recall the lines from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment:
The small room into which the young man was shown was covered with yellow wallpaper: there were geraniums in the windows, which were covered with muslin curtains; the setting sun cast a harsh light over the entire setting…. There was nothing special about the room. The furniture, of yellow wood, was all very old. A sofa with a tall back turned down, an oval table opposite the sofa, a dressing table and a mirror set against the pierglass, some chairs along the walls, two or three etchings of no value portraying some German girls with birds in their hands – such were the furnishings.
Quoting these lines in the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton complains:
I am in no mood to admit that the mind is interested in occupying itself with such matters, even fleetingly. It may be argued that this school-boy description has its place, and that at this juncture of the book the author has his reasons for burdening me. Nevertheless he is wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room.
Breton refuses, but others have been tempted. We relate the words we read to our own experience, rendering them concrete. It seems churlish to claim that this concretion is a sham: after all, this is just a novel, and we know, as readers, how a novel works. But then Breton wants art to be more than a matter of entertainment or even edification. This is why he claims the descriptions in the novel are vacuous: ‘they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue, which the author utilizes more and more whenever he chooses; he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to make me agree with him about the clichés’.
Clichés? One might object that it is this accumulation of details which permits the verisimilitude of the novel – it becomes tangible, concrete, we accompany the characters in the journeys across St. Petersberg.
Levinas observes of the reader of Dostoevsky that 'what holds his attention is neither Dostoevsky’s religious ideas, his metaphysics, nor his psychology, but some profiles of girls, a few images: the house of crime with its stairway and its dvornik in Crime and Punishment, Grushenka’s silhouette in Brothers Karamazov’. Is this the case? I am not sure. But Levinas is taking us in an interesting direction:
Introspection is taken to be a novelist’s fundamental procedure, and one supposes that things and nature can enter into a book only when they are enveloped into in an atmosphere composed of human emanations. We think, on the contrary, that an exterior vision – of a total exteriority [...] where the subject itself is exterior to itself – is the true vision of the novelist.
This is a difficult thought. Why does Levinas on the one hand assert the importance of 'a few images' in Dostoevsky's fiction and then proceed to write with what seems the greatest abstraction of 'total exteriority'? A great deal is at issue in this question, which addresses, I think, an issue Steve once touched upon at In Writing. Steve remembers a distinction in Karl Kraus between those readers who take joy in the details the novelist offers us: in the 'ponies and boots and shoes' (George Eliot's phrase) and others who look instead for a theme, obsession or an idea beyond those details. Beyond them? But, as Steve notes, one should not think of there being a simple choice between details and ideas:
It's a fair distinction, I suppose. I'm in the latter camp for sure. Sometimes the first line is enough for me to reach for the handrails. But I would say that the themes, obsessions and powerful ideas of the better novels are also found at the level of ponies, boots and shoes.
This is what Levinas indicates when, in the same essay, he links particular images in the novel to exteriority - although the latter should not be understood as an idea (obsession is a better word). What, then, does it mean? One approach to this question is to consider Blanchot's reflections on Hegel's notion of symbolic art.
Hegel associates symbolic art with that the ancient Orient, in particular the Egyptians, who represented their beliefs through animal symbols. But if, as he writes, ‘what is human constitutes the centre and content of true beauty of art’, then depictions of animal symbols of the divine can only be deficient; if beauty is the sensory appearance of the idea, for Hegel, Egyptian art is not beautiful. When he calls it sublime this is a sign, for him, of its deficiency.
For Hegel, the symbol fails; it remains inadequate to the idea it would bring to expression. But through its failure, its very inability to embody its idea, it might be said to indicate a kind of excessiveness or strangeness which Levinas calls exteriority. Perhaps this is why Blanchot discovers in Hegel's symbolic art a way of approaching what is most uncanny in the work of contemporary novelists.
‘The symbol is always an experience of nothingness, the search for a negative absolute’, Blanchot writes. But what does this mean? The positive absolute might be understood in term of the absolutum which Nicholas of Cusa used to name God or das Absolute of post-Kantian philosophy as it indicates what is unconditioned: what is at issue here is something which is both self-contained and perfect. But Hegel breaks from the conception of the absolute in both cases claiming the absolute has been separated from the phenomenal world, stripping it of what precisely renders it absolute. It is necessary, for Hegel, to think the absolute and the phenomenal world alongside the knowledge human beings have of the relationship between them. The absolute, for Hegel, is the conceptual system which is contained by the phenomenal world as it develops and gives itself to human knowledge.
What, then, is Blanchot’s negative absolute? One might say it is a resistance to such a conceptual system: it is the weight, density and materiality of matter itself as it refuses dialectical development. Then it is a matter of what escapes human knowledge as it were in the very act of knowing. It is the dark side of what is known even as it seems to allow itself to be known. It is not sheer indeterminacy, but a kind of reserve or resistance in that which gives itself to be known or understood. This is how we might understand the relationship between the particular details of a novel and exteriority.
The classic novel aims at verisimilitude. It wields the abstract power of language to aim at the depiction of concrete things and relationships in the world. But what if, conversely, the details of the story, the same concrete things (Klamm’s pince-nez, the icy light on the snow, the faces of the peasants) are only indications of something which cannot be directly presented? Here, the 'object' of such indications is not separate from those details in the manner of, say, Schelling's absolute. It is not Nicholas of Cusa's God. But nor are those details merely a moment of the presentation of the absolute to human knowledge, in the manner of Hegel. Those indications are disturbing even as they remain as what they are. They are disturbing because they resonate with a reserve which cannot be known. It is as though they bring with them a vast reserve of materiality, in the manner, perhaps, of the heavy plinths Giacometti sometimes attached to his sculptures.
Then the kind of novel in question indicates what slips from us in the world through its details. In so doing, it embodies not so much a body of knowledge but a black hole which escapes the measure of knowledge, not so much a theory of the world, but an excessiveness over any particular theory. The novel, in its details, keeps memory of what resists the measure of knowledge not because it would constitute an unknowable thing-in-itself, but a reserve in things. It presents the shadow of the real.
Let's go further still. It is possible to discern in certain novels the attempt to seize this shadow for itself - to make every encounter a movement towards its reserve. Perhaps this is how one might understand Kafka's The Castle. It is a system of indications comprised of specific encounters and details (I'll try and substantiate this claim another day).
The novel, one might say, is on a perpetual quest to discover its own condition of possibility (rather like the story by Josipovici Steve mentions).
A story which tells its own story, which seeks to reach behind itself and seize upon its genesis: to manifest, through its details, the outside from which it sprung. A kind of concrete emptiness, a material nothingness which reverberates in the things of the story: these are mysterious formulations, which may sound hopelessly pretentious. Nevertheless, it is this concrete absolute which manifests itself through the most powerful fictional works of the last century (and isn't it there, too, in a film like Last Year in Marienbad or The Adventure?).
Sometimes I think that the time of such novels and such artworks has passed, that the end has already been reached. But then I remember the music of Smog and Cat Power ...