Dreams Spilling Over Reality (talking to César Aira)

“Each of us is the ultimate expert on the gentleness and understanding we deserve.”― César Aira

I was introduced to the work of Argentinian writer César Aira by the owners of Point Reyes Books, the bookstore in Point Reyes Station that, with a deep and enticing inventory and an infused literary passion, ranks up there with City Lights and Green Apple as one of the best bookstores in the Bay Area. It makes sense, the owners, Stephen Sparks and Molly Parent (who are opening a second location in Fairfax (!)) have an incredible depth of enthusiastic literary knowledge between them.

It was Stephen who recommended me a César Aira novella to read, An Episode In The Life of a Landscape Painter. He and I had been talking about some recent historical fiction we had both read…as well as a novel I had recently finished by Thomas Bernhardt (I believe it was Gargoyles)…when he asked if I had ever heard of Aira. He introduced the idea of Aira’s writing by saying that Aira was from the school of Jorge Luis Borges—that he generally wrote his narratives in a dreamlike, philosophical manor—“automatic writing” as WB Yeats would refer to it—as if the story inspired itself.

I read An Episode In The Life of a Landscape Painter in one weekend…loved the story of Johann Moritz Rugendas—a real landscape artist from Germany, who in this fictional account voyages to South America to paint landscapes for his audience who has never seen the area (this is before the era of photography, when a landscape painter filled the role in his or her part of the world, as chronicler of unseen lands). In Aira’s story, Rugendas survives brutal physical assaults which precipitates him wearing a baggish object over his head, but maintains his drive to paint the scenery he encounters, with the climax of the novel involving him painting a landscape as a wartime battle unfolds. Within the narrative, Aira meditates on beauty…on art and on art as depicting reality…on human nature and what drives the human…and on the dark depths of the soul.

Since then, I have read a half-dozen Aira novellas, the last being the most recent to be translated into English, Fulgentius. Fulgentius is the name of an aging Roman general who, instead of retiring, decides to accept one last leadership role, overseeing a campaign—which includes a town-sized amount of soldiers—to conquer a path of cities in the name of the Roman Empire. The twist: when he conquers these cities he makes them perform a play he wrote when he was a child about how he would grow up, become a general, and go about conquering cities. It is one of the best of Aira’s novellas, using this compelling story of the colorful character as Fulgnetius to dig explore more deeply his common themes about humanity and human motivation…about art…about art and reality and how they mix.

The book sat with me for a long time after I finished it, as many of his books do, Aira packing a lot within the guise of a novella. Without much in-depth writing about the newest English release on the internet (at least that I could find), I decided to e-mail Aira’s publisher, New Direction, to see if I could arrange an e-mail interview for The Signal. To my complete surprise, a few days later Aira e-mailed me back himself and agreed. The following are his answers to my questions.

One more thing…I was asked to be a reader on the Adult Fiction committee for the book fair that my kids’ school puts on annually and Fulgentius was my suggestion that made it through to being one of the books featured. The book fair is this week. For any MCDS parents reading this—go grab a copy at the fair! And for the rest of you, it is available at Point Reyes Books (they offer mail order), and at any other truly great bookstore out there (SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE)….

DAVID KATZNELSON: What was your inspiration behind the story of Fulgentius?

CÉSAR AIRA: Apparently there really was a Roman general who had written a tragedy, and had it performed in the cities where he passed in his campaigns. I read it somewhere, I don't remember where, they mentioned it as a curious fact and it was just two lines.

The same thing happened to me with another novel, El Santo. The central fact is true, I read it in a book, just two lines, like those of the Roman general, but capable of opening and flourishing. It would be great to find things like this every day, and don't need inspiration. But, well, I found two, and I should be satisfied.

DAVID: You make the period of time the book takes place come alive, almost feel modern. What kind of research do you do before writing a historical novela like this one?

CÉSAR: No, I don't do any special research. In this case, as in other novels that I have set in distant times or places, I resort to that old-fashioned but very useful tool: General Culture. With it everything looks more natural, as if it had been written by an ancient or a native of the antipodes. They would not have needed to investigate or document.

DAVID: In An Episode In The Life of a Landscape Painter, you have an artist translating reality through his painting for an awaiting public who have never seen the lands he is traveling through.  Near the end of the story, he is literally following a battle…preserving the action on his canvas while running into it.  In Birthday, you use your writing as a form of your own life discovery.  In Fulgentius, the main character has created a piece of art that foreshadows his reality, and has it performed in the cities that he goes through on his campaign.  There is a theme that runs through these books connecting art and reality. Storytelling with memory.  How would you describe your thoughts on the relationship between art and the human experience?  Storytelling and how we interpret our reality?

CÉSAR: I cannot prevent reality from existing, and hence I cannot prevent reality from shaping my experience. But I'm not happy with this situation. I believe that literature is made with literature, and lived experience taints the process, with psychological and autobiographical miseries. The ideal is the adolescent intoxicated by literature, who has not yet lived, and writes. Lautreamont.

DAVID: This one is going to be hard putting into a question without being face-to-face but here it goes. Fulgentius often takes in the landscapes as he ventures forward on his campaign. There is a part of this military lifestyle of destruction that also gives him the ability to see the beauty around him.  While he is daydreaming about his life near the end of the novel, after his travels with Maximus, which seems to open up his life at least temporarily to bigger dreams, he “missed out on the smiling white half-moon in the blue morning sky” amongst other things and even prevents his men from killing a beautiful snake.  The final sentence of the book refers to these dreams as madness and losing them frees him to contemplate the world again.  Fulgentius’ attachment to the NOW is what has given his life its zest. What are you suggesting to the reader about how to hold the present and how to hold dreams? 

CÉSAR: I believe that everything I have written has been a repeated attempt, never achieved, to make visible that moment that Gerard de Nerval describes in his novel Aurelia thus: "It was then that the dream began to spill over into reality"

I lived all my life in a dream. I saw reality late and from afar. But I found in literature the instrument capable of bringing the dream to the real present, and making it more real.

DAVID: Are the best moments of life when we are most free….free of family ties…of home responsibilities? Of thinking about the future?

CÉSAR: Yes, it's obvious. But to appreciate those precious minutes of freedom in their full value, one must have spent many years carrying the weight of the most bitter responsibilities.

DAVID: You talk about peacetime and war….that war can fix the problems that arise from peace (“there was always war to fix them up”).  In your opinion, is war a necessary component of humanity? Is it something that is ultimately needed to fix human imperfection and iniquity?

CÉSAR: There is a paradox: I love my things, my books, my paintings, my pens, my house, and because of that love I live with the fear of destruction, fire, bombs, theft... And from there comes a resentment against my loved things, because they force me to live with fear. Therein lies the paradox: just because I love them I would like to destroy them, get rid of them and be free.

I think I can say it better, more simply and clearly: The world in its beauty and variety is something so good that it forces us to live in fear of death. We rebel against that beauty (like Rimbaud, who sat her on his knees and found her bitter) for being the mother of fear.

DAVID: Is Fulgentius someone you would like to share a coffee with?

CÉSAR: I would rather have a chat with one of the young legionaries who make fun of him.

DAVID: On a totally other note: What are you reading right now? What are you listening to?

CÉSAR: This last years I have been reading only poetry. And not new poetry but always the same poets well beloved of all my life, Rimbaud, Benjamin Péret, Marianne Moore, Lezama Lima... These days I am rediscovering Yeats, his beautiful music.

And I also rediscovered Morton Feldman. I had listened him with passion in my youth, and then I had forgotten it for many years, now I came back and listen his music all the time.

It is the era of return. As if the first time things (the readings, the music, what I wrote) had been incomplete and poorly done and now I have a second chance.

~fin~

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Many of Aira’s above literary (and other) references are not immediately recognizable to an American audience, and thus, below are articles and poetry that celebrate them.

Nerval's Lobster: Is walking a crustacean any more ridiculous than a dog?

Boing Boing’s Mark Drey dug incredibly deep in this piece looking at the colorful, crazed character of Gérard de Nerval, a poet and translator who majorly influenced the surrealist movement (he also owned a lobster, which he would take on walks). A truly fascinating outlier of the 19th century, Drey writes of how “Nerval was a fervent scholar of the occult, steeped in classical myth, Egyptian magic, medieval fables, Teutonic tales of Lorelei, the Gnostic wisdom of the Druses of Lebanon, alchemy, the Kabbalah, the Tarot, the secret teachings of the Illuminati, ‘the strange legends and bizarre superstitions’ of the Valois countryside outside Paris, where he grew up…”

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Arthur Rimbaud, the poet of sacred disorder

Rimbaud’s name is definitely a well known one, with an incredible bounty of dark, mysterious poems he wrote in a short span of five years very early in his life. This year is the 150th anniversary of Rimbaud’s poetry book Season In Hell and writer Charlie Connelly uses this moment to look at the story around the publication of the book, the relationship between Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine and how it inspired the book, and the years following when Rimbaud pretty much gave up writing….

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Yeats’ play on sale for £125,000 – thanks to message from the dead

“Billed as ‘one of the greatest rarities of English literature’, a signed copy of William Butler Yeats’s first play, Mosada, is on display this weekend for the first time since 1956 – and its £125,000 price tag is all thanks to a message from beyond the grave…..”

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The Disinherited

By: Gérard de Nerval

I am the unconsoled, the widower, the dark one,
The Prince of Aquitaine, of the demolished tower;
My only star is dead, and the rare design
Emblazoned on my lute is the Black Sun of Melancholy.

You who consoled me in the dark night of the tomb,
Do you recall what stirred my ruined heart? Send me that flower,
Bring me the trellis where the grape and rose entwine,
And give me back Posillipo and the Italian sea.

Am I Eros or Apollo? Lusignan or Biron?
I have dreamt beside the pool in the mermaid’s bower,
My forehead is still red from the kiss of the queen,
And I have crossed the Acheron twice, victoriously,

Modulating Orpheus’s lyre to intone
By turns, the saint's sigh and the fairy's scream.

When There’s No More Hay in the Haystacks

By: Benjamin Péret

Should all the hay I’ve cut be piled upon my head
all the hay that I’d split
I’d have a head of hair of dawn and fresh cream
but the cut hay flows down the stream
like golden feathers in the wind
it bobs up it bobs down
not knowing or heeding where it goes
and the boats that try to hunt it down
with their hay hooks will never catch up to the hay
because the cut hay has wings with black veins
veins like tributaries that fork this way and this
into palaces and prisons the hay branches
into the mouths of priests
into the ears of the deaf
into the neck of those to be guillotined
upon the piled-up tombs of him or her
the hay-haired who know at their last breath the secret of hay
and into the subsidized theatres of Literature and its under-
ground sewers
it branches and branches this way and that the hay it goes its
own black
way for it is the color of the sun and it has its own mind
it has a mind of hay

When I Buy Pictures

By: Marianne Moore

or what is closer to the truth,
when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor,
I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments:
the satire upon curiousity in which no more is discernible
than the intensity of the mood;
or quite the opposite—the old thing, the medieval decorated hat-box,
in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the waist of the hour-glass,
and deer and birds and seated people;
it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal biography perhaps,
in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;
an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged hieroglyphic in three parts;
the silver fence protecting Adam's grave, or Michael taking Adam by the wrist.
Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that detracts from one's enjoyment.
It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved triumph easily be honored-
that which is great because something else is small.
It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,
it must be "lit with piercing glances into the life of things";
it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

Pavilion of Nothingness

By: José Lezama Lima

I join the screw
posing questions in the wall,
a lackluster sound
color covered with a blanket.
But I falter and momentarily
blind, I can barely feel myself.
All at once, I call to mind,
with my fingernails I tunnel
a tokonoma in the wall.
I need a tiny hollow,
it’s there I go diminishing
to reappear anew,
to touch myself and set my forehead in its place.
A tiny hollow in the wall.

Multiplier of weariness 
the café I’m sitting in,
the insistent daiquiri
returning like a face of no use
for death, for springtime.
With my hands I trace the length
of a lapel that feels cold to me.
I wait for no one and I insist
on someone’s pressing arrival.
All at once, with my fingernail
I draw a tiny crevice on the table.
There it is, the tokonoma, the hollow,
I’m in company unrivaled,
a corner conversation in Alexandria.
We’re together in a round
of skaters through the Prado.
He was a child who inhaled
all the tenacious dew from the sky,
even then with the hollow, like a cat
that circles the whole body
with a silence full of flickerings.

Within reach of what surrounds us,
and close to our body,
the stubborn notion that says our soul
and its enwraptment fit
inside a tiny hollow in the wall
or on a tissue paper scratched with a fingernail.
I’m diminishing
I’m a point that disappears and returns
and a fit full-length inside the tokonoma.
I make myself invisible
and on the verso I recover my body
swimming at the beach,
encircled by bachelors of art with banners of snow,
mathematicians and baseball players
describing sapodilla ice cream.
The hollow is smaller than a deck of cards
and it can be as big as the sky,
but we can shape it with our fingernail
along the brim of a coffee cup
or in the sky that falls beside our shoulder.

The beginning is united with the tokonoma,
in the hollow a kangaroo can hide
without forfeit of its bounding joy.
The apparition of a cave is
mysterious and begins to disentangle its dreadful.
To hide there is to tremble,
the hunter’s horns resound
in the frozen forest.
But the hollow is soothing,
we can lure it with a thread
and usher it in to insignificance.
I scrape the wall with a fingernail,
slivers of lime crumble down
as though they were shards
from the celestial tortoise shell.
Is the barrenness in the hollow
the first and final path?
I fall asleep, in the tokonoma
the other still walking is the one I evaporate.

Poem 1 (Part 1)

By: Comte de Lautréamont

THE POETIC whimperings of this century are nothing but sophistry. First principles should be beyond argument.

I accept Euripides and Sophocles; but I do not accept Aeschylus.

Do not manifest toward the Creator a lack of the most elementary conventions and good taste.

Cast aside disbelief: you will make me happy.

Only two kinds of poetry exist; there is only one.

A far from tacit convention exists between author and reader, by which the former calls himself the sick one, and accepts the latter as nurse. It is the poet who consoles humanity! The roles are arbitrarily inverted.

I do not wish to be dubbed a poseur.

I shall leave behind no Memoirs.

Poetry is no more tempest than it is cyclone. It is a majestic and fertile river.

It is only by admitting the night physically that one is able to admit it morally. O, Nights of Young! How many headaches you have caused me!

One dreams only when asleep. These are words like the word dream, nothingness of life, terrestrial way, perhaps the preposition, the distorted tripod, which have permitted to creep into our souls that poetry dripping with weakness, resembling decay.

Disturbances, anxieties, depravities, death, exceptions in the physical or moral order, the spirit of negation, brutalities, hallucinations served by the will, tortures, destructions, upsets, tears, dissatisfactions, slaveries, deep- digging imaginations, novels, unexpected things, that which must not be done, the chemical peculiarities of the mysterious vulture who watches over the carrion of some dead illusion, precocious and abortive experiments, obscurities with flea-like armor, the terrible monomania of pride, the inoculation with deep stupors, the funereal prayers, the envies, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, bitternesses, aggressive insults, madness, spleen, rational terrors, strange uneasinesses which the reader would prefer not to feel, grimaces, neuroses, the bloody channels through which one forces logic at bay, the exaggerations, absence of sincerity, the saws, the platitudes, the darkness, the gloom, the infantilisms which are worse than murders, the clan of court-of-assizes novelists, the tragedies, odes, melodramas, the extremes presented ad infinitum, reason whistled at with impunity, the smells of wet chicken, the sicklinesses, the frogs, squids, sharks, desert simooms, all that is somnambulist, cross- eyed, nocturnal, soporific, night roving, viscous, talking-seal, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anemic, obscure, hermaphrodite, bastard, albino, pederastic, phenomena of the aquaria and bearded-lady, the hours drunk with silent discouragement, fantasies, monsters, demoralizing syllogisms, ordures, that which does not reflect like a child, desolation, that intellectual manchineel-tree, perfumed cankers, camellia-like thighs, the guilt of a writer who rolls down the slope of nothingness and scorns himself with cries of joy, remorse, hypocrisy, the vague perspectives that crush you within their imperceptible networks, the serious spittings upon sacred axioms, vermin and their insinuating ticklings, insensate prefaces like those of Cromwell, Mlle, de Maupin and Dumas the Younger, the decays, impotencies, blasphemies, asphyxiations, stiflings, rages—before these disgusting charnel-houses, which I blush to mention, it is at last time to react against that which shocks us and so royally bows us down.

You are being perpetually driven out of your mind and caught in the trap of shadows constructed with so coarse a skill by egoism and self-esteem.

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all other qualities. It is the ne plus ultra of the intelligence. By it alone is genius the supreme health and balance of all the faculties. Villemain is thirty-four times more intelligent than Eugène Sue and Frederick Soulié. His preface to the Dictionary of the Academy will witness the death of Walter Scott’s novels, of Fenimore Cooper’s novels, of all novels possible and imaginable.

The novel is a false genre, because it describes passions for their own sakes: the moral conclusion is lacking. To describe passions is nothing; it suffices to be born part jackal, part vulture, part panther. We do not care for it. To describe them, like Corneille, in order to subject them to a high ethic, is a different matter. He who will refrain from doing the former, at the same time remaining capable of admiring and understanding those to whom it is given to do the latter, surpasses with all the superiority of virtue over vice him who does the former.

By this alone, were a teacher of the second grade to say to himself:

“Were they to give me all the treasures of the universe, I should not wish to have written novels like those of Balzac and Alexandre Dumas,” by this alone he is more intelligent than Alexandre Dumas and Balzac. By this alone, if a pupil of the third grade is convinced that he must not sing physical and intellectual deformities, by this alone he is stronger, more capable, more intelligent, than Victor Hugo, if he had written only novels, plays and letters.

Alexandre Dumas fils will never—no, never—make a prize- giving speech for a school. He does not know what morality is. Morality does not compromise. If he did make one, he should first strike out with a single stroke of the pen all he had written hitherto, beginning with his absurd Prefaces. Summon a jury of competent men: I maintain that a good second-grade pupil is smarter than he in no matter what, even on the dirty subject of courtesans.

The masterpieces of the French language are prize-giving speeches for schools, and academic speeches. Indeed, the instruction of youth is perhaps the finest practical expression of duty, and a good appreciation of the works of Voltaire (dwell upon the word “appreciation”) is preferable to the works themselves. Naturally!

The best authors of novels and plays would in the end distort the famous idea of good, if the army of teachers, preservers of Right, did not constrain generations young and old to the path of honesty and of work.

In its personal name, and it must be despite it, I have just disowned, with an implacable will and a tenacity of iron, the hideous past of cry-baby humanity. Yes: I shall proclaim beauty upon a golden lyre, making allowances for goitrous unhappiness and stupid pride which pollute at its source the marshy poetry of this century. I shall trample underfoot the harsh stanzas of scepticism, which have no reason for existence. Judgment, once entered into the efflorescence of its energy, imperious and resolute, without hesitating one instant over the absurd uncertainties of misplaced pity, like
a public prosecutor, prophetically condemns them. We must guard incessantly against purulent insomnia and atrabilious nightmares. I scorn and execrate pride, and the infamous voluptuousness of any irony become extinguisher, which set aside justness of thought.

Certain characters, excessively intelligent (there is no call for you to invalidate this with the recantations of a dubious taste), have flung themselves head first into the arms of evil. It was absinthe—savory, I do not believe, but harmful—that morally slew the author of Rolla. Woe unto the greedy! Scarcely has the English aristocrat entered into the years of discretion, than his harp is shattered beneath the walls of Missolonghi, having gathered on his way naught but the blossoms of drear annihilation bred by opium.

Although his was a genius greater than ordinary, if there had been during his time another poet, endowed as he was in similar proportions with exceptional intelligence, and capable of presenting himself like his rival, he would have been the first to confess the uselessness of his efforts to produce ill-assorted maledictions; and that the good exclusively is declared by the voice of everyone alone worthy of appropriating our esteem. The fact is that there was no one successfully to rival him. Here is something that no one has said. Strange thing! Even upon rummaging through anthologies and books of his epoch, we find that no critic thought of outlining the foregoing strict syllogism. And it is not he who will surpass it, who could have invented it. One was so much filled with wonder and uneasiness, rather than considered admiration, before works written by a treacherous hand—works, however, which revealed the imposing manifestations of a mind which did not belong to the common run of men, and which found itself at ease amid the ultimate consequences of one of the less obscure problems which interest non-solitary hearts: good and evil. To no one is it given to approach extremes except either in one direction or another. This explains why it is that, while forever praising without mental reservation the marvelous intelligence which at every moment he manifests, he, one of the four or five beacons of humanity, has silently made his numerous reserves concerning applications and the unjustifiable use he has knowingly made of them. He should not have encroached upon the kingdoms of Satan.

The savage revolt of the Tropmanns, the Napoleons I, the Papavoines, the Byrons, the Victor Noirs, and the Charlotte Cordays, shall be held at a distance in my stern regard. These great criminals with their diverse titles I brush aside with a gesture. Whom are they thinking to fool here, I ask, with an interposing slowness? O, hobby-horses of the hulks! Soap bubbles! Puppets in gold leaf! Worn-out strings! Let them draw near, the Conrads, the Manfreds, the Laras, the sailors who resemble the Corsair, the Mephistopheles, the Werthers, the Don Juans, the Fausts, the Iagos, the Rodins, the Caligulas, the Cains, the Iridions, the shrews in the manner of Colomba, the Ahrimans, the addle-brained heretical earth-spirits who ferment the blood of their victims in the sacred pagodas of Hindustan, the snake, the toad and the crocodile, gods considered abnormal in ancient Egypt, the sorcerers and the demoniac powers of the Middle Ages, the Prometheuses, the mythological Titans destroyed by the thunderbolts of Jupiter, the Evil Gods spewed out by the primitive imagination of savages—the whole clamorous series of pasteboard devils. With the certainty of overwhelming them, I seize and balance the lash of indignation and concentration, and I await these monsters firm-footed as their predestined conqueror.

There are down-at-heel writers, dangerous buffoons, quadroon humbugs, gloomy mystifiers, actual madmen, who deserve to inhabit Bedlam. Their softening heads in which there is a screw loose, create giant phantoms which sink downward instead of rising. Rugged exercise, specious gymnastic. Away with you, grotesque nutmeg. Kindly remove yourselves from my presence, fabricators of dozens of forbidden riddles, in which I used not previously to see at once, as I do now, the seam of the frivolous solution. Pathological case of overpowering egoism. Fantastic automata: point out to one another, my children, the epithet which puts them in their place.

If they existed somewhere in plastic reality they would be, despite their proven but deceptive intelligence, the opprobrium, the bitterness, of the planets which they inhabited, and the shame. Imagine them for a moment, gathered together with beings their equals. It is an uninterrupted succession of battles, undreamed of by bulldogs, forbidden in France, by sharks, and by macrocephalic cachalots. There are torrents of blood in those chaotic regions abounding in hydras and minotaurs, whence the dove, utterly terrified, wings swiftly away. It is a mass of apocalyptic beasts, who know not what they do. There are the impacts of passions, irreconcilabilities and ambitions vying with the shrieks of impenetrable and unrestrained pride, of which no one may even approximately plumb the reefs and the depths.

But they shall impose themselves no longer upon me. To suffer is a weakness, when one can prevent it and do something better. To give vent to the sufferings of an unbalanced splendor—that is to demonstrate, O dying ones of the perverse maremmas! still less resistance and courage. With my voice and my solemnity of the grand days, I recall you within my deserted halls, glorious hope. Come, sit by my side, wrapped in the cloak of illusion, upon the reasonable tripod of appeasement. Like a piece of cast- off furniture I chased you from my abode with scorpion- lashed whip. If you wish that I should be convinced that you have forgotten, in returning to my home, the miseries which, in the name of penances, I once caused you—then, by all that’s holy, bring back with you that sublime procession—support me, I am swooning!—of offended virtues and their imperishable reparations.

I state with bitterness that there remain only a few drops of blood in the arteries of our consumptive epoch. Since the odious and particular whimperings, patented without guarantee of a trademark, of your Jean-Jacques Rousseaus, your Chateaubriands, your nurses in babies’ panties like Obermann, through the other poets who have wallowed in corrupt slime, up to the dream of Jean-Paul, the suicide of Dolores of Ventimiglia, the Raven of Allan, the Infernal Comedy of the Pole, the bloody eyes of Zorilla, and the immortal cancer, the Carrion, once lovingly painted by the morbid lover of the Hottentot Venus, the improbable sorrows created for itself by this century, in their monotonous and disgusting insistence, have made it consumptive.

Come—music.

Yes, good people, it is I who command you to burn upon a hot shovel, with a little brown sugar, the duct of doubt with its lips of vermouth, which, shedding in the midst of a melancholy struggle between good and evil, tears that come not from the heart, causes everywhere without a pneumatic pump, the universal vacuum. This is the best thing you have to do.

Despair, feeding upon the foregone conclusion of its phantasmagoria, imperturbably guides the literary man to the mass abrogation of divine and social laws, and to theoretical and practical wickedness. In a word, causes the human backside to predominate in reasoning. Come, it’s my turn to speak! I repeat, wickedness results, and eyes take on the hue of those of the damned. I shall not retract what I propose. I desire that my poetry may be read by a young girl of fourteen years.

Real sorrow is incompatible with hope. No matter how great that sorrow may be, hope raises it one hundred cubits higher. Very well, leave me in peace with the seekers. Down, down with the outlandish bitches, muddlemakers, poseurs. Whatever suffers, whatever dissects the mysteries surrounding us, does not hope. The poetry that disputes the necessary truths is less beautiful than that which does not dispute them. Indecisions ad infinitum, ill-used talent, loss of time: nothing is easier to verify.

To sing of Adamastor, Jocelyn, Rocambole, is puerile. It is not even that the author hopes that the reader infers that these rascally heroes—whom he himself betrays, emphasizing good in order to pass off descriptions of evil—will be pardoned. It is in the name of these same virtues, misunderstood by Frank, that we are anxious to support him, O mountebanks of incurable unease.

Do not behave as do these unchaste (in their eyes magnificent) explorers of melancholy, who find unknown things in their souls and their bodies!

Melancholy and sadness are already the beginnings of doubt; doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of varying degrees of wickedness. To convince yourself of this, read “Confession of a Child of the Century.” The slope is fatal once we are launched upon it. We are sure to arrive at wickedness. Beware of the slope. Rip out evil by the roots. Trust not the cult of adjectives such as indescribable, crimson, incomparable, colossal, which shamelessly give the lie to the nouns they distort: they are pursued by lewdness.

Second-rate minds, like that of Alfred de Musset, are able stubbornly to thrust forward one or two of their faculties much farther than the corresponding faculties of first-rate minds—Lamartine, Hugo. We are in the presence of the derailment of an overturned locomotive. A nightmare holds the pen. Learn that the soul is composed of a score of faculties. Don’t talk to me about these beggars with their outsize hats and their sordid rags!

Here is a method for proving the inferiority of Musset to the two other poets. Read to a young girl “Rolla” or “The Nights,” “The Fools,” of Cobb, or else the portraits of Gwynplaine and Dea or the speech of Theramenus of Euripides, translated into French verse by Racine. She starts, frowns, raises and lowers her hands without purpose like a drowning man; her eyes flash with greenish fires. Read to her “Prayer for All” by Victor Hugo. The effects are diametrically opposed. The kind of electricity is no longer the same. She bursts into peals of laughter, and asks for more.

Of Hugo, nothing will be left but poems about children, in which much badness is to be found.

“Paul and Virginia” shocks our deepest aspirations. Once upon a time, that episode, which exudes blackness from the first to the last page, made me gnash my teeth. I rolled on the carpet and kicked my wooden horse. The description of pain is nonsense. It must be shown in all its beauty. If that story had been told as a simple biography I should not attack it. It instantly changes character. Unhappiness becomes august through the impenetrable will of God who created it. But man should not create unhappiness in his books. This is to concentrate, with all strength, upon one side of things only. O, what maniacal raving!

Do not deny the immortality of the soul, the wisdom of God, the greatness of life, the order of the universe, physical beauty, family love, marriage, social institutions. Forget the funereal scribblers: Sand, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Musset, Du Ferrail, Féval, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Leconte and the “Blacksmiths’ Strike!”

Communicate to your readers only the experience resulting from pain, which is no longer pain itself. Do not weep in public.

One must know how to wrest literary beauty from the very bosom of death; but these beauties do not belong to death. Here, death is only the occasional cause of them. Death is not the means; it is the end.

The immutable and necessary truths which make the glory of nations, and which doubt struggles in vain to shatter, began ages ago. They are things which should not be touched. Those who would make literary anarchy under pretext of novelty arrive at nonsense. One does not dare to attack God; one attacks the immortality of the soul. But the immortality of the soul itself is as old as the beginning of the world. What other belief will replace it, were it to be replaced? This will not be always a negation.

If one bear in mind the truth whence arise all other truths, the absolute goodness of God and his absolute ignorance of evil, sophistry breaks down of itself. And at the same time, that scarcely poetic literature based upon sophistry will break down too. All literature which disputes eternal axioms is condemned to live only upon itself. It is unjust. It devours its own liver. The novissima verba cause the handkerchiefless kids of the fourth grade to smile superbly. We have no right to question the Creator on any matter whatsoever.

If you are unhappy, do not tell the reader. Keep it to yourself.

If one were to correct sophistries according to the truths corresponding to those sophistries, only the correction would be true; while the work thus made over would have the right to call itself no longer false. The rest would be out of bounds of truth, with a trace of false, and consequently, necessarily considered null and void.

Personal poetry has had its day of relative jugglery and contingent contortions. Let us take up again the indestructible thread of impersonal poetry, abruptly severed since the birth of the ineffectual philosopher of Ferney, before the abortion of the great Voltaire.

It seems to be fine, sublime, under the pretext of humility or of pride, to dispute final causes, to falsify their stable and known consequences. Undeceive yourself, for there is nothing more stupid! Let us link together again the regular chain of past times; poetry is geometry par excellence. Since Racine, poetry has not progressed one millimeter. It has fallen backwards. Thanks to whom? To the Great Softheads of our epoch. Thanks to the Sissies—Chateaubriand, the Melancholy-Mohican; Sénancourt, the Man-in-the-Petti-coat; Jean- Jacques Rousseau, the Sulky-Socialist; Edgar Poe, the Muckamuck-of- Alcoholic-Dreams; Mathurin, the Godfather-of-Shadows; Georges Sand, the Circumcised-Hermaphrodite; Théophile Gautier, the Incomparable-Grocer; Leconte, the Devil’s- Captive; Goethe, the Weeping-Suicide; Sainte-Beuve, the Laughing-Suicide; Lamartine, the Tearful-Stork; Lermontoff, the Bellowing-Tiger; Victor Hugo, the Funereal-Green-stick; Mickiewicz, Satan’s-Imitator; Musset, the Intellectual- Shirtless-Dandy; and Byron, the Hippopotamus-of-the- Infernal- Jungles.

Doubt has always existed in the minority. In this century it is in the majority. We inhale the violation of duty through the pores. This is to be seen only once; it will never be seen again.

The ideas of simple reason are so obscured at this time that the first thing that fourth grade teachers do when they teach their pupils—young poets with their mothers’ milk still moist upon their lips—to make Latin verses, is to reveal to them in practice the name of Alfred de Musset. I ask you, now! Third grade teachers, then, in their classes, give for translation into Greek verse two bloody episodes. The first is the repulsive fable of the pelican. The second is the awful catastrophe that overtook the laborer. Of what use is it to contemplate evil? Is it not in the minority? Why turn the head of a schoolchild upon questions which, owing to their not having been understood, caused men such as Pascal and Byron to lose theirs?

A student told me that his second grade teacher had given his class, day after day, these two cadavers to translate into Hebrew verse. These wounds of animal and human nature made him sick for a month in an infirmary. As we were known to each other, he sent his mother for me. He told me, albeit naively, that his nights were troubled by persistent dreams. He thought he saw an army of pelicans which threw themselves upon his bosom and rent it. Then they flew to a flaming cottage. They devoured the laborer’s wife and his children. The laborer, his body blackened with burns, emerged from his home and engaged in an atrocious battle with the pelicans. They all flung themselves into the cottage, which collapsed in ruins. From the heap of rubbish he saw his teacher emerge bearing in one hand his heart, in the other a piece of paper upon which could be deciphered in sulphurous script the fables of the pelican and the laborer, just as Musset himself composed them. It was not easy at first to diagnose his sickness. I advised him to remain strictly silent, to speak of it to no one, above all to his teacher. I counseled his mother to take him home with her for a few days, assuring her that this would pass. And indeed, I was careful to visit him for a few hours every day, and it passed off.

Criticism must attack form, never the content of your ideas, of your phrases. Do as you please.
Sentiment is the most incomplete imaginable form of reasoning.

All the waters of the ocean would be insufficient to wash away one intellectual blood-stain.

Jungle by Johann Moritz Rugendas

“This was one of those situations in which the whole is not enough. Perhaps because there were other "wholes," or because the "whole" made up by the speaker and his personal world rotates like a planet, and the combined effect of rotation and orbital movement is to keep certain sides of certain planets permanently hidden.”
― César Aira