A Perfect Vacuum Page 12
The novel that depicted its own creation was merely the first step of the withdrawal to the rear. Nowadays one does not write works that show how those works arose, for the protocol account of a concrete creation is also too confining! One writes about what might be written. From the infinite possibilities awhirl in the brain one pulls out isolated outlines, and the rambling among these fragments, which never become regular texts, is the present line of defense. Not the last line, it is to be feared, because among the literati the feeling is growing that these successive retreats have a limit, that they are leading by way of retrogressions, one close upon the next, to the place where vigil is kept by the hidden, mysterious “absolute embryo” of creativity—of all creativity—that fecund germ from which could spring the myriad works that will not be written. But the image of this embryo is an illusion, because there can be no Genesis without a world made, and no literary creation without a belles-lettres as its product. “First causes” are so inaccessible as to be nonexistent: to retreat to them is to fall into the error of infinite regress; one writes a book about how one essays to write a book about the wish to write a book, and so on.
Raymond Seurat’s You is an attempt to break out of the impasse in a different direction, not by yet another retreat-beating maneuver but by a forward charge. To date, authors have always addressed the reader, yet not for the purpose of speaking about him: this is precisely what Seurat decided to do. A novel about the reader? Yes, about the reader, but no longer is it a novel. Since to address the addressee has meant to tell him something, to speak, if not about something (the antinovel!), then nevertheless, always, for him. And therefore, in this way, to serve him. Seurat thought it high time to put an end to this everlasting servitude; he decided to rebel.
An ambitious idea, no question of that. The work-as-rebellion against the “singer-listener,” “narrator-reader” relation? Mutiny? A challenge? But in the name of what? At first glance it seems nonsense: If you, writer, do not wish to serve by narrating, then you must be silent, and, silent, you must cease to be a writer. There is no alternative. What kind of squaring of the circle, then, is Raymond Seurat’s work?
I suspect that the further detailing of his plan Seurat learned from de Sade. De Sade created first a closed world—the world of his castles, palaces, convents—in order then to divide the throng locked within into villains and victims; annihilating the victims in acts of torture that afforded the executioners pleasure, the villains soon found themselves alone and, in order to proceed further, were obliged in turn to begin that mutual devouring which in the epilogue produces the hermetic solitude of the most vital of the villains—he who devoured, consumed all the rest, who reveals then that he is not the mere porteparole of the author, but the author himself, the selfsame Comte Donatien Alphonse François de Sade imprisoned in the Bastille. He alone remains, for he alone is not a creature of fiction. Seurat turned this account around, as it were. Besides the author, there surely is and must always be a nonfictional someone vis-à-vis the work: the reader. He therefore made this very reader his hero. But of course it is not the reader himself who speaks; any such oration would be a trick only, a ventriloquist’s deception. The author addresses the reader—to give him notice.
We are speaking here of literature as spiritual prostitution; prostitution because, to write it, one must serve. One must ingratiate oneself, pay court, display oneself, show off one’s stylistic muscles, make confession, confide in the reader, render unto him what one holds most dear, compete for his attention, keep alive his interest—in a word, one has to suck up to, wheedle, and wait upon, one has to sell oneself. Disgusting! When the publisher is the pimp, the literary man the whore, and the reader the customer in the bawdyhouse of culture, when this state of affairs reaches one’s awareness, it brings on a bad case of moral indigestion. Not daring, however, to quit in so many words, the writers begin to shirk their duties: they serve, but grudgingly; rather than clownishly amuse, they wax unintelligible and tedious; rather than show pretty things, to spite the reader they will treat him to abomination. It is as if an insubordinate cook were to befoul, by design, the dishes going to the master’s table; if the master and the mistress don’t like it, they don’t have to eat it! Or as if a woman of the street, fed up with her trade yet not strong enough to break with it, were to cease accosting men, cease putting on makeup, dressing up, giving fetching smiles. But what of that, when she continues standing at her place on the corner, ready to go off with any customer, sour as she is, sullen, sarcastic? Hers is no true revolt, it is a simulated, half-measure rebellion, full of hypocrisy, self-deception; who knows whether it is not worse than normal, straightforward prostitution, which at least does not put on airs, pretending to high condition, untouchability, precious virtue!
And so? One must give notice; the prospective customer, who opens the volume like the door of a brothel and barges in with such assurance, confident that here his needs will be attended to with servility, this overgrown pig of a philistine, this lowlife—one must punch him in the mouth, call him every name in the book, and—kick him downstairs? No, no, that would be too good for him, too easy, too simple; he would only pick himself up, wipe the spittle from his face, dust of! his hat, and take himself to a competitor’s establishment. What one has to do is yank him inside and give him a proper hiding. Only then will he remember well his former amour with literature, those endless illicit Seitensprungen from book to book. And so “Crève, canaille!” as Raymond Seurat says on one of the first pages of Toi: die, dog, but do not die too soon, you must conserve your strength, for you will have to go through much; you will pay here for your arrogant promiscuity !
Entertaining as an idea, and perhaps even as a possibility for an original book—which book Raymond Seurat, however, has not written. He did not bridge the distance between the rebellious conception and the artistically validated creation; his book has no structure; it is outstanding primarily, alas, even in these days, by virtue of the phenomenal foulness of its language. Indeed, we do not deny the author his verbal invention; his baroque is, in places, imaginative. (“Yes, loose brainsucking leech of a letch you, yes, turdy rot-toothed trull, yes, you candidate you for a whopping decomposition and oh-may-you-molder, be treated you shall to rack and ruin in here, for ruined on the rack, and if you think that all coddly cow’s-eyes and cajolery, you’ll see, I’ll cook you your wagon good I will. Unpleasant? No doubt. But necessary.”) And so we are promised tortures here —painted tortures. This already is suspect.
In his “Literature as Tauromachy,” Michel Leiris correctly emphasized the importance of the resistance which a literary creation must overcome if it is to acquire the weight of action. Thus Leiris took the risk of compromising himself in his biography. But in heaping curses on the reader’s head there is no real risk, for the contractual nature of the invective becomes undeniable. By declaring that he will no longer serve and that even now he is not serving, surely Seurat amuses us—and so, in this very refusal to serve, he serves.... He made the first step but instantly foundered. Can it be that the task he set himself was insoluble? What else could have been done here? Hoodwink the reader with a narrative that would lead him down whatever primrose path one liked? That has been done a hundred, a thousand times. And anyway, it is always easy for the reader to conclude that the dislocated, mistaken, and misleading text does not constitute a deliberate maneuver, that it is the product not of perfidy but of ineptitude. Any efficacious book-as-invective, to be an authentic insult, to be an affront that carries with it the risk proper to such an act, can be written only with a concrete, single addressee in mind. But then it becomes a letter. By attempting to affront us all, as readers, to tear down that very role—that of the consumer of literature—Seurat has offended no one; he has merely performed a series of linguistic acrobatic tricks, which very quickly cease to be even amusing. When one writes about all, or to all, at once, one writes about no one, to no one. Seurat failed because the only really consistent way for a writer
to rise up against the service of literature is silence; any other sort of revolt amounts to making monkey faces. Raymond Seurat will undoubtedly write another book and with it wholly annul this first one—unless he begins going to bookstores and slapping his readers in the face. Were that to happen, I would respect the consequentiality of his action, but only on the personal level, for nothing will salvage the washout that is Toi.
Being Inc.
Alastair Waynewright
(American Library, New York)
When one takes on a servant, his wages cover—besides the work—the respect a servant owes a master. When one hires a lawyer, beyond professional advice one is purchasing a sense of security. He who buys love, and not merely strives to win it, also expects caresses and affection. The price of an airplane ticket has for some time included the smiles and seemingly genial courtesy of attractive stewardesses. People are inclined to pay for the “private touch,” that feeling of being intime, taken care of, liked, which constitutes an important ingredient in the packaging of services rendered in every walk of life.
But life itself does not, after all, consist of personal contacts with servants, lawyers, employees of hotels, agencies, airlines, stores. On the contrary: the contacts and relationships we most desire lie outside the sphere of services bought and sold. One can pay to have computer assistance in selecting a mate, but one cannot pay to have the behavior one chooses in a wife or husband after the wedding. One can buy a yacht, a palace, an island, if one has the money, but money cannot provide longed-for events—on the order of: displaying one’s heroism or intelligence, rescuing a divine creature in mortal danger, winning at the races, or receiving a high decoration. Nor can one purchase good will, spontaneous attraction, the devotion of others. Innumerable stories bear witness to the fact that the desire for precisely such freely given emotions gnaws at mighty rulers and men of wealth; in fairy tales he who is able to buy or use force to obtain anything, having the means for this, abandons his exceptional position so that in disguise—like Harun al Rashid, who went as a beggar—he may find human genuineness, since privilege shuts it out like an impenetrable wall.
So, then, the one area that has not yet been turned into a commodity is the unarranged substance of everyday life, intimate as well as official, private as well as public, with the result that each and every one of us is exposed continually to those small reversals, ridiculings, disappointments, animosities, to the snubs that can never be paid back, to the unforeseen; in short, exposed—within the scope of our personal lot—to a state of affairs that is intolerable, in the highest degree deserving a change; and this change for the better will be initiated by the great new industry of life services. A society in which one can buy—with an advertising campaign—the post of president, or a herd of albino elephants painted with little flowers, or a bevy of beauties, or youth through hormones, such a society ought to be able to put to rights the human condition. The qualm that immediately surfaces—that such purchased forms of life, being unauthentic, will quickly betray their falseness when placed alongside the surrounding authenticity of events—that qualm is dictated by a naïveté totally lacking in imagination. When all children are conceived in the test tube, when then no sexual act has as its consequence, once natural, procreation, there disappears the difference between the normal and the aberrant in sex, seeing as no physical intimacy serves any purpose but that of pleasure. And where every life finds itself under the solicitous eye of powerful service enterprises, there disappears the difference between authentic events and those secretly arranged. The distinction between natural and synthetic in adventures, successes, failures, ceases to exist when one can no longer tell what is taking place by pure accident, and what by accident paid for in advance.
This, more or less, is the idea of A. Waynewright’s novel, Being Inc. The mode of operation of that corporate entity is to act at a distance: its base cannot be known to anyone; clients communicate with Being Inc. exclusively by correspondence, in an emergency by telephone. Their orders go into a gigantic computer; the execution of these is dependent on the size of the client’s account, that is, on the amount of the remittance. Treachery, friendship, love, revenge, one’s own good fortune and another’s adversity may be obtained also on the installment plan, through a convenient credit system. The destinies of children are shaped by the parents, but on the day he comes of age each person receives in the mail a price list, a catalogue of services, and in addition the firm’s instruction booklet. The booklet is a clearly but substantively written treatise, philosophical and sociotechnological—not the usual advertising material. Its lucid, elevated language states what in an unelevated way may be summarized as follows.
All people pursue happiness, but not all in the same way. For some, happiness means pre-eminence over others, self-reliance, situations of permanent challenge, risk, and the great gamble. For others it is submission, faith in authority, the absence of all threat, peace and quiet, even indolence. Some love to display aggression; some are more comfortable when they can be on the receiving end of it. Many find satisfaction in a state of anxiety and distress, which can be observed in their inventing for themselves, when they have no real worries, imaginary ones. Research shows that ordinarily there are as many active individuals as passive in society. The misfortune of society in the past—asserts the booklet—lay in the fact that society was not able to effect harmony between the natural inclinations of its citizens and their path in life. How often did blind chance decide who would win and who lose, to whom would fall the role of Petronius, and to whom the role of Prometheus. One must seriously doubt the story that Prometheus did not expect the vulture. It is far more likely, according to modern psychology, that it was entirely for the purpose of being pecked in the liver that he stole the fire of heaven. He was a masochist; masochism, like eye coloring, is an inborn trait and nothing to be ashamed of; one should matter-of-factly indulge it and utilize it for the good of society. Formerly—explains the text in scholarly tones—blind fate decided for whom pleasures would be in store, and for whom privation; men lived wretched lives, because he who, fond of beating, is beaten, is every bit as miserable as he who, desirous of a good thrashing, must himself—forced by circumstances—thrash others.
The principles of operation of Being Inc. did not emerge in a vacuum: matrimonial computers have for some time now been using similar rules in matchmaking. Being Inc. guarantees each client the full arrangement of his life, from the attaining of his majority until his death, in keeping with the wishes expressed by him on the form enclosed. The Company, in its work, avails itself of the most up-to-date cybernetic, socioengineering, and informational methods. Being Inc. does not immediately carry out the wishes of its clients, for people often do not themselves know their own nature, do not understand what is good for them and what is bad. The Company subjects each new client to a remote-monitor psychotechnological examination; a battery of ultrahigh-speed computers determines the personality profile and all the proclivities of the client. Only after such a diagnosis will the Company accept his order.
One need not be ashamed of the content of the order; it remains forever a Company secret. Nor need one fear that the order might, in its realization, cause harm to anyone. It is the Company’s job to see that this does not happen; let it trouble its electronic head over that. Mr. Smith here would like to be a stern judge handing out sentences of death, and so the defendants who come before him will be people deserving nothing less than capital punishment. Mr. Jones wishes he could flog his children, deny them every pleasure, and in addition persist in the conviction that he is a just and upright father? Then he shall have cruel and wicked children, the castigation of whom will require half his lifetime. The Company grants all requests; sometimes, however, one must wait on line, as when the desire is to kill a person by one’s own hand, since there are a surprising number of such fanciers. In different states the condemned are dispatched differently; in some they are hanged, in others poisoned with hydrogen cyanid
e, in still others electricity is used. He who has a predilection for hanging finds himself in a state where the legal instrument of execution is the gallows, and before he knows it he has become the temporary hangman. A plan to enable clients to murder with impunity in an open field, on the grass, in the privacy of the home, has not as yet been sanctioned by the law, but the Company is patiently working for the institution of this innovation as well. The Company’s skill in arranging events, demonstrated in millions of synthetic careers, will surmount the numerous difficulties that presently bar the way to these murders on order. The condemned man, say, notices that the door of his cell on death row is open; he flees; the Company agents, on the lookout, so influence the path of his flight that he stumbles on the client in circumstances the most suitable for both. He might, for example, attempt to hide in the home of the client while the latter happens to be engaged in loading a hunting rifle. But the catalogue of possibilities which the Company has compiled is inexhaustible.
Being Inc. is an organization the like of which is unknown in history. This is essential. The matrimonial computer united a mere two persons and did not concern itself with what would happen to them after the tying of the knot. Being Inc., on the other hand, must orchestrate enormous groupings of events involving thousands of people. The Company cautions the reader that its actual methods of operation are not mentioned in the brochure. The examples given are purely fictitious! The strategy of the arranging must be kept in absolute secrecy; the client must never be allowed to find out what is happening to him naturally and what by the aid of the Company computers that watch unseen over his destiny.
Being Inc. possesses an army of employees; these make their appearance as ordinary citizens—as chauffeurs, butchers, physicians, engineers, maids, infants, dogs, and canaries. The employees must be anonymous. An employee who at any time betrays his incognito, i.e., who discloses that he is a bona fide member of the team of Being Inc., not only loses his post but is pursued by the Company to his grave. Knowing his habits and tastes, the Company will arrange for him such a life that he will curse the hour in which he perpetrated the foul deed. There is no appealing a punishment for the betrayal of a Company secret—not that the Company intends this statement as a threat. No, the Company includes its real ways of dealing with bad employees among its trade secrets.