The Golden Age

Fragments and wholes

When I went over the whole Rue des Beaux-Arts story again, I reached the conclusion that probably it was not true, even though I could not imagine the reason why my Paris acquaintance would have invented it. It was not merely that the story-lines were implausible: in the descriptions of the motionless objects, for example, there was a heavy whiff of French literary influences, and the commentaries in the last part of the story were suspiciously reminiscent of Roussel and Perec. In conjuring up in the café pictures of snowflakes swirling in the light of violet neon, the narrator so befuddled me that I did not for one moment doubt the veracity of his stories. But next day, when I noticed that the lettering bearing the name of the Galeries Lafayette department store had no resemblance to the lettering of the narrator’s description, I began to suspect I had been duped. And now I am almost certain that nothing I was told in the café actually happened.

And what is worse, I realized with regret that the story was not particularly well thought out. I have described already how there were two sets of identifiers of things with letters, each the mirror image of the other — in the farmyard, where things were transformed into letters, and on the roof of the department store, where letters were transformed into things. Each of these carried the hero to a new world; I think that the more radical encounter with a new world was in the neon labyrinth of the roof. Admittedly it may seem that the Homeric inscription in rusty tools is in complete defiance of the logic and order of our world, but the peculiar spectacle in the farmyard is blurred by the fact that we can only find a place for it in the categories known to us, those of the miraculous, the mystical and the supernatural; these are still components woven into our world (and as such are traps for those who seek other worlds). The material power of words, however, which the chase on the roof stirs into life, opens up a strange space between things and letters, a space that eludes categorization, a space that is neither in the world nor out of it but in a strange, impossible place opened with the help of this power. Through the gap it is possible to catch a glimpse of a certain disquieting action that perhaps reaches back to the sources of action in our world, an action that marks the birth and death of all worlds. In this sense the episode on the roof was closer to the islanders’ identification of objects with letters than the episode on the farm. The islanders were not in the least excited by the supernatural; if an angel were to appear in a deserted street in the lower town, the inhabitants of the island would not be particularly interested, although they would admire the rippling of its robe and listen to the murmur of its wings.

These two related motifs were interwoven cleverly in the story, but the promised identification of letters with objects regrettably remained isolated and barren — in the remainder of the story nothing grew from them. The state in which simultaneously we see a thing, react to it and read it as a letter casts us into an unimaginable, yet real space, in which it is not clear whether seeing, reacting and reading are parts of a single primary action or it is their incompatibility that has set the dizzying vortex in motion. And so this unsatisfactory state, which was tied to the object-letter motif, called for climax and catharis, but such a maturation of this motif in the plotline of the story was not achieved. Although the motifs of the crab’s letters and the pearls on the Berlin picture were a repeat of the object-letter drama, they showed it in weakened form rather than developing it further, just as the ornamentation of a frame is sometimes a simplified repetition of the motifs on the canvas.

Of course it was possible to accuse all the motifs of the story of being self-absorbed, isolated and fragmentary. Incidents came to an end and were replaced with others to which they bore no connection; the goddess Ino, for example, who entered Baumgarten’s thoughts in the farmyard, disappeared from the story never to return, even though there were plenty of opportunities for her to do so. Having thought these incidents up, a storyteller ought to take the trouble to join his beginnings to his endings in an elegant circle. He could say: “While the thief was sitting on the y describing to Baumgarten the Berlin picture, a vision came to the aesthetician in the whirling snow of a garment of billowing white. Shortly afterwards the white figure of a woman appeared before him in the violet neon; she looked at him with sadness for a few moments before vanishing into the darkness of the boulevard. Baumgarten had read in her expression the reproach that he had scorned her advice, that he had quite forgotten about her in the buffet bar on rue d’Odessa and hence had come to grief by becoming the well-respected head of a family and a citizen held in high esteem.” Then he might have continued: “In a fit of despair over his wrecked life, over the book he never succeeded in writing to completion, over the emptiness whose purity he never managed to hold on to, he pulled the necklace from the pocket of his dressing gown, handed it to the thief, and then threw himself down into the boulevard. But before his body could hit the pavement he felt a pair of gentle arms wrap themselves around him and bear him upwards. Ino had saved him and was carrying him off to distant shores…”

I was also perplexed by how the narrator had the girl simply disappear at the end of the story. A lovely solution had presented itself: Baumgarten could have fallen in love with the thief, whose world reminded him of the world of the rooftops, sleeping houses and undersea caves where strangers dwelled, a forgotten world of emptiness, waiting for nothing, and all the bliss these things entailed; the figure of the thief would be identified with Ino Leukothea (naturally it would be better if this were not stated explicitly, but the unity of the two characters be left to the listener to discover), and in this way, too, the analogy of the lettering in the yard and the neon inscription would be emphasized, an analogy into whose force field the smaller motifs of the pearl and crabs’ letters would be drawn, so that these were no longer superfluous ornamentation. The circle of the action might be further sealed by putting in the painting described by the thief a room on whose wall there hung a picture of Odysseus holding on to his raft as he was beaten by the waves.

I wrote that last paragraph, dear reader, late yesterday evening. Now it is nine in the morning and I’m sitting at my computer over a cup of strong, hot coffee. I would be glad if you would try to visualize for a moment the inconspicuous division between paragraphs, the negligible white space between the night-time period applied in resignation and encroached upon by the foam of sleep on the one hand, and the tense and impatient early-morning capital on the other, and to see these as a negative of last night, so that you might summon from this negative all its blackness and push it between the paragraphs. Otherwise what I write here will seem disconnected and illogical to you. All manner of things changed during the night; I lay in bed thinking about what I had written and I realized I had run straight into the trap the Parisian narrator had set for me.

Now I believe I did not understand the story. At the beginning its protagonist encounters the motions of elusive order and chaos, motions that escape from every code they help to appoint. But in so doing they create a curious unity, and any other unity, connection, and circular enclosure would violate the unity introduced at the beginning, while every violation of the unity and connectedness — and the story was composed practically entirely of such violations — would affirm and complement it. This means that everything in the story was exactly where it should be; its connectedness was formed by its disconnectedness and its unity by its fragmentariness.

By now you are perhaps asking yourself, dear reader, why I do not just drop the story told by the Parisian, as I have so many doubts about its veracity. It may seem strange to you, but a lack of veracity in the story is for me a more persuasive argument for telling it here than its veracity would be. All manner of things occur in it, and these are of no special significance, but the fact that the story of the letters is a fiction is surprising at the very least; that someone in Europe is thinking of the same things as the islanders seems to me something almost as unbelievable as a Greek goddess fluttering down towards the hero of the story on a Paris roof.