Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

Few words chime with more obsessive regularity in the Recherche than the word “laws,” and this every time that appearances are torn open and a dark or dazzling background is glimpsed beyond. One is tempted to say that Proust’s main concern was establishing laws, as if — rather than a novelist — it were a physicist writing. And this isn’t a gambit he uses only in the Recherche , as a sort of personal gnoseological seal. In a fragment we can date back to the period of Jean Santeuil , and hence to a time of apparent worldly indulgence, Proust gives us, almost in passing, a definition of literature that goes so far as to have it coincide with its lawmaking function, beginning with the vision of the poet who “stands still before whatever does not deserve the attention of the sedate man, so much so that one wonders whether he might be a lover or a spy, or again, after it seems he’s been looking at a tree for a long time, what in reality he is looking at.” At this point one asks oneself, as in some Zen story, what there might be “beyond the tree.” And here Proust offers us one of his wonderfully undulatory sentences and, set right in the middle, the formula we were looking for:

But the poet, who cheerfully senses the beauty of all things once he has gathered it into the mysterious laws he carries about within him, and who will soon have us rediscovering it in his charm, showing it to us through a hem of those mysterious laws, that hem that joins with them, that hem that he will also depict at the same time as he depicts things themselves, in touching their feet or starting from their brow, the poet feels and causes us cheerfully to know the beauty of all things, of a glass of water no less than of diamonds, but also of diamonds no less than of a glass of water, of a field as much as of a statue, but also of a statue as much as of a field.

It is not feelings, then, but laws that we find at the center of that perception which distinguishes the writer from every other being — and that causes him to observe the things of the world with the maniacal concentration that has us thinking of spies and lovers. The whole of the Recherche was to be woven out of these “mysterious laws” (which in the meantime had lost their adjective), but it seems clear that as far as Proust was concerned all literature must be woven from them. So much so that in the same text we find him using these laws to suggest a biological-metaphysical explanation of the work:

The poet’s mind is full of manifestations of the mysterious laws and, when these manifestations appear, they grow more vigorous, they detach themselves vigorously on the mind’s deep bed, they aspire to come out from him, because everything that must last aspires to come out from everything that is fragile, short-lived, and that could perish the very same evening or no longer be able to bring them to the light. So at every moment, whenever it feels strong enough and has an outlet, the human species tends to come out from itself, in a complete sperm, that contains the whole of it, of today’s man who may die as we said this very evening, or who perhaps will no longer contain it in its wholeness, or in whom (since it depends on him so long as it is his prisoner) it will never be so strong again. Thus the thought of the mysterious laws, or poetry, when it feels strong enough, aspires to come out from the short-lived man who perhaps this evening will be dead or in whom (since it depends on him so long as it is his prisoner, and he could get sick, or be distracted, or grow worldly, less strong, squander in pleasure the treasure he carries within him and that decays if he chooses to live in a certain way, since its destiny is still tied to him) it will no longer have that mysterious energy that allows it to open out in its fullness, it aspires to come out from the man in the form of the work.

Behind the mixture, here particularly crude, of positivist physiology and Platonism — a mixture typical of Proust — we sense that something unchanging and essential has crystallized in these convoluted lines: above all the idea of poetry as “thought of the mysterious laws,” while the work’s necessity is seen as the transmigration of an immortal body that uses the writer’s body as a temporary shell only to abandon it as soon as possible for fear of being suffocated. The following hypothesis thus presents itself: that it is precisely this process of osmotic transmission, from one work to the next, that, whenever the rash gesture that is absolute literature begins to take shape, renders every other connotation, whether of school, national tradition, or historical moment, inconsistent and secondary. The writers who in some way engage in that bold gesture will thus tend to form a sort of communion of saints, where the same fluid circulates from work to work, page to page, and each calls to the other from an affinity that is far stronger than any that might tie them to their time, or to some trend — or even to their own physiology and taste. This too is the “mystery in Literature” that declares itself, in its blazing obscurity, from the years of the Athenaeum review on — and which is still with us today, if only we care to notice. Any direct relationship is superfluous. But the affinity and the element of consequence between one link in the chain and the next make themselves felt most powerfully, as if in some renewed aurea catena Homeri .

The best analogy might be that of two mathematicians who, though unaware of each other and working thousands of miles apart, both feel an urgent need to solve some particular equation, something their colleagues pass by without even being aware of. One day the two mathematicians’ notes may be juxtaposed, superimposed, to the point that we might think they were written by the same person, were it not for some different manner of procedure or exposition, since in the end each person always bears a trace of the “mysterious being we are, who possessed that gift of giving to everything a certain form that belongs only to ourselves.” And if one day the mathematicians’ paths should cross, they may well walk by each other without a word, like those priests of the god Hölderlin speaks of “who moved from country to country through the holy night.”

We began with Homer; we have ended in a place that is the Elsewhere of every other. In between lies a path that is a weave of variants. Yet we know that behind every movement and tremor, the scene is always the same. It greets us from an Attic cup that dates back to the Wars of the Peloponnese and is now in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Three figures: To the left, sitting on a rock, a young man writes on a tablet, a díptychon , that looks very like a laptop. From beneath, a severed head watches as he writes. To the right, standing up, is Apollo: one hand grasps a laurel rod, while the other stretches out towards the young man writing.

What is going on? The way it is most frequently represented, Orpheus had his throat cut by a Maenad who held his hair tight from behind while plunging a sword into his neck. To defend himself, the poet brandished his lyre like a weapon, and sang. But the vis carminum could do no more than briefly hold back, suspended in the air, the stones hurled at him by other Maenads. Then a clash of arms drowned his voice and it could charm no longer. His head was cut off with a sickle. Tossed into the river Evros, it drifted with the current. Singing and bleeding. It was ever fresh, ever flourishing. It reached the sea, crossed a vast tract of the Aegean, and was washed up on Lesbos. Here, we presume, the scene depicted on the Attic kýlix took place. It is the primordial scene of all literature, composed of its irreducible elements.

Literature is never the product of a single subject. There are always at least three actors: the hand that writes, the voice that speaks, the god who watches over and compels. Not that they look very different: all three are young; all have thick, snaky hair. They might easily be taken for three manifestations of the same person. But that is hardly the point. What matters is the division into three self-sufficient beings. We could call them the I, the Self, and the Divine. A continuous process of triangulation is at work between them. Every sentence, every form, is a variation within that force field. Hence the ambiguity of literature: because its point of view is incessantly shifting between these three extremes, without warning us, and sometimes without warning the author. The young man writing is absorbed at his tablet; it’s as if he didn’t see anything of what is around him. And perhaps he doesn’t. Perhaps he has no idea who is beside him. The stylus that etches the letters demands all his attention. The head that drifts on the waters sings and bleeds. Every vibration of the word presupposes something violent, a palaiòn pénthos , an “ancient grief.” Was it a murder? Was it a sacrifice? It isn’t clear, but the word will never cease to tell of it. Apollo grasps his laurel rod, his other arm stretching out to hint at something. Is he compelling? forbidding? protecting? We will never know. But that outstretched arm, like the arm of the Apollo of the Master of Olympia, a motionless axis in the center of a vortex, invests and sustains the whole scene — and all literature.