Max Blecher: Adventures In Immediate Irreality

This is a book that soothes without sentimentality. Blecher chronicled his dying from both the interior of his body and the outside of nonexistence. He made that veil permeable: his words are vehicles traveling through the opaque membrane that surrounds the seemingly solid world. These are the “adventures” of the inside and the outside exchanging places, while being somehow exactly the same in the light of Blecher’s extraordinary sensibility. Nobody knows how to die. Max Blecher, because he was young and a genius, suggests a way that investigates, rediscovers life, and radiates beauty from suffering.

“Ordinary words lose their validity at certain depths of the soul.”

Max Blecher’s soul was a fearless journalist who reported what his hypersensitive senses and immense intelligence uncovered about the world we think we know. “The world as definitively constituted had lain waiting inside me forever and all I did from day to day was to verify its obsolete contents.” After the discovery that this is not the real world, he finds it to be the projection of a text that tells a story which erases the world as it appears to be: “All at once the surfaces of things surrounding me took to shimmering strangely or turning vaguely opaque like curtains, which when lit from behind go from opaque to transparent and give a room a sudden depth. But there was nothing to light these objects from behind, and they remained sealed by their density, which only rarely dissipated enough to let their true meaning shine through.”

This is not Surrealism, as critics sometime saw it, but hyper-realism. Blecher corresponded with André Breton, and was chronologically situated in a string of Jewish-Romanian geniuses: Tristan Tzara (b. 1886), Benjamin Fondane (b. 1898), Victor Brauner (b. 1903), and Gherasim Luca (b. 1913). Each of those writers launched a precocious revolution related to Surrealism, with an urgency prompted by an imminent and cataclysmic future. Yet, unlike his peers, for Blecher the urgency of Time unfolds with a rigorous diagnostic probity that will not yield to any unreflecting words. The games of language so beloved by Surrealists are there only to be disposed of.

Glossing the nonsense conversation he enjoys with a friend:

“What I found in that banter was more than the slightly cloying pleasure of plunging into mediocrity; it was a vague sense of freedom: I could, for instance, vilify the doctor to my heart’s content even though I knew — he lived in the neighborhood — that he went to bed every night at nine. . We would go on and on about anything and everything, mixing truth and fancy, until the conversation took on a kind of airborne independence, fluttering about the room like a curious bird, and had the bird actually put in an appearance we’d have accepted it as easily as we accepted the fact that our words had nothing to do with ourselves. . Back in the street, I would feel I had emerged from a deep sleep, yet I still seemed to be dreaming. I was amazed to find people talking seriously to one another. Didn’t they realize one could talk seriously about anything? Anything and everything?”

This is the “nothing” that is acquiring mass and is already heading for the world that Blecher feels becoming nothing but the mere traces of a once “serious” life. In the unfolding researches of his childhood, he has time to uncover in dusty attics the faded remains of gone worlds: letters, photographs, and paintings more substantial than the present, which evanesces as he writes, “like a scene viewed through the wrong side of a binocular, perfect in every detail but tiny and far off.”

There is an inverted nostalgia here, a nostalgia for the present that has already taken hold of the writer who is composing both his own and his decade’s epitaph. Blecher, like Proust, endows places and objects from the past with the ability to project an independent existence more real than the present. This world hides another, open only to the genius of child-wonder and adolescent desire. Adventures in Immediate Irreality is not a memoir, a novel, or a poem, though it has been called all those names, and compared rightly with the works of Proust and Kafka. Blecher belongs in that company for the density and lyrical force of his writing, but he is also a recording diagnostician of a type the twentieth century had not yet fully birthed, but the twenty-first is honoring in the highest degree.

The place of these “adventures” is probably Roman, the provincial Romanian city where he was born in 1909, a place small enough to explore, and conventional enough to grasp. The time is childhood and adolescence in the still new twentieth century. The probing instrument is his body rushing to work for as long as the liberty of his age and his vitality allow. Blecher didn’t outlive his unfettered genius. In 1928, while still in medical school in Paris, he was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis. He was treated at sanatoriums in Berck-sur-Mer in France, Leysin in Switzerland, and Techirghiol in Romania. For the last ten years of his life, he was confined to bed, immobilized by the disease. Despite his condition, he wrote and published his first piece in 1930, a short story called “Herrant” in Tudor Arghezi’s literary magazine Bilete de papagal , contributed to André Breton’s literary review Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution and corresponded with Breton, André Gide, Martin Heidegger, Ilarie Voronca, Geo Bogza, and Mihail Sebastian. In 1934, he published Corp transparent , a volume of poetry. In 1935, he was moved to a house on the outskirts of Roman where he wrote and published his major works, Întâmplări în irealitate imediată (Adventures in Immediate Irreality) and Inimi cicatrizate (Scarred Hearts), as well as short prose pieces, articles, and translations. In 1938 he died, at the age of twenty-eight.

Blecher’s genius is also the genius of his disease, and the timing of his death: “I envied the people around me who are hermetically sealed inside their secrets and isolated from the tyranny of objects. They may live out their lives as prisoners of their overcoats, but nothing external can terrorize or overcome them, nothing can penetrate their marvelous prisons. I had nothing to separate me from the world: everything around me invaded from head to toe; my skin might as well have been a sieve. The attention I paid to my surroundings, nebulous though it was, was not simply an act of will: the world, as is its nature, sank its tentacles into me; I was penetrated by the hydra’s myriad arms. Exasperating as it was, I was forced to admit that I lived in the world I saw around me; there was nothing for it.” Those “hermetically sealed” people, in their healthy bodies and apparently fortunate longevity, were going to go on living in the coming decade. Max Blecher, whom nothing separated from the world, had the good luck to die in 1938, freed into the “outside” before the 1940s.

Vizuina luminată: Jurnal de sanatoriu (The Lit-Up Burrow: Sanatorium Journal) was published posthumously in part in 1947 and in full in 1971. Beginning in the mid-1970s his books were translated into French, German, Spanish, Czech, Hungarian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Polish, and English. The twenty-first century is even more wildly receptive to Max Blecher.

“For a moment I had the feeling of existing only in the photograph.” Max Blecher wrote this sentence while Roman Vishniac was capturing a multitude whose members ceased to exist soon after he photographed them. Those images of people, whose provincialism was nearly absolute, later toured the world. This sentence by Blecher resonated for Walter Benjamin, himself in the grip of reproductive extinction — what the twentieth century already had inscribed in its DNA. It is a fountain-sentence, a boca de leone from which reality spews the bile of immediate irreality. The magnificent paragraph that opens with that sentence, rests on another photograph, a Victorian portrait taken at a fair, of the photographer’s dead child, and concludes with the century’s epitaph: “At fairs, therefore, even death took on sham, nostalgic-ridden backdrops, as if the fair were a world of its own, its purpose being to illustrate the boundless melancholy of artificial ornamentation from the beginning of a life to its end as exemplified by the pallid lives lived in the waxworks’ sifted light or in the otherworldly beauty of the photographer’s infinite panoramas. Thus for me the fair was a desert island awash in sad haloes similar to the nebulous yet limpid world into which my childhood crises plunged me.”