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( that strange, adorable, frightening somewhere ) where the re-marriage of a body cut in two will be able to take place, in the epilogue. Do something with this damn leg, if we decide to keep it : let it at least have a graceful swing,81 let the prop makers be inspired by the hoof of the fauns hunting nymphs, let it be seen as a musical instrument, a fine piece taken from a mill and still retaining a memory of the wind, or one of the branches of a compass ( a costume designer, coming out of his storehouse, suggests reusing a narwhal horn : fine as the needle of gramophone, with the same deftness, assuming without complaint the confusion with the unicorn ).
Ahab in Hollywood — prophecies, bad omens We can describe the failure of the captain in Hollywood according to the failures of others, prodigious failures, which became national history, & according to those thousands of unfinished films, their tales collected along the edge of the shore — stories of directors fired between take 1 and take 2, stories of silent film stars confronted with a microphone, with its patience of a suspended spider, stories of producers changing their minds, losing faith or losing their inclination, or stories of stars who died on the first day of shooting, with their courage in a flask of booze ; or stories of burnt sets, cursed scripts, honest workers added to the jinx list, like Katharine Hepburn in 1938. But most of the time, it has been the simpler tale of the story struggling to come to fruition : a bad start, poorly thought-out, too long or too short, with gaps and unsympathetic characters on either side of each gap ; on top of that the script had lost 081. In three syllables, graceful.
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any plausibility it had, the dialogues were a diversion, but diverting is not enough. Ahab will leave disappointed seventy times in a row with his manuscript under his arm, he will fall from B movie to Z movie, seeing the moment coming, like the drunkard bringing on all the hooch, when he agrees to add a vampire to his whale, or men from Venus who fall out of the sky, or the Sirens of an old historical epic recounting the travels of Ulysses,82 this time without believing it : their costumes, long & narrow, are still somewhere, in a closet on hangers between studio 11 and studio 19 — it’s hard to say at which point he stops hoping : maybe long, long before the seventieth time.
Hollywood — the story department ( this chapter contains the story of P. G. Wodehouse ) The story goes that a shrewd man named Pelham Grenville Wodehouse,83 a comic author, beloved by his readers, who love to laugh and buy his books, signed a fabulous contract one day in a boss’s office ( next door to another boss’s office ), the kind of contract Hollywood can promise : a windfall in exchange for a signature, three thousand dollars ( $3,000 ) a year in a time-limited account, in return for which Wodehouse pledged to provide his talent in the form of writing and rewriting ( three thousand, come to think of it, far more than the usual five hundred, one wonders how to spend it, what abyss to drop it into ). The story goes that P.G. Wodehouse went to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer the day after the signing, flashing his badge to the supervisors with the assurance of one now under contract — it is said that he waited 082. Circe, the Enchantress by Robert Z. Leonard, perhaps, shot in 1924. 083. P. G. for short.
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one day sitting alone at his table ( a small room for his use, a ceiling fan ), then a week, then four weeks, then three more days for a full month, he waited, for someone, anyone, a secretary or an archangel : for them to come and bring him work. There were years of this, the three thousand dollars paid with the regularity of the great royal administrations, when there’s no reason for concern, and meanwhile P.G. Wodehouse’s strolls, his wanderings from one set to another, his idleness assuming an incredulous, worried, then quiet style, the acquired habit of doing nothing & running into actors dressed as Argonauts. One boss had replaced the other, the contract had been put away, flat under a pile, in a safe, the memory of a man, a screenwriter called Wodehouse, had been lost somewhere, and he, without questioning anyone, lived off his earnings ( “Off the generosity of men too eager to put other men under contract” ). ( He could have kept himself hidden, drinking like others, like William Faulkner who was dried up by the salt of his mines, or go out but look busy, his steps quicker, with a bucket of water in the direction of a fire — or smoke on the balcony, the smoke of a job well done. ) There are huge crowds at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the anthill’s soldiers, as the newspapers sometimes say, seventeen-ball jugglers, dancers, masters of ballet, stuntmen, diction specialists, composers, a thousand violinists, twenty-three timpanists, men who know how to blow the trumpets of Rome, a specialist of Napoleon’s style upon returning from Egypt, all hired in the name of “you never know” to solve a juggling or baldachin issue, at a specific time and place — at night, it seems, you can hear the swords of the musketeers fighting right next to yet another genius from central Europe, yet another one, who recycles Shakespeare, Gogol, and Max Reinhardt.
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P.G. Wodehouse never set foot there, but he heard of a Goldwyn-Mayer department somewhere, lit day and night, several offices in a row where every day sixty to seventy staff members received, from all over the world ( the whole world of Sindbad the Sailor, no doubt ) all the stories available, in the form of synopses, paperbacks, press clippings, anonymous letters, ideas written on an envelope, news items, ads, minutes from trials, back covers of books, tedious romances, Memoir for a Universal Utopia, Proposal to Replace Paper Money, telegrams, French fry cartons, faded books, posters, programs, issues of the Prensa, copies of the Quixote, conspiracy novels, sports commentaries, police reports, autopsy reports, manuscripts by schizophrenics, dictionaries of proper names, objectivist poems, Kawabata’s novels, prophetic fortunes in cookies, and medicine inserts. There are six hundred telephone ladies sitting on six hundred rolling chairs, each operating, plugging, and unplugging twenty pins in innumerable holes, facing a switchboard cabinet as tall as the Parthenon but made of radiator metal and as wide as the sculpted frieze of Ashurbanipal in the British Museum. Next to that, the postal service, and bags of paper, envelopes and letters, seventeen trucks a day to the Metro offices, where there are the proofreaders, wastepaper baskets, the pile of accepted and rejected, binders by category, the distribution of stories in one cabinet or another, and in various drawers according to category ; the unusual, the miscellaneous, the pity murder, the happy occasion, the clever or sordid swindle, the belated triumph, the glory followed by misery, the funny coincidence, the betrayed friendship, the fight of a single righteous person versus the fanatics, the biography, the sex act disguised as a day in the country, the meticulous alibi or the adventures of a cultured skank. When he would pass the celebrated offices in the evening without always
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knowing if he was in the right place, Wodehouse imagined the lamps and the ceilings ; he imagined the newspaper article clipped with scissors treated with the same care as a fifty-page summary ( you do what you gotta do ) of In Search of Lost Time ; he saw Leo Tolstoy’s saintly face next to the front page of the Providence Daily, and snippets of speeches, pages from diaries, cookbooks, and history books ; next to that, other readers revisiting the Ancients, consulting withered copies, Aristophanes if it was necessary to go back that far, or the hundred stories of Boccaccio or the farces of Poggio Bracciolini, The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Katzenjammer Kids — . others took the opportunity to reread Spinoza under the pretext of looking for the idea that would one day make the box-office explode. Memoirs of old military men and dirty novels written by bankrupt bigwigs, a Refutation of the Protocols of the Wise, a little book warning about the invasion of the Earth by a race from one of the satellites of Jupiter, the diary of one of the survivors of the Titanic, no thicker than the testimony of the grandson of the man who saw Lincoln go down in the theater, a summary of the Elizabethan plays, a true biography of the real Shakespeare in four hundred pages plus sixty for the appendices, a futuristic novel set at the two Poles, the correspondence of Amadeus Mozart, and the Conversation Books kept by Ludwig van Beethoven after he became permanently deaf. Next to a pile of papers, a man desperate to separate unusual facts from ingenious alibis, and next to the desperate man a dozen others, their ears glued to a radio set, notebook in hand and a pencil in mouth, determined to distinguish among the amateur singing contest, news from Venezuela, a listener’s questions for the governor of Arkansas, an interview with one of their stars after disembarking the plane, an argument between two physicists, one talking about
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fields, the other about quantum leaps, a testimony from a lady who had to have her navel stitched up, and stories of lynchings in the fields of Mississippi. Stories kept being told : they spent a good part of their time, even at night, reviewing others’ movies, or their own old short films to make a one-line summary that would all fit on a typewriter ribbon ; they braided the ribbons, they mixed them in large bowls, or threaded them around a spinning wheel, to see if they could get something out of them, by the greatest & most beneficent of accidents.
Don Quixote sublimates the farm girl Ever since he’s disappeared, the farm girl has been missing Don Quixote : he’d slit the throats of two of her hens, having mistaken them for dwarf soldiers in the service of Ali Pacha, and decapitated an orange tree to teach it civility, and this civility was toward the old woman who would grow younger when bowed to ; every year in the spring he set fire to his straw bales to properly wish a happy birthday to Dulcinea, queen of Toboso, he brought her trophies of cauliflowers, he spent a whole night battling a stepladder to save her honor ( he defeated it in the morning and spared it, proof of his disheveled courtesy ), he regularly did battle with her dog and wanted to rid her of her geese because they walked together at the speed of Mamelukes — but she missed him. At the time of his travels, or rather more accurately his comings and goings, when he would ride straight toward a target known to him alone, the farm girl could lay claim to the title of Dulcinea, queen of her kingdom, adorned with Toboso jewels : she was full-throated, with white and luminous skin, pearls in the lobes of her two ears, other pearls in a drawer to replace the first ones and which never saw the
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light of day ; she had the graceful neck, a little too long, of the Italian painters’ Madonnas ; her fortune encompassed Cleopatra’s, she exchanged her rakes for palms, her stools for thrones, her only cow for six hundred gazelles plus a Nile hippopotamus ; her belly was the pride of the gods and the best-kept secret of her maids ; her love affairs were also bright and tender, fulfilled within the perimeter of this belly ; in approaching her but without touching her, Quixote took fifty years off her age, converted her warts into beauty marks, and if he’d had more time he would have taught men to see in each varicose vein the shadow of a eucalyptus concentrated on the contour of the leg. He brought her absolution, he knew how to get enough white goats from the four corners of the country to fill her bathtub with their milk and to entrust her beauty to their cream, and above all he gave her the power to decide, by raising a single finger, for example the pinkie, to decide on cream, milk, gazelles, silk, and all the pearls that even Cleopatra did not have.
Don Quixote does the windmills a favor The windmills also saw Don Quixote coming from afar ; they too had heard of him, and confused Amadis of Gaul with stories of great discoveries, or with the island of Hispaniola itself, wherever it may be — they took Quixote’s visit as a tribute and as a real challenge : it forced them to be worthy of the giants that this crazy knight thought he saw. Imagine a mill, harassed by Quixote from a distance, before being assailed in vain, a mill proud to put itself in the shoes of a giant, not sure what they might look like, how they behaved toward and looked at men, worried at the thought of never having time to find these books, most of them having disappeared anyhow, where giants, the real ones, were described
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hastily, straightforwardly, though with kindliness, described just once or twice by a man who had become a writer by chance, casual because he was convinced of the giants’ immortality ( he would talk about it better the following day, or the day after that ). For Don Quixote : the duty to fight, the obsession to save and to bring justice at a time when saving and bringing justice no longer had any meaning ( their meaning lost in the scrublands, blown by the wind, sent elsewhere, blown again, amassed poorly by priests in the pulpit as if it were possible to catch stalks of hay in the midst of a storm ) — in any case, the need to fight, and from time to time, perhaps, like a stranger’s hand on his shoulder, the fear of being wrong, but then to be wrong as never before, to give to humanity lessons of error, for someone else, much later, to find something useful in Quixote’s misguided war against flapping wings ( he would begin by saying that Don Quixote, on his way back, left behind him mills that had hardly undergone any change anyway ). Some mills remained indifferent : this little man, they’d seen him before, they’d see him again ; he insisted every seven years, his repetition a poor imitation of the mill’s immobile eternity that would never reach such heights — the mill’s raison d’etre was thus observation, patience, and on some days mockery ; in the universe of the mills, and for a spirit of the mill, the burden of Don Quixote was a cyclical phenomenon measured with the help of clocks, calendars, and comets, or eclipses : they each had their own life span ; the idea of revenge or justice or the word orphan resembled a currency without value : one definitely Spanish, but buried, because it was the sign of devaluation. Others had this pride, this mercy, of wanting to be the giant, at least for the duration of an unimportant battle, to give life to the giants,
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to commemorate their existence, solicited by Don Quixote, great and weary commemorator, he and his pathetic bluster. They twisted and turned conscientiously, their sense of responsibility coming to them from who knows where, borne by the wind, they waited for Quixote’s approval and recognition, knowing full well how it would look : always with the gesture of holding out his lance, which had become with habit a meager offering as well as a threat — they knew the knight, they knew how he would turn his back on them, in just a minute : he cried victory, he sent to the sky like a burst sack of flour his announcement of Justice Served, to a squire, the son of a miller, to whom the mills would not know how to lie. While awaiting the visit of the knight Don Quixote, once every seven years, the mills were content to be what they were, mills — people came from the village to bring them arguments about the price of wheat.
The grudge and Moby Dick Moby Dick, on the other hand, could rely on that garrulous old sailor perched at the edge of the deck to become something other than a huge fish from whom oil is drawn to light up rooms : this time, it was not the tip of a lance, but the tip of the tallest mast, more or less the same thing, and after the tall mast, the two smaller ones, the ship itself, the bow, the stern cap, and hopping on the forecastle this Shakespearean marmoset who specialized in Gloucester’s torments ( Richard “My Discontent” Gloucester ) : a single syllable from Ahab’s imprecations and the whale thought of himself as Moby Dick ( he had been able to deduce his name from the insults directed at him from the deck ; perhaps he had been mistaken, it could just as well have been a
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drinking song or one of the devil’s ninety-nine names — it could also have been the captain’s name : and for the thousandth time since the creation of the world the prey would assume the name of its predator ). Without the captain and his determination, he would have gone around in circles ( oh, certainly, with grace ), and then would have been deposited, one day, without anyone to count the number of his turns ; neither burial, nor monument, his carcass becoming little by little the sand where the carcass washes up ( not even Omar Khayyâm approaching with flippers and a snorkel to engrave on his bones a sentence of the type : we will all one day be the sand that lines the bottom of the seas ). With the captain, the whale knew what electricity there was in being hunted, he ended up understanding, he knew he was part of a story reconstituted from scratch by a captain raised amidst the Shakespeareans ( always better than the Jesuits ) ; he got dragged along, or better, he leaned into it, he allowed himself to be offered heroic titles, agreeing to assume the cruelty of the epic — he pushed the sense of responsibility and of play to the point of making himself the appropriate villain that was integral to any good story, the captain’s harpoons ended up becoming ( I quote ) “the acupuncture for a second youth.” He knew how to get in the old fool’s way ( he went around in circles, he had predictable routes, the very definition of his determination ) ; he waited for Ahab there, when the time came he would let himself be tracked down, and the captain would have the pride of discovery following a long hunt fueled by calculations and ploys perfected in his dark room — when the whale wanted to interrupt a monotonous life and stop being just himself, he knew whom to trust.
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Hollywood — the story department, continuation and conclusion Scriptwriter Ahab also imagines the arrival each morning by boat,84 by plane, by wagon, and by courier, the arrival of pages, not necessarily superb, but all that matters is that they be in abundance ; they accumulate on tables as a million sardines are being deposited in the fishing harbor, a judicious selection is made, and then the greatest minds of the script department are woken up, the coffee machines are switched back on — to look at them through the open window, they could be mistaken for the students of the Academy of Lagado, as described by Swift, in chapter V of Book III : an assembly of erudite savants divided between reading and rewriting and who do not lift their pens until they have exhausted all — and I mean all — possible combinations. Since morning, they’ve been combing through, for example, an issue of The New York Times, the very heavy Saturday edition, the one that refuses to fit into certain mailbox slots ; they’re looking for a subject, it’s even more important than dowsing for spring water, and it’s eminently respectable, and it’s to the credit of the Great Studios that they have not resigned themselves to the idea that all our stories have already been told, that they have been repeated since Ovid or since the Heptameron, that there is a limited number of them, perhaps 17, perhaps 36, and remain with us, perpetually, like the air, our own, dwindling in a closed room, breathed a good thousand times. ( Poets, prose writers even, equally as noble yet lacking this kind of fitful optimism, have long since given up, and perhaps they were 084. He introduces himself as Frank Swinnerton, sometimes as Timor Jack.
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right to do so, giving up the search for new subject matter, a canvas, or a theme as Sigismund Krzyzanowski used to say, or a subject as Nicolai Gogol used to say ( the destitute and deprived Gogol : he was going to ring Pushkin’s doorbell to beg for a subject, just one, for the last time, promise : on the doorstep Pushkin offered his subject, he had others, he had no use for them, and Gogol went back home, the nose before his eyes, his subject in his pocket, like a cat, assured that with it he could awaken all the characters in the middle of the night, the old woman, the young man, the notary and inspector, the womanizer, the ugly girl to be married, all awaiting him impatiently beneath his bed ). ) Well then, if the literary sages, divorced from their old enthusiasms after having read all the books and compared Ovid to Conan Doyle, give up looking for non-existent new subjects, then why the hell should Hollywood, its vulgar masters, its illiterate bosses, its clever producers, its cynical filmmakers, its scriptwriters paid by the line, and its capricious divas keep holding out hope for the new idea that will come to shake up the masses ( summon them, get them to come out ). ( In reality, it’s not all so clear-cut : when Paramount gathers readers and all the world’s printed matter in a single room, it’s not just for the love of the unprecedented story — or at least that love doesn’t stop the nabobs young and old from wanting to cash in on stories that have already been told twenty times over, and then resumed under a different title : how many Draculas and Nosferatus were there at Universal, for example ? how many Vampires and Returns of the Vampire and Revenges of the Vampire ? and interchangeable epics that simply replace Theodora with Messalina ? Moreover, by now these big groupings of screenwriters have been cleared out to give way to conference rooms ( or something else less cheerful ), they look like broken-down
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pumps in a desert of oil wells ; if someone were to come up with their unprecedented, unparalleled Moby Dick story, these gentlemen would ask what the pitch was a remake of : an old Phantom of the Opera ? )
Ahab in Hollywood tries to sell his whale tale There is, after a period of time that is difficult to establish, no longer any mention of the whale — and what is abandoned is thus the zoological direction, all this cetacean paraphernalia ( someone referred to it as junk ) ; this makes the staging easier, without the high waves, there is no longer a whaleboat in a pool to be shaken back and forth, and all these dollars saved on the ocean and on the creature can be invested in the costumes or, why not, in the writing of refined dialogues ( the luxury of being able to afford a poet from New York & asking him to improve, without making too many changes, the Hello, how’s it going?s ). This time, for example, before the old captain and beneath the blue sky, the blue sky, the incessantly renewed blue sky of California, it is a young scriptwriter, 85 the twelfth of the team of twelve, distinguished by her freckles ( the way they are spread out ) : according to her, there is no doubt that the studios would be crazy to deny themselves the idea of the whale, of twenty years of hunting on the high seas, of revenge so full & absolute that it defies all reason : simplicity and efficiency, the matrix of a thousand stories to come — it will only be a matter of replacing the whale with something else. The monster disappears to give way merely to its white color, threatening and tempting, the white without the whale like the smile without the cat — meanwhile, Ahab is still standing, 085. The name of Ida Lupino is suggested.
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dark as in gangster films and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s self-portraits ; he doesn’t have an anchor tattooed on his forearm, & it’s preferable to send back the pseudopirate, post-Conradian fishing accessories, “a little Jules Verne, a little canned tuna filets” ( these are the scriptwriter’s words : she’s from the Rockies, by way of Yale ) ( in a way, this suits the scriptwriter captain : he doesn’t want to become the curator of the sailors’ old lexicon, and he has nothing against denial ; he even dreads the day of his very great poverty coinciding with his very great age, when he will no longer have the right to borrow, and will have to resign himself to becoming Captain Spermwhale 86 again on little sardine tins ). Ahab the Avenger, the one in the script for the ninth draft, goes by the name of Ashton, he’s in the family of Scarface and Alphonse Capone, and he also has the scarification, which depicts the heraldry of the Admirable Bandits in the form of a stripe ( oblique from left to right ) and a bar ( from right to left ). He has a fierce look ( the script says “eagle-eyed” ), a distrustful bearing of the head ( from the side, the three-quarter face makes the reverse angles delicate ), a hat, a dark suit, an irascible disposition, an enigmatic past buried six feet below the earth, and sins confessed to a priest who is promptly shot and then buried according to summary rites while praying to God to please receive him, once again. He’s had his hour of glory : the proof is that he owns a tie pin and three horses, which are named Bucephalus, Belphegor, and Backgammon ; he pretends to make his way in middle-class neighborhoods as if in conquered territory — but his hour is over, he has debts, they are added melodramatically to the desire for recognition and the 086. Captain Sperm Whale : see above.
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abuse of alcohol : debts to a kingpin who’s bigger and fatter, and more of a kingpin than he is, the owner of twelve horses, four to one, and the factory that makes the tie pins. Old Ashton was one of the bad boys in the mid-1920s, a step below Dillinger, & now he resigns himself to being for hire again, which means returning to the field, going back to tailing, at night, the broken doors, the hours of long waiting, the shadow of the hat on the face, the fingers of the bad debtors chopped phalanx by phalanx, the brusque razor ceremonies behind the barber’s curtain. It also means, in the melodramatic and childish language of Hollywood gangsterism, giving up one’s self-determination in order to serve a boss — and here’s the beginning of the plot : Ashton, though too old for it, will have to bring his old guns out to enact another’s revenge, for the biggest kingpin, without ever knowing anything about his grudge or the reasons for his grudge, and if possible without trembling as the other trembles time and time again, with a mixture of envy and fear. ( Ahab is worried ) and the whale in all this, the immense whale ? the white color, we understand, has been taken away from him, as during the Bartholomew’s Day massacre the unfortunates were flayed to make magic lanterns — but the monster itself, the object of the grudge ? The lady lets the old captain’s anxiety play out in full, she even guides him, “with a diligent arm,” before reassuring him, telling him that the object of vengeance will not be lacking, that would be a beginner’s mistake and the death of the film by the second reel : it will be there, but less animal ( how can I put it ? ), less Barnum, less of a Natural Phenomenon for the whole family to see for a 5-dollar ticket. There, in the distance, enigmatic, at the illusory point where the vanishing lines of Piero della Francesca’s canvases meet : a silhouette, a name with
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a single syllable, the gleam of one eye, the other hidden by a scarf, or the glint of a diamond, what do you say ? on the finger, or in the ear, it doesn’t matter where, the diamond and the woman’s name will be an impure pretext, the thing magnified by the effort made to reach it, substitutable at any moment — perfectly, substitutable : instead of a mysterious lady, an evil dwarf, or a dancer, or the Hydra, or Medea, anything as long as it works. The captain would like to yawn so as to signify that he’s starting to get bored : the story heard twenty times before in more thrilling versions, the omnipotence of scoundrels and the arduous paths of revenge, the pretty girl where the lines of flight cross, the danger, the threat, the game of predator and prey, the intransigence of a wounded man, but at the end of it all, it was a foregone conclusion, the hitman falls in love with his client. If it were only that, of course, it would be trite ( the young woman reacts to the captain’s yawns ) : but this story, this story here ( she slaps the thirty sheets of paper with a wave of her hand ), this is something else, it’s going to bring the house down ( to his dying day, the captain will not know which house ) : the crux of the plot is elsewhere, isn’t it ? it’s always been hidden in the hand that does not brandish the ace of hearts ( and the young woman accentuates the does not brandish, raising her eyebrows ). This story of misguided resentment, ill-assumed by a nabob who is both omnipotent and impotent ( the excellent idea — ah, Hollywood, garden of two-way stories, where the villain is good and love is murderous ), resentment conferred to someone else, as if one could delegate such personal feelings to one’s personnel ( pause ), well, this story cannot simply end : there is a clinamen, that’s the precise word, it was flawed from its beginning and will keep deviating from the path drawn ahead of time until the hundredth minute.
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Ahab does not know where Moby Dick is in this story of the misguided path, but he listens to the rest politely, as he has just laughed politely at the petit personnel : now, hold on, the kingpin in the white suit, the Raminagrobis, who cultivates his grudge in his misanthrope’s home ( imagine Howard Hughes in his dark room — and the old captain still approves : he approves of everything ), finally gives up his grudge. Absolutely, here’s the tipping point : either something new inspires him, or his grudge comes to an end, and now it’s dried up, the kingpin replaces with tired forgiveness the grudge that was devouring his love as ( no, please, not that, not Kronos devouring his children ). Ahab is still listening, wondering how the grudge could possibly dry up ; he tries to imagine the metamorphosis of the desire for revenge into passionate love, he sees it as a whim of the kingpins once they have reached a certain age, on the verge of death, assisted by enemas, the final witnesses, the last of the faithful — or else it’s a Hollywood fantasy, another one, that must be it : and Hollywood as a whole is the axiom that justifies the implausibility. Did you understand ? the nabob gives up, like those old libertines on their deathbeds, the prince of Ligne, I don’t know who, propped up on four pillows, stretching toward a priest’s little cross to deny the flesh — the nabob gives up : he wants to call back his hitman, he’s used to pulling on cords for the maid to appear, only here, in the meantime the hitman has become an imperturbable machine, he is inaccessible, comparable to a runaway train without a driver, his obedience is the sign of his nobility, his final pride as a man depends on it, which is ultimately the vehicle of his accomplishment ( besides, he has been paid in advance ). Then, too late ( the script will hinge all the suspense on this too late ) : the killer is gone, his master has passed from
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resentment to a deep, unstable, sickly feeling of guilt, which blossoms in the heat of the day & of the night : it will take the form of an ulcer, or bone tuberculosis, there will be fever, it will come to oppress his prey, added to the regrets & the shame, a kingpin’s unprecedented shame. He does the only thing he has ever been able to do : he gives orders, he is diligent, his lieutenants are launched into the city in search of his killer, or the lady, or both of them, but in a timely manner, that is to say before the epilogue ; the men scatter in vain, and in the meantime he is also scattered, it seems as if his water is going to break ; he summons Molière’s doctors to his bed so they can tie him up from all sides. Over the course of the conversation that follows, there’s talk of the Golem of Prague, about his shadow on the walls of honest families fast asleep and soon awakened by terror, there is an attempt to remember the letters of the word truth engraved in the loam of his forehead, which have become the letters of the word death — isn’t there a bit of white whale in this story of a creature in the ground in the kingdom of Rudolph II, in Prague ? The old captain doesn’t know, but he is starting to understand now how an assassin of molded earth, with a neck as wide as his head and no heart, walks through the streets of the city. Do you see ? the night, the girl in danger somewhere, the kingpin worrying in bed, the tears in his handkerchief, the doctors of Molière, the drugs administered by the doctors he’s had brought in — and the infernal machine, an assassin’s atrocious loyalty to his boss, perhaps people will see in it an implicit criticism of disciples, lackeys, and the nation of militants, brazen — fifteen other little soldiers hunt the hunter to prevent him from doing harm, at the risk of giving this drama of the Fixed Idea the look of a small silent film : one innocent, one only, pursued by five hundred bandits.
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The old captain wonders how it will all end : with a ballet of pies as in the time of Buster Keaton, specifically ? or with all of them rushing off a cliff, the waters closing back up, frothing, over unfinished business ? or by the light of handguns, dozens of guns, in the night, each one flashing indefinitely and with a vague target ? or by reconciliation, but what kind of reconciliation, at this stage, when a reason for action is not needed in order to act ? ( As for the ending, we’ll see later, this is what the young woman proposes : as long as the idea is there, as long as Darryl Zanuck is convinced, as long as he is assured of having a quick story leading up to it in six months. The little helpers will be entrusted to come up with the epilogue : one imagines it’s pathetic, the theme of gangsterly misfortune pushed to its conclusion, half a man’s face lying on the pavement, the eye is open, a gaze but not for long, soon an eye and nothing more : of a merlin, of monkfish. )
Concerning Martha Dolittle, half-widow of Captain Ahab ( widow without a funeral ) Martha Doolittle, the half-widow of Captain Ahab who remained in town, is not vengeful, not even resentful : the vengeful armor would have regilded Martha on both sides, would have made her a knightly woman à la Orlando Furioso, lost in the forests, indomitable from the pectoral down .— the performers, all benevolent, who came later, would have rhymed Justice with Huntress, they would have found proof in it : in this rhyme, the virtues of justice equal the qualities of the hunt. She did not split the waters ( “like a knife,” “like a harpoon missing its target,” “like a buffalo gone berserk,” according to the appraisals ) in search of her Ahab, and yet, without being as vengeful as the captain &
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the whale, she was tempted to take to the road, at least to accomplish these first gestures of the legitimate wife in the effort to collect, to bring back toward her, as one gathers, the elements of her legitimacy. To face waters foreign to all her homeland & her birth, it would have been like forcing open the window and the little boards of a booth to ask the employees for the original of her marriage certificate. But we must admit — going in search of the young, then the notso-young, then the old Ahab — what’s the point ? to repair what injustice ? to start an existence from scratch, but what scratch for what existence ? to dedicate evenings & nights to correcting misunderstandings point by point, at the risk of discovering that they were not misunderstandings ? ( Everywhere and at every turn the captain tells that when he’d gotten married, he’d only had time to leave the imprint of his face in the pillow — this imprint, the half-widow kept it, she had this presence of mind : melancholy and ironic homage, the reflex of a lawyer before an exhibit, a precocious love of nostalgia, a young person’s curiosity for the most ephemeral artifacts of love, and a young woman’s curiosity for traces : among the most troubling things in this world. ) Sometimes she was given the life of an old maid, standing still, letting time pass without her, as if she had given it back its freedom too ; a sea horse’s freedom, fabulous on the way out, fabulous on the way back in, fabulous in its evocation, and of course fabulous in the effects produced on those who were half-asleep — we see the shadow of this horse and that of Martha, at her window, coming and going as well, with the much less fabulous swing of her rocking chair. In truth, there is no old shadow of a lady rocking back and forth in her room, no figure passing in front of the light bulb sixty times a minute to signify the meager existence
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of a widow and the obstinate nature of all life. It’s more accurate to imagine Martha away from her rocking chair, because she sent the beautifully twisted wood of her chair to rock somewhere else, with a kick of her foot, along with other accessories, the headboard, the wicker dummy, the photo album, frames of different sizes, and pan handles as if it were the devil being prepared for dinner ; swiftly ( we borrow this swiftly from better informed chroniclers ), young Mrs. Ahab, now widow or half-widow Martha, got rid of half her widowhood, the period of mourning, the black Amish petticoat, she demonstrated its inanity in three formulas written in white chalk on a slate, the equivalent of lipstick on a bathroom mirror ; she disengaged, she removed the headdresses assigned by tradition, she did as Sherlock Holmes would have if tired of wearing his cap with ears ( the invention of an illustrator ). She got back up, 87 she ran away, she didn’t wait twenty years for her husband to come back, there was no reason to do so, commitments are arbitrary and death arrives quickly by boat between New York and Dover. She married and remarried, without any church weddings ; we know of just one equivalent to this good amorous health passing through different nuptials, Penelope, also a half-widow, pursuing pride, bliss ( proud bliss ) and playful satisfaction for years without complaining, but without being ostensibly vocal either, pursuing her right of inventory ( we attribute to her a number n of suitors, going from 19 to 197 : she wanted to know them by name, to put them to the test, before casting them aside ; when the day came, later on, all these dead and stuffed suitors would not bother anyone : in their chests of eternal young men pierced by the 087. See above.
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good arrow, they kept forever ( I quote ) the secret of Penelopean love ). Like the Penelope from the books of mythology ( she had read an Odyssey at the public library ), Martha had enough talent, spontaneous at first, intuitive, and also experience, to make the young man believe that he was the young man and the 99 others a tapestry decoration.
Ahab on the ship endlessly reinvents the whale For most sailors, a whale, even a white one, was quickly exhausted : it had to be renewed every morning, better yet Sundays, exceptional days : it was not enough to be satisfied with the whale from the day before, always repeating the words about whales found in manuals from the time of Pytheas, what was needed was the other side of the whale, the other names for the whale, including those that seemed to have nothing in common with it ( the words about the black fly, its opposite, for example ). To renew the whale every morning — “morning that God makes” — for an audience that was difficult because it was demanding and surrendered almost nothing in exchange for the stories it was given : already, it was nice to teach one’s crewmen to gather together to listen ( a disciplined audience, in a half circle, not this melee of sailors anxious to speak louder than the others ), on top of that they had to be given more whale, like a ration, simultaneously a novelty and a reassuring constant, to rekindle the desire to start maneuvering in the direction of something, it didn’t matter what as long as there was a direction. The captain limped in front of his audience, he had the stage fright of a beginner that had become the stage fright of an old hand ( Christopher Columbus also cheated in his measurements so as not to worry his men : sailors are crude brutes who get wor-
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ried over nothing ) ; he had taught them to be quiet, before him the sailors kept their mouths shut, they granted him this raw silence but it bothered him instead of helping him to pick up where he’d left off with the whale : his leg would strike the wood, once, three times, several other times, and all the while, he wondered how to serve up a new whale while remaining faithful, at least dramatically, to the fish from yesterday ( what he called tradition ). He saw the day when he’d run out, and on that day there would doubtlessly be no more hunting because no more of this sailor’s credulity, a voluntary credulity associating whale story with whale chase, without worrying about going from one edge of one world to the other. He had more whales or whale stories in his bag than he’d thought, he took them out one after the other, he gave them all away, he combined some of them according to the oldest ones, he cut two of them to make a third ( a smoker’s technique is detectable there ), he matched them up, the body of eagle and the legs of lion, but the audience did not want to be taken in, not this time ( he thought he saw a hand seeking the handle of a knife in a pocket ) — he took refuge in his cabin, he consulted his catalog, he exhausted his supplies, he drew the whale from news items, from articles in the Chronicle, from popular books, from engravings taken from junk shops, from illustrations for Jules Verne, from true and horrific facts, accidents told by the accident victim himself to his brother, and the brother to his cousin, the cousin to a cook, the cook to his girlfriend, and by word of mouth all the way to Ahab — he took other stories from books on the manufacture of oils. The sailors’ greed when they’ve stopped fiddling with their perpetual ropes and sit in a semicircle to claim their portion of the whale : you have no idea — no idea either of the sound of the wooden leg at the moment of coming on
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stage ( and of the hours before coming on stage, still alone in his room, thinking with urgency, knowing of course that wrinkling his forehead in that way did not necessarily encourage lucid thoughts ). Some mornings were mornings of triumph : the captain would find the right whale, the right path for the whale, the right rhythm of the wave, the right proportion of troughs and bumps, something musical in the alternation, the current would catch Ahab instead of waiting for him to follow it or announce it ; both of them, captain & current, imagined themselves to be brothers conspiring in a mutual practice ; and even better, Ahab found the words to express the color white once more, but to express it without weariness, he now felt able to avoid the repetitions of the whale as easily as he avoided those at mass, which perpetuated but stupefied ; he also chose the right harpoon, the word that was provisionally suitable for a harpoon, whether it existed or not, the right distance and the right length for the story’s thread ; he revealed the character of the whale to himself and to others, structured a little, not too much ; he invented new stakes, going back in time, also renewing the motif of the grudge ( and sometimes, with virtuosity, aerial, alone on one lone foot on a thread, he rushed forward in the name of a resentment so tenuous that it looked like the absence of resentment : that would be to go on a hunt without the reasons for going on a hunt, an exhausting art for art’s sake leaving the sailors speechless ). There was no limit to being lyrical ( it’s impossible not to be elegiac ) : during these mornings of glory, Ahab found Moby Dick, he knew how to persuade himself to fear him for the first time, he perceived his obviousness confused with his disappearance, he would have enough to write five acts if he had five acts to write ( if that was his job, and if he had the time, if he was not already expected on the deck ) ; on these mornings,
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in an hour of euphoria, he let himself add to his list of conquests — flying carpets, assassins, dramatic twists, great-uncles’ letters revealing terrible secrets, pirates disembarking from another ship, a representative of the King of England — & to contrast with the hunt itself, moments of melancholy, the motif of the declining body, the delirium of fever, the captain at the hour of the calm great and small, the counting of the hours and the comments on the funeral oration — and other times, instead of one whale, three, white and similar, inspired by the Sirens, melodious and seductive, there to attract the fishermen toward shores and chasms that had nothing in common ( they promised it ) with their mercantile pragmatism, more disposed to negotiate than to fight and provided with a language that the captain dictated to them, he the sole decision-maker, whatever his pleasure as a hunter, a man with a grudge, one caught in a trap, or a storyteller. And other times the fatigued captain delivered to his men a whale like mist, the same color, the same omnipresence, indecipherable at first, appearing gradually, without ever giving itself entirely — other times, we see him in the mood to speak ahead of pitiful failures ( they were also perilous, they were valiant : they at least confronted the water ), with enough ardor to inspire hope anyway, and the story of failure was followed the next day by the story of a fish without spume, without panache, placid & indecisive, not knowing whether it should pursue or be pursued, believing to find its salvation precisely in indeterminacy ( the crewmen were now ready to appreciate as connoisseurs the charms of ambiguity, when it came to a character — they had indeed learned to love bitterness ).
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Mrs. Ahab and the spirits scale Martha Dolittle explains to one of her 79 suitors how Ahab became her lover on her wedding night in absentia — she heard this expression pronounced in court during the trial of a strangler who also escaped on one of these ships that never come back : she is still young, knowing practically nothing of legal matters, lost amidst these rituals and vocabulary to experience fascination and embarrassment, unspeaking, trying like the others to not cause the chair to squeak with every movement, considering the men behind different tables in an attempt to distinguish the defendants from the lawyers and the lawyers from the judges ; she loses the story of the murder as it is reconstructed, once, twice, the lawyer and then the prosecutor ; long afterwards, she just barely remembers a man who was well-dressed but nervous as if he were late, brandishing ( this was the word : brandish ) a rope of three cubits and calling it incriminating evidence, what stays with her most of all ( it strikes her at that very instant ) is the phrase “in absentia” which is pronounced by the court a dozen times, in a firm but not excessive tone, to invoke a banal god. Someone to her left explains judicial matters to her, the Latin etymologies, and she, still young but already a widow of this half-widowhood of Ahab, finds in the word and the matter of absentia an approximate but the least bad description of her own existence : the idea of a de facto absence & a presence of law, a presence in theory, depending on the word alone of the judges, lawyers, witnesses, clerks, the consent of the public and the gestures of the ceremony, this idea pleases her, perhaps perversely, just as the idea of a voodoo doll and a remote magic spell would please her, more crudely. She sees the trial as it proceeds, hears another ten or twelve times the name of the absent
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defendant and almost as many times this phrase, in absentia, the devil’s 99th name ; she sees how the criminal, escaped elsewhere, still stands in the name and to the whims of an indomitable authority, which follows the letter, the escapee having on his ships only the power to recover provisionally, & the next day still provisionally, but not the power to prevent the trial from proceeding all the way to the sentence : the judges at that moment standing to show the real gallows, in real wood, hard, where the absent party will end up hanging. Too bad if the words do not always do their job effectively ( Martha realizes this, it is necessary to help them, to push them a little, show a little indulgence — always the indulgence of mortals toward their concepts — & look away like the good Lord from time to time to allow for an anecdote ) : Martha Dolittle keeps in absentia, keeps it under the piles of sheets in the armoire, along with her trousseau and a potpourri of dried flowers ; she sometimes brings it out when an old aunt comes to visit, and the old aunt because she is an old aunt and is committed to her role as curator of the things that are mortifying, does want to understand anything of the definition for in absentia — at least the definition provided by Dolittle, approximate out of clumsiness and distrust, and also because nothing is simple in this world. To the old dim aunt, to others, she likes to show off this expression, though, it’s like a perfectly smooth pebble, perfectly black and perfectly matte, where all light should eventually disappear one day, and which is reminiscent of coal — she alone, mischievous, capable of seeing in this matte black a play of reflection ( in absentia, when you think about it, when you think about it with Martha, is a bit like that, two mirrors facing each other twenty thousand leagues from each other, the absence & the presence finding common ground ).
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Neighbors, in their turn, called in as reinforcements, are subjected to the matte black pebble : to them too, Martha speaks of her in absentia : but she talks about it at nightfall, at the hour of dinner and of fatigue, incipient superstitions when the candles must be lit and the curtains drawn, the owl confused with the wolf & the steps of the bear identified : at the hour when people are starting to find it the right time to tell old stories of coureurs de bois, trappers in the time of the thirteen colonies — or if not telling, wanting : wanting to hear them. At this time of candles and of the owl, of the nocturnal light distributed inequitably, Martha repeats the phrase in absentia, it makes the glasses in the cupboard move ; she follows it with explanations about legal presence and physical absence, but explanations that resemble confidences, and confidences like stories of ghosts, the words warned and bodies, trials, juries, signs, condemnation fully have their place, as they are, or just barely defined, in one of these stories of the devil appearing in the corner of a cornfield —. unless everyone is wrong and it’s a matter of love. When the half-widow Martha speaks of absentia, it is with precision, it is also with fervor — she adds fervor to the punitive authoritarian ritual rectitude of justice ( Martha Dolittle knows how to hold her little rank in the city, under her widow’s bonnet, she has to look at the staircase and the square before the courthouse with respect — but, perhaps because of this story of absentia, the word that came out of a box, as if it were a whetstone, and because of some trials followed to relieve boredom, trials of thieves, of blasphemers, drunkards, pimps, streetwalkers, of contraband alcohol with a spirits scale, fake pastors and merchants with two ledgers, in justice she also saw a little bit of the church, the theater, the pagan altar, and vendetta ; and could detect there, too, the indignant or belligerent words
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of the men at the bar when they’ve had too much to drink, in a slightly different form ). When they listen to Martha, the other ladies ( one lady at a time ) believe they hear her pronounce the name of an angel-devil of the race of Belial, but more litigious, and more crotchety in this mixture of appearance and withdrawal ( it would make some think of the tricks of Prague’s magicians at the time of the Jews, the Golem and Rudolph II ) ; her descriptions want to be linear, they spread out and branch out, it’s as if a single thread separated into several ; & it is all a question of triviality, Martha sees in the expression in absentia applied to matters of love a simple yet masterful term, almost Jehovian, of the Judex est venturus genre, that makes it possible to describe her very condition, his ( Ahab’s ) very condition, and to untie this impossible knot : not only that of marriage, but that ( says Martha with the same fervor ) of the human condition. But one after the other the ladies, and the barber when it’s his turn to hear it, and the pharmacist, forget about justice, because they get tangled up in it and want to give the half-widow Martha what it seems to them she wants : their credulity as ordinary men and women listening to ghost stories told by a devastated young widow (having heard stories about the glimmers over the land of cemeteries, it’s just another story ).
Ahab in Hollywood — an unexpected meeting with Mae West Mae West’s reputation is well established, all you need is to summon her voluptuous image in the American closeup, her remarkable hats, her poise before the nose, just as voluptuous, of W.C. Fields ; one can imagine that her job is, above all, to comically bring a little bit of nobility to vulgar lines and situations, according to a formula : triviality
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+ comedy + acting skills + poise = the nobility of the artist ; and from this integrity of theatrical arts, we deduce as we can universal integrity. To use a formula repeated here and there : “she alone fills the bodice of Hollywood” — no doubt, but she is also a scriptwriter, she knows how to compose, she knows how to alternate dialogues, she was familiar with the hours spent in front of the typewriter, two paper sheets, one carbon, & the brutal assessment of what emerges from it.88 It’s not clear how — one thing led to another and Ahab the scriptwriter found himself one evening in front of Mae West, right in front of her, focusing on not giving in to the first emotions ( West has experience : men smaller & more compact than her, she sees a lot of them, they gulp, they look around everywhere, the room’s décor, by the light of the décolleté ; she knows that sooner or later the conversation will take a more normal turn ; miraculously, her speech born ( in part ) from her opulence abolishes opulence, let’s say that it effaces her chest as real presence ). Anybody in the captain’s place would have gulped,89 and it is not only the real presence that intimidates him — but a possible misunderstanding, the fear of offending, a blunder is so quick to happen in Hollywood where they invent new ways of creating a scandal every day, for example at cocktail hour, at Darryl Zanuck’s house, one evening, by getting drunk. Evoking the whale in the presence of a lady as visibly ( proudly ) cetacean, is a delicate exercise : the captain would not want to offend his interlocutor, but to state from the start that the role was not written for her, is it to defuse the awkwardness or to commit his first gaffe ? 088. I’m No Angel, Wesley Ruggles, 1933. 089. When he swallowed, the bow tie went up and down, but it was barely noticeable & is not remembered in the history of cinema.
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Maybe because of this real presence and this corset of Hollywood fulfilled beyond expectations ( “Mae West transcends boundaries ( another journalist of the time had written ), starting with those of her bra” — these were cruel bons mots, in the style of Dorothy Parker but less brilliant ), Mrs. West accepted it all, the insults, the praise, the derogatory compliments, the salacious innuendos and expressions of admiration : with the same sense of hospitality, she unflinchingly received the producers’ crude words and the bouquets of roses that fell at her feet — so the captain’s awkwardness was a temporary, ephemeral codicil to all she had been collecting since the beginning of her career. ( The salacious innuendos ? it is necessary to understand something : Mae West was the inventor of all innuendos, the innuendo proceeded from her, from her made-to-order manufacturing machine, sheets of paper and carbon, innuendos for Paramount, and beyond Hollywood in California : when an exhilarated gentleman gulps behind his bow tie and makes a risqué offering to the Opulent, he doesn’t know ( but she does ) that he is really quoting her — she, then, does not judge the value of the innuendo, more or less apropos, but the value of the performer. ) 90
Anti-portrait of the ocean by Captain Ahab of the Pequod Ahab admitted all its wonders ( those of the ocean ), he had read them, compiled them, before setting foot on a whaler, they were peddled by memorialists, sometimes good swim-
090. Mae West actually imagined W. C. Fields in the role of the captain ( Ahab with a nose in the shape of a new potato ) ; her version of Moby Dick was to be a “menopause epic,” whatever that means — nothing else has remained of this project.
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mers, sometimes not, some embarked unwillingly, others knowing of the ocean what they saw of it from their windows, and sedentary people talking about travel, impostors, but authentic if I dare say, like this Guevara, Antonio, from the time of Charles V Bourbon, proud to sign an Art of Sailing composed entirely in his room, with a view on a slope of garrigue. The higher the authors are perched up in the mountains, the richer their praises of the ocean, at least that was Ahab’s impression even before he had become a captain : when you think about it, the whole sky is reflected in the ocean, it holds the entire sun, twenty thousand galleons died a spectacular death there and now decorate the ocean floor “carpeted with maravedis” — there, the octopuses complicate animal nature, they unknowingly perpetuate the unhealthy, sometimes comical, contortions of the mythology of the Greeks, the ocean depths test humans’ curiosity, their capacity for fear, and their ability to compare their puniness, the whales sing pantheistic gospel songs to please the bathers, the ugliness of some fish crushed against the glass of the portholes becomes a beauty delivered to ichthyologists, the great deserts are reserves of calm, the waves are a setting for marine painters and humble dissidents have come to the end of their course there, after a fall, rather long, from a plane, at night — the ocean boasts of having inherited the heroic dead. Along with all these virtues, to which the captain adds tales of a bard saved by a dolphin, and of sapphic Sirens —. but apart from these advantages, almost all purely epic and incidental, the ocean, it must be said, is an insipid barrel, it is a broth that accepts with the generosity of broths the literal and figurative meaning of the word broth. There are many who drown there, but this drowning is rarely, if ever, converted into museography : the fact that the ocean con-
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tains like a silly cistern does not make it our memory, nor our archive, nor a temple populated with idols whose names should be repeated, nor a giant mess, sordid but ultimately charming, this kind of rococo-gothic mass grave where we find cadavers but a red gold ring on the cadaver’s finger. To contain is not an oceanic virtue, not an achievement, it should not be seen as a promise of salvation, as Roland looked to the Moon for all that humans had lost on Earth : it contains passively, enduringly, without even chewing what it swallows. Nothing could be easier than containing ( this size, this shape of an insatiable bowl ) : he could have put genius into it, if the ocean had really been this old, deeply malignant Neptunian ocean : it would have contained as one wishes sometimes to see it contain, becoming a compendium, a vast & open dump where everyone would find themselves on familiar ground ; in so doing, even more skillfully ( more indulgent ), pantheon and pandemonium, even if it meant retiring, all in a jumble, totems from Kokovoko Island, images of Juno, of Mercury, and billions of crucifixes of all sizes, some like a topmast, some like nail clippers. It could have had the hospitality of a junk shop, which abandons good taste in favor of exhaustiveness and says no to nothing, to nothing at all that the thing exists in the state ( worm-eaten ), tender, dazzled perhaps by this single virtue of still existing after having endured so long ; one would be reassured of snooping around until death ensued, or to distract oneself from an eternity of swimming, one would perhaps let oneself sink to ambivalent, cheap treasures, in our image, and every desperado tempted to commit suicide would at least have the hope of fishing for a treasure of fake gold coins and plastic ducks with the tips of their toes. ( Even more cleverly, & suave, it could have given itself the air of a matrix pocket :
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we know many who would have rushed, with a pillow, and a blanket, and chewing gum. ) When one puts no stock in the number of submerged dead, the ocean remains something bland ( this is still the captain’s opinion after twenty years of rolling toward the whales : his weary opinion ) : the spices lost in a shipwreck in 1417 off the island of Ulbo, near Italy, did not change anything ( this was the Venetian galley of Nicolo Barbarigo, and it also contained pearls and porcelain ). The ocean demonstrates all its blandness, the fishes float there, meet without knowing what to say to each other, and never resting properly they continue to float in their sleep, which makes them doubly passive, to the point of being limp ; in the oceans there is no place to rest your foot, unless one is dead and then merges with the sand like the turbot, sideways, with its two eyes on the top — no box, no mercy : if you don’t believe me ( said Ahab to the Unbelievers ) go and see for yourselves ( good luck finding a chair ). Fortunately there are the wrecks, from the one sunken at Cape Gelidonya more than one thousand years before the incarnation of the Lord and which contained bronze ingots, then the Oseberg ship that sunk around the year 800, when Charlemagne was flaying the bear, and the boat of Count Hakon, Viking and sailor, disappeared in 1029 off the coast of Pentland Firth, Scotland, during a storm, when returning ( it appears ) from a diplomatic mission to see the King Canute — and the thousands of others, the Sacramento in 1668, the San Cristobal in 1589, the Slot Ter Hooge lost on November 19, 1794, to the despair of the Dutch East India Company, and filled in those optimistic and prosperous times with bullion, gold coins, snuffboxes, pipes, candles, large and small spoons, forks for the refined, faucets and pottery of various colors — these wrecks add to the ocean the drama that it lacks ( the tragedy adds to the
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courage of difficult eras ) and a whole range of magnificent content that can only be imagined by reading the catalogs that remained in town, cups and saucers, champlevé enamel, silver ingots, and gueridons, and exotic wood, and conquistador armor, and all the know-how of the arsenal of Venice : content, then, that is renewed every day ( January 7, 1629, it’s the ship of the king of Bohemia, in the harbor of Haarlem ; on February 22, 1870, the Golden City, a paddle steamer, in Mexico ).
Fine gift for his squire Quixote was a distraught individual, and we willingly grant him our reader’s pity ; at sunset his shadow extended ever narrower and thinner across the earth, imponderable, still somewhat recognizable ( not for much longer ), not eliciting much surprise since it did not, in any case, lift a single grain of sand ; the knight’s increasingly elongated shadow scouted out ahead, but for a pittance, giving the knight the opportunity to advance an idea of his own solitude : soon, it was a question of minutes, he would be there where it was. His madness made a loner of him ( this was debatable — assertions have been to the opposite, an overcrowded madness, an aviary, inn, menagerie madness, a madness of Carnaval like the one in Salamanca or Valladolid just a few years after the first publication of the Quixote in Spain, when villagers appeared disguised as the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance ) ; moreover each defeat after his battles was a return of the self to oneself, to demand accountability, to take stock of losses, consoling himself, scolding himself, always all alone, & composing a consoling fiction in his fishbowl .— but at least Quixote the knight had the company of the little squire Sancho.
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Ahab did not envy many people, jealousy was not in his absolutist nature ( except when he worked as an actor : he would have given a lot to be the actor in the role of little Lucius when he carries a candle in its candlestick to Brutus, in the night ), but he is still jealous of Quixote the knight with a Mouth Six Feet Long, just as he came to envy Sherlock Holmes &, later, Phileas Fogg, Esquire : the knight because of Sancho, Holmes because of his doctor Watson, Fogg because of Passepartout, his tiresome, grumpy, hurried valet, feverish like Leporello, always repacking his bags, but constant enough to serve as a good companion — the happy makeshift companion.91 ( To give a kick to, then a nudge of the elbow, alternately, to talk about the gear of a mill wheel, less spectacular than its blades ; whom to turn to so as to pass on, and then bounce back, his frustration, his enthusiasm of half victory, his expectation, and share his dismay of a Quixote and Sherlock Holmes, respectively, as a fig and a still warm buttered scone. And to complain about, too, because of the slowness or too much of haste, complain about the smell of his feet in the inn after a day of walking ( this is for Sancho Panza ), complain about his excess of lyrical zeal : this is for Dr. Watson. ) Some nights, Ahab would like to pester his squire : the captain with the sad expression could regale him for long hours with stories of whale hunting, always the same hunt, same fish, same hurrahs, flying jib, spars, bobbin, & string —. the squire, or rather the brave fellow tasked with paddling alongside his captain, makes a gift of his boredom in exchange for stories ; this, for Ahab, is stunning.
091. Of course, he sometimes comes across a so-called & intermittent impresario, but an impresario does not replace a squire.
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Catalog of shipwrecks ( excerpt ) Erik Raudi’s fleet, sunk in 986 toward the east coast of Greenland ; along the same coast, Arnbjorn’s boat, in 1125, with its cargo of precious objects ; the White Nave, November 25, 1120, on the rocks of Barfleur in France, with many precious objects, coins, and the children of King Henry I of England ; Francisco Pizarro’s boat in 1510, toward the Cape San Antonio in Cuba ( it was a Spanish pinnace ), the Santa Maria in 1544, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Santa Barbola, a Spanish ship weighing 400 tons, off the coast of Bermuda, another Santa Maria in 1492, on December 25, to the north of the Dominican Republic, and again, in 1524, a 110-ton Santa Maria off Puerto Rico, and in 1525 a Santa Maria, another one, in Puerto Plata ; in 1569 the William and John, an English trader’s ship filled with gold coins, lost near the coast of Guinea ; in 1578, the Dranis in the entrance to Frobisher Bay ; twenty years later, in Baie Sainte-Anne in New Brunswick, the Chancewell, an English vessel ; the Edward Bonaventure in 1566, in Pettislego Bay, near Fraserburgh, Scotland, losing jewelry, silver, gold, & furs ; the Pegasus, an English ship, supposedly filled with treasure ; in 1740, one and a half miles from North Ronaldsay, the Swedish East India Company’s Svecis, at 600 tons and with 28 guns, stranded on Dyke Bank ; the Pindad, the Annunciata, the Santa Cruz, the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes and Encarnacion, which sunk, respectively, in 1551, 1553, 1555, 1561, and 1564 between Portugal, Spain, and northwest Africa ; much later, but in the same area, in 1828, the Black Joke, Benito de Soto’s pirate ship, lost with his treasure ( it is not specified which ) ; the Madre de Deus, on July 9, 1609, sunk in Nagasaki Bay, with 300 to 400 million yen ; and in the Mediterranean, a wreck, filled with bronze ingots, in the 8th century b.c., another wreck in Rhodes sunk with the statue
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of Aphrodite, a wreck in Skiathos filled with statues of the gods, a wreck in Giglio filled with musical instruments, and the Aboukir shipwreck, which sunk around 1915 to scatter clothes, olive oil, almonds, coral, and saffron in the sea ; the Winfield Scott, on December 2, 1853, off the coast of Santa Barbara, with a million dollars in gold ; the Yankee Blade in 1854, the Golden Gate in 1862, the Brother Jonathan, the Golden City, the Prince Alfred, the City of Chester and the Princess Sofia in 1918 — and on May 5, 1945, near the island of Anholt in Denmark, a German u-534 submarine, in which, it seems, there had been gold and strictly confidential documents.
Concerning the wooden leg ( again ) One step on his legitimate leg, the next step on a crude imitation — the crude imitation, depending on the day, is a woodworking scrap, the remnant of a table leg that was left over, or mispriced and sold for a quarter of the price, or it is an arbitrary leg made by Ahab’s very hand, one day when he was bored, since men were given to spend their spare time whittling branches ( the care with which Ahab worked the wood of his leg was a sight to behold : attentively, of course, but also with some negligence — detachment and indifference — as if the desire to kill the time prevailed over the needs of a man who had been maimed). His legitimate leg, not always robust despite its title, intermittently reliable, but unpredictably claiming its legitimacy every so often, with a cramp if necessary ( this is one example among others ) ; sometimes it was jealous of the other, the false one, because of its Art Nouveau whims and this apparent indifference of things to pain : a human adventure from which we sometimes draw too many conclusions, and most emphatically.
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By breaking them, twisting them, using them as levers to lift lids, striking forcefully so as to be heard, or threatening and then personifying punishment on his ship, by exposing them to the salt, the rain, the sun ( and still using them as a beater to tenderize octopus ), Ahab ended up with a fine collection of wooden legs, the old ones preserved with the young ones, the broken ones, the half-broken ones, the intact ones, the rarities, the paltry stumps, landmarks of a shaky memory ; he did not expose them as one does at the entrance to a temple to welcome miracles, he gathered them in a trunk, they swayed from one side to the other depending on the state of the sea and the movements of the ship : the music in the wooden box was that of an army of the dead on the march. Sometimes there was a twinkle in his eye, the pride of Trajan the emperor when he wanted to speak of his exploits to his people around his column of bronze : & he imagined carving or would definitively carve in the wood of his leg the episodes of his Ahabean career, the fights, the victories, the defeats, the farewells and returns, the wedding, the streets of London, the reunions, the unquestionable triumphs and those that remained contested, the hours of confusion, the tribulations all the way to the Leeward Islands, and the hours of bliss near the apotheosis, even if it meant lying a little, in a spiral around the wood.
Moby Dick on the hunt for Captain Ahab Jupiter had so far metamorphosed into everything, including a shower of gold coins, and there was also the bull, the swan, the draught of air, the little shepherd, the melody of his flute, a magnificent girl, a handsome sailor and a lyre bird. To attract a fisherman from Crete and his beauty of alabaster and crushed berries, Jupiter could have become a
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white whale — his metamorphoses did not last, as we know, they were spectacular to the point of creating a scandal, but they never bothered to keep on, and this in fact is the source of their charm, this nonchalance assumed with elegance, and vice versa, before Olympus and mortals. And of course, there is no question of completing his appearance with everything a whale usually has, loaded with fat and of tendons, not just for that, not for one afternoon of love that will be forgotten the next day, the scope of the whale must be pure and inordinate charm, appearance on the terrace, a great farce of seduction, but empty and thus aerial, not to deceive the dazzled young man, to be an accomplice to his aesthete’s gaze : the Jupiterian whale should be a large-scale display with no content, otherwise, how to appear ? and how to be light, how to make love ? love in the lapping waves, as Hesiod must have written somewhere : love which is soon the foam that has disappeared in the foam ( I quote from memory ).
Ahab in Hollywood — Spencer Tracy, James Cagney, Buster Keaton Why not Spencer Tracy in the old captain’s pea coat ? his look of an Irishman with the reddish blond hair, stocky and wide, with a delicately wrinkled forehead ( ocean motifs, as if the word navigator were written on his skull ) ? He would knock out a lot of good work on a ship, he’d be given a top hat, he would keep it on his head as he would keep a gangster’s fedora on his head, and get it to move if necessary ( a little to the back, a little to the side ) ; he would have the advantage of adding a touch of courtesy ( Christian, no doubt, a sui generis courtesy ) to the Ahabean brutality, but ( this is a risk ) perhaps also the kindness of a soft touch, incompatible with the grudge.
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So, James Cagney, or rather : Ahab in a shorter version, and more stubborn ( irascible diminutiveness, Cagney had the time to make a small business out of it, while waiting for the opportunity to be ripe, always with his “old frowny potato face,” that was all the same, who knows ? sentimental ). Stomping, terrorizing his lieutenants, it’s got his name all over it, invoking God, making him come with prayers, then challenging him after having wheedled him, challenging him from so far below, as if to avenge Job three thousand years after his grief — and then run headlong, harpoon out front, toward the whale : he being so small and so determined he could enter the whale by one of his wounds. The most serious consideration has also been given to Buster Keaton ( after having laughed about it for a good fifteen minutes : the idea was a joke to relieve tensions after hours of mind-numbing rounds of discussions among scriptwriters, Charles Boyer or John Barrymore ? John Barrymore or Charles Boyer ? ). Buster Keaton appeared between Boyer and Barrymore as the angel of silence, falling right on the table from the ceiling, from the floor above, in a little cloud of plaster — it took a few minutes, the time to let the dust settle, to consider Keaton’s face, his calmness, his interest in the horizon, his two eyes so wide apart that they allowed him to see port side and starboard simultaneously, and to be sustained by what he saw so as to remain quiet. After all, Captain Ahab, once the burlesque was put aside, & the anger, it could be this wise stupor, a lack of belief equally distributed between God and Devil, a face waiting or the ocean ( waves ) to illuminate it & bring it to life. ( Switching from silent movies to talkies would have been, for Buster Keaton, an Ahabian feat — that is, the speeches, harangues, and lines from Shakespeare served by the old captain
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to his sailors could have been, for Keaton, the occasion for crossing ( at last / alas ) the frontier separating the silent from the spoken — for example, this scene in which the captain spoke before his men for the first time : an initial modulated onomatopoeia becoming Shakespearian, to express his deep disappointment ( o sideration ) and the onset of his grudge. Writers, a filmmaker, various agents, managers, and directors of conscience suggested to Keaton that he consider the role of Captain Ahab as a vehicle allowing him to pass from the Great Silent Art to the more chaotic, more trivial, sometimes more painful art of the dialogue. ) In fact, the captain’s grudge, expressed in the form of a tirade, almost marked the passage ( around 1927 ) from the silent to the spoken, 92 a passage accomplished before all and for all by the laconic maestro Buster Keaton. He would have done so cautiously, reluctantly — and a little mistrustful of the idea of setting foot in a world where he didn’t feel welcome : he wasn’t born there, he would appear as an intruder, he knew it, being out of place suited him but this time no extravagant stunts to escape his misfit’s discomfort. ( How many likable nuisances had he played in the silent films, men who went through the wrong door and had never been able to turn back — for many of them, taking their blunder to the limit seemed to be the only way out : the hope, perhaps, of finding salvation at the very end, with everything patched up and beyond the disasters, or on the ruins after disasters — the return to calm, it was perhaps for these honest klutzes a cyclical principle of cataclysm and renewal inspired by an Indian model — unless it was Aztec. )
092. Two months before Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.
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Interlude — concerning the dramaturgy of the self ( to escape depression ) Depression is the fatal lack of drama applied to oneself —. this was stated by Fernando Pessoa the Taciturn on pages of notebooks rediscovered half a century after his death, & by Dezső Kosztolányi the Spiritual Chronicler, 93 in a Budapest daily, read the same day by gentlemen in the café : newspaper pages brandished at the end of a very long rod ( a luxurious wood, with a handle for turning ). After having demonstrated the subtle links between lack of drama and depression’s victory in the countryside, Kosztolányi postulated the existence of a Frigyes character struck by neurasthenia, he was taken to a dramaturge-doctor on the other side of the Danube, in Buda, where he had his waiting room, and in his waiting room, Viennese Secession armchairs, and patients in the armchairs, each one more de-dramaturged ( and I quote ) than the other others. No dramaturge-doctor for Pessoa, no witty tale published in a daily newspaper, only the development of his intuition, with extreme care for fear of breaking it in his grasp ; with small steps, he tracked the idea of a dramaturgy that was good for morale, he touched on it while taking scientific detours in 1900, one gets a glimpse of his cautious curiosity as a reader of the Medical Encyclopedia and Sigmund Freud for the masses ; his idea of dramaturgy passes through Goldoni, Lope de Vega, autobiographies vulgar and ambiguous, the one by Benvenuto Cellini, but also Pessoa’s own circadian adventures on Douradores Street, through what he knows of his neighbors, what he sees of their staging, what he hears of their boasts, in other words, an ongoing account of them093. Or Dorothy Parker, or Cole Porter, rue Monsieur, in Paris ( 48° 51' 3" North, 2° 18' 59" East ).
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selves, ready for everything, offering his credulity to anthropology ( he tried to see, for example, how the inhabitants of a city that seemed so disinclined to showing off, Lisbon, contrived to follow, every day and every day thereafter, the dramaturgy of themselves, and without this they would sink, not “in the manner of those drowned in the river,” but “in the manner of dentures in a glass of water” ). Casanova had his motto Follow your god, waste in the place of greed, no missed opportunity, good or bad, recognition of anything that looks like happiness, fortune, second hand, contraband, from the boudoir, stagecoach, or casino, and he also had speculation instead of the complaint hurled at the empty Venetian sky with every blow dealt by fate — until his seventies, waste and speculation, and a library refuge to treat the wounds of love while rocking on his chair, allowing him to escape melancholy ( years later, having retired to a Bohemian castle, it would be another story : the soup of mixed vegetables and the sarcasm of the young people ). Neither Pessoa nor Kosztolányi proposed dramaturgy of the self as a panacea that was as effective as Casanova’s bluffing martingales, they were both old enough to understand how melancholy took one by surprise without bothering to be the consequence of a cause — there remained the intuition of salvation through dramaturgy, they saw it as a prelude to appeasement, they hoped to reconcile psychiatrists’ waiting rooms with opera halls, and why not connect them with long corridors, with caryatids ; they give a prophylactic justification for literature, the purveyor of drama, while simultaneously reconciling the frivolous supporters of entertainment and the aesthetes of Paris, the infantry in square, in testudo, for whom literature was the continuation, through alternative means, of the Jesuit missions.
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Dramaturgy restores death to us, facetiously : thanks to a playwright’s malice, stratagems, old savoir-faire, and all that can be reassuring in this idea of savoir-faire ( the custom without the conservatism, advanced science & tricks of the trade one related to the other, competence through the eternal return of the same ). This is not exactly learning to die, it is the abandonment of the most fruitless struggles against death, of the narcissistic reasoning to escape from it, even more hypocritical promises of the hereafter, relying on the authority of the Fathers of the Church and on the Sunday pastors’ strength of conviction, born from insistence alone. No need for frilly speeches on the Death of Great Men or the Return of Ashes to Ashes for consolation ( dramaturgy has nothing in common with consolation ) : whosoever wants to find relief from melancholy through the dramaturgy of the self accepts, quite simply, death as the end : then, in this way, it is possible to construct one’s dramaturgy around this end. ( Dramaturgy is a lie ? naturally, a lie joined to the librettos, to the decoys, to the omissions, to the hypocritical maneuvers, to all our boasts that pass in succession before the mirror like hats on a client’s head in the milliner’s store. The end of all things is inevitable, somewhere there is a forensic scientist ready to help demonstrate ( stethoscope and form ) the ineluctability of our death, and this is why the dramaturgical lie can at least boast ( this is a major swindler’s about-face ) of getting its reasoning, and especially its maneuvers, to fit with an actual fact — ah, not a moment too soon, an actual fact : the opera, the five acts, Chekhovian, Goldonian, hung by a nail on the actual fact of death. ) With the sublimated, Goldonian, Donjuanesque death, final act death, trapdoor beneath the feet of the seducer of innocents and chorus of delivered survivors death, or
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Mishima’s graduate ball death, or detective novel mystery death, or apotheosis of Cæsar death, or to put it differently, because it is necessary to be trivial, the easy death facilitated by a librettist rushing to finish his stories, dramaturgy applied to oneself allows for boasting : pride, the staging of oneself against a nice plain background, the describing of the contours of one’s existence scene after scene, the choice of the right lines & their distribution, the pleasure of each thing in its place, the comforting certainty of being able to relegate any first- or second-order concerns to the right place in a libretto. Dramaturgy of the self does much for narcissistic comfort, at least there’s that, as long as Narcissus does not lead to an umpteenth form of suicidal gloom — . the dramaturgy of the self turns up the collar, attributes names and titles, rechristens with grandiloquence, without tiring of it ; it gives reasons for antics ( self-dramatization and playfulness are even intimately linked ), but when one gets oneself out of the swamp of melancholy in the style of Baron von Münchhausen, play-acting is also the necessary construction, and it too is the beginning, the middle, and the end ; its allegiance to the rules does not prevent grandiloquence, which is the start of the transgressions ; the rules must be observed with a drunken Carthusian zeal, or rather the zeal of Rasputin,94 they will be over-sacralized to reach levels of the sacred where obsolete doctors give way to players of the opera bouffe. The beginning can account for all the myths & the clichés of birth, spring water, the stork, the visitation, or the boiled linen & blood on the straw, but for the melancholic cured by the dramaturgy of self, the beginning will always be a librettist’s business, not an obstetrician’s — and from the librettist’s point of view, 094. A Carthusian’s zeal imitating Rasputin.
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the beginning is not being brought into the world, the idea of being born makes him depressive, more than the fear of dying one day. Dramaturgy has the elegance ( charlatanism + . compassion ) to always replace the obstetrical beginning with a later theatrical beginning, without pain, an arbitrary prologue, glory of the artifice and the drum roll, chosen to set the tempo, perfected by centuries of literature and courtship, of royal ceremonies, by the tricks of a librettist in love with the sublime and paid by the line. Dramaturgy of the self allows everyone to invent their beginnings and then to wait for death by portraying it in advance : an end that is symmetrical with the preludes for example, the cupid of the East opposed to the cupid of the West, or Dante’s rhyme, or final spark responding to the very first, or a facetious death of cymbals in the manner of Joseph Haydn in his Surprise symphony. Only the dramaturgy of the self 95 makes it possible to get rid of the worst pain imaginable, which is absurd pain : a slump is fine, even if it’s sudden, but for God’s sake, a firstrate dramaturgized slump, falling in time to contrast with a scene of blissful happiness, to alternate with the duo of lovers who could care less about anything else and preceded by prophetic signs as in Shakespeare’s Cæsar, of credulity, of disbelief, of apprehension or valor, as long as there is suspense, misfortune inscribed in an overall design that also encompasses ( contains them and leaves them free with wide, forgiving mesh ) the dragonflies in Japanese ink, hardly visible — misfortune with drums, trumpets, & hand of God, ineluctable machination, formal misfortune, and around it enough witnesses to tell the story later ( they will only 095. According to Hawthorne, George Washington was born fully clothed, in pants & a wig, the powder already on the wig.
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have to paraphrase ), & above all, misfortune overflowing with meaning : it becomes allegorical, it’s been necessary since the world began, languidly awaiting the hermeneutic interpretations, the analogical, anagogical, theological, all one could want ; it’s like a nesting doll, it contains drawers with handwritten bills that reveal the unlucky man’s reason for living, and the key to his belonging to the world ; the fortuitous accident defers to Schopenhauer, an eminent dramatist, to assert itself as not fortuitous and not accidental ; the tile that’s fallen on the passerby’s head becomes not only the Fatal Tile of Punishment and I-told-you-so, but Fatal Oxymoronic Privilege, repeated every day if necessary, Privilege of the Chosen Schlemiel for whom the tiles are destined, as the farm girls were intended for the Greats of Spain ; the tile does not fall to annoy, it was determined by the librettist in perfect harmony with the composer, it has survived the twenty versions of the libretto, its fall is a tribute to other falls, perhaps a parody of them, it is so dramaturgical that it requires no God, devil, or teleology, it outstrips the forced and sometimes panting dramaturgy of biographers, it is something of Da Ponte’s thing stolen from Metastasis, Metastasis plundering Plautus, it is Goldoni’s trick, Lope de Vega’s plot, with the sense of rhythm from Buster Keaton, who was the teacher of Morton Feldman, Elliott Carter, and all the genius rhythmists ; the tile does not fall on a head senselessly, it is a punctuation mark, however painful it may be, it connects the unlucky person at time T to the beginning, middle, and end, the beginning, middle, and end of the tile’s existence, the beginning, middle, and end of the unlucky man’s existence ; in this, again, the incidental sub specie dramaturgis accounts for the first word and the last line, just before the curtain.
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If Moby Dick had been a chapter in the adventures of the Baron Münchhausen If Moby Dick had been a chapter in the adventures of Münchhausen, his dimensions would have been multiplied by two, care of Münchhausen himself, & by three, care of his listeners : then two more times, then ten, to the point of violating the laws of equilibrium among length, surface, & volume. Instead of oil bottles sold in boxes of twelve, the useless beauty ( boring, kitsch, & sublime all on offer ) of the hunt, let’s say the pursuit of an animal by a small and sporadic man, collector of unverifiable triumphs — fighting would be a game of colors : the pale fish, the Baron Münchhausen 96 as a whole, with some traces of gold. Imagine the triumphant entry of Baron Hieronymus into Moby Dick’s maw : anyone else in his place would have paddled in, lost an arm, cursed the saints and swallowed enough water to die with the only dignity possible left, that of the drowned, with a distended abdomen. It’s as if Münchhausen, on the other hand, had donned ballet slippers, his voice resounded under the vaults of the palate, as an infidel sings libiamo ne’ lieti calici under the nave of Santa Maria, then drew the jaws behind him closed : it was a gesture of a traveler who has wearied of the trip, closing the hotel room curtain right in the middle of the afternoon, its sovereignty subject to no clock. Inside, he met some important people, old sailors from the time of Frederick the Great, of Leopold I, of Rudolf II king of Bohemia, he shook decrepit hands, lifted tricorns to see the faces of pioneers he awakened, he played games of cards and won, and along the way had lost half of his property and then recovered it ; he shared some wine from Madeira with an old Spaniard, 096. Ruddy, scarlet, to be precise.
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he talked of the Great Discoveries and the shipwreck of the Santa Barbola in 1551, a 400-ton vessel filled with gold and silver ; he slept like a dormouse, he collected samples, he sang anew to see how all this resonated, he forgot the hour for mass, he took notes while leaning on a molar, he was suffused with the ambiance of a sperm whale, he wondered how to make his adventures credible, he reconstructed a compass with a femur remnant and the hands of his watch, then when everything was exhausted, removed from his pocket the pepper that would free him ( cayenne pepper ). In the baron’s stories told and re-told around the table some 10 or 15 years after the fact ( if we dare call his adventures facts ), the whale is simultaneously incommensurability, escape, threat, and miracle of whiteness “irreducible to some optical explanation.” The incommensurability of the whale is a dubious infinity, an infinity of gossip, taking place by effraction in a universe that has nevertheless been subject to measurement, since Kepler and Tycho Brahe ; the escape can be a menacing moment, and vice versa. As for the miracle of the whiteness, it is the crux of the plot : it is the voice of the nymph Echo beyond the river, there where she is not, the tracks of the Snark for the hunters who are disloyal to the Snark itself, it is the miracle of Simurgh, now customary, comprised of all those who were looking for him, are the multiple significations of this man who was several men, one after the other, but one single orangutan, in a Parisian street mentioned by no index, is the absence of a face attributed to a certain evil spirit of the East and to criminals in America, it is the aurora borealis warranted by the reflection of the herrings from the Baltic, it’s the name of Nobody given to the Cyclops, is all that one could write about the color of the full moon ( the astronomers, the coal miners ). At the head of a flagship, the baron of Münchhausen, instead
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of going to slay the Grand Turk, starts to pursue this whiteness, “which competes with the light of the day,” to offer it an explanation, beyond his reach, out of the gold, silver, and pearls of the galleon El Buen Viaje lost in a shipwreck in 1621, the reflections of Archimedes’ mirrors, the crystallized fortune of Prester John ( in which case his old age is assured ). The white comes first, it is first presented as a glow, then as a color — whether it takes the form of a whale is not very important ( it is Münchhausen who claims this ) : a nymph would have done the job, or a mill, or the face of Sardanapalus covered with the white lead borrowed from the women’s chambers and the courtesans’ celebrated ointments, 97 or the elephant god of India, who was blue by dint of being white, “but whose blue is expressed as white emerging from the fog,” or the opposite of a funeral gondola, the opposite of the Wagnerian mourning expressed divinely by Liszt. If Münchhausen could survive so many deaths, for example, that of being devoured by a Bengal tiger on his branch, it’s because when crawling on the branch in the direction of the tiger, when yielding to its devouring, he reserved the right to contradict, in a month, in a year, and so this part of himself that was necessary for the story, namely his consciousness and the organ of speech, escaped the tiger : the jaw of the tiger closed then on the envelope, the carcass, from which the baron had retired, the baron as liar. The other trick of the baron, the trick of an eternal survivor, was to be constantly half himself, half a story of himself, by a play of mirrors, Münchhausen anticipating the retrospective narrative — in fact, at the age of 15 he was planning to write his Memoirs, he predicted the nostalgia of his 15 years, 097. They should have been hetaireia ; the same paragraph cannot simultaneously accommodate Sardanapalus & the hetaireia.
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and foresaw the amused memory of his predictions — once he reached the age of 70, Münchhausen had not been disappointed — which does not does not mean that he was not surprised.
Moby Dick, a B-picture animal Others suggest that the captain scriptwriter adopt his huge fish as it is, a fish, without changing anything ( this almost comes as a relief ) : the whale, the frightening immensity on the cheap, welcoming with it all the oceanic legends from East & West, including the remains of Atlantis that nobody wants anymore ; they leave it to the truly great geniuses who came from Vienna with their court to delicately handle the muted feelings & have a whole hodgepodge of Freudian objects that never fit very well with the story itself to parade across the front of the stage to the sound of clock chimes. There are more modest, third-rate directors, and their ark is less hypocritical : they accept the whale, and call it whale, the appropriateness of the name to the thing is for them a guarantee of success ( the tautology is a revelation addressed to few wise men ( this is the great enigma : we do not see that which it is impossible not to see ) ) ; they go to ask the props crew if it is possible to inflate one immediately, in a studio left empty by another team over the lunch break, then paint it white with whatever is left over of the pigment used for the elephants in a production of Cleopatra, the seventh of its kind. One day, by chance, between Josef von Sternberg’s office and Ernst Lubitsch’s, two different kinds of tobacco, scriptwriter Ahab comes across Roderick Stewinghue, a novice filmmaker who sees the glory coming, busy shooting, waiting for this glory, with rescue teams, in borrowed studios and a secondhand set previously used
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by others, by several others, that had been destined to be burned. ( How many of these facades has a B-movie director like Stewinghue saved from the pyre at the last minute to make a set for his masterpieces, even if it means rewriting his masterpiece, at one minute to midnight, on one knee, with one hand, in the middle of the set itself ? Once, in its early days, it was the palace of the Sultan of Khorassan, or at least what was left of it, a reject from Harem Girl, 98 reappointed the palace of the caliph of Baghdad by the sole force of his genius ; another time, a palm tree borrowed from the Egypt of Ramses II and Cecil B. DeMille, transformed into an identical Californian palm to serve as a backdrop for a troubled romance between a pastor and a whore ; another time, a Tartar encampment on the banks of the Volga 99 that Stewinghue converted, without making any changes, into a Hebrew bivouac pitched a hundred meters from the Red Sea ; and another time, with a beginner’s ardor, Roderick dared to fix up, before it was sent to the junkyard, the old shack where Lincoln was born, in the version of his life shot by D.W. Griffith, as the log cabin of Goldilocks : it was a stroke of genius, a bold reinterpretation, the cabin set withstood the contortions without a flinch — but whatever the manner of rescue, they never lasted long, they were abandoned the next morning. ) Young Roderick heard about the story of the white beast and the fisherman, he thought about it and for a few days sees in it an opportunity for glory : he refers to it as a calling card, and also a hard-hitter, and in his one-minute pitch the scriptwriter captain still works out the words radical and sincere. He is a little disappointed, of course, when he 098. Raoul Walsh, 1926. 099. The Volga Boatman, Cecil B. DeMille.
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understands that Moby Dick is not the name given to a lake monster with multiple heads and a foggy hideout, a creature photographed in the dark, to save money — he consoles himself as he can, telling himself that a giant whale is just as good as a three-headed creature, & fishing on the high seas would replace hunting at the cursed lake. It would be the whale appreciated for its own sake, a simulacrum would be found, it would be filmed from the bottom up, there would be a close-up of its eye, enlarged hundredfold ; it would also be seen from a great distance, it would be a diffraction of the light, a play of the film, it would be the ever-deferred threat ; if necessary, it would be made to splash around in the only setting available at the moment : that of Carthage, in the first century, at sunset.
Aspiring scriptwriter Ahab meets Josef “von” Sternberg ( or : It is curious that so little has been written on the subject of the bogeyman )
[ 1935 ]
“In the beginning” he was Josef Sternberg, just Sternberg, long enough already, for goodness’ sake, the mountains & stars, the peaks, the cosmic glitter : it would have been inappropriate to ask for more. Josef entered his life as a Sternberg in Vienna, in the fashion district, that’s where he put on his first slippers, later his first boots, in keeping with a more martial fashion — the Austro-Hungarian Empire was keeping on, a few good souls taking turns to wind up the spring of the gramophone, the hope in the waltzes — the waltzes that was then inevitably succeeded, in waves, by ragtime and the foxtrot. Somewhere between the Vienna of couture ribbons & the citrus paradise of Hollywood, Josef Sternberg became Josef von Sternberg : the von appeared, like a beauty mark just above a young girl’s lip, overnight, & that says follow me ; the captain imagines it sunken “like a
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wedge” between the first name and the last, on a civil status sheet stamped by an Ellis Island customs officer ( the gesture of a veal escalope tenderizer ) : because of a pointed design, both, wedge and von, impose themselves gradually, at first a suggestion, then the triumphant affirmation. But by what miracle did this von appear : divine grace ? the designation of the mortal by Aphrodite ? or the metamorphosis, two horns with the same root one would have to be proud of — between Austria and Sunset Blvd. perhaps there had been a mysterious conversion, after a fall from a horse, being knighted by the king of England, but on what merits ? Out of compassion, Ahab also imaged one of these diseases leaving indelible traces, you know the kind ? that perpetuate a memory of summer in the form of a rash. A capital V, two feathers in the hat chosen with care, jay and partridge, the caprice of Josef Sternberg, his little vanity, but also the sense of farce ( farce of the world connected by a thread to the farce of a single man ), the meaning of derision, of the arbitrariness of the sign ( why is Sternberg called Sternberg and Messalina, Messalina ? ), the ear of a music lover to appreciate the internal rhythms, the taste of a poet and a colorist who understands the virtues of this o to round out the es flanked by rs, rigid as merlons. Neither had the old captain held back from playing with his civil status, if only to test the latter’s very plasticity, and to soften it, when he found it stiff ; he gave himself pseudonyms without counting, a new one every seventh morning, for the pleasure of it — the euphoria of new pajamas, amazing, blue as a change from red ( having the twenty-six letters of the alphabet at his disposal & knowing how to combine them was the best way to chase away anxiety : it would be Douglas Fairfield on Monday, George Cavendish on Tuesday, & Cavendish would unscrupulously dispose of Fairfield’s sorrows ).
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But until then, he had never dared to ennoble himself — yet it was within reach, it would have been enough to find the right combination of an o, an n, and a v ( every time, Ahab would not have felt more aristocratic, but with a certain jene-sais-quoi he would have felt all the aristocrats of the world, all at the same time, drop a notch, the merest fraction of an inch, in the direction of the common people ). Now he understood and he didn’t hide his admiration : taking advantage of a seven-day boat trip between York and New York to raise oneself to the rank of archduke was a stroke of genius : an artist’s bluff, a narcissist’s coup d’État, a war of succession settled “without firing a shot” with the single stroke of the pen ( ah, it was necessary to acknowledge it, the performative stroke of the pen : as the day when two presidents sign their cease-fire on a sheet of blotting paper ). When Josef “von” Sternberg arrived at the dock at Ellis Island ( or was it Fort Clinton ? ) he had this von on him, for him, he anticipated the credits on the big screen and the headlines of his obituary, later ; he clenched the von in the palm of his right hand, others clenched a master key or a twenty-dollar bill, the father to twenty million more ( it was also an ace of diamonds : the one kept for just the right moment ) ; in addition to this little stratagem, Josef told himself that an Austrian from Austria would have no trouble convincing all the bank tellers in non-monarchical America of the value of his noble lineage — nothing better, right, than a country of republicans, of egalitarian pioneers, where nobility was not practiced, to gild his coat of arms. In fact, in Hollywood, people would believe in this “von,” they would give it a value, but what kind ? Josef “von” Sternberg would die years later, honored, fulfilled, humiliated, fallen, and beaten, he would die without knowing if the inhabitants of the country of Hollywood, the moguls and the make-up artists,
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had signed off on this “von” out of indulgence or conviction. He would have liked to have been told, before he died : whether it aroused admiration or pity ? whether the film marketers from Mayer or Zukor had taken him seriously, granted the respect due to the knight by the low-born schlimazel, or had let him play with his three little noble letters only because here everyone gets to be what they want to be ( and plus, in Hollywood, the artifices were numerous, there were plenty in the prop stores : and so if one agrees that Charlton Heston is Moses, why not Josef “von” Sternberg ). Ahab could see that there was something else besides the “von,” several things after the “von,” tacked on afterwards : a little moustache, a shiny monocle, a coat of Habsburg fur, horse breeches, an aristocratic distinction, an ottoman for stretching out, and culinary preferences, all of which were attached to this “von” by sleigh reins with bells. 100
Versions of Josef “ von” Sternberg The baroque arts do not always make the artist cheerful, and there are many who exulted all their lives in fugue and stucco, multiplying the folds of the draperies, but who in private were as dry as toast — in fact, Josef “von” Sternberg was sometimes martial, when he turned the crank handles, and reserved, crystallized, suffering when he sought inspiration at home ( “the cockroach of inspiration beneath the mattress of a maid’s room” ). But before the captain, after a few encounters : generosity itself, 101 hospitality & sacrifice 100. All this took place immediately after the shooting of The Woman and the Puppet. 101. Sternberg’s settings, like Velázquez’s paintings, were hospitable to dogs, infants, dwarfs, the wounded, degenerate princes, who have titles & hereditary diseases — so why not ambergris and harpoons forged in the old style ?
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( the reserve would come later ) ; he may have been aware at this time of the fragility of his “von” moth : a day would come when Paramount would give him his butler’s day off, & that day Marlene Dietrich would no longer answer the telephone. In the meantime, he was still a jovial man ( joviality and moderation ) : Josef had flipped through the captain’s synopsis, underlined here and there the words spars, gleans of flax, scuttles, triple pulley, and tierce of molasses, convinced that he could fill a story in five acts with it ; he also underlined the adjective and the verb limp, and now here he is, Sternberg, with his manuscript and annotations, exalted, before the scriptwriter captain, saying to him, my friend, there’s material here, we’ll make something great out of it ( how many times has the scriptwriter captain heard this kind of there is material ? ) : your story of the gloomy man with the grudge, the white prey, it’s clear, and the project of revenge linking one to the other reminds me of the precise design of the vault between the north and the south pillar on both sides of a cathedral, in Germany, I don’t remember which one. Your grudge-holder, I’ve seen him, I’ve detected him in the smell of anchovies, I read his imprecations, I corrected them, just barely, I created others, the imprecation requires style and I have my own ideas about it ; I have also noticed how he walks on his artificial leg, telling myself what an epic and intimate epilogue it would be if he were to abandon his grudge the day his enemy, this big fish, gives him back the piece of his leg : he is appeased & satisfied, coming together like the two halves of the Androgyne, or like two halves of a king of hearts that secret agents piece together — . do you like spy movies ? I like your albino fish too, I was tempted to follow him, and desires like this are not so common — and what’s more, I did it, I followed him, and by this I mean that I read your
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pages to the last in the wake of the big beast, a beluga perhaps ? — and I liked the relentlessness of the grudge-holder, you can trust me : I am known to be a specialist in fierce passions, with innocence included, too. ( Magnificent, this said in passing, all this fishing vocabulary, we wonder where you picked it up, I guess a dictionary in an antique shop where you can find diving suits ; I made a small list of them, it’s in the hands of my chief set designer, now he’s got to go forage for the props, he gets by knowing, not knowing the exact meaning of each word, but he is full of wonder, he trusts his ear, and I know that at the end of the day I’ll be able to fill the set with all these bolts, sterns, sheaves, mortises, and even these square-end lugs you’ve served me on a platter — . they’ll be combined with my usual landscape of candles and mirrors ; I’ll find a way to add some corbels, you have no idea how important they are, they are the metaphysical support of our sets and our civilizations. ) I have staged strippers and Russian empresses in furs without being a specialist of the strip-tease nor an enthusiast of the czarinas’ empire — if you want to know, the real object of my curiosity, which is also my deep anguish, and my mystification, is the pursuit of things : not love but the pursuit of love beyond the ordinary toward the sublime or the ridiculous ; the will to power pushed to the point of insanity as in some Shakespeare, and the libido when it reaches an absurd point of non-fulfilment. Even cold reflection will, I know, sooner or later extend to overflow the limits of an ailing terrain — and I, for a long time, stand there, it is my duty, at this border, also cold, drowsy, lizard & weasel, with my camera. I have taken the liberty of expanding, cutting, and separating the essential and unnecessary things — I have removed the ocean, for example, for matters of good taste
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( even the last of the Viennese rococos must account for good taste ) : I hate filming water sprays, I’d rather not have them, I’ll accept the sea or even rivers, estuaries, to have the junks drift slowly from left to right, in the background, only to divert the eye. A director sometimes has the thankless task of being omnipotent, he is the one responsible for the metamorphoses : I took it upon myself to make your grudgeholder a Roman emperor instead of a fishing captain, this will add depth — not just any emperor, you’re in for a treat, an emperor of the very beginning of decadence ( imagine the preludes to decadence : here too the photographer must lie in wait ) : the emperor Claudius, stuck like an umbrella stand between Caligula and Nero, a little less glorious, less visited, but still virgin, I was going to say copyright-free ; a lovely emperor Claudius with a fat chin and shaky hand, a little silly, a little bloodthirsty, ridiculous and carnivorous, who alone contains in his parturient’s belly every Roman contradiction. Don’t worry, the main part of the script has been saved, it still has the relentlessness, the resentment, the desire for revenge, borrowings from Shakespeare, there will still be this vaulted line between the grudge-holder and the object of his revenge, fleeing — & I’ll give you a gift, no one will lose out : your fish is Messalina, & there’s no longer the matter of getting the monsters to move. You and I are made for each other, we prefer the figurative meaning, you because of your great age, me because of an artistic temperament, we will be the masters of metonymy as I am sometimes also of hyperbole : an actress in white peplum will be infinitely more manageable than a marine mammal, I know this from experience, she can be entrusted with lines of dialogue, why not a line about the perfumes of Arabia, we’ll place a brooch shaped like an octopus on her breast, one of her stunned lovers will compare her to the Gorgon : presto.
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Here we are on a more familiar ground, our audience has already seen ancient films with sandals, and they know by now to recognize at first glance the wise stoic, the demented emperor surrounded by monkeys & favorites who have been turned to pumice, the blindly faithful servant, the palace schemer, the abstruse pagan priest, uncompromising in the smoke, the vulgar emancipated slave, and the sympathetic ex-soldier with a dented head who looks on this whole world of ephebes and swindlers with a disillusioned gaze. The spectators will be delighted to have Messalina instead of a big fish, it will be a change from their Sundays spent at the aquarium ; we will have a man and a woman on the set, we will weave connections from one to the other, & there you’ll find everything that’s already in your drafts : an old dispute ( the empress affords the opportunity for private apotheoses in the arms of the praetorian guards ), the resentment ( Claudius is first the child, then the idiot, then his jealousy comes, at first he’s surprised, we witness the advent of an adult rage in an infant’s body ), the plotting of revenge ( the emperor’s strategists delighted to be able to participate in these grudge fests ), fulfillment ( the wench’s white peplum, the knife of the censors, on the steps of a staircase to parody the death of Julius Cæsar ), and for a grotesque epilogue ( Claudius at the table ready to dip into a doe’s liver asks his servants what time Messalina will deign to join him for supper — I found this scene in Suetonius ). For Claudius, we convinced Charles Laughton, he was once Henry VIII of England, he knows how to play the carnal tyrants, he will be perfect to play Claudius as Claudius himself never dared to. I do not know anyone like him who can be both soft and hard at the same time, and so artfully, don’t talk to me about being natural ; he will be vulnerable omnipotence, his lip will be soaked with fig juice, he will
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see his executioners working while sucking chicken bones, and when he proffers his thumb to give orders to the gladiators, this thumb will also be gleaming. Going from your sea captain to Emperor Claudius is self-evident, listen to what Suetonius and Seneca the Younger said : Claudius had wobbly knees, he dragged his right foot, he limped in his palace during the day, and once he was dead he walked unevenly in the direction of the sky ; he spent his time shaking his head like Samuel Johnson did, and in addition to his naïve laughter he had a very singular voice, hoarse and sharp, a voice, brace yourself, “of a marine mammal,” marinis beluis : I’m not making any of this up, look at my notes, Seneca the Younger wrote it in black & white, I found it in his Apocoloquintose. Marlene Dietrich will be Messalina, she will be an empress with lantern jaws ; 102 it so happens that she appeared on the screen in an orangutan costume, her dance was a miracle, I saw the genius of Dietrich in animating a great ape ; and as such she’ll have no trouble giving to Messalina the look of a fish, the way she walks is worth three Sirens — in addition to the tirades of Lady Macbeth, we will have her recite lines from Rainer Maria Rilke. And if I can’t convince Dietrich, it will be Merle Oberon, a girl with a long face and the mouth of a lover who is difficult to satisfy, and the eyes of Antigone, disappointed by everything she sees ; she was Anne Boleyn when Laughton was Henry viii, why not give him his revenge ? a role of a lover with one hundred & twenty suitors, all gathered like flowers of the fields, with the stem, and every morning she returns home, unabashedly, after wiping her cheeks. She will be surrounded by half-naked vestals, I will get white jellyfish for her pool, it will be a change from the Roman style carp, and together you and I will find 102. We could also talk about her cheekbones.
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equivalents to all these savory details typical of the whale : the majesty, the appetite, the indifference to the goading, the ability to disappear ( we will fill a bath with milk ), and the jet of water that excites men’s curiosity, every time, it never fails : for the Philistines it is a physiological reflex, the refined see it as an expression of its freedom and its joie de vivre, the immediate exultation with no tomorrow signaled proudly from afar. This is how the attributes will be distributed : Claudius will have the crazy leg, the grudge that’s too big for him, and which he also takes for epilepsy, the voice of a whale and all the blubber that keeps him alive — for Messalina, the color white, nine-tenths of her body hidden beneath the bathwater, the romantic leanness that was the captain’s, but the duty to flee an obsessive’s revenge to the point, ultimately, of breathlessly reaching the very point where death awaits him. ( Scriptwriter Ahab does as dictated by circumstances : he agrees, he has seen what the other writers do and knows what to do now, more or less : in Sternberg’s presence, it is advisable to remain silent and show his agreement, silence and agreement in exchange for Messalina — it could have been Paulette Goddard in the role of Semiramis. He is pleased at having gotten off so lightly : Charles Laughton would be so thoroughly professional as to take lessons from the giant squid at the Philadelphia Aquarium, to attain the sublime, always this mixture of softness and hardness, he would even take diction classes — the squid, like the emperor Claudius, like Laughton, being a flaccid and carnivorous mask of omnipotence teetering on ruin ( scriptwriter Ahab doesn’t know it yet, but Charles Laughton was to spend hours tirelessly, perhaps exultantly, listening to the speech of Edward VIII on the day of his abdication — the height of
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power from which one resigning may take flight. This time, it would be lessons in emphasis, megalomania, and dejection ; the captain would see in the abdication a tribute to his name attached to the whale’s. He doesn’t know it but guesses that the Tragedy of the Emperor Claudius is never to see the light of day ; Laughton, by dint of listening to the abdication of King Edward, eventually gives up, a sublime renunciation that causes him a little embarrassment ; Sternberg will lose himself in sets that are too vast and, above all, too spare, foreign to his crowded corridors ; Merle Oberon will cross the windshield of her car, as is the case with many of this era of motor racing, like the Great Gatsby ; the luxurious epic will turn into a pumpkin, just as the emperor Claudius did according to Seneca the Young in his Apocolocyntosis. ))
Invisibility of Moby Dick The captain was suspicious of Moby Dick’s invisibility as he distrusted the invisibility of God — invisibility supposedly good but in truth haughty, a guarantee of no real human freedom if the memory of the rains of Sodom were to prevail over him at the moment of thinking divine tolerance had been invoked.103 No, the absence of God, including His peaceful walks of an out-of-work gardener down the paths of Eden far from Adam and Eve, the absence of God is made of suspicion, watchfulness, surveillance, and His omniscience adds to His feigned distraction from ineffable memories and implacable prophecies ( if He had always had the past and the future within reach, the falsely debonair God was already cultivating the resentment of the betrayals we had not yet committed ) ( already from the time when 103. See above and below.
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Abel’s head was bashed with a jawbone, the absence of God had been a doubtful mixture of hypocrisy, premeditation, voyeurism — it was ( it would not be the last time ) a decree of immunity ). When the sea gave him the time to do so, Ahab would underline in his copy of the Bible, sometimes for the seventh time, those passages in the Old or New Testament where this God was absent, having His flippancy hover over mortals “like the dust after the departure of a man on horseback.” It could not be indifference, if He was Love Entire, not incitement to crime, that would stand in contradiction to the ontological proof of the existence of God developed by Saint Anselm of Canterbury by struggling six days in a row except Sunday ; it couldn’t really be distraction, nor a sudden attack of melancholy, it was a deadly disease, unless melancholy was a test of humanity one century before venturing into incarnation — or else a kind of infinite couldn’tcare-less attitude, altered by the shame of having created, and thus of existing a little more concretely than desired ? Heretics speak of trickery and negligence : God of the Christian Bible spares for Himself alone, alongside Creation, the private margins forbidden to mortals : at his disposal, for his pleasure, where he is constantly saying, while gallivanting about, This is good, and there where the shadows, not angry, reach the light. ( This would be the reason for the absence of God, this need to go to the margins to write his Commentaries on the Margins of Creation — but this had to remain one of those secrets transmitted clandestinely from one gnostic plagiarist to another in a Turkish bath, the fraud being for the revelation the seal of its authenticity. There were the jaws of donkeys, the trees of knowledge, the salamalecs of snakes, and simpletons around an apple, without even being sure it was an apple, Esau’s hirsute grudge, his hirsutism
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passed on from father to son — and all around, comments, sometimes plagiarizing in advance the angry typography of Léon Bloy, proof that He was capable of self-criticism. ) The captain’s exegesis in the evening “beneath the swinging lamp” was to understand the whale’s absences : he identified the divine absences, noted their recurrence, their beginnings and ends, he dated them according to a clumsy but more or less reliable computus, he charted them, he classified them by categories ( arbitrary but effective ), underlining in red : drew provisional conclusions, conclusions like sea spray. He may very well have known the differences, rather numerous, between marine mammal and God of the Bible, he wanted to understand, and to understand he made comparisons, what more do you want, it’s human, he indulged in comparison. To those sailors who listened to him ( they pretended to pay attention, his speeches were, along with the seagulls, an ordinary passing moment of life at sea ), the captain showed himself capable of likening Moby Dick to a haughty and secretive God — the next day, he compared him to the Devil, to his corpse-like pallor, and to the word “Evil” so frequently written by priests in an attempt to understand it — the next day, by a trick of thought worthy, too, of Gnosis, the captain set Moby Dick, God, and Devil, on the same skewer ( for him, as with a great number of amateur scholars, the confusion was expressed as syncretism, syncretism as confusion ) — and two days later, it was no longer a matter of comparing, Ahab abandoned himself to the joys of tautology, the joys of the mercenary when he calls a spade a spade, to rouse his troops : Moby Dick ended up entirely in Moby Dick, all sailors were encouraged to sharpen the tips of their harpoons.
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Ahab and Josef “von” Sternberg — addendum to Charles Laughton ( Only Charles Laughton could have considered the role of the whale as a godsend to an actor of his grade : the opportunity for scenes of bravery on an Oscar-worthy set, to impress a difficult audience, to give full measure to his royal Shakespeareanism and play aquatically with the ambiguity of the genres, frolicking.104 His gaze unforgettable in extreme close-up : severity, cruelty, love, compassion, all at the same time, in his one whale’s eye, but what an eye, polished with the classical repertoire, accustomed to the antics of the cinema, sustained from within by personal setbacks —. of which nothing will be said. ) ( Laughton would have been an excellent captain, but would have betrayed the idea of Ahab : a more tender captain ( morbido ), rounder and fuller ( the temptation to be a world map ), a baby doll potentially looking flabby and competing with the muscular but unbearably fat roundness of his enemy the whale ( let’s not forget that the whale is a supply of oil ). His avenger’s fanaticism would then be all the more disturbing : it would not come from a man with a concave face, chosen from among Dante’s graphic and literary portraits ( the penitents with hollow cheeks ), but from a man with a full face who’s just barely left the table, hiding his obsessions, all austere, beneath a praise of hedonism ( just from having rosy, dimpled cheeks, Laughton passed as a refutation of Puritanism, though the truth was not so simple ). )
104. His obesity sometimes pathological and sometimes comedic ( what is then called a stature ).
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Ahab and Josef “von” Sternberg between two work sessions ( Between two work sessions, Josef von Sternberg agrees to become involved, just a little, all boasting set to the side ( temporarily, it relaxed him ) ; he chooses the old Ahab as a confidant because of his permanence and polite indifference, and also his insignificance : he says that in the studios where rain & rainbows are made, the creator’s desire joins with the law of the coffers : there more than elsewhere, more vigorously, and with a frankness found nowhere ( the frankness of the studio bosses from Central Europe, of shtetls and cabaret, now elevated to the rank of Hollywood emperors, with breathtaking accounts and diva hairstyles — confronting this frankness, the gall of the artist who appropriates Goya’s Caprices ). This is how the fights go : on the one side, the half-genius who has more or less adapted to the law of the studios, proud of his extravagances, of a biography he himself created, but tied to contracts — on the other hand, machines so vast they are entered into, they could hold many people, one could live there believing in immortality ; the half-genius with desires of creation, imagining theaters of puppets, a whole Faust, a Don Quixote, he draws men and donkeys on a sheet of paper, he wants to bring characters to life, to unite them and tear them apart, he wants to recite Keats and make ships move in the middle of the sea, and before that envision the sea as a series of waves or illusion of movement as far as the eye can see ( or as elegiac to-and-fro ) — the big studio, the machine, has to feed six hundred electricians, a thousand extras, Assyrians and Apaches, the ballets, the Kapellmeister, the appointed composers, the team of sixty-seven scriptwriters, the sound engineers, and the girl responsible for putting Rita Hayworth’s lock of hair back on Rita Hayworth’s forehead.
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It is necessary for such meetings to take place on ground that is not really neutral, the half genius, the machine, i.e. the man thinking of Keats and the movements of the ships, & the accountants, the directors who want to fill theaters in Minnesota every Saturday evening, every Sunday morning. Everyone knows perfectly well, and everyone knows that the other knows, and so on, everything must proceed quickly : the half-genius sacrifices a part of his Ibsen, the one in charge of the coffers agrees to take the first step of a dance supposed to bring him closer to Ibsen ; they negotiate hard, knowing in advance the losers’ place, the accountants must feel a particular emotion, truly unsharable, when they bring the name of Keats into their coffers. Painters have depicted their benefactors at half of their size somewhere behind the magi, musicians went to Versailles when the king arose, and poets awaited favor, Leonardo da Vinci ran after Borgia, and Galileo was a courtier — but there ( according to Josef von Sternberg ), in those studios where Robin Hood is made to dance from grove to grove, the game played between the genius and the men of the coffers is the most distinct, and also the most elementary : as to be expected, this is a place where there is no more room for the baroque ).
The art of being empty-handed ( speech delivered after missing the whale sixty times ) The one who leaves empty-handed laments, while making his way back with an empty bag, that he could have made the precise drawing, in charcoal, in black chalk, of the empty bag, more a connoisseur of the emptiness than the satchel, the empty bag being only one installment, considered sub specie aeternitatis, of the empty-handedness following unsuccessful hunts — later he knew to convert sadness into
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the theory of sadness, made of circles and triangles, thanks to which the Empty-handed Return could attain graphic perfection. The empty-handed wanted to return home as a man of science, proud of the immeasurable subtlety of his line ; he did not want to be a beneficiary of the pity that is just one step below forgiveness ; he wanted his return to be choreography, and for a long time exorcised feeling. The art of empty-handedness makes of the accepted failure a form of expression deployed in time and space, with moderation — sometimes the acceptance is confused with simple fair play, or resignation : in fact, many hunters thought it best to leave it at that, the minor nobility of the loser who smiles ; it was not enough, of course, to elevate the return to the level of the fine arts, more was needed : this minor nobility was a paltry point of departure. The art of being empty-handed implied the art of avoiding capture : a thousand ways of giving up, a thousand ways of aiming adjacent to the target, or of standing alone at the meeting point, with the Moon if there was a Moon ( the poet’s petty goodwill Moon ), with nothing if there was nothing, the gaze lost through tree branches, and the silence that would soon no longer be the silence of the hunt. The captain was seen returning, ruined as ( it’s a very uncertain as ) a Roman general without victory, back after having known the East of the barbaric ingratitude — his sailors ( it is not said enough ) had learned with the time to perceive in the captain’s eye the expression of his bitterness in the aftermath of a failed campaign : the face of a Mormon after a bad night, wondering if it is right to wait for the seventh day. The art of being empty-handed escapes these circumstances : nothing to do with the downcast expression, the bitterness of a disoriented leader before his troops, and the incomprehension, the self-criticism, the absurdity of the
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world, the anti-prayer to God, the impossible confessions to make, all the sweat and fuss of the loser ; it was necessary to see instead an art of lightness when the charnel houses were empty, preference given to the hypothetical prey instead of the capture made — the art of being empty-handed delicately abstracts shoddy deeds, even if they are effective, he wants to give to the hunts the grace of icons’ visages, colored with such finesse on a board, with such a thin film of color, without ever disappearing they threaten to fade away. The art of empty-handedness is spiritual, it escapes the witnesses located far from the event ; of this art, the sailors ( there should be a catalog of them, horsemen, pimps, frustrated poets, outlaws, fake choir boys, prison escapees, etc. ) know what to know : they know how to add the love of nothing, nothing being so chic, like a tie, to their duty to bring in the numbers. The artist of empty-handedness lets the prey go, it is not a question of the honest man’s generosity, which is luxurious and maudlin, toward the poor creatures, even less so the compassion of Saint Francis ( we see Francis the saint in the presence of a chickadee, we never imagine him before a school of cod ) : it’s something else, what’s needed is a sense of orchestration, the silence before, the silence after the strike of the kettledrum, given away for nothing. The art of being empty-handed is fulfilled on the way home, obviously : it is an art of the aftermath, it turns its back on epic scenes that are neither successful nor unsuccessful, but upended, catastrophic, like battlefields, where the remains of lost ammunition mix together, here bits of broken harpoons, tracing perspectives poorly — as it is fulfilled on the way back, it is an art of the second time, it has its irony and melancholy ; it is derisory after the great rite of the hunt, it is dutifully nostalgic, and has the colors of a
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sunset deploy behind the empty-handed hunter’s back, to the best effect : tragic, with brass instruments. It maintains honor in dishonor since it chooses the opposite of capture ; it knows how to prolong the desire, it takes pleasure in postponing the triumph and all that follows until the next day, so much the worse if the triumph does not come or if its nature will have changed by then ; it leaves the empty-handed hunter in charge of his projects. The art of being empty-handed also fine-tunes sadness, if necessary, as the style of the feeling of things in ancient Japanese poetry : but this sadness becomes in its turn an art, it is lavish, it is not impotence acknowledging itself, it still has awareness of the importance of forms in this earthly existence, & the recurring need to cut out silhouettes from paper. In the best of cases, the artist of empty-handedness conjures frustration, and even the idea of defeat ; his art reaches its perfection ( an impossible but theorizable perfection ) when it stands as close as possible to renunciation — this edge of the wing of renunciation ( I quote ), Ahab would approach it some mornings while leaning over the rail, waiting for the moment when the fear of falling and the idea of persevering become one and the same thing : the same feeling, not very defensible, perhaps a miracle, perhaps a misunderstanding, or a disturbance in thought, as the impression of déjà-vu for example ( but Ahab always ended up giving up : it was one of the very challenges of Ahabeism ). Ultimately, the empty-handed hunt becomes a masterpiece when a source of pride : the hunter then returns home among his own majestically, on an elephant if he can, with the ambiance of a sovereign entering the city : his hunt was separation, getting the hunter and his prey to meet with no witness, hunter and prey communing beyond the reach of the uninitiated, the hunt won or lost was a part of their
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private life and concerned nobody else — just a little later, the hunter returns to show himself to the people as a trophy, or as an injury, this is all he has at the ready. Hands empty, the net empty, the empty-handedness triumphs, his gesture gratuitous, his defeat was art for art’s sake, and also the bag no longer dangles, it benefits from the emptiness inside its skin to breathe — the next day, it starts all over again, the outward journey at dawn, the return at dusk, never capturing the prey is the best way to maintain perpetual movements, and to suggest a life unchanging and thus happy, a similar life, the renewal being the abolition of death.
Advice to Josef “von” Sternberg It’s impossible to imagine the torments of the genius filmmaker in the morning, when he goes to lead his team of fifty and of one hundred on a large film set : a whole nation of technicians, monkeys on poles, tightrope walkers, electricians, costume designers, pairs of scissors in miles of tulle, carters, and extras as numerous as the citizens of D.W. Griffith. How to convert this feeling of being a piece of straw torn from a rocking chair, how to convert it into a formidable determination of genius at work ? how, if not by choosing his wardrobe, by creating nuptial parades, improved by experience. And above all, it’s important to be the first to arrive, to rely on the Strategy of the first Knight to show up : before the first sweeper, before the first one to lay out the adhesive tape : to arrive in an empty hangar, to hear the sound of his lone footfalls, to bump into the desks, to dismiss the night watchman, to inspect the dust with an air of the lady of the house when she is bored and has knick-knacks — to make this hour last as long as possible,
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standing in the company of the dark projectors, still master for a few minutes. At home, and in the car just now, on the way to the set, the director is a creature with no certainties, he does not even have faith in the atoms of Epicurus, it has no basis in anything — now that he is standing behind his camera, he must be a knight, the Great Condé at the age of 20, the son of the king on the plain and the battle of Rocroi, crowned with crows, leading 10,000 men against 10,000 other men, of a different color ; he has to strike his thigh and instantaneously pick up the thread of his dialogues : it is the time to reconvert the what’s-the-use into an imperious Hollywood Will, simultaneously the creator’s desire, tragic impulse of Genius, and financial necessity, dictated by the studios, which has to produce at any cost : to occupy the large hangars, amortize Gary Cooper’s salary, illuminate dull screens with fires and come up with ever more fables. Ahab wonders if he could give lessons in certainty to a director confronted with a thousand extras, drawing his arguments from his past as a captain, ruthlessly of course, to recycle the experience of an authoritarian master he’d had only by proxy. In particular, he says : to keep his team in check, there was the strength of the orator, natural charisma, intimidation, the monopoly of power, but all this is not worth a hat — as soon as he utters the word hat, Ahab frowns : what he is saying is ( Sternberg understands ), it’s the importance of the costume, to each his own, casoar or stetson, or golf pants, or hair gel, black glasses, glass of bourbon at five o’clock in the afternoon, cigarette holder, or an eyepatch. At the extreme of these tailoring tips for men, one wonders if it was not him, the captain, who inspired Josef Sternberg to add von to his name of a Viennese Jew — having
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shown him how to put his hair back into place over his eye, and in less than a quarter of an hour, in an office at Paramount dictating to him a von Sternberg life in the palaces of Austria-Hungary. ( To take hold of his crew, Ahab had invented the whale, he made it resurface every time his men started to complain ; he knew how to rely on his obsession, not as a terror, rather as entertainment, or both, moving quickly so as not to give anyone the time to disentangle their fear from their pleasure ( one day in the future, the captain will whisper to Josef von Sternberg : find yourself a whale, a white whale ). )
Josef “von” Sternberg and Moby Dick His detractors say that what he agrees to keep of the ocean is a dome of caviar on a silver platter ( even if sturgeon is not, strictly speaking, oceanic : for a man from the Austrian Alps, the oceans resemble each other, a lake does the job just as well ) ; other times, it’s a lobster claw, or the stuffed swordfish in a lawyer’s office ; later, it’s the cheap charm of a man dressed as a gondolier, in the next phase, a pearl necklace, or a newsagent’s pipe and cap ; harpoons are the wooden spikes that fancy sailors use to capture the olive at the bottom of a martini glass, or from the surface, in the instance that it has the grace to float. ( All he knows of the ocean, he learned from The Odyssey ( a little also from The Phantom Ship ) : for him, the drama of the sea is the question of the faithfulness of a woman, practically a sailor’s widow, attractive at her age, incapable of sewing on a collar, determined to refuse suitors one by one after testing them. )
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Half-widow Martha Dolittle and the rumors about Ahab The audacity of Ahab turned captain would have made her laugh if she were to hear about it ( if she knew he was now in Hollywood, among so many stars and little helpers ) : a distance of twenty thousand leagues between the very young man who’d just barely finished with his textbooks and the world of whaling, so they say ( severity, fatigue, poverty, iron laws and vicious contracts, bad pay, senseless deaths, freezing water, sea monsters and rounds of butchery on the deck ). If ever a traveler were to come and talk to her about her Ahab turned captain, if rumors were to cross the Chesapeake Bay to reach her, Ahab’s widow would see through the sham and perceive the fragment of a collective lie ( served to his family, his old mother, his old father, and his creditors ) to hide the death of her fiancé or his total reconversion, as if he had been appointed ambassador of the United States to Borneo.
Half-widow Martha Dolittle summons then dismisses She will never get the tables to turn : instead, truly and prosaically curse this fugitive Ahab, by bringing down her fists, unfit for a lady, in girlish intimacy ( brandish, hold tight, she knows how to do like the others ) — yet in the absence of Ahab, there is always something of the poltergeist more or less present, in the silence and the angle of the walls, in the movement of the curtains, in the to-and-fro of the shutter in the wind, in the mass of the box spring in the middle of the night, in the mirror on the edge of a shelf, in a newspaper page that turns over and slides under the table, in the bubbles of a glass of water and the lethargy of the large armoire that itself has spread out over the years.
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Instead of turning the tables, the fist, the curse — in all fairness, a wife’s reproaches to her husband pronounced in a less apocalyptic tone, becoming calmer, because they are tired, on a slope passing from anger to melancholy, to the confidence of a love that is hypothetical, hypothetical and increasingly transparent, not like a veil of Salome’s but like a mosquito net. When she wishes to invoke Ahab, eternally young, eternally betrothed, intimidated before the ring, Martha Dolittle has recourse to this fist, clenched then unclenched, to a few words, ultimately very little, the few words they’d had the time to share during their weeks of engagement, of a respectful banality, now pronounced avariciously so as to avoid wasting them — in a very low tone : a whisper, but not that of prayer, that of designation .— it is also the breath used to extinguish a candle without spilling the wax. Then Ahab returns, opportune and provisional, he is the servant knight, just passing through, he’s planning to leave as soon as he arrives, but he is entirely domestic, without reproach and without contradictions, he makes his will a non-existent given, appears without illuminating or damaging, he wants to disturb nothing, except by invitation, so he lets himself be guided, his very presence, volatile and subject to a large number of doubts ( the second thoughts of being engaged ), becomes palpable, Martha Dolittle is the only one who knows at this point : he is Ahab as he should have been and will be again next time, he comes in profile, this is Ahab’s good side, unhesitating, very diligent, the cat’s faithfulness & unfaithfulness, he assembles the elements of his wedding night, wanting to do the right thing, he does not leave before the end — only after can he take leave, through the open window, or the closed window, leaving an imprint behind in his place, yet again.
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On other days, the next morning for example, it is not the raised fist nor the open hand free for a slap but a single kick given in the light air, accompanied ( but it is purely decorative ) by a movement of the arm & wrist, waving the beater Martha uses for the laundry ( with ice water : grueling women’s work ) — Ahab is no longer necessary, is no longer grata, not as a present husband, not as a halo of memory, nor as a topic of conversation : everything that exists & takes place is then fully non-Ahab and constitutes a paunchy world of fruits, bellies, and days, hours well spent, pillows, cauldrons, trivial projects, useless conversations, with secret fertility, a world of short-term distractions & petty worries the size of a pin, of triviality hooked by long threads, themselves trivial and then sublime, to metaphysics : to those categories of metaphysics that have troubled us for centuries. And still other days ( the most frequently, perhaps ) it is this alternation of convocation and dismissal, including when the widow Martha begins the inventory of her suitors in the company of a suitor : Ahab the lover in absentia may as well be there and not be there, and alternate, as one hesitates to pass through a door for fear of disturbing or discovering, making the rounds of the curious, not of inspectors, of the fiancé who is tempted but kept at a distance ( and then courteous despite his boorishness, aware of having to disappear, he the specter, behind lovers who are perhaps more ordinary but more concrete ). Martha Dolittle also has good manners, she does not pronounce Ahab’s name in the presence of one of his substitutes, she cannot compare the incomparable anyway, especially not the suitor to the runaway husband, his portrait does not hang over the headboard, he does not command, he does not provide the example, he is not the stuffed bird in a corner of the room overhead ; when Martha summons him, it is to get a hold on his absence.
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Ahab in Hollywood — meeting with Erich Stroheim ( known as Erich Hans Oswald Karl Maria Stroheim von Nordenwall ) The day following the next, or months later,105 scriptwriter Ahab, his manuscript under his arm, undergoes the ordeal of a long tête-à-tête with another “von” fellow, Erich Stroheim this time : he too comes from Vienna, birthplace of the operetta marquises, also a skilled calligrapher who scratched at his identity papers so as to make the insignia of the great reigning families appear there. Sternberg is partial to romantic furs, he gets lost in them, he looks like a chieftain acceding to the throne of the tsar in his skins of ennobled beasts — Stroheim likes dress uniforms, that is, he likes the uniform and likes the pomp, the uniform when it’s time for the ball and the ball garb when it gives itself official airs ; he wants the good reputation of the military man with a hundred stripes, elevated to the highest rank, claiming that his flesh retains the imprint of admirable battles, but he wants to be chic all the same, the dolman taken out of its armoire, no traces of mud, white, lead white, cream white, ostrich feather white, Franz Josef meringue white, with golden cords on the chest. In the time since crossing from one Paramount corridor to another Paramount corridor ( he encounters different varieties of Hungarians, dialogue writers, former playwrights, filmmakers, and dark-eyed starlets ), the captain has known of the jealousies developed there, euphorbia-jealousies of the hothouses : he is not surprised when he spots in Stroheim’s monocle a gleam directed straight at Sternberg’s monocle : 105. Stroheim has just written Tod Browning’s The Devil-Doll and acted in The Crime of Doctor Crespi by John H. Auer, after Edgar Allan Poe.
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envy, competition, relentless criticism ( in the kingdom of Hollywood, there can be only one “von,” the other is the usurper, and the genius, amidst a setting of watchtowers in the style of Ludwig ii of Bavaria, does not share ). Stroheim is famous for his neck, that of a bison from the Austrian Alps, made for cervical collars ; and it is known that his skull imitates the globe that the statues of standing kings hold in their hands 106 — he inclines this smooth skull, this neck, to look down at little Ahab ; he read his manuscript, he followed the adventures of the whale from one scene to the next ; he will soon make his verdict known, the little captain awaits the word that will be a thunderbolt, a deluge, the fire on Gomorrah, ashes, locusts, the aching ceiling of the shaken temple by Samson & the javelin that planted the soldier at the foot of the walls of Troy. Stroheim will devour it all in a single mouthful, he who swam across the ocean, braved the big studios, revolutionized the fine arts, dismissed domestic staff and bookkeepers, captured stars and starlets, including Gloria Swanson, emptied banks and imposed nine hours of work back-to-back : long processions of flagellants followed by those in ecstasies. He will be intractable, ordering a glass of calf’s blood with a raise of his eyebrow ; he keeps his monocle clamped tightly, but somewhere a little something moves him : for a moment Mr. “von” wonders if this exhausted man before him was not also the son of a Vienna sausage maker, descended from the shtetls, who’d come to Hollywood without ever choosing the right mask. ( It’s true that he could have found something better — Ahab introduces himself with the name Cole Coleman, which is certainly not the most epic, and invented himself to accommodate a career as a successful 106. Frederick II for example, but there are others.
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author of 42 nd Street : no one will bother to check.107 If he had had the insolence of this Mr. Erich Stroheim, more audacious than Sternberg in his own way, to the point of soon reaching the Münchhausenian degrees of deception, Ahab would have done as he did : instead of Cole Coleman, a name of mustard with smoked meat, adorned with the abundance of Erich Hans Oswald Karl Maria Stroheim von Nordenwall : a carriage drawn by seven thoroughbreds, each with its own pedigree, and each its own plume like a barber’s shaving brush ). Stroheim is torn between the brotherhood of schmuck to schmuck ( pressing the old captain to his heart ), the judgment of genius inflicted on an amateur, or a long tirade to sketch and then accomplish his own panegyric, life and work, high nobility past, cursed artist present, and between the two the great misunderstood works — or the pedagogical explanation, in other words the lesson Michelangelo gave to the last of the assistants who swirled paintbrushes in the turpentine — he still wonders if he will strike down, if he will embrace this pathetic Jobard, so touching when he smooths out his manuscript, or if he’ll throw his script in his face, telling him that talent requires selfsacrifice ( one fable is worth another ).
Birth certificates ( Later, Orson Welles will also counterfeit birth certificates : on the screen, there will be the successive avatars of Charles Kane & Arkadin, or the king Macbeth incapable of becoming
107. Over the course of twenty-five years of vacationing & being half-unemployed on the West Coast, he also had the names Henry Lewes, William Cairns, H.W. Massingham, Charles Burchfield & Bill Gilmore — with multicolored ties.
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himself while transcending himself all the while ( sublimating, outraging ) through the effort of being what he believes himself to be. Welles will not give himself the title of Count : for him, the “von” & the minks, the Habsburg neck collars are like Cecil B. DeMille’s boots, accessories of the 1920s ; he will not claim to come from the aristocracy but will want nonetheless to get the hinges of his identity to move. As much as possible, for the joy of it, reflexively, out of the impossibility of doing otherwise, or as a precautionary measure, supported by this intuition : that the indifference of self to self, the pious lies, like coquetries in the style of Zsa Zsa Gabor ( one could say Linda Darnell ) looking younger by ten years, family legends borrowed from the repertoire and the suitcase full of false noses could well save someone’s hide, who knows how and when, as long as there is a link ( perhaps itself purely theoretical ) between the coquetry of Zsa Zsa and the pseudonyms of Vercors, the false papers aged by the full moon ( secret codes, the Enigma machines, undercover agents, invisible Trotsky committees, the arbitrariness of the sign of the personal messages recited from London, and the mimicry of prey ).
Scriptwriter Ahab — work sessions in the company of Erich Stroheim ( known as Erich Hans Oswald Karl Maria Stroheim von Nordenwall ) When you think about it, Erich Hans Oswald Karl Maria Stroheim von Nordenwall : excellent idea, multiply the first names and the last names, only one initial is missing somewhere ( there are illusionists like that : if they can pull one rabbit out of a hat, they pull out twenty ). You’ve got to acknowledge generosity and even sincerity : bragging raised to this level is no longer bragging, it is the dance of the bear, the carnival man’s inferno — and the lie multiplied to infinity,
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no longer for deceiving but for inviting interlocutors to come & participate in his deception ( because there is an operetta name for everyone, Hieronymus, Günter, Jörg, Jan, Klaus, Werner, Otto, Fritz, Kirk, Ernst : you just have to help yourself & then put them back on your way out, at the exit ). Because he has this face of an expatriate delivered from the neighborhoods of Vienna, Captain Ahab moves Stroheim the unmovable : Master Stroheim had come to send away a suitor carelessly, now he wonders if something would be possible, in fact, a collaboration, a project, a masterpiece : the Stroheimian revival, the return of the terrible Austrian after years of hibernation. He could go to Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, and suggest to him this story of a whaler — . with Gloria Swanson, if Swanson is available ( we’ll make room for her between the whale & the harpoon ), and with Stroheim himself, who will give himself a role as long as he finds a costume for himself in the costume department : a dolman, once again, he has a weakness for the dolmans “with frogging.” So the matter of scale, then : the adventures of hunting sperm whales are extensive, but that’s not enough, there needs to be a Stroheimian fresco made of them, spreading over several decades, stirring up the unwieldy lunacies, the unwieldy appetites & the unwieldy terrors of men, money, sex, and power, all of which are on a human scale — because, as you will understand one day ( this is what Erich etc. Stroheim says to an attentive Cole Coleman ), you will understand it one day, the scope expands as soon as we are concerned with the diseases of men. The oceans, the blue whales, the six months underway, mizzen capstan, all this is grand, but this grandeur is rinky-dink ( I quote ), compared to the incommensurability of human adventures : even the pettiness of a man having congress with a woman is immense,
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because behind her lies the great orgiastic bazaar brought back from Greece by Sigmund Freud, and Gustav Jung’s cosmic rummage sale, not to mention everything else ( Stroheim does not specify which everything else ). ( The old captain fiddles with the cap of his pen, he listens indecisively, he composes for himself his own stage directions — once again he will witness his story metamorphose into something else, a flamboyant orchestrated fresco, a complete stranger to his whales, and once again he will have to approve in silence, fold his notebook, go elsewhere, or buy into it despite everything. In fact, for one hour, Erich etc. Stroheim von Nordenwall improvises the synopsis of a big talker, the captain feels like he’s seeing his fish getting lost on the plain of Taras Bulba ; he sees it getting lost too, as if by miracle, behind the cups of Limoges in the Verdurins’ salon. Why not make of your hobbling captain a false count Karamzin, as in my Foolish Wives, surrounded by fake princesses, or the opposite, a nobleman in exile posing as a tie salesman, as in my Merry-Go-Round : he desires a princess, there’s your white fish, he marries her for her fortune & for the sexual debauchery, which he hopes for just because he feels like it, which she promises just by moistening her lip, prophesied by tremors of her pelvis ; they are married, perversion gets involved, in the second-third of the film the false marquis realizes he has married a false princess ; the filmmaker and his set rejoice in unison with this wasteful fraud — fraud that devours itself. ) Erich, Hans, Oswald, Carl, and Maria Stroheim von Nordenwall maneuver as they take their time : they were diplomatic with the producers, with the lady actresses, they were seducers in private, they know how to dig a tunnel with a little spoon, they now know how to sweet-talk anyone : you just have to go slowly. So, gradually, Erich, Oswald, and the
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other von Stroheims reveal to the old captain a project worthy of Foolish Wives ( six hours of film ), and worthy of Greed ( almost nine hours of film ) : listen to me carefully, dear sir, a Big Something, 430 minutes in twelve tableaux, seventy characters, a story over half a century, stories of banknotes, of bounced checks, of alcohol, of usurpation, of ladies’ panties, manhoods valiant and then failing, we keep the leg carved out of whale bone, & we’ll gloss over the rest —. we’ll have our seven-hour masterpiece filled with grimaces, it will be edifying & scandalous ; those who survive will compare it to the Last Judgment : the cards of the Last Judgment beaten by those of Dangerous Liaisons — and after that, brace yourself, here’s the final touch, we will entrust our hundred reels to one of Hollywood’s wonder boys, one of those German-American emigrants, Berlin, Brooklyn, Broadway, Beverly Hills, like Carl Laemmle or Irving Thalberg. They themselves will pass off the reels to the last of the editing team’s drudges, intimidated by such amplitude — & then it will be sublime, it will be the real tragedy about tragedy, a metadrama by Erich von Stroheim that will one day vindicate von Stroheim in the eyes of the Creator God : the Paramount drudges will mutilate the masterpiece, it will go from seven hours to a mere hour and a half, a Punch-andJudy matinee, it will no longer be Michelangelo and Laclos but a light comedy for selling bags of popcorn, somewhere in the garbage cans there will be remarkable scraps, Rembrandt scraps, Pentateuch scraps, Legend of the Centuries scraps, Swann in Love scraps, Dante’s Inferno scraps, and over the trash cans, Erich von Stroheim von Nordenwall will ensure the glory of his wounded condor. Are you tempted to accompany me in this triumph by forfeiture ? imagine, you will be perched on my giant’s shoulder, in keeping with the recurring fate of artists, the
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greatest, who have always exchanged their frescoes for ingratitude and been paid with the change from the cloakroom — better than that, you will be in keeping with the demise of Austro-Hungary, you will embody the spirit of the Times, Vienna abolished will no longer be illustrated with Metternich’s escape but rather von Stroheim’s destiny, which is well worth Alaric’s capture of Rome. The spectators will be satisfied with a little light comedy that lasts 90 minutes, as a little polyp extracted from your Leviathan, and we .— we will be free to stuff ourselves at the banquet of what was left on the cutting room floor : standing, by the fading daylight ( how beautiful it will be ), we will look at bits of film, one frame after the other, everyone will recognize its share of talent ; our salvation will be a well-kept secret.
Melancholy of Hieronymus von Münchhausen ( in the third person singular ) If he is to write one day of his Melancholy, if he is to lay it all out on paper, to reproduce the miracle of the projection of a sphere onto a plane and delight in the straight lines becoming curves, if he has to compose his lament, speak of loneliness, of lost years, of pleasures that took flight with the last pollen, the routine succeeding the passion, and the anguish of no longer having a goal — then, Baron Hieronymus von Münchhausen will accomplish his task. He will write of his Melancholy, his suffering, the tears, the lost loves, the jealousies, the failures, and the decayed teeth that make the puller laugh — only here, more from bad habit than by will ( will to what and of whom ? ), he will replace the word tear with the word net each time it appears, then will replace the word solitude with shotgun, and the word failure with salt pork, and lost loves with hot air balloon. Tears that become nets, solitude a firearm, abandonment a dish braised in pineapple,
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after the third paragraph, the story of his melancholy becomes the story of a wolverine hunt, on the coast of the Great North, as it’s called, Canadian, because there is no Little South : toward the thorn bushes and low temperature records : an adventure story in the forest, of toes thawed before the stove, of thick soup that comforts days of silence and snow and nights of rest under the soft touch of a quilt in the company of an Eskimo ( this is just like Münchhausen ) — after which, there will always be time to replace the words pineapple and shotgun with sensuality and swooning.
Why and how Baron Münchausen fascinated the ex-captain Ahab Admitting the dual nature — divine and mortal — of Christ is a spiritual exercise, and it doesn’t always go smoothly, but to discover that Baron Münchhausen, of the cannonball and the trip to the Moon, indeed existed as a Baron Hieronymus, belonging to the nobility and the army, this is a sensation that can be deep while accounting for the laws of human understanding. Sometimes, Ahab, an admirer of Münchhausen the baron and character compares himself to an unremarkable family man to whom the possibility of a dissolute life, Don Juan style, is revealed by accident : curiosity, confusion. He would especially like to know the practical details : his reading of Münchhausen’s adventures could be that of a judge reconstructing crimes : what he wants to know is how the names, creatures, words, and gestures are structured, how the Veritable Münchhausen ( 1720–1797 ) comes to consult the pages of the Fictional Münchhausen, and what he does with his written adventures, whether he adapts his existence to these stories of extraordinary hunts, if he sues the plagiarists, and thus contacts his lawyer, fills out his trial records — or rather prefers to summon the other Münch-
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hausen, in the only way possible given the circumstances, by carrier pigeon ( let’s say fifteen pigeons went to track down Münchhausen where he was, where he was not, and where he claimed to be ) : and when the time comes to have a duel, to behave like Don Quixote facing the other Don Quixote cobbled together by a plagiarist ( the lid of a pot to imitate the shaving plate that imitated the helmet ). He wants to know how the Veritable Münchhausen agrees to persist as the Fictional Münchhausen, if he waits for his news, if the lies of the Fictional distract him from his reality as a retired officer, or if the Veritable Münchhausen considers the ongoing lies, his own, those of the Fictional Münchhausen, as a shared language, a rhetorical device that would serve as a point of reference on a bridge over the Oder, at the same distance — there would be only one word common to the authentic braggart Münchhausen and fictional sincere Münchhausen, a word that would serve as a window, a bull’s eye, a keyhole where the spy and the spied-upon exchange a certain intimacy. When he saw the Fictional Münchhausen appear in the form of thousands of books sold on the markets, the Veritable Münchhausen had to bite his fingers ( there is a link between biting his fingers and saving himself from the waters of the lake by pulling on his ponytail, but we do not have the space to allow the baron to develop this comparison ). The Veritable Münchhausen is not accustomed to contrition, he never regrets, he doesn’t know how to do it ( one evening he offered his excuses ; on closer inspection, he realized that they were two apple turnovers ) — but this time, this time perhaps, regret : to have overindulged in puns, to have babbled on and on like a drunkard with an empty stomach, a drunkard sobered up, having inadvertently fallen asleep while leaving the other baron, the Fictitious Münchhausen,
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watching him, holding the candlestick, and once certain he was asleep, to go off philandering. Not very strong in regrets but, on the contrary, an expert in optimism and a great collector of Motifs of Consolation, saying : if the Fictitious Münchhausen is born from a single untruth professed by the Veritable Münchhausen, then the Veritable Münchhausen can in turn regenerate, keep himself alive, thanks to the untruths pronounced about him by the Fictitious Münchhausen. This here would be ( the baron explains himself by making small gestures with his fingers to signify the complexity of things and the simplicity of reasoning ) a game of mutual recognition, and a three-part system of life, truth, and death, articulated with a few letters, quite similar to the story of the Golem that was told all throughout Prague. The truth of the story is probably less Prague ( none of the whimsy, no 12 strokes at midnight ) : around 1760 the Veritable Münchhausen returns from wars against the Grand Turk, he conjures the trauma and depression by making a transcription for harp, lute, trumpet, and glockenspiel, all joyful instruments ; he invites his friends to dine with him, and he entertains the notables with adventures that extend from lunch to dinner, first one horse, then two, then a legion, first Samarkand and before long, the Moon ; everyone goes home to digest the leg of lamb and lull themselves to sleep with these beautiful adventures, forgetting them bit by bit, as one makes candied fruit from fresh fruit. Everyone but one of these notables, a certain Rudolf Erich Raspe, with whom Mother Nature ( I quote ) had skimped in terms of scruples and honesty, but did not skimp, however, regarding plagiarizing talents : furtive as wiseacres are, furtive and admirably mobile, Raspe moved to London, it could have been Buda or the Cayman Islands ; and it is in this refuge, practically a hot-air balloon basket, that he translates the
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Veritable Münchhausen’s chit-chat into the Adventures of the Fictitious Münchhausen — the manuscript to the copyist, the copy to the foreman, the proofs to the printer, and the copies to the bookshop patrons. Ahab still wonders ; reconstructing the facts a century later is work, buried clues are collected and the corpses are exhumed, indecipherable ( being indecipherable seems to amuse them ) : does the Veritable Münchhausen take offense ? did he go to track down copies of his Adventures to burn them, like Gogol running from one bookstore to another to buy and destroy copies of a book of particularly calamitous poems ? — or he gives free reign to the Fictitious Münchhausen, without even thinking of claiming his copyright — or he gets one copy delivered, just one, and conforms himself to what is written, trims his beard to look like the engraving and tries to prove himself worthy every morning ( “with the momentum of the boxspring” ), worthy of the Fictitious Münchhausen, of his youthfulness, of his causticity, ready to give him a wall of his house to display the stuffed trophies from his hunts. Or he’s advised to take a boat, cross the Channel, ring Rudolf Erich Raspe’s doorbell and punch him in the nose with the most celestial, premeditated, long-armed jab that had been gathering momentum all the way since Bodenwerder. The Veritable Münchhausen will one day tell how he chased his plagiarist through the fields, mountains, and valleys, English gardens, false ruins, temples, and the Petit Trianon, and the ponds ( he knows them well : Raspe splashes about while Münchhausen moves about easily ), how he saw him appearing red against the green backdrop beyond the oaks, how he set his sights on him, aimed between the ears of his horse, set his best quill soaring to touch him on the
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hat. (As to be expected,108 the Veritable Münchhausen will tell these tales at the table, always before guests, and will add episodes ; later, another Raspe, this time called Wutz or Bürger, will make little booklets of them, sold for so many cents a piece. ) Everyone puts their hand in the fire or their head on the chopping block — either way, it’s a gamble: The Fictitious Münchhausen packs his bags one morning for Bodenwerder, to attend the funeral of the Veritable Münchhausen. He even buries him, literally ; he is seen solemnly picking up a handful of soil from the pile gathered by discreet extras in the cemetery ( no less thoughtful ), considering this handful of earth, seeing it as a subject of fable, that which came to the surface when the ferret, itself also of fable, perhaps dug its tunnel : in sum, a Speech on the Pile of Earth on the Design of the Tunnel. ( Or better yet, even more solemnly, he pulls from a remarkably capacious pocket a vast rococo reliquary that is entirely the Vienna Mistress of its Power, and in this reliquary a handful of earth collected in Catherine’s Russia, or the Great Turk’s Anatolia — or even better, Moon dust : this is certainly what it is, Baron Münchhausen, the Veritable Münchhausen, can only be buried with a bit of the Moon. ) The Veritable Münchhausen was courteous — boastful, nevertheless courteous, this kind of gentleman inexhaustible from one end of the table to the other, ready to apologize to the ladies, one by one, individually, and for each a different excuse, if his endless discourse contained a touch of barracks humor. He courteously leaves the Fictitious Münchhausen to his own adventures, to invent others, to plagiarize his own until they wear themselves out, he lets 108. Chapter xxvii : How Münchhausen crossed the hahas with a warbler’s step over the puddles.
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himself be plagiarized without saying anything, his generosity of spirit is that of a plagiarist, the old grimacing monkey of plagiarism : he considers the offences of his younger brother, even if he’d been plundered, with nostalgia.
Where the ex-captain Ahab is seen taking a close interest in the Don Quixote of the plagiarizing impostor Avellaneda Impostors are everywhere, all the inns keep a room free for one of them, and some push scruples to the point of being impostors of themselves — at least that’s what the captain claims, one beautiful declamatory day, addressing an audience of ( very attentive ) seagulls. Shakespeare had his own, who had no trouble disguising themselves as him : he was recognizable and looked like everybody else ( double virtue typical of this genius ) ; Don Quixote had his, and also Cervantes, when he saw in the bookshop windows the works by one Avellaneda, his plagiarist, author of an opportune sequel to the adventures of Quixote ( not just opportune : venal, fraudulent, hypocritical, but, it must be acknowledged, in some places well-done — besides, the old Quixote, who had the gift of forgiving at every turn despite his reputation as an avenger, could have detected in this plagiarizing mimicry some evidence of respect, the homage of the copyist to the masterpiece ). It is still not known who could have been hiding under this ordinary name of Avellaneda : the captain conducts his investigations in libraries, swimming as always, from one work to another ; without a superb collection, he contents himself with getting the contenders, none more credible than the next ( but in terms of imposture, credibility is perhaps a poor criterion ), to fall from these yawning books. He reads the eternal litany of hypotheses, comparable to the
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Catalogue of Veritable Secret Authors of the Work of the So-Called Shakespeare, supplemented at each publication by descendants eager for truth ( Successors Battling the Official Lie ) ; he even finds one essayist smarter than the others, in Ithaca, New York, who demonstrated that this Mr. Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda was in “reality” Miguel de Cervantes himself, who had wanted to cause a stir. There was nobody to identify William Shakespeare, however — and in 1200 pages of adventures, Cervantes’ Don Quixote never had the opportunity to duel the other, redundant Don Quixote ( he did everything to avoid him, leaving for Barcelona when the other was parading his knightly legend along the coast of Saragossa ).
Ahab in Hollywood — concessions to Carl Laemmle Carl Laemmle, the producer, is this pumpernickel sprite who came from Germany to expose his Heimatlos dome to the uncompromising California sun — fortunately, he brought from Germany ( in addition to a certain Wagnerian love for stunted trees, unhealthy forests, dwarf masters of the flames, and treasure-guarding snakes ) a collection of hats that were his size, his very small size. He could have been an extra for the Tetralogy, in the role of Alberich, king of the Nibelungen, but fate intended for him to become the head of Universal Studios, and in the middle of the morning one day he finds himself before the old scriptwriter Ahab ( going by the name of Sam Samuelson for the occasion ).109 In the smooth voice of a civilized huckster, Carl praises the catalog of his company to old Samuelson : see how it has not been idle in barely a decade ; during all these years, the 109. Leonard Woolf.
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other studios staged lovers, indiscreet mistresses, policemen with hearts of gold, bumpkins who’d come to the city, but Universal could boast of having introduced far more surprising creatures to the world : the Werewolf, for example, and the Hunchback of Notre-Dame. In other words, if Laemmle and his people love the maimed with a veritable love — not the phony love of the Church that collects lepers as others do impressionist paintings, not the love of the sister who sheds a tear on the stump of a limb because it will take her ( the sister ) six steps up in purgatory, none of this .— no, sincere love, the love of the entertainment industry, without altar & without tears, a love strictly controlled to avoid the slightest overflow, without sentimentality, without mawkishness, without the greed of padre protector of the legless children because they will make him a saint. Universal raised an army of writers, producers, technicians, make-up artists, prop-makers inventing rubber monsters, lighting designers, and actors ( leading roles that looked like secondary ones, thank God ) ; and all this has been gathered not just to ensure the financial glory of the Laemmle family, it is to serve as censor-bodyguard for the love that a filmmaker cultivates for monster men. The scriptwriters will stand by, O stern & sleepless watchmen of dramaturgy, to chase away pity, they will correct their script until the spectator’s love for the Hunchback or the Headless Man is located precisely between disgusted fear and perverse desire, on level ground, uncertain, ready for anything, responsive to suggestions, where affection for a monster can be combined narratively with mockery and suspense — marketing managers will ensure that the Snake Woman has a minimum of dignity, without which the tickets will not sell, and the children will never go to buy the figurine. ( The lighting designer also arranges for the lighting according to the
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company’s rules : at this moment, he ceases to be a judge, and when the make-up artist, together with the prosthetist, adds to Bela Lugosi a hairpiece that scares people off, their actions are subject to the duty of doing the right thing —. to such a point that idle feelings such as pity or defiance and superfluous comments dissolve entirely, in the way of a little romance. ) It needs to be recognized for this quality — after the Hunchback and the Werewolf, Universal succeeds in having the Phantom of the Opera love and be loved without reserve, eaten away by fire & smallpox, Frankenstein’s patched-up man “whose soul leaks through the seams,” Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, Nosferatu, who is a copy of the count and who suffers from this every night, the Elephant Man, the Panther Woman, and Dr. Jekyll’s double, created to tailor the charm of the ugly to the girls of London. So, why not a whale, as long as it’s humanized a bit ? eh ? not to make it more attractive, to make the whale the symptom of a human disease — because, you see, to separate the vengeful captain from the white whale is a beginning scriptwriter’s mistake : perhaps this gets us more battles at sea, but what we lose is precisely this mixture that brings out the humanity of the monsters and the monstrosity of humans, “which is what our business is” ( here, it’s Carl Laemmle speaking ).110 Imagine instead the combination of porpoise and captain — let’s get the Walrus Man, or the Squid Man,111 placed under a curse, kept alive solely by the desire for revenge ( when the thirst for revenge fades, depression takes over : Squid Man looks at himself in the mirror ( the melancholy of the ungrateful teenager, courage of the medical examiner, 110. 1939 — he will die in September. 111. “I’ve heard of krakens.”
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the disillusioned frankness of a drunkard when he observes the progress of his cirrhosis — but also the wounded pride of Snow White’s stepmother ), he hesitates, he thinks, then finally throws his sleeping pills to the dogs ). He comes out of the water when everyone has fallen asleep, he slides his tentacles one on top of the other ( Laemmle counts six of them ) to signify a monstrous appetite for fresh meat and a burning and unsatisfied sensuality, looped back in on itself ; he emerges at night, the night is always cinematographically favorable to these monsters, it behooves, as Madame de Sévigné would have said, their bad intentions & the insufficiency of our special effects ; the spectators will see him lose water with each step while making batrachian noises ; the terror it engenders is that of the slug, insidious terror ; it advances in the streets of the village, near the shore, why not Nantucket, since the script mentions it, to exercise his revenge there in accordance with a precise timetable ( a precision foreign to his squid texture ) : the first morning, the mayor strangled under his quilt, the second morning, the pastor’s daughter on the carpet, the vestiges of kelp : the investigators will take care of it. So be it, the Squid Man’s grudge, but for what old grievance ? this would be a matter for the second and the third acts : the small coastal village, so friendly, supported by its church, its woodwork, its brides blooming anew every April, shows its true character : if it is not big enough to have the underworld of London, it has enough recesses dug across the centuries to keep its depravities warm ; they remain between locals, isn’t that so, there’s incest, greed, trafficking in little runts, bribes, falsified land registries, and the liberties taken by the pastor who pardons himself ( as for the recesses, they are between the cellars of the houses, where the marmalades are kept ).
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But neither Carl Laemmle nor Universal wants to get lost in the recesses of the village’s infamy ( it is not the desire that is lacking ) : the hidden corruption of small towns à la Disney is a nice motif, but what’s most important, and scriptwriter Ahab must never lose sight of this, it is indeed the profound humanity of the monster, dripping with murder, and whose every suction pad is an invitation to a chilling sexuality. Over the course of the scenes, the audience will have to discover this deep humanity : now it’s up to the scriptwriter captain to have enough talent to attract everybody’s sympathy for his abject character, to the point that they applaud the next time he strangles a victim — he will have him go through the streets, for example, always in the dark — that of sleepwalkers — but attracted this time by the notes of a Nocturne by Frédéric Chopin, “coming down from an open window” ; he will make him stay beneath a porch to listen every evening, before or after his crimes, to the young & beautiful widow of a sailor playing My Bonnie is Over the Ocean, then a piece by Carl Maria von Weber as one listens to it within the walls of the House of Usher — the monster swoons beneath the window, his listening is the elevation of a music lover, the grace of John of the Cross, the deep pain of the man torn from the company of women, without justice, it is melancholy and perfect pitch, it is also the onanism of the octopus-man in public, who considers his enjoyment as a tribute to the beauty of things, of all things in harmony, pieces by Liszt and whiteness of the thigh ; the tears are those of the true connoisseur ; he remains motionless, it’s like seeing Salieri transported by The Magic Flute, he closes his eyes, he does not see the men of the village approaching, all whalers, armed with harpoons that have been stowed away for the winter ( they have been tracking the
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beast for days, and when they don’t find him, so as to avoid the shame of returning empty-handed they beat up one or two Chinese men, one or two tramps from Katowice, making a clean sweep ). The epilogue should be heartbreaking, the Octopus Man hanging from the end of a rope, in the early morning, at the sound of a bell, the peal of deliverance, he seems to be dripping, someone closed the lid to the piano, the monster’s face, tied off by the knot of hemp, reverts the face of a young and my goodness quite cute sailor Bonnie, that of those who are over the ocean, as repeated in the song that plays over the credits.
In which the number of fools is estimated One auspicious spring day, scriptwriter Ahab manages to get an appointment with George Stevens, director of comedies sometimes described as delicious 112 — such as The More the Merrier, 113 shot two years earlier, performed by Jean Arthur ( delicious ) and Joel McCrea ( delicious in his way ), laugh out-loud funny, even if everything takes place beneath the crisscrossed, cracked, and windswept sky of the Second World War ( before that, there was Marriage Incognito and A Damsel in Distress : James Stewart, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, P.G. Wodehouse, and tales of engagement ). In the end, no luck, the meeting was delayed : George Stevens left for Europe at the last minute, his camera under his arm, to film barracks in Bavaria that were completely alien to the delights of The More the Merrier.
112. If not delicious, light. 113. The More the Merrier, 1943, script by Robert Russell and Frank Ross Jr.
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Moby Dick in Hollywood — Billy Wilder and the Ocean An interesting subject, certainly, but for someone else, not for Billy Wilder : the whale, the hunt, the ocean as an alternation of highs and lows, both Dantean, cruelty, relentlessness, gigantism, the God of the Bible tied up in all of this, we can see from here what John Ford would make of it, or Cecil B. DeMille, the demiurge in riding breeches : he knows how to raise the waves, it has even become a habit for him, the oceans obey his director’s finger, and when the oceans separate, they reveal three thousand equally obedient extras. This doesn’t mean that Cecil, seduced by the adventures of Ahab, would immediately drop his little Biblical production of the moment ( Samson, and if not Samson, Salome, or Moses, or Zebulon,114 who is too often forgotten ), one does not imagine him interrupting a shoot, but he would have at least pricked up his ears, that is certain : and in a certain way, Cecil, who is a clever man with dubious tastes, but clever, would have seen in this whale the missing link between the Biblical Spectacle ( his hobbyhorse, his Oscars ) and the western of his colleagues : because after all the death of the white fish is a rodeo that floods the five continents and leads to human casualties. Billy Wilder may have come from Germany after Austria, but he did not think ( unlike Carl Laemmle ) to bring the Wagnerism in his suitcases, monsters are not what he masters best, at least beyond a certain size, he is not Olympian enough ( he’d hate Olympus even more than Bayreuth in November ) : for him, monsters must not have the excessiveness of Dante’s Lucifer, towering like a mountain, but 114. Gen. 49.13 : Zebulon shall dwell on the coast, and he shall be by a haven of ships, and shall extend to Sidon.
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be the size of an average man, with a handkerchief in the pocket, a hat, to put on or sit on, a packet of cigarettes, and immediately identifiable neuroses. When the scriptwriter captain draws the broad contours of his whale, the game of appearances and disappearances, the uncertain and unheimlich white, the old animal and shamanic stock, the relentlessness of the man with one foot, Billy Wilder gets a glint in his eye, one eye in particular : the swelling and the narrowness, the whale compared to the captain mid-Lent, when he thinks about it, he likes it, he sees it as a reprise of a traditional motif, the eternal struggle of the fat versus the skinny. A comedy director certainly could do something with it, the battle of the overworked egos, the comedy of revenge upon revenge repeating itself, in a glut of cream pies ; it would also be enough to imagine a single girl dressed as a boy hidden amidst all these sailors : when tightening the strings of her corset, she’s revisiting a transvestite gag as old as Aristophanes & portrays the erotic misunderstanding with the utmost refinement. The afternoon goes on,115 Billy Wilder’s eye still gleaming ( in it, the love of one’s neighbor entirely confused with mockery of one’s neighbor can be seen : mockery of the human race as a whole — if Wilder shows himself empathetic in this regard, it’s that men, he knows, share the same derisory fate ; mockery is a sign of recognition ) : he’s on the verge of getting this young girl, then a second one, on Captain Ahab’s whaler, wearing very masculine fishermen’s costumes, cut straight and all the more suggestive — from this, there would be enough to fill up one hundred and twenty minutes of gags, one of them could play the ukulele, the other the harmonica, everyone who saw the previews would 115. A spring afternoon in 1949, one year after The Scandal of Berlin.
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wait for the moment for a change in the watch shift & for bedtime in the cabin. Wilder follows the thread of his tale of masks with the help of his riding crop, and he enumerates to himself the sublime and the sordid details, considers to what point the sublime can be defiled, he already makes the list of the costumes and props, then seems to come back to earth, as the expression goes, that is — reality : he is no longer certain that this variation on the theme of the gender swap is appropriate for the whale, even if the whale, without changing costume, switches constantly from one gender to the other. Secondary stories are always possible, and from caprice to grace, even in an exclusively masculine universe, it is feasible : Wilder had already shown himself able to have several dozen soldiers dance, sing, cry, sulk, and fall asleep in a stalag setting — the girls were an apparition, pin-ups from the Eastern front, but they too, like Moby Dick, faded as soon as they appeared. So there would need to be likable characters around the captain : a second-in-command, clownish, mocking, never fooled, especially not by an obsession with a whale, serving as jester and competent sailor ; or a clumsy one, to demolish any sense of pomposity, and along with it the ship, as only the forgetful characters in movies can, without wanting to cause direct harm ( the Syndrome of Prince Myshkin and the Tempting Vase ) ; or a singer, a lazybones, a trickster disembarked from a pirate ship who still believes himself in the era of Drake, a solemn sailor, a kleptomaniac, a poet, and other figures that will be characterized later, just before casting. But what if that’s not enough to create a comedy lasting one hour and forty minutes in three acts with a remarkable conclusion ? a shrew perhaps, borrowed from Gogol, the captain’s wife, Mrs. Ahab, returned from her widowhood on land to upset the love
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between her husband and a white whale ? the climax of the show, in these circumstances, is a domestic scene between Ginger Rogers ( Mrs. Ahab, née Leboeuf ) and Jack Lemmon ( Ahab, with a wig ), with umbrellas, flippers, harpoons even, all balanced on the back of the whale ( he, then, impassive : an observer, motionless, consenting to provide the floor for humans flailing around for no reason ).
Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett propose another version of the whale The authentic Pequod has long since become a museum piece, abandoned for lack of means to maintain it ; its fishermen have registered for unemployment, some of them have turned to mining in Yellowknife ( there or elsewhere, as long as they keep busy ), some have gone downhill and no one talks about it anymore ; the time of the hunt is distant, but the whale is resentful and his resentment, as noted, is slow to travel through his large body to reach this area of his brain sensitive to injustice. The comedy is faithful to the old vaudevilles, it begins with a misunderstanding, a boater captured by a myopic whale, too old for vengeance that is not appropriate for his age : he stalked his prey for a century, the cataract took its course, the boater has had the misfortune of resembling the captain and finding himself in the whale’s path — at the moment of being devoured, the hapless boater ( Cary Grant, if he accepts the role ) attempts to show the witnesses, the whale first, to what extent his death is based on a misunderstanding. ( When yachtsman Cary Grant observes the sun with a sextant and then calculates his latitude, he seems, in this order, to make a toast, drink a glass of bubbly, and then sign an autograph ; he will be, under all circumstances, a choreographic actor. ) For the next scene, Wilder proposes the soliloquy of the pseudo-captain
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Ahab, pitiful but still very loquacious ( loquacious-Cary Grant ), in the stomach : he pleads his innocence, he does not accept an identity that has become derisory once buried deep in the belly of the beast, he says aloud a summary of his resume, he has the presence of mind to list everything that distinguishes a gentleman of the Upper East Side from a fishing captain, he thinks he still holds onto his innocence, and therefore his acquittal, to the very end of his clear speech, clear as the line that delimits the face of Filippo Lippi’s angels — the whale responds to his arguments with silence ; in this silence, Cary Grant asks what time the whale will start digesting. ( Wilder imagines with his set designer this chamber with soft walls and unstable ground, and to better judge the setting, instead of Cary Grant, he puts Jack Lemmon, his favorite actor, there : he represents both the average New Yorker, captured on the third day of his honeymoon cruise, worried about not being able to alert his bosses, and the Schlemiel of the Jewish tradition, who left Central Europe long ago without ever getting rid of his bad luck, as if the predicament were a tradition, & tradition his duty : his connection to a very long history of shipwrecks. ) If there is myopia, the decay of old age, awkwardness, and the replacement of horror by the grotesque, then yes, in fact, even Billy Wilder can get a hold on the epic ; he would add a little psychology to it without which there is no possible joke, the huge fish will gain from betraying his human weaknesses — to write his role, it will be necessary to draw inspiration from some retired divas who are old but who, in the time of silent crank cinema, were young and very pale, highlighted in black. The whale could be in this category, why not ? whether it is whale or sperm whale, male or female, prey or culprit of old anthropophagous crimes : a fallen diva, always dressed in the old-timey way, strictly solitary, bitter
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toward the rest of humanity and the animal world, his lone companion being a remora, suckers on his belly, also tired, piteous stalwart, staring into the void, living on his momentum as if he were floating after death ; the whale, meanwhile, persists in existing in a world made up of increasingly sparse pieces ( rather, filaments ) of memory.
Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett propose another version of the whale, continued How to combine the adventures of the frivolous boater & the drama of the diva ? — all things considered, Billy Wilder supported by his colleague Charles Brackett makes two proposals to the scriptwriter captain ( he is willing to accept all possibilities if they bring in enough money to pay for his rent ) : 1 ) The comedy of remarriage inside the belly of the sperm whale : him, he’s Cary Grant, for the last time, Cary Grant, master of remarriage in black & white, recognizable by his chin shaped like the buttocks of one of Guido Reni’s angels, and the luster of wings in his hair ; her, she’s Katharine Hepburn, because a stomach is her rightful place, she will contrast with it, angular & quick while the belly is silky and takes its time. They were celebrating their divorce separately, on a cruise, each on their own, they’re still wearing their clothes from the last ball and have not spilled their gin ; the whale captures them, one and then the other, five minutes in between ( the rhythm must not get lost ) : him first, because he makes a credible Ahab, in a tuxedo, while he meditates aloud on the imminence of the end of time ( this is to seduce a young lady who is just barely of legal age : the Apocalypse, in his opinion, seduces young girls who are tired of being optimistic, worried about having all the time in the world ahead of them, relieved to have short deadlines
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and so nicely explained ) 116 — then her, dressed as a man, in pleated trousers, deploying all of her refined audacity before a semicircle of suitors, all more or less slender. The revenge of the myopic whale, the forced coincidence, and the laziness of the scriptwriters — no matter, Grant and Hepburn find themselves in the shadows in a whale’s belly, with what they could save in addition to the tuxedo, a cocktail glass, and a plate of canapés ( in French in the text ). Grant is a famous golf player, he finds a club & a ball somewhere in the monster’s stomach, left there by a predecessor, he decides to work on his swing while waiting for help ; Hepburn is a naturalist who specializes in marine mammals, the shipwreck is for her a godsend, an amusement in the style of Lewis Carroll, but also comparable to Pliny the Elder’s trip by boat to the lava & the ash of Vesuvius, to understand them, even if it kills her ( the godsend is also being able to have the whale as a witness at every start of an argument : as an accomplice, as a sisterly colleague, in the name of female solidarity ). And now we have the epilogue, the rest will take its course : Cary Grant abandons his golf club, he has stopped using it as an ironic sexual symbol, he manages to demonstrate that the whale is a male, he re-marries Katharine Hepburn in the monster’s mouth, converted into a chapel ( for this, the whale will need to capture a missionary priest, on his way from Boston to Africa ) ; the two spouses, rings on their fingers, disembark at the wharf of New York, where the witnesses’ shouts of bewilderment drown out their wedding vows. Billy Wilder is half-convincing, but only half : Ahab tries to imagine a gentleman in a tuxedo and a lady in evening dress in the darkness of his whale ; there, he finds no savage combat, he wonders how to provide entertainment for an hour and a half by having two actors in a squishy, under-lit 116. Billy Wilder is solely responsible for these remarks.
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set that is, to be honest, monotonous — Billy Wilder agrees, his martini too, and his martini’s olive, all in unison, like his riding crop against the top of his thigh : there would need to be candles to light the inside of a whale, and an excellent screenwriter to save the candle.
Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett propose another version of the whale, conclusion 2 ) Moby Dick as a fallen star : she is a lady with watermarked skin, she has abundant memories, she was the one who made those whom she now misses most, and on this trajectory of invention she ended up, just like all of us, confusing the imaginary with the traces of a true past, she longs for the time of the ancient wars, of the bare-handed hunting from sailing ships, and the sight of a liner’s chimney makes her wince : her nostalgia becomes the great art and sophistication of a housewife whose winter garden looks out onto a mausoleum. Imagine this ( Billy Wilder comes to life again : to the rhythm of the whip striking his Sunday pants ), Moby Dick has known a glory of which we know nothing, who were born too late, long after her heroic struggles — all we know about whaling comes from etchings in books, arrows on display at the Museum of Man and the calls to arms of the protectors of the species when they brandish a flask of oil, we are incapable of assessing such a reputation, it clings to an old & receding world, which knew itself to be epic or did everything to give that impression — we are ungrateful toward heroic years : when they are not ignored, they are considered a long and pompous carnival. Diva Moby Dick dwells on her exploits as a huntress, she sees everywhere the shadow of Ahab’s hat, representative of flattering and chivalrous adversity, from another time ; she
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praises the harpoons, she misses everything, even the foam, she no longer spawns in this part of the ocean where the submarines of the Second World War have crowded together sideways, floating almost gracefully : the idea that modern times exist is a personal affront ; she awaits tomorrow for her return to glory, she will appear again, white, she will emerge from her depths ( she does not like the word solitude ), she will spit up to the sky, Ahab will also show himself in one form or another, and their unfinished struggle, with no winner, will be able to play out to the end, this time. The drama is poignant, but it risks being tiresome, it is recto tono, it would be necessary to add a love story, dominated by nostalgia, obsessed with the permanent restoration of the past, as if depressives constantly wanted to transform an object into accessory and self into a representation more or less spared of self ; the old broad seduces a much younger male, he gives in to interest — in all this, the story mixes calculated sexuality, maternity, necrophilia, and the negotiation of feelings. In the final act, the fatigue of age metamorphoses into dementia, detached from the world, like the slow petrification of the Gorgon or those who let themselves be seen : the lover has taken a mistress in his turn, their youth taunts the old Moby Dick who has enough strength and pride ( which she confuses with pride ) to commit an exemplary crime of passion, respectful of traditions — perhaps another way to perpetuate the old days. This is how Billy Wilder imagines the final images : a corpse flutters, it is the young male, Moby Dick approaches the coast to show herself to the men on the shore, as she has always liked to do despite a life of dissimulation, a wild life — she shows off her dulled whiteness, she says she is ready to fight again, she says this without risk and without believing the sailors gave up hunting a century ago ;
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she turns around again, she shows herself, her murder restores her femme fatale pride, that is to say, killer whale pride, but it is the vestige of pride that doesn’t pretend ; some witnesses look at her because they are willing to pretend, they see her come to a standstill, it seems that for the first time in years she’s reached a form of happiness comparable to absolution, entirely illusory, she contains herself and, too heavy to bear the burden of being what she is for very much longer, she sinks, this time definitively — above her remains the regret of her white color. What do you think of that ? — as always, Billy Wilder’s whip against Billy Wilder’s thigh.
Interlude ( short ballet ) While alive, and then even more intensely even after her death, Marilyn Monroe elevated the art of appearing to such heights that the saints of our calendar come across as petty and rare, incapable of becoming phenomena — and should the Virgin Mary, or anybody else really, decide later to appear ( if she dares ) before the eyes of mortals, she will do well to follow the example of the abundant and generous Marilyn Monroe.
Captain Ahab and the inexpressiveness of the landscape And sometimes the captain of the Pequod wakes up in the morning without any whale : without any notion of the whale : he can very well curse the drunkenness of the previous evening to justify the morning’s forgetfulness, it’s pointless, there was no drunkenness, rather an evening of rest ( a monastic evening, with the perfume of the burned oil ), without even going up to see the dusk, always more or
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less the same — but here, in front of him, no whale, no swirling water ; in his books, no whale, nothing in his pockets and his mind empty, not even this old trick of inferring the whale from his absence ( of course, he would have preferred a thunderous absence : for the record, the Leviathan’s absence, it must be something : other splashes, other chasms, and men gathered around these chasms, eliciting their hunting tales, the clumsy voluntaristic imagination of mourners over the deceased ( they know at least that the fable, not memory, counters forgetting ) ). We can see it as one more betrayal : in disappearing that day, the huge fish didn’t even want to give him a gift of his absence, which would have been so easy : high sprays and a hole in the sea, the blood of wounded creatures, also very Homeric. The captain doesn’t want to go so far as to infer the whale from his wooden leg, it would be yet another mistake ( the first was waking up carelessly ), poor taste of a whining prophet .— and the truth is, it’s already provided, the wooden leg has served him well for suggesting, all these years, it has been faithful to him, more than once providing him with a whale, his ration, not extravagant but sufficient, like the marriage of Grudge and Homecoming, or the interlocking of what is lacking and what is in excess. Accordingly ( the captain’s life seems to be made of “accordingly”s : they are relatively clever, and if some of them could be the manifestation of the placidity of a steer looking at his grass from very close-up, others allow themselves to be moments of pure genius : not just a spark, a lasting moment, a full minute, “like a thick slice of bread,” after which the captain wonders in vain how genius could be reached by resignation or simple observation ) — it is thus, some mornings, in the absence of the whale, the landscape is inexpressive, and nothing, neither in his repertoire, nor
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in his prayers learned by heart and fortunately meaningless, nor in his epic bad faith, nor in the psychology of Vienna, nor in the books of aesthetics, nor in the marvelous travel guide, nothing comes to help him find an explanation. The landscape is inexpressive on its own ? It is its own fault ? Ahab suspected this, he was right to distrust the landscape, and also right to consider the inevitable Hokusai or Caspar David Friedrich as skillful beings who enchant us but who deceive us by substituting painted stories for landscapes and calling them landscapes — he was right to go in reverse, the landscape is not even the paleotestamentary or Faustian-according-to-Goethe chaos made of blocks that have fallen on top of each other : it is a vast compromise ; and the expression as the meaning is a gift to the desert from good men awakened to desolation. Old Ahab envies them, these awakened men, he could have been one of them, more than once : it was so easy, it was natural : the illumination of the mystic with his head in the clouds, this is nothing compared to the intelligence of any awakened oddball when he has the strength to spread the word from the far reaches of the plains and expanses of water — ( he may very well know that neither happiness nor pleasure, nor malice, nor the luck of the dice player, nothing at all lasts, and does not repeat itself at will, he may know this, the memory of a single minute of understanding makes him nostalgic, and as for this nostalgia, that is something that may last ). The inexpressiveness of the landscape is its own stupefaction ? its aphasia ? then he was correct in being suspicious of himself as much as the blasted landscape : nobody can be sure of finding any assistance whatever in any panorama whatever, this is not the place to find a remedy for powerlessness, the landscape alone will not, will never have the kindness
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to awaken in us the interpretation : it will remain passive, the passivity being all his wealth, without ever abiding as an enigma. ( At least, it should know that it is not an enigma : this would make it modest, would compensate somehow for its scope ( on another occasion, the captain will praise the inexpressive landscape, considering inexpression as the condition of his liberty, his very own — incidentally, ours, but who the hell cares about that ? ). ) Some mornings — most mornings perhaps, and even more, the longer he was at sea — Ahab, like many of us, confronted the inexpressive landscape : the inexpressive expanse of the waters : on the surface of the ocean, no mystery, no violence, no memories of naval battles, no ukulele of Poseidon, no baklavas of Sindbad proffered by the millions to the tempest, no scars from Columbus’s voyages, from his victory confused with failure, no facetiousness of Lucian of Samosata, no magical seductive hospitality of the Ringing Islands, no liberal mythology of Crusoe and his assets and losses, nothing of everything that a man, generous, who started the day out on the right foot, could give to the ocean as a crown of flowers tossed to hail the departed —. no, the expanse of water is an expanse of water, it is contingent, and nothing happens, it doesn’t take the trouble to signify because it is unable to draw a meaning from its depths ( besides, at this particular moment of the lament, even the idea of Great Pelagic Pits is a fiction told by pedestrians on the deck of a ship or in the solitude of a library ). The captain happens to be standing, one whaleless day, before the ocean, starts some little captain dance, pays his share of mythology, accepting to play the game, as always, a little naive, a little cunning, and initiates a staging, so to speak, while waiting for the ocean, each in turn, a gesture :
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& indeed, it seems that the ocean is willing, it too achieves
this well-balanced mixture of naiveté and cynicism, it is gratifying, it returns the little that it is given, it is all illusory, it doesn’t matter, it will be illusion without reserve, the ocean is a reliable customer and is again lavish with mythology : the oceanic feeling, Homerism, the epic conquistadors, the fantastic zoology, the platitudes of the Storm and the Shipwreck, all stories that have been formulated already. But the day after, it’s over, the staging does not take place, the myth does not resume, the ocean is satisfied with being what it is, both content and container, and it is then as if nothing had happened, not even the anecdotal — that day, it’s pointless to hope for elsewhere, salvation won’t be there either. ( These mornings, without whale, without myth, the ocean as a bowl of cold soup, the horizon as horizon, taking itself as a unit of measurement without addressing itself to anybody anymore, and without promising a possible other side, Ahab is destitute : he no longer has the epic to come to the rescue, he feels like a foreman in a time of layoffs that’s come in spite of everything, standing before his workers : he no longer has anything to offer them, neither the abyss nor the terrifying color white, his authority as grand master of impressive things is going to give way, barring a miracle. He would need an inspiration, instantaneously, the means to situate the idea of the abyss somewhere other than in this ocean — he proceeds and seeks his words, twelve steps separate him from the rest of the crew, six of his good foot, six of the wooden leg, between here and there perhaps he’ll find a way to talk again of the deep sea and restore the lost value to the words deep sea, perhaps he will recall the word syzygy, it sounds like the name of a Hungarian starlet. )
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Moby Dick in Hollywood — Billy Wilder and the hammocks A hammock : if you were to ask him what a story should look like, Billy Wilder would reply, a hammock — rigorously woven, attached at the beginning and end, without unhooking from its two attachment points, taut but flexible enough from here to there to contain and rock, to swing, to enhance naptime or complicate, in just the right amount, erotic projects lacking in spice ; the hammock obeys some simple rules ( in short : mesh, gravity ), but its flexibility is as important as the tension — its very pliability, without which it loses all its charm.
Moby Dick in Hollywood — Billy Wilder and his whip For half a minute, when the three acts of a play are over, when the protagonist has become protagonist and the last line, the very last one, is set before the curtain “like a newborn baby on a doormat,” or as a riddle, or as a promise, or as the beginning of something, or as farewells bizarrely formulated — once all this is accomplished, for half a minute, I’d stake my life on it, the audience can see in it not redemption itself, that would be too much to ask, but the idea of redemption, and the author in turn starts to believe in it, just for half a minute : the next instant, the accountant reproaches him for the length and the company’s lawyer for an obscene phrase. Don’t have any ideas ? but one hundred times, six hundred times a day my Viennese-Sunset Boulevard intellect is beset by the absence of ideas : it is simultaneously calm water and a fly’s buzzing, get on with it — and me, schmuck that I am, instead of following a word that would lead me to the beginning of a tale, I mix up ideas of punishment, of enchantment,
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of flaccidity, of powerlessness, and I’m just about to change jobs : get the softness of pizza dough turning in my fists. While the ideas are absent ( they don’t really run away from me, that would already be taking me, who I am and my fragile orphan’s sensitivity, into account ), I know a dereliction like no other — a priest’s feeling of worthlessness when abandoned by God after forty years of service is nothing compared to the dereliction of the scriptwriter without a script — the abandoned priest, at least, can toss his habit, give away his wafers, return the key to the beadle, and join the legion of secular men, their hardships & their wounds, their luxuries and the bets they make : in short, he leaves one story for another, replacing the four Gospels with epics by the million, domestic ones, good or bad ( moreover, he can go to the movies to see the symbols of his religion mixed with the props of westerns, the bustiers of musicals, the striped shadows on gangsters’ bodies : he has a limitless supply of things to mock ). But the unfortunate writer cannot consider the return to his fellows, to the century, beyond the studios — the absence of narrative is a curse that can strike anything, men, animals, common cranes, and buildings, and the reading of the Merry Wives becomes an ordeal as dreary as a breakfast of spelt porridge. That day, when any idea of narrative has fled elsewhere to titillate one more fortunate than oneself, nothing comes to bring the promise of a resurrection — a comedy in three acts masterfully accomplished is a unique miracle, with no repeat, it happened once, a long time ago, a stroke of beginner’s luck, it may as well have fallen from the sky, like the turtle on top of Aeschylus’s head ( and even here, the scriptwriter wouldn’t know how to tell the story of this miracle ). Do the ideas come back ? they come back sooner or later, the triumph is not thunderous but exists far from any
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victory ; the scriptwriter with no script accepts the return of the ideas as a little gift ; he is careful not to break anything, he’s learned of the fragility of these things, the fear of losing everything outweighs the pleasure of possessing. But it would be unfair to make of the scriptwriter a drudge working in the mines of Hollywood who is permitted no happiness : one idea is enough, a comedy discovered randomly by waking up amidst the milk bottles : it will cure scrofula. For three minutes or three days ( there’s no need to track the numbers, which are arbitrary ), the scriptwriter hops around, fraternizes, becomes a friend to all, restores his soul, settles his grudges, forgives many, reinvents an ingenious and naive form of libido, he knows how to hold in the palm of his hand something comparable to a treasure map simplified to the extreme, or the key to a boudoir where an odalisque is sleeping, or a petal, or the miraculous token that will break a casino. ( And then — and then, to hold in his hands the beginning of a comedy is to know that one will soon build friendships, go to meet the ideal friend in the form of Cary Grant and tap him on the shoulder, and then contemplate understanding the universe by dividing it into three acts ( five if need be ). )
Ahab at sea, leaving only an imprint in the wedding pillow 117 Or : Of the pillow as unpolished and listless as a mirror — or even : Ahab trying to see what he really looks like — or : Ahab trying to resemble the imprint of his face ( i.e. : to prove worthy of it ) — or : Ahab looking for the remedy to his melancholy — or : Ahab reciting the “Alas poor Yorick” while holding his old pillow in his hand — and finally, ex-captain Ahab, ex-Ahab, ex-everything, returned by 117. “Leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow.”
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chance to where he found himself once, starts a long conversation with his hollow mask ( according to whom I do not know, it’s possible to read one’s future in the wrinkles of one’s pillow — but what interest is there for the captain to read his future after having lived it ? what foreman’s pleasure ? ). Dialogue ? a little self-compassion, a little self-criticism, a complicity sought eagerly and relentlessly to break the ice between two strangers, exchanges of unrelated memories, the evocation of abstract, almost metaphysical generalities, with metaphysics being the link between two ghosts who encounter one another. But Ahab ( convex Ahab ) also seems to question his pillow ( concave Ahab ), in a low voice, perhaps ashamed, as if he were questioning the Pythia — but a very old Pythia, once venerable and now obsolete, belonging to another system of beliefs & cults that are now enclosed in the cupboards of museums, in the form of vases and three-legged stands. His wedding pillow : if it was a footprint in now petrified mud, Ahab would have been entitled to a beautiful scene, almost Robinsonian, the encounter between his foot and its imprint, or rather his one good foot encountering the narrative of a bygone promenade. Some moments of introspection, that’s a concern— unless the captain, tired of looking inwards like that all the time, decides to ward off narcissism through triviality : comparing a youth’s leanness with the breadth of an old gentleman’s foot, the foot of one who has walked too much and never knew to rest. To recognize himself or not to recognize himself ( in his wedding pillow ) — but let’s be serious, Ahab was never the kind of man to spend time with himself in mirrors, nor even to seek out their company : according to him, confronting one’s reflection in a polished mirror doesn’t lead to much good, nor to joyful conversation : each meeting with his
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reflection is for him a neutral procedure, without precedence, as if the consensus, or rather the status quo, allowed both of the Ahabs, reflections of each other, to keep their hat on their head — the same hat, the same indifference. In the time of his life as a young actor, of course, it was the dazzling mirror, the precision of the detail : the young Ahab would observe himself with a concern for efficiency as the sole guiding principle — in short, over the course of several years in the theater, he had time to learn to look in the mirror with indifference & impartiality (spending so much time with mirrors over the years, slathering his face, made introspection one of the numerous phases of self-disguise ). So much for the mirror — but the pillow ? at first glance, it’s the complete opposite of the mirror, no one in their right mind would consider replacing one with the other : sleeping with one’s head on glass, and in the morning observing his sleepy face in a cushion, plump, mute, and unresponding, that’s attached to the bathroom wall. With thirty years, even more, of distance, the former captain maintains that he’s discovered the pillow of another age, as one doesn’t make anymore, embroidered in the old way, having passed through six or seven trousseaus, inherited, handed down, unless stored in the attic, in a trunk, where things that are getting in the way are stored — he finds it, he dusts it off without creasing it, and asks it, so pliable, what he never asked any of his mirrors, never in his life — namely, to give him a lasting definition of Ahabeism.
Moby Dick in Hollywood — Cary Grant in the role of Captain Ahab Billy Wilder always dreamed of catching Archibald Leach ( Cary Grant ) in his director’s nets : this time, this time at last, this will be it, this time Cary Grant will accept the role
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of Captain Ahab — and it will be the fairy tale that his colleagues so frequently experienced, according to what they tell the journalists on opening night : Cary Grant gets the script in the evening, at 6 pm, the time for a first drink ; at 7 pm hesitant, at 7 :30 pm appeased, at 8 pm under the spell, at 9 pm feverish, and at 11 pm convinced, already reading it for a seventh time, at 1 in the morning, picking up the huge telephone receiver ( a comedy receiver ) to wake up Billy Wilder, somewhere out there, at the other end of Hollywood, and in a dry martini voice tell him, along with other words of love, that he’ll accept the role, immediately, unconditionally, without even waking up his agent — that he sleeps like the devil, the hibernator, with none of these neuroses of artists. It will thus be Archibald Leach Cary Grant, his large scale, his large size, and his talents as an amateur dancer at the helm of the Pequod. ( Cary Grant convinced : go figure what motivation drives the great comedian to this tale of ocean & shellfish ( and of divine resentment ) : until now, Cary Grant has systematically turned down Billy Wilder’s proposals, one after the other, the sweet, the salty, and the spicy, as well as the raw & the cooked : hesitating, letting himself be tempted, then backing out at the last hour in favor of a William Holden, a little less attractive, or Gary Cooper, a little less comical. This time, it’s the right one : as curious as it may seem, Billy Baby-Face Wilder will direct, tilting his head, this kangaroo, Cary Grant : he’ll have him take the huge rudder of the Pequod, smiling, always smiling, amidst the sea spray, even when he gets a sardine, tossed by a third assistant, in the face (which is broad, a screen unto itself )). ( Ahab, “the real one,” always seemed to be standing in profile, just one section, one eye at a time, just one, as a precaution — the style of Cary Grant, his persona, his legend, is the opposite :
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the face from the front, the broad jaws, both eyes looking into the camera, or almost — and to fully take advantage of the rest of his anatomy ( one pays handsomely enough ), he arranges himself on the set to show both arms, both legs, both shoulders, and if possible both ears, always from the front : it is a betrayal of the Ahabean nature, but it is necessary to make do with what one’s got : possible to leave on a honeymoon with both Ahab and Cary Grant. ) Cary Grant is an actor of arms & legs, and this is why ( it was to be expected ) he refuses the wooden leg : if only it would have allowed him to make the falls that made him famous ( in Monkey Business ), but the risk is so great that it would get in the way : is it really necessary to look like John Silver ? in addition to the bum leg, is it necessary to have a blindfold over one eye and a hook at the end of the arm ? ( who first had the idea of threatening the enemy by waving a huge question mark in this way ? is it necessary to suppose that Blackbeard’s enemies suffer from such a phobia of doubt ? ).118 Admittedly, the peg leg is a film-maker’s nightmare, it paralyzes the action, it gets mixed up with the camera stands, in the long run it bores everybody, it’s the plaything of mediocre actors — however ( Billy Wilder answers Cary Grant ), it’s archaic, it’s a musical instrument, it can become a comical prop, some fringe can be attached to it, the captain can engrave the name of his conquests there, or pare it at dusk, singing a song. And that’s not all : the wooden leg suits the captain as well as the actor Cary Grant because it is the tool of the contrapposto, its lever or its point of support — forget the hillbilly swaying of John Wayne, anyone can do it, plus it’s the posture of the cowherd : the true embodiment of the mannerist contrapposto, in 20 th -. 118. Archibald Leach himself used to ask this question all the time — he was happy with his joke.
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century Hollywood, is Archibald, is Cary Grant, he alone knowing how to make of his natural and perhaps painful scoliosis a superb figure of style ( between you and me, it would be magnificent, Cary Grant, as Saint Sebastian under the arrows, or Jesus Christ on the cross — the cross had better watch out ).
Ahab at sea — to finish with the wedding pillow Questions in the style of Thomas Browne : what did Captain Ahab’s face really look like ? Did he resemble his portraits ? & did his portraits resemble him ? what does resemblance mean for us, if the resemblance of men applies to the captain ? & what if the imprint of his face in his wedding pillow still exists, if nothing came to distort it, no rival, no anger of an abandoned woman, and what if dust has filled the hollows, and what if he were to recognize himself in this dust ? And again, what if the imprint of Captain Ahab’s face, in the absence of the face itself, could be the object, one beautiful and distant day, of a discovery, or of a rediscovery, as if it were the remains of a shipwreck, admirable but infinitely discreet content, the container still being an enigma ? if fortunate explorers end up one day coming across this hollow mask in a pillow, intact as ever, that is to say, untouched, abandoned out of desperation or anger, or because sometimes everywhere else is better than here — they will have opened a door by chance, will have made a floor that has been silent for centuries creak, opened the shutters, made a nation of field mice run away, and found in the room ( it was the bridal room ) a pillow, from far away a bag of cement, and the face of the captain, represented in tears or in a swoon, but the gaze, if we can talk of a gaze, now looking straight at those who come to rediscover it — saying too late, too late.
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Cary Grant in The Pride and the Passion ( Someone has given this serious thought — Hollywood is a place where any thought has been seriously considered at least once, somewhere : not in the name of freedom of the mind, but in the name of the you-never-know, the younever-know of vendors : of all the verbal combinations, there is one that is likely a source of immense profit : this is a truth taught by businessmen to some men of letters, and the music-hall artists, without always understanding, have learned to live with it, little by little. Thus, someone seriously thought about it : entrusting Cary Grant with the role of the Lord Jesus Christ, from entering into Jerusalem on a donkey all the way to the scene of the cross ( in the role of Pilate, James Cagney would have done the job : Scarface first, then Pilate, a fine career ). The mannered irony of Cary Grant would have added to all the pathos of the Passion, to its low purple sky, to its weeping Hebrews and its cruel soldiers ; at the last minute, before sighing, before even lifting his eyes, Cary Grant-Jesus would have beheld the entire scene with that same look he’d given Eva Marie Saint, in the dining car scene : irony at its highest degree ( at the peak of his career ) as the only vehicle for his interest in others, and as the beginnings of true love. At the foot of the cross and on the slopes of Golgotha, the afflicted, the suicidal, the apostles, all aware of both the miracle taking place and the orders shouted by the director — meanwhile, Cary Grant-Jesus, at his martyrdom, perfectly secured by harnesses, regularly refreshed by terry towels, real ones, with lavender, sprinkles the crowd with his irony just as the Holy Father likes to water his universe with a bountiful rain, from time to time ( once won’t hurt ). Nailed to the cross, Cary Grant runs the risk of losing part of his charm, the charm of his mobility,
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the independence of his four limbs worthy of a drummer ; he still has the play of his gaze, a sign of his detachment — & his Why have you forsaken me is irresistible, pronounced in the same tone he uses every day when ordering a double scotch ).
Tired of fighting against himself, Ahab turns to the edifying case of William Cody turned Buffalo Bill How did a cowherd ( William Cody ), a cavalry scout without much education or creativity, nor a sense of showmanship, become, within the space of five years, a famous actor in the role of himself ? Before the age of thirty, he was able to leave the plains and the coniferous forests, the army-style camping life, the mornings of a trapper, meals of beans, to learn how to act and then become an actor, more or less competent, in his own troupe : and since that time, the plains, the conifers, the beeches, the Indians’ attack, he acted all this out with his partners ; the beeches were illusory, the conifers were suggested, like the plain, & the attacks involved blank bullets. What had been required in order to get there had been necessity, the mother of invention — easy enough to say, which is not enough : in the depths of his rustic cowboy spirit, William Cody had to keep on like the crown jewel of cunning & perversion, thanks to which this peasant of the Mancha of America knew how to devise the Lie & the great Wild West Show : one fine morning, in a room, between the bed & the window, he saw the play of dust illuminated by oblique light and immediately understood that playing his role as Buffalo Bill would be far less exhausting than being Buffalo Bill — and, it must be added : far more profitable. It is said that the young William didn’t become Buffalo Bill all on his own : alongside him, there was at least one costume designer to invent the huge Stetson, the fringed outfit,
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the goatee and long whiskers, soon white. He even had an impresario : this was at the time when, in this country, the impresarios were preparing to occupy the entire territory, all the way to the Pacific, to take care of everything, including Sitting Bull ( and soon, Abraham Lincoln killed right in the middle of theater, and Billy the Kid ) ; his name was Ned Buntline, he had a flair for publicity, he attracted the young William Cody with his horse to Broadway, around 1872 : there, Buffalo Bill showed his beautiful build, that of a boy from the plains from the plains to the New York ladies before firing his first blank.
Moby Dick in Hollywood — the equally edifying case of Orson Welles Orson Welles was also approached, as must still be said in the profession, for a role commensurate with his importance, meaning his reputation, his stature, his voice of a crooner and Shakespearean ( radio charmer — and as for the Shakespeare of historical plays, a player of brass instruments : the horn to announce the beginning ceremonies, himself a master of all the ceremonies ). He could play Ahab, playing destabilized men, like the time when the world of Charles Foster Kane and Kane himself were lurching, dragging the camera along with them, and the spectators hanging on to the railing, to signify the imbalances of a man —. perhaps Ahab, provided that he holds himself back a little and takes his usual emphasis down a notch : less madness visible in his hounded eyes ( if he’s forbidden fury, he can always portray the incomprehension of the tyrant facing a world that no longer understands him ). ( Welles would have been round and massive, not athletic enough, nor very supple ; his wooden leg assertoric, something funereal about it, exaggerated, and of course theatrical, it had already occurred to everyone : walking would have been the gesture of
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the gravedigger when testing the soil to know where to dig, where the hell ? — a gravedigger from Denmark. He would have declaimed, the camera zooming in on his mouth, his beard like that of the phantom sailor appearing to Mrs. Muir, and in close-up would have evoked the world while looking at a horizon over the shoulders of the audience, calling the whale, dedicating a poem to it, & plotting ( this is condemnation ) God knows what point-of-view shot. ) Orson Welles : before offering him a contract again, is it necessary to catch him ( the famous extravagant contracts to Hollywood : they are the glints from the water of the pool, they are the Machiavellianism & the generosity of the forty thieves toward Ali Baba : there is also a little bit of Faust and minor procedures — and in the end, the promise never really bound to immortality, then the minor inconveniences of poorly heated dressing rooms, of perilous mornings, of heavy loads to carry, and in the midst of the glory, the sign of humiliation, a plate of fresh figs, a snake beneath the figs ). To get the hooks back in : in other words, to take trips from Ibiza to Cork and from London to Paris by train and by plane, chasing the plume of smoke from a cigar — the pursuer losing momentum from hotel room to hotel room, and he, the pursued, edging ahead of the chase ( which is not quite running away ). Since he’s filming simultaneously in Spain & Morocco, in Sicily, in Buttes-Chaumont, it seems that he’s everywhere, encountering failures everywhere, resuming with the ubiquity of a demigod, which pleases him and makes him dizzy — meanwhile, Hollywood is about the only place on this Earth where he, the magnificent fat man, is not to be found. Ten years ago, he deserted the palm trees and the blue uniformity of this sky for regions of chiaroscuro where he met up with ( it appears ) Shakespeare and Don
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Quixote, always these two — and some other side-lit characters of the repertoire, a face half in shadow, a face that always surprises. This is what they say in Hollywood : every time Orson Welles disappears, it’s to find William Shakespeare or William Shakespeare’s equivalent somewhere in the corner of a hallway, a library, a desert, a vacant lot, a country of corridas and epic values, and why not in Ireland, in taverns kept alive to keep legends alive. He’s out in search of inspiration ? better than that, he claims to find the opposite of Hollywood there : namely, clouds, all the nuances of bad weather, the light that is averse to the film industry, &, in the tirades of Richard III and the Quixote, the trace of men’s cowardice, love, of a depth made of infamy & aspiration to refinement. It wasn’t so long ago that he was standing there under the palm trees, protected from the desert by the set, still a young man then, with straight hair that the studio photographers took pictures of — good luck finding where he is now : he plays the Wandering Jew, the Gentleman of Leisure on Holiday, the Debtor fleeing his creditors, the Last Bear of Central Europe, the half-cursed artist ( worse than simply cursed ) out looking for an editing table, somewhere in the suburbs. A major studio considers sending out men after him : agents, paparazzi, a private detective, a long-time friend with the burden of friendship in his suitcase, the idea of credence and love — again, planes and trains : someone thought they saw him in Paris, stirring a café crème, near Gobelins, someone else saw him in El Jadida, in the Portuguese cistern, in costume, practicing a mixture of Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor ; someone else, in Italy, without a beard this time, and nervous, looking like a fallen condottiere waiting for his assassin ( and, though one can’t
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promise it, a few yards from him, a lady in a raincoat ). Modern times already favor the pursuit of one man : not only the plane, but the telephone ( a bakelite marvel viewed today with a certain reserve — but one should not judge things that are outdated, that were avant-garde and now lay heavily ) : to convince Orson Welles, it is necessary to get him on the phone, then talk to him about lucrative contracts ( just lucrative enough : something to pay off his debts ), and to pronounce the words “white whale” at just the right moment. In this limbo between one telephone receiver and another, where he is practically the only one to know about the existence of a book called Moby Dick, Orson Welles thinks of Herman Melville’s failure, the rejections, the books closed definitively, of the withdrawal of the author turned customs controller ; he keeps silent, to collect himself — the agents at the other end of the line are correct in taking his silence for acquiescence. The return of Orson Welles to Hollywood after his years in Europe : let’s say there is the deplaning, the sovereign man at the top of a ladder, amidst the abating noise of the motor and the propellers — and this trouble of being both Charles Foster Kane and the opposite of Foster Kane : a ruined man who came to beg after having traveled non-stop, halfway around the world. If he accepts, it is not to get back in the saddle ; it is especially ( he says ) to show how monumental a Leviathan is when it washes up on inhabited coasts. Welles could have lasted several more years without a penny to his name, accumulating his debts in various coffers of princesses dedicated to patronage — there are so many in Europe since the beginning of the republics —. hoarding them, luring with promises, and becoming rich with credits matching the extent of his genius, in order to
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dig a pit where he could one day, sooner or later, take his place, to die : this time, entirely at home, entirely. He could have taken a tour of Europe one or two more times, in the footsteps of the aristocrats of Crébillon’s time, London, Paris, Rome, Tangiers, Cordoba, slamming doors, letting himself be adored, making himself look bad, testing what was left of his notoriety, and exercising his charisma in overly soft beds, his charisma reaching to the floor by virtue of weighing on old slackened Spanish bedsprings ( they themselves had seen Quixote ). Living from debt to debt, sometimes with a little money, but by accident, getting cozy with one producer, as many swindlers as the Earth can contain, this one from Dickens, the other from Goldoni, the other from Balzac, with a complexion like wallpaper and smelling like a candle, another from Shylock, and yet one last crook, recognizable down to his shoes, and who knows how to talk about the late Renaissance. Orson Welles ever fatter as he advocates dieting, going from hotel to hotel, from city to city, buying film, burning it half a thousand miles away, buying other batches of enclosed reels, a little spoiled, reading the first half of Othello in Milan, the other half in Carthage, putting together, as best he can, and amidst squalor, dialogues in the shot & the countershot, each line separated by entire years, and during these years, despair & projects. Too bad, he agrees to see the little money given by chance ( Mercury, the princesses ) disappear in the hands of Shylock, he accepts the Shylock test if in the end the loyalty of all these Shylocks makes him the ultimate Shylock, the best, ultimately the most capable of being him in everyone’s place, but not just anywhere, on a stage — he has a hard time becoming Shylock.
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Moby Dick in Hollywood — Orson Welles Finally back in the fold of Hollywood — one imagines him advancing mistrustfully, mistrustfully looking up at the high and useless palm trees ( an immoderation which serves no purpose : the palm trees “planted on both sides of the expressway in order to purge an already pure sky” ). He makes his way just as mistrustfully to go and see the men of the major studios ; he would like to recite Melville in the men’s faces ( they would learn it well ), Melville in the guise of sea spray, in order to throw a wrench in their fine days. In his suitcases, not so fat, but almost, a piece of Macbeth, a piece of Othello, a piece of Conrad, a piece of Cervantes, a piece of Faust, a piece of Münchhausen, a piece of Gulliver, The Comedy of Errors, views of Venice, stills of himself in the process of wrapping himself in a foulard with a free hand, and self-portraits as the devil, as a drunk, as a king, as a traveling salesman, as a magician, as Tiberius, as a lion tamer putting his lions in pawn at a pawnbroker’s, as a Borgia, as a sermonizer, as a prophet, as a fugitive, as Barabbas, as Pickwick, as Rembrandt himself disguised as a knight — and in a notebook, twenty-seven sketches of wooden legs. He prepares himself to step into the skin of Captain Ahab ; he pictures him in his mind by imitating him : from one end of the hotel room to the other, he takes the hundred steps, which are never exactly one hundred in one direction nor in the opposite, one hundred passionate, irate, seething, melancholic, monomaniacal, exhausted, overwhelmed, and alternately morbid steps, then after these, joyous, hysterical, fulminating, mystical steps, followed by clownish ones, he imagines for instance Captain Ahab offering himself up as a spectacle to his sailors to make them laugh, which is not too far from reality. In solitude he hams it up ( hamming it
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up without an audience is a kind of perfection in the art of being an actor ) : he doesn’t try to reconstitute the exact limp of a sailor on a whale boat, but he reinvents it to suit the needs of the theater, or better, to let the sailor study him instead. ( After having conscientiously staggered in the manner of a bear in a cage, then in the style of Tamburlaine ( he even tries for Charlie Chaplin ), he takes out from under his bed a briefcase and removes from it a dozen little tender pink plastic things, with gracious interiors, soft as cartilage must be : fake noses of different kinds, each more or less subversive, because you’ve got to have a vindictive nose if you want to be Ahab. ) He is conscientious : even if he curses the studio system to Hell, he agrees to do advertisements in exchange for port wine, he gives it ten percent of his grace and his talent which, no question, is worth a thousand times the talent of the others. Commissions, imbeciles, increasingly minor roles, the bear dancing on television and the caricature of himself, he will get there, he’s already on his way : he does it all begrudgingly, he withdraws, he takes umbrage, gets a lump in his throat,119 sacrifices part of his soul ( he’ll always have some to spare ), he comes face to face with himself in a mirror, damns half the human race, claims Shakespeare as his witness, but ends up going ahead anyway — and by going ahead, he imitates the vainglory of the geniuses of the Cinquecento when they went off to wax the arm rests of a prince. Orson Welles’s agent offers him a role as Captain Ahab in order to entertain the general audiences of Warner Brothers ? Alright, so be it, he’ll do Ahab, it will put food on the table & be prestigious too : he’ll do Ahab as a bear, as a 119. Holds in his tears, and if he doesn’t hold them in, claims they are quoted from Milton.
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sailor in an operetta, as a lover of Circe, as a Neoplatonist ; he will reread his Moby-Dick in order to suffuse himself with it as they all claim to do, and to prohibit others from talking about it as knowledgably as himself — he’ll reread The Scrivener too, hoping to find something in it to nourish his captain with. He’s already growing his beard out, which just goes to show to what extent he’s premeditating his role ; he picked out from among his false noses the one with the most suitable form, he found the profoundness of his limping ( a long syllable following by a short one, like a trochee inspired by the hendecasyllabics of Catullus, or a short syllable followed by a long one, like the iamb of Shakespeare ) ; he struck the right tone, he knew how to burnish the tanned leather of adventures, a little foundation, a little natural usury ; he wavered between losing weight and fattening up, he became ample in order to incarnate Ahab in the shape of a porpoise, he thinned out again in order to suggest the asceticism of men mad and alone, who venerate an untraceable God and forget to feed themselves ; he struck the right tone again, more hoarse ; he tried out postures, he looked for examples of costumes in books ; he boasts ( but we ought not to believe him ) of having gone into an antique shop to talk to the owner about wooden legs all night long, at dawn and in the morning too, whilst going from wine to aged rum ; he made sketches on loose pages alongside a project for Crime and Punishment ; he searched on his immense toddler’s body for a space to tattoo an image of an anchor and a whale, or something simultaneously satanic and biblical ( he didn’t have time to fill up on works of cetology, but he was practically there, he wasn’t too far off ). Orson Welles presents himself at the door of the big studio as the vanquisher of Hollywood and of Agincourt, he returns to this setting he has always dreaded, the mix
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of copper and prewar wood, the long tables where bankers talk of capes and swords ; he greets the boss and his representatives in order, he recognizes the director off in a corner, the executive producer, the lawyers, the secretary ; he drops a word from Hawthorne, no one understands at first and the laughter sounds like certain easy chairs when they are sat upon. It is his turn to sit down now, he has become almost confident, he breathes in the open sea air thinking there she blows, there she blows, then, without batting an eye, he hears the name of the actor to whom the big studio has just awarded the role of Captain Ahab : the lucky guy. Immediately, he foresees his return to Europe : the airplanes too small for him, Paris and then Spain, making the rounds among fake princesses, reels of film bought here & there, his pride at the bottom of a foxhole, the company of a New York intellectual come to pay him a visit and confirm him in his genius, as if he needed that. He thinks also of his bank account, and when he wonders what role they are thinking of giving him instead of the role of Captain, the three bankers, two accountants, the owner, the lawyers, and the secretary reply in unison : the white whale. The character of Moby Dick : an embarassing honor ( the elephant that Harun al-Rashid offered to Charlemagne, who hadn’t the slightest idea where to put it ), but the role of an entire existence, the occasion for Welles to exercise his great mannerist art on an outsized stage — in that one must see the harmony between actor and character : Moby Dick seeking Orson Welles for decades to find him at last in Hollywood, where everyone is gathered together in the final act. The white whale, when you think about it, is a role truly unlike any other ( that’s what the bankers are saying, along with his agent, and the director ) : the equivalent of Jesus or Nero, or God the Father, God plain & simple, or even Buddha
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played by Charlton Heston, with that musculature he’s famous for. The arguments are several, Welles takes umbrage, he scowls, and when Orson Welles scowls it’s like Jehovah retreating at the instant of Creation in order to cede a little place to the Universe, or rather a Grand Cosmic Sulk. His mistrust is itself just as monumental, nourished by recent failures, minor & major betrayals, and by the constant study of men ; his mistrust is born from the addition of humankind to the producing kind, & it blooms in the unmissable sun of Hollywood, where everything is shiny, among so many artists desirous of swimming pools. Across from him, three executive producers, smiling, solar, a script on the table, happy to have hooked the beast, gotten him to come back from Europe, and very sincerely proud to offer to an actor on the decline, in the guise of magnificent alms, an unsurpassable role : the Leviathan, the Leviathan, you do realize. Welles, one imagines, bites his cheek, he looks at the three producers, he must recognize in them the Magi, he sees three sole filets laid out upon a heap of ice, mottled pink & white — for him, the sperm whale is a humiliation on top of humiliations, a plot to make him disappear more radically still, he being so precocious, the laughing stock of the western world. They talk to him of loftiness, nobility, someone intones the word infinite ( or eternity ), they present Welles with story-boards ; a little later, as an aside, man to man, the director talks about the whale as a great sensitive soul : a reservoir of deep thoughts — tormented, visionary, melancholic, precious. Orson Welles and the director alone in a room by themselves ( how did they get there ? ) give themselves airs of breaking with the rules of Hollywood, the talk of artists : instead of talking contracts, they dream of Moby Dick, they circle around him without murdering him, talk about him as others have spoken of Lady Macbeth, her pointy nails,
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her weaknesses, as still others have spoken of Queen Christina. Let Orson Welles be reassured : Moby Dick won’t just be a gigantic costume you strap on, with a hole to stick your head through, it will be a matter of skill, of psychology, he’ll have to incarnate him with gravitas, make him dance as on a tightrope, imagine ancestors for him, and a childhood too ( as if the Method of the Actors Studio might one day conquer the whale ). For the rest of the day, Orson Welles hesitates, he consults engravings ( of the whale in profile ), he strokes his chin, wonders if he ought to fatten up or start losing weight, wonders likewise if he will know how to draw on his repertoire for some roles close to the whale, wonders if there’s some sperm whale in him ; he envisages huge sets, the false sea, stage managers, the costume of Moby Dick like an immense, stiff wedding dress, with palm trees, the hours spent on makeup, grueling rehearsals, the suspicion of the press, the rumors, chimerical portraits, half Orson Welles, half Moby Dick, innuendos, his head wedged tight in a carcass, and not a single line of dialogue. How did Orson Welles refuse the role of Moby Dick ? we don’t actually know : he was either resounding or resolutely silent ( once again, an empty hotel room, a terrific contract in the waste basket, the salary underlined once, and the name of Moby Dick too ) ; he took a plane back to Europe, he found the place where Don Quixote once passed by, he found his notebooks, he returned as he would to his home, to the continent where he had gotten into the habit of failing spectacularly, where defeat could become a literary genre, where fallen genius could find a few examples of glorious retreats in the old Lives of Saints penned with twigs : the hermitage & the work in progress, ever in progress.
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Moby Dick in Hollywood — Orson Welles and the role of Captain Ahab If he wants to portray the Captain, it is not to put the game of power into play once again ( in the role of the stubborn, distressed, and fallen victor who then triumphs over his defeat ) ( Orson Welles in the makeup trailer : twenty-four bulbs shining to put him to the test and one hour of makeup to get at the idea of omnipotence ) — no, it is to finally understand why Ahab had been so intent on running off, in the sense of getting the hell out. The sailors were a joke, half-illiterate ; this white whale nonsense was just the stuff of alehouse legend out of a mythological dictionary, & yet it was a pretext the captain couldn’t forgo, doubtless because chasing a whale was more elegant ( literary ) than running away. All the same, grand pretext or no, Captain Ahab’s journeys had the single motive of escaping the self, and accompanying this motive there was a paradox the fugitive was never to resolve so long as he was still alive : Ahab would always find Ahab there in his own bed, “as far away as he may hide.” To elude oneself : all of an art, a feat reserved for some. Few desire it &, of those, few truly achieve it ( achievement meaning what precisely ? obtaining a special membership card ? attaining Salvation prior to everyone else ? granting oneself the immunity of Don Quixote ? making conversions more violent than the fall of Saul at the moment he became Paul ? ). In the interim between a trip to Clichy and a trip to Spain, Orson Welles promises himself he’ll make his Captain Ahab a virtuoso in the art of eluding himself — he also promises to take the lesson to heart ( previously, as Duke Prospero all the books of the Milan library helped him to stage a fake tempest, and now in the role of fugitive on the run, everything would come in handy ).
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Ahab at the Time of his Escape from Hollywood ( oil on canvas ) .— if one damns oneself by running away, so be it ; this is what the Captain — Orson Welles in the Captain’s shoes — did : let himself be damned so as to freely spout his imprecations against Hollywood, as if it had been necessary first to compromise himself and then assume his globe-trotter’s curse ( this is how Orson Welles envisioned the Captain : reckless enough ( behind him, nothing to lose ) to incur the disparate yet convergent reproaches — from God, the police, men, the Whale Oil Company — that he could, once having amassed them in spades, then redistribute ).
Ahab and early childhood The traditional belief is that Ahab poised on the deck of his ship was somewhere between recollecting and scheming — . it is pretty clear that the scheme signifies the desire for vengeance ( unless the Captain, secretive in his own way and shielding his cards under his pea coat, had foreseen from the outset a future beyond the whale ) — but does recollecting necessarily mean memories of childhood ? so this man, totem of his own wrath, aged but also immunized by the grudge, this man of old hemp rope, had a childhood ? and, by way of a miracle, memories of this childhood : nothing more valiant than three orphans in a basket at the foot of a door. Childhood ? Ahab would lose his reputation as an untethered scoundrel if he were to admit to having had one ( reputation of a madman outdistancing the figurehead by eighteen feet ) ; a single childhood, just one, and with it a presumed innocence, anticipatory joy, grudge-free and vengeance-free, in sum the tender age defined in terms exactly opposite to what Captain Ahab had become. Let’s say rather that Ahab readily defines himself in precise opposition to
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childhood : turning his back on it, fleeing it faster and more violently than he pursues the whale, fleeing childhood with terror and arrogance as well as sang-froid ; it’s the sang-froid of infanticide, and he opts for gentleness only if it helps him to achieve his ends ( children have tender flesh but blurry contours, so it’s imperative to take aim correctly — doing so is a matter of luck, seduction, the favor of fate or even the victim ). Behold Ahab — always on deck so that every time the tempest passes it recognizes him as he stands mutely, unshakeable though violently tossed, ready to suffer though never stooping ( he was no Saint Pachomius ) — and see him as the antithesis of childhood : he spent his adult life denying it, running far from any form of infantilism like Nikolai Gogol, another Rushing Rage, fleeing the incarnations of the devil ( who took the form of a slug, a caterpillar, the mucus dripping from his nose ), always on the run, his own immaturity reappearing as a symptom constantly catching up with him — and so he flees again, denies again, and he makes his refusal a battle, another crime, a theory, but a rough-hewn theory like that of the hunted ready to do anything to save its own hide but already scenting its predator and knowing everything of its death — and as he flees, he discards his signs, memories, his tracks, legacies, reflexes, and dreams, promising himself to tear off his skin if necessary, or spit his baby teeth or smother himself under a pillow if in the mirror he were to recognize the treachery of an infant’s face in his image. We then see him coming up against maturity, wallowing in it, committing to it too quickly and too deeply, his enthusiasm precocious, unconcerned with making any blunders and actually counting on it, supposing that imperfection and brutality were preferable to restraint ; he exhausted and bruised himself escaping the soft, fresh, and tender pink of childhood, he wandered
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and fought, he was foolish, he endured, he welcomed the wounds with gratitude, he loved the fatigue and disillusionment, he was seized by a passion for the trappings of old age, accepting them all and without order or reflection desiring them all, even sickness and bereavements ( he couldn’t get enough and would have had cousins killed, it didn’t matter where, in Macau, to experience the loss and count one less foreigner who shared his memories of the nursery — a knife’s notch in the wood of his leg ) ; he wanted to be serious, grey, preoccupied, and responsible, he wanted to turn the tables on all the childhood epithets or dig his way through the mucky soil to the adult underworld to find their exact opposites and wear them atop his head or on his body, or subsist on — or let’s say gratify himself with — them ; he accepted the poor company of virility, he thought it was best to follow other men, themselves also frightened by childhood but puerile in a more brutal way, confusing the virile soul with the mature one and depending on every shattered woman to crown himself king of kings ; Ahab also believed in abundant and enterprising sex ; sex for days and hours, and he believed in fornication as proof of manhood and in drenched beds carrying him off once and for all like rafts from the room of the little boy. Childhood was tender, soft, shapeless, and subject to metamorphoses — Ahab aimed to be firm and brutal, impenetrable, with the solidity of a door. He imitated ramparts and was humiliated by his skin, he wanted the asperities of syphilis and the profound imprints of those condemned to death and pardoned in extremis. Was childhood inconsequential ? He wanted to be the most consequential of men, depositing everywhere evidence of this consequence, at precise intervals, which one took as traps and signs of his trail ; his desire to be coherent reached the point of obsession, devoted like a Carmelite to causal-
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ity, and to remain so until his death he shackled himself to the grudge, to the desire for vengeance, finally finding his place in the world, fixated endlessly on his rock, observing chains of reasoning formed from causes linking to consequences. Childhood was a time of fascination, and so Ahab cultivated a sort of fanatic indifference, not always easy to grasp : the whiteness of the whale was more likely to dazzle his commentators, his witnesses, with Ahab proudly maintaining the cold dispassion of an equal match, ready to radiate white if necessary, and so as to not let himself be dazzled, the rest of the time he’d mope, cloud over, imitate the blind prophets of Crete, rudely, foreswearing light and at the very end of a sort of clumsy blindness looked for greater lucidity : one overheard not a prophecy but his rambling. Childhood was sickly and his constitution would be of iron, his wounds to no effect, he would refuse to attribute his immunity to a legacy of childhood ailments, his desire to avoid the chicken-pox prevailed over intellectual honesty, in his eyes good health was aristocratic defiance rather than a remission after years of incipient fever ( what was riskiest for Ahab was to be robust without believing in rejuvenation : the good health of toughened old people, surviving like things that have become inedible ). Childhood was illogical and we’ve seen that Ahab wanted to become an enthusiast of reasoning : even in the middle of the ocean, within reach of Poseidon’s forked tail, between the tales of the superstitious sailors, tales of Scylla, and tales of the end of the known world, buffeted by tempests that were initially the fear of the tempest then exaggerated yarns about the tempest the day before yesterday, threatened by Sirens, by the octopus, by the giants, he always managed to flaunt his sextant instead of the cross that wards off demons : not to make an assessment, what’s the point in the midst of a
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storm, but to demonstrate that all the while the art of measurement was still being practiced. A narcissistic childhood ? Ahab repudiated narcissism and attacked it using a sword borrowed from Saint Michael, drawn from the dragon and gleaming with its black blood, allegorical and showy, slitting its throat even if it meant splitting the baby — and all his life, with his feet in dockside ropes and water up to his neck on board, even when he was writing the ship’s log & tempted by autobiography, he refused to indulge his ego. He was heard yelling his name from the prow in the direction of the waves, several times he established himself as captain, aware of its Biblical value, but he never made the mistake of contemplating himself to the point of losing himself in contemplation, and when he beheld himself, it was with the eyes of an illiterate on the portrait of Esau, perceiving ugliness, but an acceptable ugliness all in all, consistent with the idea one has of human ugliness — ugliness and bad faith. A coddled childhood ? Ahab declared himself born an orphan, a son of his works, having emerged from the earth where he’d dwelt like a root vegetable rather than an expectation ; he didn’t even have to kill father and mother, he didn’t even have to factor them into his calculations, he considered them later as part of the ignorance necessary to life, just as one accepts the incomprehensibility of the universe as necessary to our presence in it.
Orson Welles, Author of Moby-Dick This is what Orson Welles repeats to anyone who will listen : Of my failure will be made a place — a collection of remains bringing together voluntary defeat and swiftly-interrupted work — to be visited from the inside, like visits to the Statue
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of Liberty are nowadays. To see the statue from afar is to participate in a healthy ceremony of apparition, and this is reserved for immigrants ; but the idea of visiting it from the inside pains those who are sensitive to symbols, and they speak of profanation. Others think of taxidermy, of autopsy, while others still will easily contemplate the stairs, the elevators, and the restaurant, the common sense of commerce, the logical and moral impossibility of renouncing profits, delighting in the renewed observation that for America, under certain circumstances, there is no blasphemy possible ( just set up shop and invoke the commandment of supply and demand — at least that is what Orson Welles tells us rather bombastically, mocking the notion of entering a beacon of freedom in single file ). He never passes up an opportunity to compare the immense Liberty Enlightening the World to his own immense Euro-American ruins that are the color of dinosaur bones found on the sand and that let the daylight pass through, vast enough to give the curious late-comers the illusion of visiting the vestiges of his greatness from the inside — imagine, from the inside : the unrestrained curiosity expressing itself aloud, no longer concerned with the silence of a mortuary chapel, appropriation in addition to curiosity, the sense of knowing more about them than the vestiges themselves, more than the deceased who was at the origin of the remains ( everyone would have known better, that’s for sure, there wouldn’t have been all this ruin, these tall white dinosaur remains, no monument of failure over which the visitors now delivered their Discourse on Success ). Yes, they’ll visit his remains, and there will be piles of manuscripts, notebooks exposed to draughts of air, film reels welded by rust, the meticulousness of a lab assistant when the time comes to reopen them, the dread and the compas-
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sion of being in the presence of friable things, a nod to the Michelangelic genius, another nod to the big capricious bear incapable of finishing anything, one to approve, the other to disapprove ; there will be typewriters, as many machines as there are interrupted projects, and in each machine a sheet of paper and then, within arm’s reach, some leftover hazelnuts to attract God knows what monkey ; there will be pieces chosen at random, confessions, no clear theory for disentangling successful works from sheer error, no aesthetic theory, no legal theory — his grieving friends just as perplexed during his life & after his death as the jurists who are later saddled with settling his estate. It’s a disaster : he, Orson Welles, or at least the image of him replicated on a bit of film scarcely as long as from here to the door, disguised as who knows what exactly, Lear or Shylock, impossible to be both simultaneously ( and yet ) : what he’s saying, with his eyes looking right into the camera, will — in the absence of sound — have to be deduced from the movement of his lips, nine out of ten chances to then determine that his words anticipate our confusion, our curiosity, our appetite for knowledge, the silence, the efforts at deciphering and the time it takes to scrutinize the movement of his lips — in addition to taking all this and ourselves into account — that is, in addition to giving us life — the apparition of Orson Welles as King Lear, as Shylock, tells us of his completed works, about those that will not be completed, about where they get interrupted, about what it feels like to see the film again each morning at the place it stops or to see it again ten years after having forgotten it, seeing at the same time, with the same impetus, the desire to continue and the impossibility of doing so. While we’re on the topic of failure, why not pitch a Moby Dick to all those film moguls, the biggest, the next-biggest,
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& the other, less baroque semi-moguls born on the rubble
of the studios ( the big studios had fallen and Orson Welles couldn’t enjoy it, already he wasn’t really there anymore ; Cleopatra with Liz Taylor and Heaven’s Gate, it wasn’t him, but he would have liked to have taken part : he’d have had Cæsar riding seven elephants and tripled the expenses, if it were even possible to perform such a miracle ). Why not Moby Dick, even if from the start it means considering the non-completion of a major film that will have involved diverting, like in Imperial China, the waters of a river and the waters of a second river into a Hollywood swimming pool to create the ocean — why suggest the ocean with a single glass of water when it’s possible to force a grand studio to crack its vaults open ? ( though Orson Welles knows perfectly well how to suggest the Atlantic with a basin and Mount Ararat with a blanket ). ( It has taken a lot of cunning on the part of young and then old Welles to conceal his ability to suggest with the help of practically nothing :120 if his producers knew, they’d kiss him on both the cheeks and the mouth, give him a little ovation in their office, encouraging him to let spectators and bosses take advantage of his evocative genius, encouraging him in this direction : every atom of talent in the art of the unspoken, the ellipse, and the miniature is as many dollars saved on the beast. He must therefore keep silent : Orson Welles is constantly torn ( but in all likelihood exquisitely so ) between the thirst for greatness, the spectacle like a tent spanning nations, & the love of the povero makeshift job, the economy of the penniless Shakespearean theater, its invisible castles, its invisible armies, its forests invisible like the sea between Venice and Cyprus — most of the time, his journey is from the grandiose to the paltry ( he prefers to 120. Most of the time it is the ruse of lying by omission.
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say miniature panorama ). In the beginning, the grandiose is on paper, it’s just a question of words, Welles advances the Mountain, Lepanto, or Walhalla, or Hamilcar’s mercenaries to dazzle his interlocutors and provide them with the veritable dimensions of the masterpiece ( stating a high price is the best way to start bargaining in a souk, he knows the rule, but he also does it to announce how highly he esteems his film project, himself, the spectators, and perhaps the human race ). It’s later — a matter of weeks, or of minutes if the director’s fate is settled once the door has closed behind him — much later that the time for the miniature comes : Orson Welles once again becomes a connoisseur of puppets and wire, and being deprived of resources is for him a series of enigmas to solve, the enigma of the sphinx and matters of contingency ; he knows how to make daylight come through a fake window, he has the wherewithal of a mechanic, he’s so good at conjuring that he deems himself capable of suggesting his interlocutor, the man from the beginning, to whom he was talking about Walhalla. ) When the time comes, there will be others responsible for commenting on the incompletion, themselves seized in their lifetime by imperfection ; this will be after the passing of Orson Welles & they will talk of Michelangelo’s slaves, of The Art of the Fugue’s unfinished counterpoint number 19, of the drafts of great feverish geniuses tempted by indolence, with the final sentence interrupted and no period, the final period having gone elsewhere to lay its egg in another basket and punctuate another sentence that needed it more —. they will see him, Orson Welles, defeated in advance, ready to shoulder his ambition and his impotence on the same front, one propped up on the other, they compare him to the old man from an Indian legend who conquered the Himalayas by rubbing them, once a year, with the edge of his silk
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handkerchief. His extravagance, say the others ( the detractors ), is the enormous quantity of straw, moss, and flour this twenty-year-old boy hoped to grow up and age on, the false moustache, the belly of Falstaff, and in this belly the masterpieces of the Library of Masterpieces, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Quixote, Hugo, elephants, pyramids and the walls of the Forbidden City, large monumental rooms in the Gothic or Biedermeier style — but you had to see how Orson Welles, who wanted so much to appear next to those pyramids as a Minotaur emerging from the labyrinth victorious but naked, how he chose in each one of those great masterpieces a tiny moment escaping all excess, two lines of dialogue between a tired gentleman and a sensitive lady, or the eyelid at the moment of closing, or a confidence said in a murmur with the false hope of being heard by no one : from Shakespeare, the fragile plea of Shylock, of Hidalgo don Quixote, Sancho Panza rubbing his chin as if to say what am I doing here ? and of the enormous drama of the sperm whale, the only tear ever to drop from Ahab’s eye into the ocean : so small, some still doubt it, they wonder, Orson Welles recites it to maintain its existence even though it’s true. And now he’s back at it again, pulling the old monumental masterpiece with two thousand extras like Cheops and Khephren’s twenty thousand, he’s rebranding the white whale, too bad if it’s led to humiliations as an actor — he’s taking his time, with his advertising voice for champagne or the best coffee in the world, to demonstrate how the Leviathan is a perfect fit, the monster itself or rather all the water it displaces, because Moby Dick is above all his very imprint, the high wave coming to spray New York on one side and Los Angeles on the other, once every seven years. When a conversation starts between Welles and an agent, or a producer ( and this may very well be a dialogue entirely
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recreated by Welles in a hotel room ), it begins with the Leviathan, the size of the pool, the size of the waves, four and a half hours of performance as in the time of King John I and II. Next come the tricks with canvas & pulleys, a philharmonic orchestra, many double basses for example, a landscape of Verdi, then a smaller chamber orchestra, a fan blowing from under a canvas, and to conclude the long epic, Ahab behind closed doors in the captain’s cabin alone with his ghosts, with knocking like the knocks at Macbeth’s gate as described by the priceless Thomas De Quincey. Just before taking his leave ( the producer gives signs of approval resembling an apologetic refusal ), Orson Welles plays his last chip : him alone, from the front, partial side view, bearded, but with his original nose ( my genuine shriveled American-style schnoz ), reading one page of text after another, looking at the page, sometimes into the eyes of his audience ( the mortals ), sometimes far ahead of him, the ocean where everything ultimately disappears, on his face the reflections from a little water contained in a large bowl — and then, that’s it ? But, sir, that is quite enough. Of an ambitious Moby Dick by the master of grandiose figures, Orson Welles, nothing will remain except ruins to be visited from the inside : from the inside because they are vast, empty, bright, permitting the daylight & the draughts of air to pass through, and so as to reproduce the effect of visiting the Statue of Liberty, this mixture of homage and grave desecration. Perhaps the entrance will be through a Whale effigy, like Bottom’s head slipping delightedly ( a pretty good bet ) into his donkey costume : after all, if Barnum makes more money in a week with a stuffed sperm whale than eight theaters do in a month with the works of William Shakespeare, then why not get the customers to penetrate the body of a Hollywood whale made of wood, canvas,
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and polystyrene, for a fee of 5 dollars ? And so the failure of Orson Welles will be combined with the whale’s eternal, peaceful death, since their remains will stand together, they will be one and the same thing. ( For 5 dollars, a visit of a movie whale from the inside : its cables, bits of adhesive tape, its carcasses, numbers written in pencil by the foreman, who was the great-great-greatgrandson of Daedalus, pieces of string, openings for the lighting and for the camera’s eye : according to the script, scenes with Jonas or Pinocchio along with the old captain tormented by a dream of being swallowed were to be replayed inside even if it meant making them up. And for the same price, the director’s office, the director’s Moviola, fake sketchbooks added afterwards to give an image of overabundance, all these lost ideas, recovered years later to exorcise the loss of another idea. ) 121
Moby Dick on the hunt for the captain With every crossing, how many shipwrecks does old Moby Dick discover on the ocean floor ? The wreckage always present, always there, its loyalty an outcome of abandonment .— the whale watches them as he passes, sees them sometimes coming back to life and recognizes the supremacy of shells over the rotten wood, would like to take these tales, which are a mixture of gold coins, bronze armor, and putrescence, and hawk them up to the ocean’s surface ; life, even his own, can be measured out in this way, from one wreck to the next, and in knowing one’s way around it’s possible to distinguish the galleon from the caravel, Portugal from 121. Orson Welles ultimately stages a White Whale, but in London, at the theater.
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Spain. ( The whale sometimes casual with the remains of men, sometimes analytical, consenting to consider all that the wrecks contain of renunciation, seeking to deduce what they also contain of beginnings, as a way of entertaining —. and perhaps also ridiculing — himself. )
Ahab in Hollywood — the impresario’s prophecies, apparitions, and consolations When it doesn’t work out with Universal and when it doesn’t work out with Paramount, after the disappointments of Josef “von” Sternberg, the impresario in the argyle suit ( ever the same, he’d appear on the corner of Broadway and 40th St holding two hot dogs, one for himself and one for his protégé ) happens to resurface, consoling — he happens, this is the right word, he happens along to thwart the deep despair, in any case that’s how he presents himself, a knight in shining tin to right Injustices. 122 He offers some entertainment to console the melancholy scriptwriter Ahab, rejected by three producers in a row, in the ( pell-mell ) form of stand-up comedy jokes, gambling house martingales, tips for greyhound races, sayings borrowed from Lubitsch 122. Having passed from one studio to the next like a migratory bird that has no home where to settle, the screenplay even found itself one day in the hands of Ernst Lubitsch, the man located “at the end of a forthright cigar” ; this was the time of The Merry Widow, in 1934 ; for ten days it remained in his suitcase, then for fifteen on his desk, then another twenty-three on the desk of his associate, Samson Raphaelson ; they added feathers to it only to take them back out, the whale became a white poodle, a farcical soldier, a principality princess, a handkerchief-seller in a store on the Király utca in Budapest, but Király utca reconstructed in a studio, no more believable than Venice or the islands of Fiji ; obsessives, indistinguishable from besotted sweethearts or frustrated lovers, find traces of it in Ninotchka.
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& Max Reinhardt, Max Reinhardt having filched from Solo-
mon, author of Ecclesiastes ; he jabs him with his elbow, he compares the glory of fools to the obscurity of true geniuses, he tries to remember Hamlet’s monologue about justice riding a slow mule ; he starts over what he’s already started over one hundred times because he feels ready to combat dereliction, the most abysmal of metaphysical anxieties, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza combined, fearing neither ridicule nor petty-mindedness thanks to little promises that had already come in handy seven times and resemble ( I quote the captain ) second-hand shoes. His courage is admirable : the disproportion between his modest means as a bookmaker and the profound metaphysical unease gives an idea of his courage, which is the monstrous audacity of an impresario, the impresario in a coat with forty pockets, each one containing either a cigar, a contract, a vision of the future, or a letter of recommendation signed by Charlie Chaplin. For him, him and his argyle and his genius ideas that will save the morning, there are no failures, only preludes to something else, with the reverse sides of rejection letters to be used to draw the reconquest plan, doormats in front of a producer’s door so he can wipe his feet as a warm-up : When scriptwriter Ahab and his furtive impresario Abe Miles ( or whatever his name may be : Michael Kelly, for example ) find themselves out in the street after a last humiliation ( a refusal that was not Jupiterian but friendly, almost a nurse’s refusal, all the more humiliating ), Kelly sees to it that the street is the setting for the rebirth, he sees to it ( he’s sharp ) that everything happens in the morning, before ten o’clock, and that the morning serves as proof of the beginning of everything, its vehicle and its musical accompaniment : he would never make the mistake of subjecting his client to a refusal at sunset : he’d wreck himself on whisky & soda for nothing.
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Miles / Rinaldi / Kelly appears and then disappears : an appearance of three-quarters of an hour followed by an absence of six months, sometimes three years, and when he reappears, he has the ability to pass off the three years like three-quarters of an hour, it’s also a question of tact ( the same tact keeps him from telling a lady who’s aged how much older she looks ) ; he bounces right back, he has no nostalgia, which would serve as proof that twelve years had passed, for him it would be like letting it slip that he’d served a lengthy sentence in Sing Sing — Ahab doesn’t take his disappearances personally, he’s seen his whale disappear so many times in the hopes of making his invisibility tantamount to inexistence : well and good for those who believe in it. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, Screenwriter Ahab finds himself alone, with his shadows all around him if there are three spotlights aimed at him while he crosses a stage on the day of an audition, shadows that give him some When shall we three meet again —, in the presence of the producers, he rolls his brochure in his two fists, he reduces his neurotic shyness down to the narrow dimensions of the tube ( in the evening, when it will be time to reread his proofs, he’ll have to flatten his operetta back out with an iron, without lingering too long on each page ). At that moment, or these moments, the so-called impresario is in limbo : they say he stands in a corner of the image, looking like the putti blowing wind from the angles of a world map but less plump, less rounded and naked, less æolian ; his face sometimes appears in the patterns of a curtain, but he hides at the very moment we think we’ve caught him in the act ; and, of course, one ( Ahab ) believes he sees his face keeping watch from a poster, out from the audience in the third row, in a puff of cigarette smoke — another time it’s a 100 dollar bill, the head of Benjamin Franklin with cocker spaniel ears & a weak chin.
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The three hundred and sixty-sixth day is his : the magic of the leap year breaks him out once every four years, and on this day Ahab may find himself sitting before a plate of fried bacon and eggs sunny side-up, the yolk still intact ( a pure geometry full of promise, but organic — we’d dive right in ), he may be standing in line or searching for change at the bottom of his pants pockets all the way down to his socks, Abe Miles or Rinaldi taps him on the shoulder,123 without even greeting him he gives him tips on the greyhounds running in the 6th race, 37 to 1, or points to a man on the other side of the street, a talent scout for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer — no sooner done than he vanishes again, he made an appearance so as to deliver his one line, then took advantage of the Captain’s trip to the bathroom to take flight — and by way of a signature, it certainly was his, leaving behind the unpaid bill ( though sometimes a fiver : now Lincoln, the other Abraham ). Again, an impresario’s consolations are trivial : he boasts of quixotically confronting abysmal fears and Pascalian infinities with the help of little filler words like skeleton keys .— or better yet, the miraculous pin in the spy novels that can open any door, yielding or stubborn. The prophesying promises, which vindicate a setback without ever failing in their duty, can be just as grandiose, in any case they have the plasticity of silver, this ability to gradually pass from the wretched to the pharaonic with apparent ease : the ease of someone who slums it in the half-basements and then on the same day goes to the governor’s ball ( since his return to shore, the captain has always been fascinated by this flexibility : when a specialist in financial matters, for example, speaks of the Vanderbilts’ millions and then the potato123. He always signals his presence on the shoulder, from behind, to mimic the parrot’s return to its perch after having flown away.
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sellers’ five cents without a change in tone, applying the same rules of calculation to both, the same for all ). Abe Miles is one of those people who makes a promise of five cents followed by a promise in the millions : the promise of Cleopatra and a bridge of gold, a rainbow and the spot where the rainbow touches down, the Ark and Stonehenge, the promise of Eldorado’s gleaming rooves, the crowds of King Vidor and of Rudolph Valentino, those who rushed to his funeral, or the throngs attending the Anadyomenal birth of Florence Lawrence — he speaks to him of buildings with one hundred and forty stories, of ambrosia, of Beverly Hills houses, he shows him a photograph of the costume Gloria Swanson wore for Zaza, directed by Allan Dwan, he also shows him Allan Dwan directing Douglas Fairbanks and seven hundred extras with the help of a megaphone big enough, where it’s widest, to sleep in, a eunuch from the Thousand and One Nights with his turban.
Every time he misses the whale, he insults God To bolster his atheism, sailor Ahab makes use of everything epic and trivial that ocean life contains ; he distances himself from the coasts to develop, alone with his oily soldiers, a cheap paganism that will always escape the mythographers and that is, truth be told, not worth a hill of beans ; during his fishing expeditions he replaces the metaphysical torments with the cares of a deep-sea fisherman, cruder but calming because they do not consider the existence or non-existence of paradise. In short, he goes about his business as if he had forsaken God at the age of six & was now standing by his definitive ruptures ( Ahab promises himself that when the priest comes to perform the extreme unction, he’ll ask him for news from Pluto ) : there’s the whale,
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himself, old Satanist plans written on scratch paper, now wadded up and stuffed beneath the skin of a taxidermied rabbit ( to renounce Satanism is to fulfill his duty as an atheist ), and on top of all that, the Verified Absence of God. Ahab is convinced : only an atheist can touch the whale with his harpoon and spend the rest of the day quietly tying his sailor’s knots — but this unbeliever can say so as much as he wants, he still can’t keep himself from insulting the Lord every time he misses the mark. ( Ahab blasphemes, shouldn’t have, too late : God takes this opportunity to reappear : the insult postulates His existence and He, as if all love and all opportunism, answers the postulates, which are well worth a prayer — God hastens to exist for good, His graciousness is boundless, He signals His actual presence, or in the words of one of the sailors aboard the Pequod : You can’t miss it. )
Presentation of Da Ponte You know Lorenzo Da Ponte ? the Venetian who went to Vienna and wrote Cosi fan tutte there, the fashionable then obsolete librettist, a courtier to Joseph II who spent part of his life scheming against his competitors and fleeing the fathers, brothers, and cousins of young ladies who got knocked up in the time it takes for an arietta ? He knew little Wolfgang Mozart descended from his father’s bench, he knew the Emperor, bankers, Salieri, embassy men and duchesses struggling under the weight of their wigs ; he collected competitors and it is said he met Casanova, the real one, by a wood-burning stove in the snowy Austrian winter : they spoke as brothers of garters, wages, and the passage of time — over the course of his long life, Da Ponte would cross paths with more mezzo-sopranos & a good number of moneylenders. But the most surprising, the most noteworthy,
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as far as we are concerned : he will meet the young Herman Melville one day, one evening, in the Americas, and that evening they will talk of whaling ( for old Da Ponte to meet a fledgling Herman Melville one evening in 1800, Market and Monroe streets had to cross, and the pedestrians Melville and Da Ponte had to be unoccupied at the same moment, facing each other ).
Rapid Portrait of Da Ponte In Venice, Da Ponte pulls up his stockings in a single gesture, he knows the art of unbuttoning and re-buttoning himself quickly, the stealth of romances is not really to his taste, it’s a necessity that has become a way of life that is not entirely without its advantages — in fact, between twenty and twenty-five years of age, he shows himself capable of making love, which is to be understood as copulating acrobatically : the skill of a tightrope walker : equilibrium, a makeshift ( or else premeditated ) balancing pole, the direction of the wind and the current, an amateur science acquired on the job, a modest but sufficient knowledge of the laws of gravity, a few tricks he learned from dancers, like a good kick for example, also a sense of the brevity of things, resembling from afar a sense of humor ( in general, we ignore the amount of self-mockery the tightrope walker needs to balance ). Eroticism is certainly a strong word : eroticism all the same, of a handkerchief drawn from a pocket, of a privacy screen, of a closed shutter, of a table, of low light, of a hand passing through a pocket to reach another hand. A little later, with some time on his hands, he gets girls pregnant : love is always clandestine, a little better organized, on a bed, with the husband in the fields or already meeting with a judge ( or busy writing an accusation letter, his tongue ( his
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cuckolded husband’s tongue ) between his teeth ) ; weeks go by before depositing the fruits of his love, as they say, at the convent with the nuns who are, though virgins, no less maternal. ( A century before him, a respectable man from London named Samuel Pepys would perform his erotics every day, as regular as a diarist and visiting some very profane tabernacles, servants, chambermaids, who were surprised to be called tabernacles for the time that insemination took. Before going blind, as part of his little ritual, kneeling and with no Everlasting, he would put in his finger, not his tongue, and would assess the thickness & thinness of things, would finish up and then go to write it all down in his journal. ) Da Ponte, with the Leporello’s aria already in his ears, would push the girls against doors, thanking the door afterwards.
Rapid portrait of Da Ponte, continued
[ 1780 ]
In the Vienna of Joseph II, Lorenzo Da Ponte became a librettist, without it being clear exactly how ( a letter of recommendation, perhaps, or his skills as a fine friend to the ladies, or with his poor reputation being reversed “like a glove” — . certainly not his complete works, which at the time would have fit under his shirt, between a break-up letter and a threatening one ). All around him, the Germans, the Italians, contenders for the title of Imperial Poet, competition participants, the candidates, lucky and unlucky, composers decorated twelve times in a row with a beautiful crown of leaves & flowers, rewarded with a tuba trophy the color of gold, perhaps promised a place in heaven, for all we know. Da Ponte invents for the Emperor, for the theaters fifteen days prior to the start of the season ( and the season lasts the entire year ), and simultaneously for the public ( Lorenzo is one of the two thieves of the Passion ; the second keeps
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time with his foot ) — Da Ponte invents, and so, in order to help the invention along he copies a little Goldini, a little Beaumarchais, and the librettos from the year before last, replacing the peasant girl Gertrud with the maid Ludmilla. For him, these are years dedicated to combinatorial art : twelve semitones allow for at least half a million melodies, for the most part forgettable, the three main characters of an opera, even a comedic one, do not produce as many variations but do what they can as they cross the Bosporus in one direction and then the other, or as they reconsider incest. According to the advice given by the director of the Milan Ballet to Carlo Goldoni, barely twenty years old and promising as a cherry, there should be five arias for each of the three leading characters, with two in each of the first two acts and one in the last ; only three arias for the women with the second major parts and for the second treble, who is a man and who must be nondescript, or slightly comic ; the author must equitably distribute ( as if dividing a guinea hen at the dinner table with a silver knife ) the bravura arias, the arias of action, the tender arias, the inferior arias, the minuets, and the rondeaus 124 ( a legend propagated by Goldoni himself describes Goldoni consigning his final manuscript to the fire burning in a stove ( like Nicolai Gogol, but for other reasons ) : for the stove to scatter the bravura and inferior arias ). Lorenzo Da Ponte is almost always broke, though this compromises in no way his elegance ( at least sartorially ), and with his charlatan agility he finds the strength to recover from the ordeal of a piece that gets booed, this very evening. As soon as he gets back home, he jiggles his armoires, or rather, the armoires of others, to shake out some ideas 124. I cite the best authors.
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for an opera : a dramatic situation that is made a little less implausible by pretty banter and a line of music adorned with violins like embroidery. ( Sometimes there’s nothing to be done, it doesn’t work out : the opera houses may very well have high ceilings, with all the room and the machinery to have the gondolas and then the mountains of Anatolia, as one imagines them in Vienna, pass before the orchestra, the libretto doesn’t take, it hiccups, half-heartedly delivers bravura arias that are not especially brave, it multiplies the implausibilities, they’re like trap doors through which the author, heaped with ridicule, would like to disappear, right away, but he doesn’t ; the composer, his inspiration exhausted, leaves the enthusiasm, let’s say plain musical fervor, to the brass instruments : it’s up to them to make their note last as long as possible before giving the floor to the disappointed spectators : their booing is a slight modulation from C to D sharp, with no real beginning, no abrupt end, continuing on into the silence. ) Da Ponte has his formidable competitors, old & young : the old imitate Voltaire as they get on in age, but their domestic Voltairism does not keep them — au contraire — from remaining faithful to Joseph II, the Emperor, his galloons, his long nose on which his very prestige, the dynasty of Austria, hangs ; every morning they pronounce, in lieu of gargling cold water & spitting back into the sink, their love of the fatherland. They’ve seen other lands : having seen others means a little of everything, the fog of China, the harem of the Great Turk, any heroic exoticism — at the age of thirty, Da Ponte already knows enough of artfulness to understand the true nature of this I’ve-seen-other-lands ; a trap set for those who are younger and who have not seen them. They have their Ovid in their pockets and Dante too, which they read while holding their noses ( which, after all, gives them a
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Dantean face ), and the loquacious Goldoni, and some masters who provide some pretty phrases, such as Petrarch for lyricism & Poggio Bracciolini for bawdy jokes. Formidable competitors, even when they have seven fewer teeth, always clinging to the sturdiest banisters of Vienna, knowing how to hold on to them for a long time, at their leisure ; they’ve reached the age where glory is their due, the position of imperial court poet is their natural & imminent destiny ; they’ve accumulated enough pages now to intimidate a bookbinder : soon there will be the Complete Works in three parts. So those are the older ones — the younger ones also have their virtues that pass for vices, or the opposite, they are unexpected, this contributes to their charm, they’ve always got ink in their nibs, Da Ponte wonders where they get it from, and when the devil they manage to get it ( he also hopes to identify the moment when a smooth-talker takes a breath : this breath, this would be an admission of weakness ). They make three or four librettos per year : a turquerie, a love drama, a farce, a grand martial machine, they have a catalog of proper names, itself also inexhaustible, and when they christen the brave bugger in the second act Corado, Corado is unequivocally, carnally, called Corado — like Sirius, Sirius, and to a lesser extent Da Ponte, Da Ponte.
Da Ponte embarks for New York — the Europe of flights Far from Vienna, nostalgic for his times as an ornament of the State, Lorenzo Da Ponte gathers his last fugitive forces to become a Da Ponte of New York : starting over, a little outdated, sometimes less is more, the future ahead of him in the land of pioneers. He had made his way from Italy, from the Venice of the Jewish ghettos, to Vienna, where everyone presented themselves imperially, at the opera and in
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the gazettes ; he had been able to invent a new way of being, a Da Pontean Viennoiserie — so, he packed his bags yet again, said goodbye yet again, surrendered one or two of the family jewels to an antiquarian in exchange for an amount that was quickly reduced to nothing, escaped enemies and creditors, covering his tracks by fleeing as quickly as possible ; he knew how to do this. ( For the young Herman Melville listening to old Lorenzo tell it, the entire eighteenth century is, in Europe, a harmonious ballet of fugitives, because of the vulnerable cities, the doges, the Lordship of Florence, the Council of Nine in Siena, the prince-archbishop in Salzburg, masks too loosely attached, the spies, the moral code stepped up by the prince-archbishops — and because of the blasphemies, of the desire to blaspheme, of the crime of lèse-majesté committed all to easily, by sneezing the wrong way, because of the libraries, the books of magic, armchair atheisms, couplings against a chest of drawers & the witness behind a dormer window, up at the top in a corner, like the convex mirror in the Arnolfini Portrait. Like so many others, Da Ponte was obliged to build bridges, not in the sense of establishing connections, between one city and another, sometimes hiding in a basket, most frequently on horseback, but post-haste, and to leave Venice to its own obsolescence behind him on the horizon. Closing his eyes, Melville imagines all of Europe — especially its roads — crowded with half-nobles, demi-intellectuals, artists, fraudsters, ready to do anything to survive, each with their own good reason for doing so and a sure idea of their refuge — it happens that they cross paths, one going to find salvation where the other had been imprisoned. ) In Europe, perhaps because of a curse of a nymph dragged around by a cow, getting around in the previous century, the century of Da Ponte and his glockenspiels, assumed the
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form of contradictory escapes. Melville, future author of The Confidence-Man : His Masquerade, can see it from here : a farce with fifteen characters, written when he’s tired of his stories about sailors, or by Lorenzo Da Ponte when he wants to pay comic homage to his century ( no other homage than a comic homage : for Melville and Lorenzo, the eighteenth century is more comic, all in all, than rococo, comedy inviting all rationality to its little pleasures ) ; a choral farce featuring fugitives, nobles, and commoners, all followed by a squire and a trunk full of manuscripts, all blameworthy in a light tone, also itself comic, but they are also vindictive, improvising their innocence with departures early in the morning, boldly correcting laws, halfway between one city and the next, leaning against the necks of their horses. 125
Da Ponte, Ambassador of the XVIII th to the XIX th century Da Ponte — half adventurer, both rich & poor, a good and bad seducer, skillful collector of stories, author of his own sensitivity and melomaniac out of necessity since he had to frequent the opera to pursue his career : miraculously, all these elements added together do not create a man who is fragmented, gathered only in the heat of the moment, and in truth Da Ponte presents a solid, smooth appearance, of a piece, comparable to a high-quality foie gras — the harmony of the disparate Italian is the pride of Da Ponte in exile, happy to show himself to his hosts without any break
125. Young Melville or old Da Ponte, or Melville with Da Ponte, underlined the names of the cities on a map, drawing lines from one to the next — but a single chart, even mapped out based on the best sources ( diaries and reports ), does not explain why the cities of Europe strove to catapult men over their ramparts.
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in continuity, which is the mark of a certain falsity ( in opera at least, on the stage ). The adventurer is necessary to the good and bad seducer, the good and bad seducer was the condition for his vocation as a priest, and subsequently it was his strength as a collector of stories, and the collector of all kinds of gossip, high and low, Boccaccio’s gossip and gossip from the palaces of Italy, that made of him the indispensable librettist. Perhaps the responsibility of marking the passage from the xviii th to the xix th century fell to Da Ponte through deliberate stageplay : as such, it’s a matter of believing in the change of epoch, of trusting, as only a librettist knows how to do, in the numbers that determine the centuries, like characters’ names or titles, entries and exits. Of his last exile by boat from Europe to America, Da Ponte makes the allegory of the centuries pivoting toward one another, he represents the Old World all the way to the theaters ( or employment offices ) of the New, he pulls some items from the xviii th century out of his pockets, some pistachios from Italy, some marzipan from Vienna, the bottle of ink he used to draw Mozart’s curls in the margins of Così fan tutte ( Mozart himself stayed behind ) ; like Casanova, he draws from his hat anecdotes now grown obsolete, he accepts that he is quaint, but he is not satisfied with being a reliquary of xviii th-century baubles, he wants to make the link between the era of breeches and that of pleated trousers, because he knows he’s capable of it, perhaps even made for it : all his skills as a charmer, upstart, false priest, & plagiarist would now serve him as a skillful, deliberate, and suave ambassador, the white lies about his years in Vienna balanced out with the pious flatteries and his oracles as an entrepreneur. And then in his baggage of exile he’s brought along enough savvy, tricks of the trade, playing cards, palace secrets, obso-
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lete and resolutely useless ( decorative ) memories, samples of perfumes and fabrics, copies of masterpieces, plans for operas, he also has a prayer book and an excerpt from Figaro, he could use it as a bargaining chip : he’d play the part of the conquistador who had come from the monarchies to trade with the new Indians. 126 Da Ponte the miser would have generously gifted his exile to the historians, if they were to use it as a remarkable milestone in the passage from one century to the next : a milestone visible from afar, sentimental & epic ( the journey was dangerous ), allegorical if there was a sea crossing, a little egocentric, focused on a single man, but all in all ( Lorenzo would say ), better to open the century on the Voyage of Da Ponte than on Bonaparte’s coup d’état, n’est-ce pas ? more pleasant and more suited to a general audience, the flight of a penniless half-genius, this mixture of courage and cowardice, the days spent on a ship eating poorly and sleeping poorly, this look of an aged Ulysses in a three-cornered hat leaving his brats in his wake and, to pass the time, playing a card game invented in Venice a long time ago — this, rather than the odious thirst for power and this tasteless French take on Cæsarism. ( Instead of the Republican calendar, the Changing Era could have started with a Da Pontesque calendar, all in rhyme, and in its style one would have recognized the lightness & the sauciness that suddenly turn sublime, as if by accident : the passage from one century to the next marked by Da Ponte’s exile in America would have been the marriage of necessity ( fleeing bankruptcy ) and fantasy ( rebuilding one’s life elsewhere ). )
126. Graciously, he would have accomplished his task, attempting to make us forget about Napoleon.
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Da Ponte, Ambassador of the XVIII th century, codicil America’s out of luck : the ambassador from old Europe is Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Viennese Magi king, not Mozart ( he was trapped ), and not Haydn either, though he would have liked to have paraded his facetious old age and his symphony called The Surprise in the new cities of America to give these people a somewhat different idea of the century of the Enlightenment ( the rococo reflected from the Enlightenment) : this wouldn’t have caused any changes in the Declaration of 1776, but the old man’s appearance in a New York salon would have gotten tongues wagging. Da Ponte is who they got — a minor ambassador, but that’s what Europe looked like to the Americans of Jefferson and Washington : brilliant, excessive, frivolous, unfulfilled, hampered by all the genuflecting, determined by the tastes of princes who live and who die, who go to war at every turn. Some of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s interlocutors have a more flattering idea of Europe — they say Signor Da Ponte isn’t really up to the task : he’s representative in his way, he does what he can, he’s like a faded locket portrait.
Da Ponte’s crossing from England to America Depending on where in the drafts of the Memoirs we look, the crossing lasts thirty-seven days, then fifty-six, then eighty-seven, then one hundred : one hundred days, most of them spent in the absence of any landscape ( Lorenzo may have been born in Venice, the floating city, but he cannot consider twenty thousand square leagues of water as a landscape ). One hundred days suggest one hundred steps from stage right to left, from starboard to port, puffing on a pipe, of course puffing, extinguished nine times out of
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ten, Lorenzo’s footsteps meditative & dark in the limbo of international waters, as he tries to make the connection between his past adventures, the disappointments and the triumphs ( happiness itself when that demanding Viennese audience would stand to applaud him ), and America, of which he knows nothing, what to expect at customs, the gentlemen whom to entrust with a letter of recommendation, and the bankers, and the lenders. ( He is like everyone else, Lorenzo, he is like old Ahab when he took the name of Peter Gansevoort and like Herman Melville when he added an e to his name, and Emperor Joseph ii when he would lift the top of his harpsichord : the misfortunes of the past remain with him, they become an unshakeable memory, they will remain true to him until his final day, whereas the triumphs and the minutes of sensual delight will never engender lasting memories, the strength of regret is not given to them — . Joseph ii and old Ahab would agree with him. ) ( The banishment from Venice, the expulsion from Vienna, the loss of his charges, the two hundred florins given as charity by Leopold, Joseph’s successor, he will remember this for a long time, he could still talk about it — but the evening of the premiere of the Marriage of Figaro ? and the day when Salieri seemed to congratulate him sincerely, and that time when the subject for The Tree of Diana came to him gratuitously, in addition to the life he was given at birth ? and the night of the appearance of the beautiful Nancy, when he became the opposite of an abbot ? all this is so difficult to remember. )
Da Ponte goes through customs Some say ( they are wrong ) : the young Herman Melville was already working for the New York Customs House when Signor Da Ponte landed from Italy with a parrot in its cage,
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all its contraband colors protruding through the thin steel wires to fall to the ground. The other intentional mistake involves confusing this customs house with the main offices on Ellis Island, where many years later immigrants would turn up for the ceremonies of the medical examinations & identity checks ( Herman Melville, it’s true, is said to have found his place there, that it was an opportunity for him to pursue his career as a novelist, shamefully interrupted : he’s to have created prose there, prose out of a single word : to each newcomer, sometimes from Armenia, sometimes from Calabria, or Pomerania, a very short excerpt of Melvillean poetry, a surname translated from Armenian, Calabrian, or Yiddish — if we were now to gather twenty thousand of these men and women who passed by his counter, we would have enough to make a short and resounding novel with more characters than action, but in the end it doesn’t really matter, the action will develop on its own, moreover: plot twists are inevitable. Da Ponte remained Da Ponte,127 too old, too famous in spite of everything, and far too much a master of his surname to change it right past the customs gate — and then, as is known, the name Da Ponte was a recent acquisition,
127. Signor Da Ponte didn’t have to undergo the ceremonies of customs or quarantine : it was a different time, it was a different category of people, people still arrived in sailing ships .— but at one time or another it was necessary to unfold the superb Italian leather, his wallet, to show the letters in it, it is not known which transport and identity documents : On the other side of the desk, an American gentleman who himself had not been there much longer had to welcome the great man and his Repertoire, vaguely remembering the name Amadeus Mozart & unconvinced that he was dealing with a genius.
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so precious for a Jewish family from Italy, uprooted from God knows where — doubtlessly too precious to part with ; to him it seemed like a painted wooden coat of arms, three-quarters empty, but useful.
Da Ponte in America The whole north of the island of Manhattan has not yet been built up and is left to a few crows, but Signor Da Ponte can’t help but marvel at the street lines drawn in advance, at right angles, at a right angle to America, perhaps imported from a sprawling Europe ( who knows ? the Europe of Cassini’s triangulations ) — ashamed of his wonder as if it were that of a peasant from Puglia standing in front of a café window in Florence.
Da Ponte and George Washington This won’t be found in his personal writings — but Da Ponte had gossiped enough during his lifetime as he drew the golden thread from his mouth that now tongues can be loosened about him, especially if they furnish some evidence : Lorenzo Da Ponte crossed the Atlantic attracted by the immense renown of George Washington’s dentures, complete, solid, the dentures of the father of the Nation, enough to arouse the jealousy of Lorenzo, who had been toothless since his thirty-sixth birthday. Superb ( it seems ) dentures of wood and ivory, half and half, which gives Washington in most of his portraits this placid presidential stiffness, almost dazed, conscious of his duty, jaws clamped ( in fact, unlike Lorenzo, Washington did not laugh much : laughing his Washingtonian head off was not allowed : it was neither in accordance with his status, nor adapted to his apparatus
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.— also, according to legend, the famous dentures took the opportunity at night to smile, alone in their glass, with nobody to see, enjoying a good joke that American history did not want to remember ).
Da Ponte in New York — at the general store, Mozart absent, his distant triumphs Long before the horse-drawn carriages would take Henry James from one straight road to another in a freezing winter, Da Ponte finds himself in the city, but what does this look like ? he doesn’t triumph over Park Avenue followed by three thousand brass bands, he doesn’t inaugurate a Broadway theater, not yet : he simply opens a general store : he explains the virtues of pesto alla Genovese & pistachio pesto to ladies in their winter furs, putting aside his libretto projects, his memories, his works written for a genius perched atop a stool, his nights spent copying and correcting Don Giovanni until the ground opened up to the underworld : sometimes tempted, a jar of jam in his hand, to explain how much hackwork had gone into the masterpiece — a hackwork masterpiece, that’s a share of immortality, isn’t it ? Not very Mozartian at first glance, this city, from Canal Street to these meadows divided into equal rectangles : one day there will be harpsichord music there, but later, much later, at the Metropolitan, or in an old factory for a neo-neoism show, mixing with a skill sometimes foreign to the fine arts ( sometimes not ) period instruments and the assembly line, Aeschylus and Arthur Miller. But in the meantime, where is the Mozartism ? Da Pontism ? the severe frivolity, the five voices harmonized to build up conflicts and settle them, the costumes of the seraglio, the hats, the colors, Konstanze teasing the pasha, Blondchen teasing Osmin, the
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feathers of the parrot bird-catcher, the love duet, the soul of a slain man escaping little by little, the terror inspired by the strings’ prolonged chromatic descent, one hundred and twenty strings, performers in black with their heads bent toward a score — if this hasn’t disappeared ( it can’t disappear ), where is it hiding ? We can see Da Ponte, great importer of salted capers and dried tomatoes for his general store, looking for traces of Mozart on the walls of the city, in its shop windows, in its revues, in the houses if he’d been able to lift off the roofs, in people’s ears : the traces of a Da Pontesque Mozart and therefore, at the same time, the badges of his own reputation, the meager Da Pontean talent hanging like a sandal on the heel of a child god. Da Ponte walks along the same streets where the captain will walk : he too finds it difficult to choose between solicited memories and necessary oblivion, lugging a bit of his old ghetto around with him, and also keeping, beneath several handkerchiefs, his family’s old name, in use until the day of the rebaptism ceremony in the church, under the gaze of the Christians’ jealous God, a name that was supposed to connect him and his family by a chain a thousand links long to Galilee : Galilee, of which he knows well nothing. He walks up to the New Yorkers like a great man, a melomaniacal Cæsar returning from a triumph over indecent peoples : in Europe he mastered the fine musical arts, he mastered with dexterity the love of young women, he was punished for it, and just as skillfully he had to deal with the morality and tolerance of different countries, and the intertwining of the two, traps that tricked many men ; he was willing to be a gentleman of his century, he was doing his part, and from afar he orchestrated flautists, he heard sopranos pronounce his words — his own — written in silence, for himself, because at the moment of writing the soprano is never
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a sure thing : she may very well never exist : no need to run away, remaining out of reach is enough. ( In any case, he triumphed in Europe,128 his works and a little of himself resounded in the theaters of Milan to Salzburg and Prague all the way to the ceilings, and what ceilings they were ; he let himself get carried away, so much for the sin of complacency, conscious all the same of leaving behind on the ground forever a little of the mortal Da Ponte, & his clothes, while Da Ponte flew away. ) Now, he lands, he doesn’t know if he walks along these boulevards like a victor or like the gentleman fresh off the boat ringing at magnificent doors to ask for hospitality from ladies or their granddaughters who are supposed to know him by name : the celebrated carillon of Europe.
Da Ponte sincerely convinced He left a few European suitcases behind him, some girls who’d had abortions, others still pregnant ( “with his works” ), competitors from Vienna, colleagues, old masters, libretti from Metastasia and Casti, little words of farewell to those he hadn’t had time to say goodbye to — he took everything else with him, the wealth and the poverty of the man of the theater, and a part of Goldoni’s legacy : his sense of farce, this ability ( perhaps Italian, perhaps Venetian ) to laugh at his misfortunes : the more misfortunes meant more laughs, and at the heart of a brotherhood of dispossessed, cuckolded unfortunates, the laughter of the New Year. Other serious people, coming from the Lutheran churches and speaking proper English, would see this as a perversion : this way of 128. It doesn’t matter if they were small triumphs wrested from a second-rate’s destiny.
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joking is the innocence of people born under the sun, or boastfulness pure and simple, one can’t laugh so much with one’s feet on nails, unless one knows the Devil ( & for others, it’s a martingale : the vigor of his frivolity is part of a tradition that dates back nearly twenty centuries, to Latins like Horace, despite legions of popes taking themselves seriously, or perhaps thanks to them ). “Sincerely convinced of the transience and fragility of human nature” ( this is what one of his biographers claims ), “he will come to conceive of his own existence as a drama ; not a tragic drama, but a comic opera.” Sincerely is a hapax in the long life of the librettist, who was sooner accustomed to the high Viennese culture of dissimulation — but let’s trust his biographer that Da Ponte is sincere, it must make his head spin ; the momentum could drive him to write an Ethics and then offer it to others : after so many comic librettos, a book of philosophy, a viaticum to those who have lost their way, wouldn’t it be a splendid epilogue ? at the end of his life, crepuscular and generous. Convinced : it’s a fact, Lorenzo has convictions, they didn’t come from his talent, but from his jealousy, and the desire to occupy a post ( “I named one of my ulcers after you,” is what he might have said to his competitor Giambattista Casti, alas talented ). Ephemerality : it fills his librettos, it harmonizes with the fugues of Mozart or Gluck or Salieri or their colleagues under the imposing patronage of Bach ; most of the time, evoking the ephemerality of humanity is an elegant and megalomaniacal way to talk about one’s own predicament, the Da Pontesque predicament. Opera bouffe : equating one’s life to a drama is for everyone ; to assume the non-tragic drama is less common : Da Pontism could be precisely this ability to convert the drama
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of a life into what is the most farcical of an opera,129 a translating macchina, or the unit of measurement common to the drama that is lived and the comedy that is written ( this unit of measurement is perhaps a slogan, jingling, faltering — thank God, said Lorenzo, our slogans are faltering ).
Da Ponte meets Herman Melville The circumstances of their meeting are unclear : let us go back to Quixote’s de la Mancha township, to its vague “not long ago” or to the “Some years ago — never mind how long precisely” that opens the first chapter of Moby Dick’s adventures. In 1838, Da Ponte is getting close to ninety, he won’t make it, he’s just experienced his final failures — he’s made his way through the general store, through private lessons, through the bookselling business, he could have spent his final days selling Umbrian olives one by one, this would have been quiet but insufficient, he preferred something else : at the end of his life, his reflex was to set back into motion vast, infeasible, precarious projects, Italian mish-mashes, an Opera Theater in New York ; he solicited subscribers, he brought in singers from Italy, he teamed up with a certain Montresor, and ever the impresario, he launched his last big ship just for it to leak : better an operatic failure, all in all, it reminds him of the good old days, a failure at great expense, going crescendo. In 1838, Herman Melville is nineteen years old, he just finished his studies & will be going back, he puts one foot here and one foot there, he is hesitant ; perhaps he’s already crumpling up drafts of poems at the bottom of his pocket : while waiting for the whales and the books ( whale-books, 129. See also Cole Porter.
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book-whales ), he’s a teacher somewhere in Massachusetts, like Stephen Dedalus riddled with debts having to face ungrateful students ( but the reality is perhaps different ) ; this year, in the month of February, he has three days off & visits New York in the snow that hardens at night and gets barely any softer by day, but glistens — to look for what ? not Washington’s dentures, not at his age ( he’s too young ), so maybe an adventure ? Old Lorenzo Da Ponte leaning on his cane, lisping, takes him in one evening, half-frozen from hesitating in front of the door of a house where, it seems, one would find sofas, armchairs, smoking rooms, hot water taps like at the Denys’ place in Syracuse, a Daedalean invention, the luxury bathroom piping, stair railings, young ladies, and copies from Titian ( except for Allegory of Time Governed by Prudence ) — a quarter of an hour later, they find themselves before some mulled wine.
Da Ponte and Melville — opera seria, opera buffa Somewhere in the good city of ( nella città di ) New York, the very venerable librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte is speaking with the very young Herman Melville, ninety-nine and nineteen years old, respectively — they’re chatting, in February 1838, six months before Lorenzo’s death, the night is suited to their chatter, it is readily remembered as a setting and a cliché ; with the night, lamps, converted whale oil, O miracle of Genesis and the Wedding at Cana, under the light, in a confined space. The young Melville has not yet written a line, if he has written one it has displeased him, his father has died from pneumonia, the English had ruined him, his brother has gone bankrupt, perhaps to honor their father, and made a fool of himself in a bank, he almost went blind, he found himself on an uncle’s farm to realize that the corn
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grains made no more sense to him than the figures of the litigation, he envisions before him a life of loans, moving to smaller apartments and taking care of a family — in short, he feels like he’s already lost, he feels ill-equipped, rightly or wrongly, he sees ominous signs everywhere, the Bible is a suffocating consolation, or no consolation at all, love is a confused notion, writing is not a profession, salvation is a theory that soothsaying priests invented in the catacombs, on a night like this — they would have been better off talking about escape ( or about exit : the word exit and the exit itself ). He is nineteen years old, this kid, and not once does he talk about girls — this surprises Lorenzo, who would like to talk about them again at the age of ninety, waving his slender fingers before his eyes to reconstruct memories of fireflies down to the nearest millimeter. Because he went from Venice to Vienna, because he has taken mistresses to appointments with the angel maker, or to the front doors of convents to deposit a basket with a first name inside, Lorenzo could tell Herman in terms not crude but simple about Julietta and about Zoraide, he could fill the young man’s silences with Italian songs — these embarrassed silences, come now, one day they will become saucy innuendos. They’re in a semi-basement, they’ve had a first glass of wine, now a third : Melville, his head projected on four walls by the light of a single candle, continues his complaining, which is intimate & then Homeric, hesitating between confession and the great epic genre, which presupposes enough room to spread sails, even fake ones, like at the theater — to Da Ponte, this is a good sign : doesn’t hesitation put the sobbing on hold so as to reflect a little, by sniffling — and sniffling, reflecting, is already converting sorrow into a representation of sorrow. Melville tilts his head, he sees the wax dripping from the candle and the wax dripping from his nose,
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one echoing the other — Lorenzo Da Ponte, during those long minutes of wax dripping, tries to convert the Melvillean misfortune into a Da Pontean opera buffa project : the lack of money is the pawnbroker scene ; the torments of the writer who hasn’t written anything is the scene of the false poet in love, and so on. While Melville cries to get lost in his tears, the old lady-killer Da Ponte ( he’d lost only six teeth of the thirty-two of his youth, all in a single day, when he’d had his own turn of bad luck ), Da Ponte doesn’t let up, he strings together the story of the baron in love with the young girl, and of the prince swindled by an old woman, and of the king disguised as a cobbler who is abducted by Turks who want to make him a Janissary. We will never know exactly how Lorenzo goes about converting a catastrophic existence into five acts of slapstick comedy : something like alchemy — all that we have left of alchemy, except for the gold : the smoke, the kitchen, the shelves, the dyes, the powders, the bottles, the sulfur and the mercury, ruin, and the desire to start over after failure.
Da Ponte and Melville — opera seria, opera buffa ( continued ) The misfortunes transformed into moments of opera buffa remain intact, they belong to the unlucky man, hanging from his pockets — oh well, somehow or another Da Ponte does his job, he converts : this operation relies on algebraic powers, and in this way, in ordinary matters, Lorenzo is a good mathematician, in addition to being familiar with commerce : converting misfortunes into subjects for an opera buffa also comes down to maneuvering like a pawnbroker, who loses and restores, finds equivalences, pulls a rabbit out of his hat, guesses what it is that secretly connects the old family watch to a sum of money measured to
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the nearest cent, and finally exaggerates & distorts, skews simple equations to his benefit ( without which no such profession is possible ). The young Melville, still somewhat in the dark, somewhat in the light, sees his misfortunes, one after the other, differentiated, scooped up by this marvelous Italian Da Ponte, the kind of good talker who gestures as he speaks and passes these woes from one hand to the other, into a pocket and up his sleeve, and as Da Ponte dictates they become the text for an amusing love story under an Italian sky — he sees as they escape him, it almost brings him relief, but he’s still in possession of them, the conversion of misfortune into an opera libretto is not an absolution or exorcism, not always a therapy, simply conversion, the performance — in the moment, joyful — of an acrobat whose job it is to do so. ( Knowing his business : Da Ponte finds himself in it, he makes the skill a character trait, the extension of his pride, that of an actor performing pride — next to him, Herman Melville is throwing together a theory of uncertainty every three minutes. ) Compassionate and tender, Da Ponte gives of himself, distracts Melville from his minor doldrums thanks to all his Viennese baggage, his pink and pale blue eighteenth, his company of violins ( first violins, solo violin ), his flings with different registers, different repertoires ( “I knew the soprano — the light soprano, the coloratura soprano, the mezzo, the alto, I also knew pre-Wagnerian ladies who held their own against the tenors and put the baritones to shame” ), his familiarity with the domed interiors of theaters, with the boxes and the figures of men appearing in these boxes as if they lived there, thanks also to a whole life spent under stucco ornaments and in the company of copyists, scores, short verses adapted to the breath of the singers and the
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impatience of the spectators, Joseph II’s melomania, sometimes interrupted by campaigns against the Turks — carrying the unguent of Vienna in his arms, he praises Mozart’s joyfulness & transparency, the beautiful fluidity of his sonatas and his way of escaping the void after having brushed up against it during the adagio. Does the young Herman Melville appreciate the arias of Mozart whistled by this toothless stranger ? does he recognize them ? perhaps ; has he heard of the child prodigy and does he measure the distance between New York’s Five Points and Vienna, made of meringue ? All the same, he must be moved by the “là ci darem” from Don Giovanni, and the bouncing tune of “mangiare mal e mal dormire,” a perfect example of the metamorphosis of resentment into ritornello, should transport him elsewhere — Lorenzo Da Ponte then tries to whistle Papageno’s aria, his duet with Papagena ( on a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, rest his soul ), then he sings the “mille e tre” for the pleasure of repeating his famous catalog thirty years later, at the risk of embarrassing this modest young man a little : he doesn’t seem to know from experience how one dances around the mille e tre. A bit later it will be over, Da Ponte will have succeeded or failed, leaving Herman Melville to his black bile and schoolroom slates, he will return him to the dawn, accompanying him up to the front of his house with the feeling of leaving an illegitimate child on a good family’s doormat — a sense of déjà vu. Too busy, no doubt, to raise his own Da Pontesque morale, so far away from Italy, from Vienna and Prague, from the violin scrolls and the two hundred bows that made him triumph by striking the edges of the music stands : applause, Lorenzo would say to himself, just like daylight through a forest of sparse beeches : neither too much nor too little ( neither too much nor too little, yet that’s not what
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it is, the martingale, not always ) ( Da Ponte doubts ). Even if he is still sad when he returns, Herman takes away with him a bit of Da Pontism, telling himself that insouciance is perhaps a ludicrous notion, a Viennese ornament from the days when men had no obstacles, but perhaps it is a style, the insouciant style, just as Bruegel the Elder had a velvet style : Da Ponte the courtier sold it seven times in a row to his emperor, giving the impression of haggling his virginity seven times over.
Da Ponte palms off Ahab to the young Herman Melville How many times does Alexander Pushkin come to the rescue of his charming friend Nicolai Gogol ? Gogol has a talent for storytelling, a Ukrainian raconteur in St. Petersburg who can hold his audience for three hours, Russian hours, by drawing out the portrait of an old babushka to its breaking point, but Gogol regularly asks his friend Alexander to provide him with a subject : 130 the subject of a story, at least one .— it’s as if a loner had come after midnight to ring the bell at the home of a kind and forgiving soul to ask for his dose of laudanum : a stimulant or a solace. And Pushkin provides : his abundance is not that of Nicolai Gogol ( they are not abundant in the same ways ), Pushkin lightens his load without fear of giving up an essential part of himself ; subjects for stories, situations for comedies, he gives Gogol as much as he wants, he has others in the drawers of his nightstands, three different bedrooms : the story of the arranged marriage, the story of the gambler who is mistaken for someone else — Gogol listens attentively, all Gogolian attention, 130. “Please give me a subject, any subject, funny or not funny” — in a letter to Pushkin, 1835.
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that is to say, relative and tormented, he has grasped the starting point, now in his eyes there’s a glimmer of another kind, it is no longer worry, the relief the subject gives him is worth one hundred times that of the confessional, a hundred times at least. He’ll do wonders with it, a successful play, or a novel, he will multiply the characters, the passing and the prominent ones, even if it means moping around, then exonerating himself, then being contrite, because novels, whether we like it or not, contain a depraved humanity. When Pushkin dispenses the start of a story like a balm ( or like the key to a bachelor pad — let’s just call it a balm ), Gogol gets agitated, it seems like he’s back in operation again, his movements are like that of a repaired clock gone amok, this energy is exhilarating and exhausting —. Pushkin sticks to his frivolous Pushkinian calm : his excitement has its own style. When he sees Herman Melville’s sad soul, Da Ponte feels that he too plays the role that Pushkin does for his friend Gogol ; he also believes he can contain, and after twenty years in the opera, he’s convinced that he can find salvation in the magic formula, that of the subject : the synopsis : the shorter it is, the better to soothe anguish or languishing, & depending upon the way it is read, at the right moment, to the right person, or to oneself aloud, it exhilarates. It didn’t happen often, but during his scattered life as a poet who sold a little of everything ( librettos and items at the general store ), Da Ponte experienced the euphoria of the subject : it served him to overcome the resentment of jealousy, to wait out a predicament, to convince a prince’s better half, & he gripped the subject, noted on the back of a creditor’s letter and folded in eight, in his fists, hiding it from the eyes of the deceitful, unfolded it to reread it, looking hopefully for the pronouncement of his salvation, but looking anxiously
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for the absence of salvation, salvation as a fleeting and derisory illusion, or worse still the pronouncement of his error, as if what were written was “too bad you old fool” instead of a perfect plot. ( Sometimes it happened, instead of letting himself be dazzled at each rereading, Da Ponte experienced disenchantment : rereading was tantamount to denigrating .— it would have been necessary to fold the sheet once more, in 16 instead of the octavo, put a little red wax, a seal, and lock it in the safe : for a year, to keep the brilliant idea away from that gaze that sought to tarnish it. ) ( Sew it into the lining of his coat and walk around with it, or otherwise swallow it as a decoction. ) ( Rereading is tantamount to denigrating, or even depriving it of its substance : by dint of being considered and then reconsidered every five minutes, the dazzling story, otherwise referred to as a stroke of genius, becomes a dull, routine little joke — and the most trying thing isn’t noticing the dreary routine, but knowing intimately that one is the author. ) Herman Melville in the twilight before his glass of beer has his mind set on the sorrowful, according to his character ( later on, the sorrowful will make him want the big epic picture ; he will be biting, & funny, funny to the teeth yet again ). On the other side of the table, Lorenzo Da Ponte understands that he must be a provider of optimism this evening, his optimism will be a makeshift optimism, a priest who impregnates young girls, an occasional plagiarist for whom the author’s name is an orange blossom that has fallen on the foam of the cappuccino and must be removed — the optimism of an old man who’s done the vanishing act twenty-five times, and now feels as if he has arrived. To boost Herman Melville’s Presbyterian morale ( sic ), Da Ponte has the choice between a glass of gin, an excerpt
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from his Memoirs read with a touch of humor, an evocation of the Grand Canal back in the day, the story of when he lost all his teeth at once, or more ribald stories considered as common ground between old and young man. The ribaldry doesn’t work, the Memoirs bore him, the Grand Canal is a stagnant exoticism, the alcohol remains, but three glasses won’t do it — that’s when the idea of the subject comes up : to restore the will to live to this twenty-year-old Melville, who looks like a future poet, but who still seems to hesitate, there’s nothing better than a point of departure : immediately afterwards, this distraught lad will discover this form of hope that is the project. There were not many in Vienna and then in London who saw the librettist Da Ponte racking his brains, it wasn’t his style : what they loved instead was the Da Pontean idleness — and yet, tonight he’s racking them, his brains, he even has a look of concentration, he thinks he’s on to something, he doesn’t have it yet and he wouldn’t want to lose it, he’s digging through his recent memories, he’d like to find a sizzling anecdote, a story about customs or bankruptcy, put on a good show, a point of departure, an amazing coincidence — but lately, there’s been a dearth of coincidences, both good and bad. He’s searching, he doesn’t want to be the second of them to give up : above all, so as not to lose face, not to break his word, not now, when the salvation of a soul is at stake ( there is no need to bring out a theme from his old librettos : they made their little splash in Vienna, but in the middle of a winter’s night in New York, where the setting is like a smuggler’s inn, they would make a poor impression on this melancholy young man : Da Ponte can hardly imagine himself palming off the subject of The Beneficent Bear — even in the worst of situations, decency is to be maintained ).
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On the sailboat Columbia that brought Lorenzo Da Ponte for the first and last time from Old Europe to the New Continent, there were few passengers, poorly paid sailors who didn’t speak the language, an invisible cook, card players, a fellow pretending to be a man of confidence who wasn’t, taciturn neighbors — there was also that irascible old captain, the master on board, a former whale hunter, a good part of his ear torn off by a hook, gnawed by a catalog of personal grudges of which he revealed nothing, perhaps so they would remain mysteries ( according to what we read in his Memoirs, suspicious Lorenzo observed him out of the corner of his eye while the captain in fact would scowl at him, “yawn, and keep silent” ). From Nantucket, he was known as Abissai Hyden, still he must have this name of a psychopomp, and Da Ponte offers him as-is to the young Herman Melville — something there for the hero of an opera buffa, no ? perhaps even an opera seria, as preferred by the music lovers of Paris and London ? A sufficiently gloomy character but touching, with a certain range, a certain mystery, as was the case with Don Giovanni when he was defying the commander’s statues.
Da Ponte and Abissai Hyden from Nantucket That evening, after three glasses of beer and mulled wine, he offers it as a gift,131 conscious of having fired his last cartridge : with a character like that, you can imagine the magnificent libretto, the invention of an opera that is half-buffa, half-seria, a seria-buffa ( or semiseria : it’s a reinvention ), with
131. “I fell into the clutches of a pirate from Nantucket, a whaler who treated his passengers as his sailors, and these as men have never been treated before,” Lorenzo Da Ponte, Memoirs.
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a tenor in the role of the captain who has a hole in his ear, Maria Malibran playing the Queen of the Amazons coming to accost the Columbia to reduce the men to slaves : the mad captain, his crew of baritones, his passengers, and among them the lad, let’s say, Emanuele, who falls head over heels in love with the Amazon Clizia, the queen’s favorite, in theory shielded from the love of boys. He had been able to see it, the victorious Amazons, celebrating, sword in one hand, a flute in the other, brought to laughter by the fishermen sailors who were their catch and loot ; he’d imagined the love between the favorite & the young Emanuele, a handsome Italian patriot fleeing the repression of Austria, heard the song of the huntresses and the voice of Abissai Hyden, the Tartarian, the terrible, suspected of having dug beneath the scuttle a hole and then a conduit in the shape of an inverted periscope leading to the Underworld through three thousand feet of water ; he’d envisioned him as a little Hades, a little Beelzebub, or a little Faust, but with the meanness of a stingy captain, the kind to transport stowaways and sell them at the lowest price. He’d told himself that Abissai would provide a wonderful contrast to the queen of the Amazons, and for entertainment, all the Amazons, more nimble and rhapsodic, more rascally than warlike, zingarelle ; on the backs of receipts he’d written down the idea for a second act and the third, the love duet beneath the moon, the aria of the barrel-makers, the great banquet scene, for the last act he’d envisaged the affection of Abissai, the affection of the Amazon queen, a monstrous love pushing them toward each other, a love that is a bit comical and finally deeply touching, the marriage, the reconciliation, the forces of sailors and Amazons united against an external adversary, the fleet of the Grand Turk, a mixture of fantasy and various facts.
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But he’s too old for that now, too tired, he has come back from the dead so many times, emptied his drawers, and he suspects that in six months he’ll have given up his very last tooth to God, more likely to men, his funeral will take place in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, just as one last indulgence, to flatter his pride with music — provided there is a choir. It is thus at this moment of confidence & counsel that Da Ponte leans over to the young Melville without spilling a single glass ( the acrobatics of experience ) and says to him : I offer him to you, my pirate from Nantucket, you’ll make better use of him than I with my bitterness and residual seasickness ; you’ll be agile enough, you’ll be able to make him kind and luminous — but I prefer that you avoid one pitfall : this old curmudgeon was called Abissai Hyden, you heard me, Abissai, & then together with Abissai, Hyden, as if Abissai weren’t already enough. At the time, I remember, I was seduced by this name of cymbals, gong, and contrabassoon, I believed I detected in it a comrade to these Altamars and Biscromas I created to inhabit my operas ; in it I measured, I believe, the right irony and the impeccable darkness ; what remains in me as a music lover continues to be sensitive to these Pentateuchal syllables, they are those of a remarkable villain, somebody who frequents the depths of the sea. But I also know that any librettist worthy of the name must from time to time show restraint ( I have not always been faithful to this duty, and the whole of the XVIIIth century will soon plead on my behalf ) : If you accept my Curmudgeon, if one of these days you write a libretto worthy of my Don Giovanni that will make you rich and famous, refrain from using his name, you would not be forgiven, its oversignificance & pre-gothic tone belong to our world, where extravagances are forgiven, as sometimes symbols are forgiven because they’re accidental — you will be able to be more
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understated, I trust : the Curmudgeon will appear before your spectators with his ear cut off, his name of Abissai Hyden will go away, like the contented soul of Don Giovanni, to hide in the grave of the sea : and that will be the last of it. 132
Melville’s Ahab, Da Ponte’s Ahab Many interpreters of the Moby-Dickian thing ( professional specialists or amateurs more demanding than professionals ) would not want a captain from Da Ponte’s notebooks : the lead is too mediocre, Da Ponte is a phony, a compiler of librettos acquired from rag-pickers, a half-librettist who freelances for weddings and the opera season, half-businessman pumping other people’s money, counting on cash as well as on nice turns of phrase, with his facility as a plagiarist. Ahab deserves better than this blowhard who’s dismissed in a puff of smoke wherever he goes : Ahab must be terrible, born of a nightmare, like Jekyll, Hyde, and Frankenstein’s patched-up thingamajig, he must be given life by the bolt of lightning from Chapter 119, the one from Corpo Santo that burns his harpoon, or at the very least the more domestic lightning of Melville’s migraine, an evening of depression close to madness ( and for others, he must have 132. We must either believe the story about Abissai Hyden or admit that Da Ponte found his captain elsewhere : he again pilfered from his old rival Pietro Metastasio, himself a pilferer of Ariosto, who imitated Luigi Pulci, who had imitated others, all of them going back to ancient gossip peddled from the north to the south of Italy, in bits and pieces, about a lake, a priest-king, and ritual murders carried out every twenty-five years : foolish stories — perhaps the old captain was already present, angry, prematurely exhausted, with his wooden leg, in the epic of Gilgamesh, written on walls in Babylon.
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been born of a disgusting miracle of the sea, the saliva of a squid, for example, the cloud of ink then serving as a beautiful metaphor ) ; optimally, they want to see him bloom, that’s what they claim, above Melville as he sleeps, with his look of Goyaesque fancies, drunk with pride but a little embarrassed at the idea of representing good and bad at the same time. ( Oh, well, imagine what you want, and go and tell Da Ponte, to thwart him : one night of insomnia, one drink too many, the memory of a sermon in church, the jealous God failing to become a God of love, a charming, one-eyed oyster merchant, and the advice of a publisher, a wise man according to whom, if the book is about a huge fish, it needs a tremendous fisherman. ) But a captain Ahab drawn from the leather wallet of this Lorenzo Da Ponte, who palms it off in exchange for Esteem and an advance on earnings, is not the same thing : it lacks elegance and is in fact a little unseemly. A fragment from his Memoirs is, were we to accept this, an excerpt from the prose of a fine liar used to offering a sycophantic fable to get a position or just to flatter, flatter into the void, you never know, the benefits of flattery come later without any warning. Better a Melvillean Melville who owes nothing to this half-impostor from Italy, especially not a piece fallen from his Memoirs, the alms given to the destitute one night of distress : if this be the case, we must acknowledge Ahab’s Da Pontism, namely the picturesque, the rococo, the pre-vaudeville, the ins and outs of the commedia, facile contrasts, even more facile rhymes, material borrowed from competitors, who find inspiration in opportunistic idleness and are themselves borrowers in the name of the continuity of the Eternal Motifs ( sic ). ( Especially since it will be necessary to search for the source of this Da Pontean Ahab
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in other librettos, older ones, copies of copies, somewhere in Europe under piles of catalogs, from royal library to archiepiscopal library : perhaps with the prolific Metastasio — . and from Metastasio it will be necessary to go back, who knows, to a minor author of tragicomedies from the time of Septimius Severus. ) Da Ponte’s Ahab : an obvious lack of seriousness,133 two solo arias in the bass register, the role of the villain, one of those who cloisters away young girls or covets them and writes false break-up letters signed with the name of a handsome young man, the fiancé — the false letter then falling, naturally, from the branch of an elm tree, in the autumn, into the young lady’s bodice. This Da Pontean Ahab is not just covetous, he’s a schemer, he inherits the denarii of Judas, his fortune is a lie or an unspoken word, or a mixture of both, he’s inspired by greed, it helps him to find rhymes for short verses, which give the illusion of ardor rather than appetite — Lorenzo Da Ponte has him approach the soprano damsels to sound again ( the formula works ) the innuendo of love ( Da Ponte crosses his fingers : perhaps beauty will emerge from this vulgarity set to music ).
Ahab on the quarter-deck The captain happened to clean out his ears, really one ear and then the other ear two hours later, so as to enjoy how much of a lag there was between one side and the other, and to consider himself at that moment on par with Saint Anthony in the desert : attention, abstinence, restraint, and meticulousness.
133. Of gravity, elegance.
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Ahab on the forecastle To make the ordeal of being himself and no one else more tolerable, he hesitated for a long time between buffoonery, the constant lie of lovers and usurpers, affliction alternating with false affliction, histrionics, the glory of the monster preserved in a jar filled with alcohol that wins the admiration of poets ( all transparencies conjoined : the transparency of the jar, the alcohol, the poet, and the poetry ), and megalomania ( unable to make his choice, he decided to take it all, buffoonery and megalomania, at least at the time when he was still hammering the Pequod ).
Orson Welles patches together an adaptation of Don Quixote ( followed by : Orson Welles attempts to be Shylock ) Orson Welles must have gotten deliciously lost in Don Quixote, the two volumes like two comic testaments, and this would likewise imply that he got lost alongside Don Quixote in his own dismembered story — struggling for years in hotel rooms locked from the inside ( do not disturb ) with two thousand meters of film, cut into long strips, more or less, paying homage to the routes that the knight followed, more or less, across Spain. It also involved a voluptuous communion with the ribbons of film, with the chapters of the book, with Franz Kafka’s commentaries, and all the interpretations that Rocinante and his master were able to inspire at a time when interpretation, for lack of a horse, picked up where Quixote had left off. There was the certitude of getting lost in it, of confusing the beginning with the end, of seeing the pieces falling piecemeal on his foot as the armor of Quixote could have, a little here, a little there, salvaged right & left and soon returned to the earth to be scattered one last time
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( a redistribution ). This is, moreover, the love story between Orson Welles and Don Quixote ( that of posterity, of the second volume, of the copycat Avellaneda, and of that which no one could see, in private ) : it puts the question of unity and fragmentation to the test over a period of many years. Not the impudence to conclude immediately, no certain answer to the enigma, but at least an intuition when Orson Welles observes what he was able to compose by adding one end to another, and what he chose to abandon : the intuition that Welles and perhaps Quixote did not stop wondering how a composite being gives, to himself & to others, the illusion of continuity, down to its very ashes. Splitting up his copy of the Quixote, scattering its pages from one country to another and simultaneously cutting, reattaching, losing pieces of his own Quixote, which he has difficulty making, to the point that more often he gets the impression that he’s repairing it — he does it to understand, to decipher ( Welles is an actor, if he wants to understand a grimace his first reflex is to grimace ), undoubtedly to love better, and to alleviate who knows what anguish ; to pay homage once again to the human race so dazzling in its diversity, from infamy to Petrarchism. Others will say that it is to escape himself, to first tear himself apart and then give himself the slip, as he often promises himself : at times it resembles the gestures of childhood when childhood destroys a toy to experience the astonishment of pleasure & misfortune at the same time — but they should not be confused, even though Orson Welles speaks of the electric train in respect to Hollywood : all those spliced strips, the fragmentation, the falls, the reassembly, there is no sacrifice, and when Welles separates a character from the actor who plays him, and the actor from his voice through dubbing, or from the set by a false reverse shot, the vertigo experienced
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is foreign to the pleasure of destruction : it is the observation that no mutilation will ever prevent a man from being a man and a narrative from being a narrative — no mutilation robs the spectator, his own in any case, of the power to pay attention to phenomena, and granting it ensures continuity between one thing and another ( giving a name to an improbable hodgepodge is an indulgence always superior to the malice of fragmentation or to the malevolence of those who impose abandonment and exile ). ( Staging hurriedly, at the last minute, and then filming by surprise, too early, a play from the repertoire just before rehearsal, when Ruy Blas is still in his plain clothes, his face free of the mask and his body far from his costume, is for him an alarming experience : the fear of failing but the certainty that it will all work out in the end : a miracle of Music-Hall. ) As somebody familiar with the cutting room, he believes he has the right to play Shylock ( it is also a duty ) —. he thinks to himself : my exile, my preoccupations, my ruin, my abandonment, my spiritual and material fragmentation, my desire to leave myself far behind every day ( yet with the certainty of finding myself around the corner ), my unfinished works, my possessions that have gone missing in foreign safes, my dispossession, my injustice in response to injustice, my allegiances, my motel rooms, and my art of brutal separation must allow me to understand Shylock, however distant he may be, and however different from me. I was born the opposite of the poor Jew of Venice and the diaspora, I am the American with a nose that is too small but with a vast territory, who has the name of his god written on all his banknotes and a passport of empire — only, the misadventures of Hollywood authorize me today to become Shylock, little by little, or a descendant of Shylock :
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I too had to flee, I learned to pack a small suitcase, and like the Jews of the diaspora, I learned to do without Temple, which requires a little intellectual agility and control of one’s deepest emotions : Temple is everywhere a Jew recites his Torah, Hollywood reconstructs itself around me from the moment I turn a camera toward my face, even if I’m in the middle of the Spanish desert. If I am doomed to chase after Shylock without ever catching up with him, I can hope to get closer to him, to his most intimate and perhaps least historical part : like Shylock ( I’d stake my life on it ), I have secretly and carefully developed a hatred of myself, which is of defiance and exasperation, which is also the innocent desire to be anyone else, and the dream of one day looking at myself in a mirror as a stranger, seductive and disconcerting. I’m not going to play Shylock as a Venetian, or Shylock as a merchant anymore, his honest greed will always escape me, I’m not going to play him as a humiliated man, a fussy vagabond ; I manage just to understand the “when you tickle us, do we not laugh ?” ; getting closer to the Zohar of a nameless god, a gold coin, and a yellow sign does not help me to be Shylock as I would like to be, cursing me so rapidly to become Arkadin or Kane — but I will catch up with Shylock the day I manage to make my disenchantment the twin to Shylockian disenchantment : at that time, both of us will want to give ourselves the slip, self-betrayal will be the subject of mutual agreement between Orson Welles and the moneylender — with makeshift resources, and because it will be urgent, we will remove the name from one thing, the thing from another thing, and the city from the city map.
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Old Lorenzo speaks to young Melville with experience about resentment What does Da Ponte know about resentment ? what he was able to learn about it while in Vienna, home of merciless competition, alliances of convenience, jealousies, and little vendettas settled by fiery letters, without any name at the bottom of the letter. These little Viennese paybacks engender little, almost ceremonial grudges between gentlemen in the same profession : the fact that they are opportune and can be burned immediately spares them from the need to be ample, as ample as a baldaquin. He definitively discovered the maw of a deeper grudge the day he had to write hastily ( it’s always hastily, with Da Ponte ) the part of the Commander for his Don Giovanni, for a baritone, bass-baritone : as it was necessary to impress an audience that had grown exacting, especially toward an Italian, he gave his statuesque commander the gravitas of theatrical machinery, the machinery of revenge. Even now ( thirty years, no, forty years, Dio mio, after having written Don Giovanni ), Lorenzo wonders if Giovanni didn’t go through all of that voluntarily, the farm girls, the maids, the women of the world, to give himself up in the last act to the Commander’s revenge : he wanted it, his avenger, he invited him to strangle him, and he waited for him without moving — the invitation made to dine, the table set, the wine chambered, the false ease, the apparent forgetfulness, all this was a production, that of a master of the house who does not want to make his evening a ponderous ritual but an informal gathering. He desired his damnation, to the point of digging a trap door in the floorboards, adjusted to his height and shoulders, to the points of his tricorn ( going down without his hat was out of the question ), through which he would disappear — getting this right was essential.
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In the last act, the grudge-holder shows up, punctual, as the roasted chicken is served with its feathers on a bed of vegetables ( just imagine Don Giovanni on the day of his lapidary guest cooking, wearing an apron, licking his index finger from time to time, and Leporello running to the grocer’s shop to buy cloves — perhaps it exists, this bouffe version of Giovanni, the song of the celery stick, a ladle as big as a bathtub, where Donna Elvira would have fit comfortably in the lotus position ). When he sees the Commander before him, Giovanni tells himself that the time has finally come to observe the grudge down to its smallest details, and perhaps to understand something of this existence — but the exercise is difficult, the Commander is a statue, he walks heavily without giving much to see, his grudge cannot be read on his face, not easily, once someone will die without knowing why. One does not become a spectator in the blink of an eye : Giovanni tries to buy time ( he aspires to immobility as a mark of nobility ), he slows down his gestures : it takes him a good minute to bring a hazelnut to his mouth, reminiscent of Cleopatra with her priceless pearl.134 ( When the Commander, who has become a bald Sphinx, strangles the very small, very ephemeral Don Giovanni, he realizes too late that the defeat was anticipated ahead of time : he falls into his enemy’s trap, and his enemy falls through his trap, as planned, his old dream. )
Penultimate advice to the young Herman Melville There would have been another salvo of advice ( but one is less certain of this ), Da Ponte inciting his young friend Melville to visit Venice or the whole Italy of his youth, Da Pontetian, 134. These are, ultimately, all hypotheses — after each hypothesis of this type, Lorenzo Da Ponte orders something to drink.
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to discover his traces along the streets and the alleyways, on the bridges, in the squares that are called campi, to awaken the Zerlina, Violetta, Pipa, and Ernestina, whom Lorenzo loved abruptly when his cheeks were still rosy — and if Melville dreads getting old women struck by amnesia to emerge from their graves or an impasse behind a wall, then he should take advantage of being in Venice and far from home to rouse his own new Zerlina, Violetta, Pipa, and Ernestina, great-great-great-granddaughters, get them to jump over a canal, first in short and then in long strides, and start over, and continue stories started long ago, in his own way. Da Ponte’s biographers grant their hero a superior strength of conviction, with alcohol helping ( they may be right ), to the point of casting doubt on Melville’s voyages on various whalers en route to the Galapagos, until 1844 : his whaling exploits served to hide from his family the mild winters and summers spent between the rio della Misericordia and the rio della Sensa, on the way from Violetta to Ernestine. It is not known if Da Ponte was a sound adviser, and one wonders if his biographers saw clearly ; the meeting took place in February 1838, and Lorenzo died in August ; Herman Melville was hired as a cabin boy the following year ; from that day on, we have to take his word for it.
Moby Dick in Hollywood — the paradox of the one-legged actor The sight of the actors trying out for the role of the captain in the prop store is a sight to behold : crutches and wooden legs in drawers, but also affixed to the wall, coming down to them as do the trophies of those miraculously cured in a chapel dedicated to a holy healer ( one also sees them rummaging with desire, genuine desire, in the drawer where eyepatches are arranged by size, by kind, left eye or right
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eye ; it must be written somewhere in the Sailing Code that the man of the sea does not, after a certain age, have the right to be equal on both sides : symmetry is off-limits for him, it’s a token of beauty and banality reserved for those who have stayed ashore ). They don’t all know how to limp, they must be forgiven : the captain never knew either, he never even knew if it was possible to know, and now, after having gone through one hundred types of crutches and one hundred types of wooden legs, he believes he has the right to say that there is no learning in this regard, you don’t learn from anyone, you don’t base an experiment on inability and repetition, and obstinacy doesn’t metamorphose into science every day — there is only the obligation to act, & mortals who, with some luck, manage to get away with it.
Moby Dick, the old hunter, seen through the spyglass The cetologists are aggrieved to witness his endless hunting episodes : they see the old Moby Dick taking his usual course, behind a fishing boat, in front of another one, in rhythm with these liners that will soon no longer exist but continue in spite of common sense ( at the same speed, and just as lamentably, plantigrade, the big floes detached from the ice pack pass by, portly and resigned, peaceful perhaps, stripped of any millenarian fear, but ashamed with the shame of drifting without direction, they too have fallen, freed, all fallen ; they seem to want to apologize before disappearing — in any case, they will disappear, in the form of the trickling of fresh water, acquiescing, before reaching the Tropic of Cancer ). The whale gives himself vindictive airs, imitating the captain in his time as captain ; he is martial, he is a hunter, he still relies on the fascination of a large mammal, so he parades, his absence of self-esteem
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incites him to show himself — but what is seen passing by, from a cetologist’s point of view, is neither vindictive nor martial, it is much less than that : a slow fish and its listless wake behind it, no longer foaming, a bit of scum like an old leftover. The cetologists have the impression they are observing a final journey made on an old impulse given centuries ago 135 and which does not concern them any more ( nothing in common, for example, with the Sphinx when it sweeps down, as one says, on a small mortal prey, half-shepherd, half-sheep ). But the cetologists’ judgment is not to be entirely believed : they are severe, they are disillusioned ; their severity is bitterness, their bitterness is a part of their melancholy ; they are nostalgic for a time when it was still possible to say, jumping up & down, she’s diving, she’s diving or there she blows, there she blows, back when they themselves would give in to terror more easily.
How a big studio entrusts F. Scott Fitzgerald with the adaptation of Moby Dick
[ 1940 ]
In Hollywood we already knew Patrick O’Brien, metamorphosed into Hobby, known as Paddy or even Pat, the very model of the disappointed & obsolete screenwriter, looking for inspiration ( dry & arid, reserved ) by reading Irish whiskey labels — but there are a number of others, from among these drinkers, ready in the event of a crisis to name Ireland as their country of birth, and to return so as to fortify themselves with water from the source. Hollywood, from time to time, to general surprise, wants to show commiseration, without ostentation, sending one of its short-haired messengers to solicit somewhere in town, 135. An old impulse : always the same ( see above ).
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wherever he may be, a talented and unemployed drunkard to offer him an honestly paid job ( he may as well be, with any luck, a drunkard of genius, one of those it has courted, brought back home, pressed, dazzled, and disappointed before bringing them back to earth ). His pity is mingled with a Hollywoodean greed, a natural greed in short, forgiven before & after, since we tell ourselves that, in the end, show business is a business & orchestra seats are expensive —. in spite of that, he sometimes seems to be full of attention, he is maternal, he sometimes weeps for his mistreated geniuses, without us knowing where he gets his tears from: he can’t bear ( or does so with difficulty ) ( Hollywood would be pragmatic and sentimental ) the idea of leaving a man of letters, once renowned for his lines, paid so many dollars a line, to languish in a small apartment. The little shorthaired messenger leans his bike against the wall, hurries up the stairs of a cheap hotel ( “which gives credit until the day after the world ends” ), notes that the doors are the color of goose poop, against the background of a mauve corridor, then knocks or rings, reads on a mailbox label the name of the fallen genius, and as he says it aloud so it will go through the walls to reach bedroom, he hears the sound of empty bottles moving on the floor. The highest-paid author in New York ( four thousand dollars for each short story published in Esquire magazine ), now a West Coast scriptwriter who is remembered from time to time, is F. Scott Fitzgerald,136 he has a finger on every key of his typewriter, almost all except the numbers, and stares into space, wondering if he will once again write the story of a poor young man in love with a rich scamp, and if he will be able to sell it for a good price, the price, say, of twelve ties ? 136. During the year 1940, which was his last.
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Since it’s a matter of adapting a story about sailors ( there had been talk of whaling ), they could have gone and woken up Ernest Hemingway, who had triumphed over everything, sleeping happily beneath a muleta : he would have brought a bit of his virile power to this ill-fated adventure of a whale pursued by a whaler : composed as a combat, the story going from uncertainty to victory, plus the victory wounds would have pleased the men from Hollywood. F. Scott Fitzgerald asks himself precisely the question, as the messenger rings his doorbell, stirring the bottles with his foot : why come find him to write the script of a fisherman : he the vanquished, the city-dweller, hating anything remotely resembling a field of wheat in the countryside ( for Fitzgerald, after two bottles, the comparison has the force of law : the ocean is more or less a wheat field, & the sea is Kentucky boredom when it rains ), why come looking for the New York kid in love with the penthouses, known for covering up his cabin window on transatlantic liners between America and Europe ? The first thing to say to these nabobs when Fitzgerald has regained his composure and can consider his hangover as an injunction to negotiate : ask Ernest instead, he loves bullfighting & tuna fishing, your white whale story is a clumsy combination of the two, if my intuition does not deceive me. 137 So much for Ernest, America’s most famous scorpionfish fisherman ( “whom America offered to Paris in exchange for its admiration” ), Fitzgerald accepts the contract, he sees zeros on a sheet of paper, he translates them into a number of characters and days of reprieve : he is willing to try to give a more or less dignified, presentable form to the rantings of this drunken sailor ; he will use his own drunkenness as 137. At Salamis, the Greeks maneuvered as if fishing for tuna.
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insider knowledge to better penetrate this old captain’s universe ; he promises not to increase the costs by reducing the number of naval battles ( a screenwriter must like sobriety, at least while writing : it’s a matter of production costs, and it keeps him and his people away from the frescœs of the Last Judgment ).
Moby Dick versus F. Scott Fitzgerald Scott Fitzgerald goes from one fall from grace to the next, it became his style, it gives shape to his success, a way to make a remarkable paradox shine at nightfall like a solitary diamond on his finger — a long time ago, he saw men like Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd fall on screens stretched out a few meters in front of him, without learning anything from them at the time, telling himself that the revelation by the great masters would come later. The 1920s, with or without howls, the roar of engines, still lasted too long for a man of spontaneous success and fleeting happiness : in secret, for himself, but systematically, he got ahead of the curve, he initiated his decrepitude, the splendid decrepitude of a handsome kid standing right in the light — at that time, in the absence of premonition, death was a motif for a writer of short stories, and the object of his worldly challenges, it was also the very example of contingent things ; Fitzgerald developed it before the end of the decade, he at least had the talent to bring it into being within the heart of his success, a matter of participating in the design of his imminent end : its graphic design. Always the fall from grace, when he can no longer make his friends laugh, drunk on nineteen, twenty-two glasses, when he has to greet a stranger who had been best friend in the entire world, the night before : & he’d also offered him his tears. He could have continued to live
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his Fitzgeraldian decadence on his own, in this rented room, in the absence of everything, without this or that ( money, wife, friends, invitations, pen and ink ) : he would have taken advantage of this free time to look for the prophecy of his forties in his youthful works. But there is no way to stay calm : the short-haired Paramount messenger who’s come this morning to knock on his door to bring all the water of the Captain Ahab story into his cabin is the devil’s latest trick, the best way to spoil even his own decline —. Fitzgerald does not, however, feel inclined to fail at failure. He accepts — Pat Hobby, the creature of his Hollywood short stories, written to rid himself of his rage and to better make of himself a trial without compassion, Pat Hobby, the fat alcoholic, would have cobbled together his screenplay, to make ends meet, ignorant of everything ( it’s an advantage ) about the fish trade and the production of oils in factories. Fitzgerald does not intend to make things right by drinking water, nor at his age does he intend to borrow the style of easy triumph ( triumph in the style of Hemingway ), it would be too tiring — but he will at least do his best, and spare himself shame by turning in some tidy copy. F. Scott Fitzgerald, adapter of Moby Dick ; or the Whale : it will be necessary to find a way to set off one or two torpedoes, if possible ; in addition to this old captain, there will be Marty, Edna, Sylvia, and Max inspired respectively by Cole, Alexandra, Margaret, and himself ; he’ll pass over these stories of fishing, which he finds tedious, as quickly as possible, so as to concentrate on the essential. ( Later on, if scriptwriter Ahab naively asks the last of the Fitzgeralds what this essential consists of, Scott ( call me Scott ) will have the feeling of being both resolutely full and absolutely empty, “the essential” becoming for him simultaneously obvious and enigmatic. ) ( Just imagine a meeting between Fitzgerald on
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an empty stomach and Ahab, under another name, a kindly old man, clever enough to sell his story to the producers in three lines. Fitzgerald always makes a face when people talk to him about haggling over stories, as if a good joke could really be sold for a lot of money ; he remembers having sold the rights to a short story for a thousand dollars, and it was sold the next day for forty times as much : his grimace is one of greed and contempt for greed. ) F. Scott believes he has, labelled on his forehead and tattooed on his belly, at least two titles, Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby, he once compared them to two decorative & cumbersome butterflies —. he thinks he’s got the hang of it, he chooses the names of his characters with the care of a chair-mender, he reminds the upholsterer of the right nail, his right hand knows how to bring the carriage back to the line, he could be a trombonist, he learned from Henry James how to calibrate his pages and speak to the chief editor, he has divine indulgences & generosities, giving five thousand words to the story of a failed marriage, ten thousand to that of the reunion ; he learned to write lines of dialogue, God knows who from, with these later crossed out by the director, patiently but sharply. ( Before the author, Ahab would show himself to be courteous, he would not dare ask him if he knew Stravinsky well : he would be satisfied with seeing what his whale was going to be disguised as this time — it sometimes tires him to have to insist so much on the whale’s cetacean nature. ) Some nights ( paranoia & twilight coinciding ), Fitzgerald thinks there are some shenanigans afoot, the latest, or nextto-latest, that his enemies at Paramount have devised so as to draw ridicule down on him : a trap based on a miraculous contract and an old Hemingwayan sea dog who’s supposed to dictate his adventures to him so as to make of them a feature-length film, full of wind gusts, with Douglas Fairbanks
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dangling from a rope and wearing tight pants. The mirific contract worked, he got Fitzgerald to leave his cabin, passing over empty bottles ( they were rolling all over, like apples in a basket : already aboard a ship on hostile seas ).
F. Scott Fitzgerald spends his last days in the company of Moby Dick Entrusting the screenplay in its umpteenth version to F. Scott Fitzgerald meant foisting them off simultaneously : a pleasant sideline, in this case the hotel room rented by a studio 138 somewhere in Los Angeles, entire days for writing, the thousand dollars a week reduced to two hundred out of caution ( cover with gold and then pay in handouts : in this matter, the nabobs know they invented nothing ). The troublesome Aguirre was sent to seek the gates of El Dorado at the very end of the Orinoco, escorted by various kinds of madmen and fevers ; now, to give Fitzgerald something to do, to pay for his beers by the truckload, and to keep him in line, a messenger ( the messenger from earlier ) entrusts this talented man ( but comparable to an empty cigar box, where the presence of cigars and the trace of an old luxury can still be guessed ) with the script of Moby Dick in draft form ( its thirteenth draft ) : two hundred and fifty pages, with annotations. The hope of seeing them both disappear, at least for a while : Fitzgerald because of his self-portraits “as Fitzgerald,” increasingly pathetic, the script of Moby Dick because nobody wants to hear about whales at a time when submarines are stars ( from America, Germany, or Japan ). And indeed it works, they in fact disappeared : Hollywood tricks are the crude tricks of stranglers and great patrons who don’t have any taste, but they work, they achieve their ends, the result 138. Paramount, probably.
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delights the great patron as if it were John the Baptist’s head on a silver platter ( ah, the shining beauty of silver, the chasing, the hallmarks, & atop is a trophy, which doesn’t say a peep ). There is either a bottle next to F. Scott, or there is not : proverbial, fraternal, with this nothing of treachery contained in fraternity — in any case, a totem, in half-darkness, reflecting lights already reflected, coming from elsewhere, from an exhausting outside of which Fitzgerald sometimes wants to know nothing more. It stands watch if it stands watch and could be the eye of Cain, but there has never been a crime serious enough to justify now calling an empty bottle the eye of Cain — if it is empty, say, if it drains itself, time has an effect on it, it is still sensitive to duration, it is a fact of the living, not a milestone of death ; it could even measure the hours, not those of the mortal, those of the drinker, if the drinker is willing to bestow this virtue upon it ( beyond certain hours, indeed, the drinker bestows any virtue upon anything, their generosity would like to work both ways : they offer out of greed ). It is also a cliché : to remember Fitzgerald, when they pass a cemetery or the Algonquin Hotel, some of his old friends choose to start with the label of a bottle — and then, from far and wide. He must have missed winter, the real New York winter, as any man born and raised with the alternation of summer with snow would miss it ; the lukewarmness of February in addition to the bottle graveyard becomes, in this empty room with drawn shutters, proof of the end of times, the end of times as he knew them — already happened, about to happen. He may have voluntarily reduced himself to very little by drinking, by doing to the bottle what it demanded of him, but Fitzgerald is not fooled by his own tricks ; he applies them with what remains of his cool head, that frightening remnant of practical & discerning lucidity, indestructible, located at
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the bottom of inebriation : he knows he has long associated his decadence with the decadence of America as a whole during the long 1930s, he saw there a playwright’s move, or a cowardice, and even today, if he takes the trouble, he knows how to make a distinction between his beliefs and his disbelief, he would be ready to acknowledge ( let’s say that the Last Judgment exists ) his responsibility for his ruin, without anybody else, inspired by nothing else but the idiotic, divine desire to continue being F. Scott Fitzgerald after having been him, oh so easily. A little more ( one more Judgment, or Judge, and a movement of the hand, one more, toward the bottle, without grasping it ), and Fitzgerald would recognize himself as being guilty for the Crisis, even the Dust Bowl —. not fooled this time, and not fooled by the ruse of nursing his victim wounds with a great culprit’s pride, either. Perhaps he knows it ( nothing in the room gives us proof of this ; it is empty of symbols, apart from the signs that our compassion wants to put there ; it is neutral, it had not been waiting for Fitzgerald to exist, it feels no responsibility, it is placid as things are, and for this reason it admires no one, it stands in the way if it has to stand in the way ; it goes on without expecting anything, not even Fitzgerald’s death — and after him, after his passing, it will not want to recall any legend, itself only somewhat legendary, or not at all ( the following day it will still offer hospitality ) — perhaps he knows it, that F. Scott Fitzgerald will live out his last days in the company not of this bottle ( he leaves this to the biographers ), but of the pages of a scarcely drafted script that six or seven before him had already tried their hands at —. at one point there is talk of a sea of oil and the absence of wind in the middle of nowhere. ( As he was sometimes waggish, both sober and drunk, those times when the very faculty of speech passed uninterruptedly from drunkenness to
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the day after, he would imagine his final days, even in Zelda’s arms, because this is where it was safe to imagine his last days — nightfall, early winter, was the best he could find to get an idea of death, a good start, one does what one can. He imagined his last days in Paris, missing New York, he imagined them in New York with the happiness of remaining where he was and feeling at home, he never imagined them in the open sea in the mouth of a whale — more often, he prophesied them in the form of a fight, in a far more comfortable room, decorated by Marcel Proust, between a genius killed by tuberculosis and the letters of his work —. sometimes he gave himself the strength, sometimes not, to press the last key, the one with the period : but as big as the Beaverhead Crater in Montana. ) ( We see him turning the pages of the script, from first to last, and last to first, the melancholy of a weary caliph, content and poor at the same time, looking for a name to keep him company. )
F. Scott Fitzgerald — Mr. Ahab, I presume ? Frigyes Karinthy had the comical idea of prophesying his death as a sudden ending that came while tying his shoes ; his death was as he had foreseen ; Fitzgerald could see himself lying on the carpet, at a girl’s house, too far from the bottle, far from his notebook, far from the telephone, far from a doorknob, in which he would have absurdly put his last hopes. The girl, they say, is true : the chronicles confirm the official version of a death of such little magnificence, so little, without the whirring of torpedo wheels, and a death that this time, again, entailed neither the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, nor a carnivalesque funeral up Broadway. In truth, there is no girl, at least for the moment,
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only the carpet, the telephone that is out of reach, and any trivial object to which a dying man, falsely inspired ( dying inspiring stupid whims, no doubt ), will attach importance. And Fitzgerald’s days are studious, he needs this to restore his dignity : somewhat worried, he spends hours familiarizing himself with characters who are gradually less present, making detours to his classics to try to understand what a whale looks like and what place to give it in Ahab’s rise and fall ( it’s not rocket science to see it as a symbol, everyone can grasp this, and the idiots responsible for this idiotic contract must have liked it — Fitzgerald’s skill will in fact involve crushing symbols that are too heavy-handed ). To grow attached to this Captain Ahab, without understanding him, so foreign to the New Yorkers’ ways, to get close to him without believing in him, to find him a little picturesque, to look for a face in the books of Dickens, that of a judge, that of a poor sap, to finally place it over the captain’s elusive name — & to try to see more clearly, to get rid of the marine folklore, to justify the idea of revenge, that is, to find somewhere in the universe as Ahab knows it a good reason to be angry with someone. And then to fight, ever to fight against the unpleasant impression that this story of an immense fish is not made for Fitzgerald’s refined and fragile fingers, but for Hemingway’s huge fists — Fitzgerald knows the ocean because he’s slept on it, he’s contemplated it from the deck before returning to the warmth, he’s entrusted it with the contents of his stomach, a pagan offering performed several times ; he knows it above all for having been bored there, horizontally. The idea that so many fish have lived there, still live there, is the result for him of a laborious reflection, going from clues to conclusions, motivated by the coincidental presence of a lobster on his table — . and he never gets used to it.
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( To prove himself worthy of the circumstances : he wonders if he should guess at signs foretelling his death in the pages of this lousy script, in the notes added in the margins by the second or third team of writers, all desperate to revive an impossible story ; he would like to know what this fish has got to do with him ; he wonders if he would be better off pouring his frivolity, acquired in the 1920s on the French Riviera, over these superstitious tales. Two hours later, out of pure professional conscience, he is willing to be convinced to the point of accepting the whale as a threat to himself : ok for the whale if it manages to get its mouth through the window of this studio, and is satisfied with a little author from Hollywood. )
Moby Dick on the hunt for Captain Ahab — volunteer captures This is what is said ( another legend, like four heads of the god Hermes at the crossing of four roads ) : talk is heard all over about the whale & his captures, it’s said that the beast chooses his prey from among the pedestrians gathered on the shore, a victim immediately designated as chosen, and that in this abduction there are rigorous criteria, relating to literature ( nobody is obliged to believe it ), to science, to the struggle for life, to disputes dating back to Poseidon, and something like respect : one strong spirit recognizing another. Some are candidates without knowing each other : they too hope to be given the respect of the strong spirit, they would like to know what the recognition from a sea monster means, and this knowledge, they accept it if need be amidst the spray ( the light and the perilous adventure simultaneously ) — they count on being spotted from afar, & to have their aimlessness as beach walkers mistaken for an old captain’s charisma. They don’t run toward an open mouth,
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they have understood that they should rather act nonchalant along the water’s edge, without prudence, because it’s haughty. They’ve heard it said : the whale, if it’s true, still prefers to choose, his pride depends on it, it carries out his revenge by choosing prior to the capture ; he wants to be the great frugal one, he wants to make his selection with disdain, he even wants to be unfair, if necessary, the absurd error being part of his plan ( unfairness is the application of the Olympian whim ). Rumors reached the beaches with a shoal of empty bottles, saying that the whale is rare but sudden, that nothing stops him, he is arbitrary and entire, his myopia adds to an unfathomable will, coming from afar ; he is grandiloquent, & knows no doubt, the millions of cubic meters of water are not there to deny him when he is wrong. In any case, one must just let it happen : offer oneself as a candidate, but never apply, which would be grotesque — . just imagine : to apply while rowing, clenching one’s jaws, straight toward the beast, a fake, mottled harpoon in hand : and a ridiculous hunter’s clumsiness — on the contrary, passivity : virginal, poetic, where appropriate, disillusioned, vanquished in advance, victorious because it has always wanted defeat ; or the passivity of one contemplating a landscape, paralytic, offered to the sublime, soon believing that one makes one’s immortality depend on the immortality of things when they are thus contemplated ; or passivity of the ungrateful old bachelor, not handsome at all, who wants to watch, sitting on a station bench, wild love pass by ; or passivity of one who has devoted his life to waiting for nothing, for nothing, and now knows what this nothing means ( he would know how to reconstruct it if it were to disappear ). To attract the whale, this complete passivity is necessary, every morning on the beach, looking casual, the sea spray, the sun, the currents of air, whatever happens ; the silence,
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the meditative walk, a mangy walking stick planted in the sand to tell the time by the sun — but no malice of the expiatory victim : the beast must believe in its cruelty until the end. And it is still said : some people have died in this position, sand in their socks and pockets, waiting, perhaps no longer waiting, offering themselves for all they’re worth, even once they’re gone.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, the last adaptor of Moby Dick Beyond his conviction that he needed to pass the script of the white whale on to that yokel weight-lifter Ernest Hemingway, beyond this conviction, there had to be something — . in other words, F. Scott Fitzgerald can’t just turn the pages of a script and add a For Ernest, For Ernest to each line by way of stage directions. ( If he is now forbidden the writing prowess that came to him, effortlessly, at the age of twentyfive, salvation may lie in a bloated & parodic imitation of Hemingwayism – and if that doesn’t work out, he’ll find a path in these unfortunate pages of Moby Dick, the screenplay scribbled by twelve or fifteen successive screenwriters. ) Misunderstanding, distrust, and indifference at best, regarding these characters : not Ahab, who’s too coarse and so inflexible, who will never let himself be taken apart, his dismemberment notwithstanding — nor the fish, Fitzgerald needs a cook to serve as interpreter — nor any of the crewmen, they are not of the same nature as he is. In a letter that ultimately ends up in the trash, Fitzgerald complains to his wife that he’ll never be able to pull off these stories of scallops, if they don’t interest him : the life of a fisherman, even if he’s a little mad, plunges him into a deep gloom ; he felt the same when visiting the big aquariums, in a green light, face-to-face with a grouper ( for Fitzgerald, the grouper is
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the perfect representative of the marine world, the sadness of its face is eloquent : not even an inspired and malignant sadness, it’s a sadness of boredom free of all whimsy, doomed to end badly ( and may nobody come and tell him : the grouper’s sadness is an effect of our anthropomorphism, the result also of fishing, the hours of waiting on the fishmonger’s crushed ice, oh jovial fishmonger, gloved to the elbows — no : on the contrary, the grouper imports all the oceanic gloom to dry land, it does not make a mystery of the monotony of the deeps, monotony with mussels’ flesh ; it does not shine, it does not pretend to peddle the adventures of Neptune, it is not capable ( and knows it ) of suggesting dreams of deserted islands, or lagoons, or the purported joie de vivre in Polynesia : the grouper’s face tells the whole truth of ocean life without light or orchestra, or cocktails ) ). With time, as he flips through the pages, Fitzgerald adapts — in other words, he familiarizes himself : he underlines the . captain’s outbursts with a pencil, one here, another there, to gauge the rhythm of his attacks, if they obey the laws of ancient medicine, like quartal fevers, and to see if it would be possible to put them to music, contemporary music. He performs little calculations, it is work, but not really ; he compares the temperature curve of the captain’s tantrums to his own cycles of drunkenness, sometimes mopey, sometimes enthusiastic to the point of wanting to repaint the Hollywood letters up on the hill ; from experience, he deduces the number of bottles drunk between two whale hunts and two speeches on the imminence of a whale hunt ; the authority of his calculations resembles that of Eratosthenes determining the size of the globe based on the shadow visible inside of a well. When Fitzgerald understands at last, it is through his weariness, his reluctance ( he hadn’t really intended on touching the script, just make his two hundred dollars, delete what
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had already been added & deleted ten times ) ; his lucidity as a reader has managed to pass through several layers of writing, the boredom of his predecessors superimposed on disenchantment and their skill ; to ultimately get to know the true Captain Ahab, as he is able to imagine him, according to his definition of true, Fitzgerald must push the producers as far away as possible — hoping to develop a fiction for himself alone, the fiction of his screenplay. He can put his hand on the captain’s shoulder, he could also give him back the mismatched pieces of his life ; he’s got enough in his pocket to give life, to bring life to Mrs. Ahab, who has remained back home, so that she’s more than just a static love interest, a wooden face nailed on one of the walls of the room. At the time when, with full awareness, he finally assimilates all of Ahab’s fevers as cycles of his own addiction, & resentment as the remedy, the only remedy, for his drunkard’s downfall, Fitzgerald can consider writing, on the backs of the pages, or on other blank pages, anywhere, the Adventures of Ahab instead of a Sequel to the Adventures .— then the ocean makes sense, it is no longer an extended absurdity, it is full of meaning, the whale and the hunt become feasible, they could take the form of a confidence Fitzgerald makes to a friend ; twenty years of a drunkard’s powerlessness and false glory were waiting, without knowing it, for a story of a man who hunted a sperm whale to the point of madness so as to finally open themselves up to the opposite of powerlessness. ( In the meantime, Fitzgerald tried everything, the New York story, the provincial story, the fantastical fantasy, the romantic comedy, the rich girl melodrama, the story of the forest walk, the subtext of the salon, the epistolary short story, stories of barflies like tarot cards, all to wake up the next day around noon with the feeling that he has said nothing, and thus written for nothing. )
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He pulls the script from the hands of Ernest Hemingway, who would have made a fishing party of it ( with the turns of the spinning reel ), enough to still sell his hundred thousand copies ; he knows how to tell the story of a loser saved by the desire for revenge, and now has the means to draw the portrait of a whale ; he feeds a sheet into the roller as he has done thousands of times before, types the letters of a captain’s name with perfect confidence, starts a first sentence about grudge, making it the lightest of our desires, and something beautiful — and then collapses.
Fitzgerald prophesies his alcoholic end He had prophesied alcoholism too, but he cheated, adding advantageous errors to his prophecies, aware of falsifying from the start. When he could afford it, he could be proud of the lucidity, still intact in the last degree of inebriation ; he would now like to inherit it, a gift from the time of his power, he believes he has the natural right to take it all the way to the end, like a key, like a right of veto, something sovereign, not divine, but then of the sovereignty of Genghis Khan, or of an even greater king ( any comparison is impossible, as the universal power of the emperor is either inconceivable for someone who’s been drinking, or the drunkard’s omnipotence far exceeds the empire – accuracy is of no concern, Fitzgerald compares anyway, comparing is one of his habits : an analogy’s failure always includes success, however minuscule, for itself, consumed & celebrated in the moment ). His drunkard’s lucidity at least allowed him to sublimate his alcoholic end — but he knew that later in life he would be condemned to collect the side effects of genius, all unpleasant, in the absence of still having genius, or of having had it once, in the hopes of luring genius into a room decorated and
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furnished to its taste. With a little chance, though the chances were increasingly slim, with a bit of luck Fitzgerald would eventually find genius as a reason for being, as a private talent, as will and as immunity, at the very end of his collapse, with his head in a basement window. ( Chances were increasingly slim : to begin with, his luck at having been a very handsome young man, then his luck as a Broadway contestant dressed for auditions, then his luck at cards, then his luck as a railroad scammer, then the luck of someone who finds a cigar on the sidewalk, & the cigar still smokes for him — then the luck of just getting away with it, by a single hair, just one, and not getting roughed up too much, not this time. ) The drunkard’s end in his drunkenness, at his final stage, without joy or sadness, both bequeathed to the living to furnish the days of their lives, with only the hope of catching death itself off guard without resorting to suicide ( which would be too easy a game ). We don’t know if the long fresco of failure that Fitzgerald painted during his life in and around his books, on a blotchy plaster, with the faces falling back down as they are painted, was the only method, laborious & painful, for him to escape — in other words, to escape death if death presents itself, from the current judges if there are judges, from the critics since they are there anyway, from Ernest Hemingway & all the endemic Hemingways around the world, born from the flank of a swordfish — escaping, of course, the Fitzgerald that his cheap stories published in Esquire will determine for a century, more or less.
Of the hospitality of the absurd and of Moby Dick With age, old Moby Dick promises himself that he will finally reach a full awareness of the absurdity of this world — . which does not mean finding a meaning in absurd lives
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( abolishing the absurd by dedicating oneself to the first meaning that comes along ), but offering hospitality to the absurd — or rather, better yet, accepting the hospitality offered us by the absurd : unreserved hospitality, beyond idyllic, extended to hair-splitters, chihuahuas, proboscis monkeys, flies, their uselessness and obstinacy, to chimpanzees born to study literature but who do not, and to whales like Moby Dick, about which one wonders, what purpose they might serve : a hospitality that is the opposite of suffering, the opposite of pitchforks, absurdity and triviality opening their door very wide, offering their millions of sofas, putting an end to our anguish as living creatures as easily as a pantheist reconciles the religions of the Book by pointing to the bare breasts of Tantrism. The whale has a floating spirit, but this hasn’t escaped him : salvation through meaning is a dangerous and frustrating game, the appeasement comes at the moment the slightly humiliating but limitless comfort of the derisory is accepted : to luxuriate in being absurdity diluted in absurdity. Why not offer hospitality in turn, after having been so well-received, and since the nonsense of this world is, for us, an immense container that allows itself no selection process ? The whale knows this, confusingly, his stomach is hospitable, there are many legends on this subject, to find out, just shake the superstitions from East & West, and tales of men who spent twenty years of their life in a sperm whale’s belly will fall from the books : since then, nobody’s come to refute, belief must have been deemed preferable to doubt, it is hospitality in exchange for the whale’s hospitality, himself worthy of the welcome of the trivial, tit for tat.
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Fitzgerald ’s irony Now there’s no doubt, Fitzgerald’s windows have gone dark, there weren’t that many lights to turn off anyway, fewer than he would have thought, far fewer ; elsewhere, someone pulls the plug on a Christmas tree garland and the effect is more spectacular, it is dramatic, it is the deep disappointment at the end of the holiday season. It’s impossible to know if he had time to feel sorry for himself at the last minute — if he’d have had the time to translate his minute of self-pity into an ironic epigram is another question, the answer is probably no : as a dying man, the ironist Fitzgerald must have had a hard time ( he could only win the battle of irony while alive ). The next day they come for the corpse, a stale glass ten inches from his outstretched fingers, his face dry, already consenting to death ( but perhaps with a post-mortem consent, no one will know ) ; the same day, the same men, perhaps attendants, perhaps friends, pick up a nearly-finished script ; both are taken away at the same time, in the same car — but the idea of ownership, like that of consequence, is very fragile. ( Those who found him provided us with a portrait of a corpse stretched out on his stomach, his nose in a carpet already belonging to another time, a future of synthetic fibers, in which Fitzgerald did not recognize himself. )
The white whale as container If it’s necessary to use reasoning, à la Lewis Carroll, that resembles the tricks of the camera obscura ( rectilinear tricks ) to prove that an adult is just as comfortable in a whale as in a cathedral, grand organs included, then we’ll use it; 139 139. Pat Hobby’s imagination as imagined by Fitzgerald.
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if it takes evidence wrested from the Darwinists, then we’ll wrest them ; if it takes frogmen, if it takes images taken from a bathyscaphe, if it takes a symposium of naturalists specializing in circus attractions and extreme conditions, if it takes serious books, far more serious than this one, if it takes the demonstrations of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who is both a biologist & a mathematician, if it takes a carcass on display at the Natural History Museum, if it takes the report of a forensic scientist — then, we’ll go from there.
Catalog of passengers Those who fill the belly of a whale, as tenants or foreign bodies, make their voices heard in the sperm whale’s head as if they were his bad conscience : melancholics come there to flee the light of the sun, convinced that the unfruitful depression will be replaced in the shadows by inspiration ; a French female political agitator from 1848, 1871, or 1918, who takes refuge there for the time it takes to convert her infernal machine into spinning wheel for the winter nights, and oil into lighting, regrets into Ovidian poetry, and to await amnesty ; an ichthyologist and a conchologist ; a deserter and his mistress, readers of adventure books, taking advantage of the whale’s appetite to develop a wild and pacifist life ; a reader of Dante’s Inferno, a reader for the three-hundred-and-thirty-third time, asking herself questions about architecture ; an ordinary walker astonished to find himself there, spending most of his time wondering where he is, taking measure of the dimensions, finding them arbitrary, and questioning the form and then the reason of his fate ; a retired sportsman ensnared in a stupid wager ; a tired widow,
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beset by the alcohol she wants, offering herself to the whale to live there in fulfillment, though she doesn’t know what kind ; a Greek shipowner fleeing the Treasury ; a criminal chasing impunity ; an English eccentric ( several ) ; an empiricist sacrificing himself to the whale in the hope of demonstrating the impossibility of living there ; a composer of spectral music in search of silence without having much hope of finding it, & haunted thus far by memories of little ditties ; another loner who cures his depression by reading comic books, by starting back over again. 140
Ahab in Irving Thalberg Speaking of allegory, Fitzgerald equated Captain Ahab’s struggle with the battle of the New York prodigy ( himself ) against the Hollywood machine : immortal and elusive. ( Analogies, even if they are only fleeting, are always found in the pages of a screenplay, at various points, in the form of old vestiges : Fitzgerald wanted to take advantage of this fishing story so he could afford to pay Irving Thalberg, the miraculous self-made man, who had risen from kitchen dishwasher to major producer ; he wrote some rather grandiloquent tirades for him ; he reserved scenes of combat & others of melancholy for him ; according to a lost version of the screenplay, Irving Thalberg, Captain Ahab’s twin, was to end his race alone, engulfed, but slowly, as if with reluctance, by the monster’s enormous maw, where the absence of light meant the absence of a future ( and also the end of the sequence ). )
140. From Thomas Jefferson, Memorandum on the Whale.
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How do the whale’s inhabitants live ? How do the inhabitants live ? starting out, they feel their way around, moving forward blindly like the prisoner in the dungeons of Toledo so as to give shape, measure for measure, to the universe that contains them ; they gather what they need to live and what they need for light, they wait for the next meal to sort out the fresh fish and the shipwreck remains, they set up a berth, they add tapers to candles, they mine the boxes of books saved from the shipwreck, hoping that it’s not all Fénelon sandwiched between two Bossuets. Then, reading Bossuet if the books are in fact by Bossuet, ultimately finding him thrilling, considering him as an overlooked precursor to Jules Verne ; to combat boredom in every way, by remembering all the ghosts and demons, one after the other, that Anthony encountered in his desert, by imagining the solution to a spherical crossword puzzle grid that closes in on itself, and using the tip of the finger to draw several escape routes in the darkness.
Plenitude of the empty thing When empty, the whale chooses to compare himself to the round back of a lute, also bulging and hollow, but inexhaustibly rich because of this particular hollow, not another one, of emptiness so well-detailed ( delimited ), to the point of drawing from it, for example, the chords of Flow, My Tears or Cross Road Blues and starting again on demand. ( He compared himself to a balloon, but it was irrelevant ; he looked among the flora of the land masses for fruits that were in his image, the coconut did not meet his expectations, nor did the eggplant ( he would have needed a cross between the two – if that ) ; he could have been shown an abandoned temple and have recognized himself, a demonstration of his vanity. )
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Resentment as a pretext, according to the late F. Scott Fitzgerald Resentment is a diversion ( this is what Fitzgerald had taken to telling his agent, though he’d really been addressing himself ), nostalgia finds no suitable form, except to be contained in memories that are endlessly recombined, and then every day more paltry, more elementary ( and also deceitful ( if that were all ) ) — grief leads to nothing if it rests only on the repetition of a single motif, or else runs the risk of making life a repetition of the same stuporous present. Regretting lost vitality will never allow for the return of the vitality, nor even its description, a portrait precise and accurate enough to gather at least on paper the conditions for its reappearance — and so, anger ? not even anger if it doesn’t provide momentum ( & at the moment, as Fitzgerald writes in one of his letters, nothing provides momentum ) — . finally, resentment, perhaps, provided that it is inspired by the resentment of that damned Captain Ahab, can be surmised from the pages of the script. 141
Old Ahab back in New York after his Hollywood years Tired of so many days in a row without a single drop of rain, the old captain chooses to leave Hollywood, he’s shaken too many hands, he now crosses paths with too many Ahabs present in a hundred versions of scripts that, lackluster, will 141. At the height of his art, his grudge passes easily for a magic lantern, he projects images of revenge on the four walls of his cabin — they repeat themselves, they change, they put the grudge-holder to sleep or else add to his insomnia, and they quote the great authors, draw false perspectives, adapt their forms to his naivete and the opposite of his naivete, suggest perpetuity and all the while promising to disappear — the lantern holds on to so little.
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never make it to the screen : he manages to take French leave, in the early morning, in the dawn of adventure tales ; he takes advantage of it to catch himself off guard, without warning, felt under the soles, a rag around the hooves of his mule ( though he has no mule ). He doesn’t find himself valiant, but cowardly — on the train taking him back to New York, crossing the Great Plains in the opposite direction, he could write “with a twitching pen” in praise of the coward, of the reasons for his escape, of the means used ( a knotted rope, a visa ), of the very early hour ( past noon, after eating and after the digestive, is not conducive to heroism ), of the insignificant void left behind ( an unmade or untouched bed, the mystery of the locked door ), of the priceless look on the faces of those who discover the ruse ( gallery of grimaces, the catalog of expressions imitated from Franz Xaver Messerschmidt ), in praise of the horses saddled in the middle of the night, of the horses’ silence, and then in praise of the luggage left in the room of the last hotel to pay the bill ( leaving the innkeeper to sort out the underpants, a miraculous medal, half a book, a bottle of who knows what, and fifteen love letters ). For Lorenzo Da Ponte ( him again ), this story of a suitcase left in a hotel by a fugitive as payment is the first act of an opera, yet another, which will come to light, or will not : as an andante aria, the innkeeper will list the contents of a luxury trunk in his baritone : the marvelous name of things, their triviality, their preciousness, their mystery relating to certain details, and, on the part of the innkeeper, the mockery, the disgust, the embarrassment of having to meddle with a man’s privacy, then the voyeurism, a veritable curiosity — and here is the desire to infer giving rise, as a second aria, to the catalog of inferences : the baritone, this time accompanied this time by his wife, a mezzo soprano, paints a portrait of the
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gentleman, he bears a startling resemblance to Da Ponte himself, inconstant, generous, sometimes cowardly, loved by and a lover of women, sentimental but with a sentimentalism that is attached to physical evidence ( which passes for fetishism but is, in him, the endearing weakness of a lover ), a gambler, a liar, a sycophant, a schemer when the money runs out, yet not dishonest enough to carry out his plots ( & so on ad libitum ) — in the second scene of the first act, the gentleman en route has the floor : he is a tenor.
Ahab waits for the whale in town The grudge and the counterfeited necessities of hunting had induced him ( the captain ) to get his pencils as sharp as possible ( then proud of his work : when it reached this degree of perfection, the tip was at once the sign of his stamina as a fisherman & the emblem of an illustrator-andpoet’s peaceful refinement — he still sees in it now a truth of geometrical order ; it had eluded him before, it had to be Platonic & Euclidean, like polyhedra, all the more delightful for being so economical ). A century later, still the same pencil sharpener, Ahab the Venerable can no longer count on resentment to get him out of bed in the morning, from his bed to the cold shower and from the shower to the battle of Lepanto : resentment as a coiled-up spring for a young man, this spring now resembles those ropes gathered in a spiral on the quay, over time forming soft slabs. In its place, he chooses waiting, he adds impatience & a bit of anxiety to it : the old captain would like to hone it with a pencil sharpener, to a fine and painful point, energetic, for hunting, it he could create this point with small, harmless blades ( weekend blades ). A captain who has been retired for ages ( among those who are said to bury everyone ) still has captain’s reflexes, and
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by this I mean that he relies on navigation rituals when he believes he must locate the lost north : again, this time he unfolds maps, retraces the curve of currents with a red pen, highlights meridians, jogs his memory on the subject of loxodromes and orthodromes, fixes mistakes, corrects the magnetic north : making an effort to specify what awaits him down to the last millimeter, and when, and where, and in what form, he calls all of this his very last insight. By plotting the curves of his whale’s possible routes on graph paper ( “wherever he is” — “wherever he goes” — though he does not add, out of decency : “whatever state he might be in” ), the oceanographer captain understands that he is also drawing the portrait of a dull anxiety that he’s been familiar with for a long time ; but he also sees, bringing the paper closer to the lamp ( from now on, a filament ), how these lines slant entirely differently to give shape, this time, to his hope : in many places, it intersects with worry. A wayward old captain who makes every effort to keep his worries in the purified state of an axiom takes time to understand that hope makes room for itself, fraternally, in his definition of worry, the day when worry, fatigued, closes back up like Prometheus’s wound grown tired of waiting, according to Franz Kafka — and perpetuates itself in the form of curious, almost greedy anticipation. He makes use of the compass, the sextant, the ruler, a gyroscope, his measurements compared to the tide schedule, corrected according to the data for the migration of the magnetic pole toward the west ; he covers the maps at & go and resem.1/50000 scale with circular arcs that come ble, if we may be so bold, Christmas decorations ; he manipulates all these land navigator knickknacks in his room on the corner of 65 th Street and 7 th Avenue, above a shop that sends the scent of toasted sesame all the way up to the
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Lord’s nostrils, O Abel ; he brings a chart of the Atlantic floor together with a map of Manhattan Island, he knows that witnesses beyond Queens have seen the mouth of a humpback whale emerge several days in a row ; he wonders how to extend lines from the chart onto the map, and whether the continuity of the line can serve as evidence.
Moby Dick and the Hunt for Captain Ahab — Moby Dick captures cetologists In the days before people could take a plane from London to Boston, the cabins of transatlantic ships were full, and on deck one did not only meet newlyweds, honeymooners, & retirees discovering the world, attempting to carve out an acceptable form of existence from the soft material of their idleness, with peaks and valleys ( I quote one of these retirees ) — also : artists, like these Broadway idols accustomed to going back and forth from New York to Paris, Paris to New York, to broadcast their refrains everywhere and, meanwhile, compare the bathroom taps in their hotels .— there were also entrepreneurs, they had the idea of the century in the style of La Rochelle & wanted to see it bear fruit in Chicago before someone faster registered his patent. And finally, there were the cetologists who had written written articles in Nature and Science & had twenty bookmarks tucked in almost as many books ( someone compares them to the little paper umbrellas planted in scoops of vanilla ice cream ) : they’d left Le Havre three days before & were practicing out loud, “in the wind of the Atlantic,” for the conference they’d be attending at Cornell. Sometimes there were about fifteen of them making the trip, all invited to the same place, the tickets were bought collectively, & soon there would be buttons distributed to them so that they could recognize each other without
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having to submit to the protocols of a radio soap opera, Mr. Saddleback, from Regensburg, Ms. Sinisgalli, from Louvainla-Neuve. The trip went as well as could be expected, this was the answer they gave to the question, as soon as they set foot in America, the breakfast was passable, as were the bridge partners, the ocean revealed itself in all its autonomous, indifferent, and monotonous splendor, parading ( I quote one of the speakers ) a majestic boredom worthy of Poseidon. 142 The news blurbs paid them a quick tribute, their sense of brevity was inimitable : Nine university professors were on their way to Cornell to discuss cetology, the white whale didn’t give them the chance ( or, even more succinctly, Nature’s Revenge : nine cetologists swallowed by a whale ). ( Jules Verne would have been less expedient : the cetologists’ stay in a whale’s belly would have been an adventure of three hundred and fifty pages : preparations, journey ( chapters i and ii ), capture, surprise, lamentation, and stupor ( iii ), discovery, organization ( iv to vii ), divisions within the group, quarrels, and reunion ( viii to xii ), presence of invisible enemies, recognition of the adversary, struggle, and victory ( xiii to xxii ), miraculous domestication of the whale from within ( xxiii to xxx ), finally the escape, its design and its execution, to end on a beach of sand and gravel, a chilly summer’s day on the coast of Maine, not far from a forest of balsam trees ( xxx and after ) : at the epilogue, the eight surviving cetologists ( there was a death, a mourning, a funeral, chapter xxii ) mourn the huge carcass : the whale died a beautiful death. ) It is said that a certain number of these experts in cetology were a little surprised to find themselves in a whale’s belly ( they had spoken so frequently of this interior, from the point of view of the mythologist and veterinarian ) and 142. Da Ponte could not say the same.
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with the opportunity to argue in there for days, to the point of exhaustion, about marine mammals. They were scientists, they’d inherited strict methods and had learned, for example, to be wary of marvelous coincidences — though these may have served Rocambole when he lacked imagination, now they could undercut fifteen years of research ( comparative cetology ), ruin careers built on doubt and caution, the opposite of farce ; they could make a serious man look like a comic, worthy of François Villon’s students, who set pigs on fire before releasing them in town. Their astonishment mixed with euphoria, doubt, & embarrassment — some were overcome with shame and refused to call the place where they were the “belly of the whale,” substituting it with an approximative “beyond” or “abyssal trench” or “air pocket” ; they managed to convince themselves of this, & then remain silent, but their silence was a bad front, resembling the embarrassment of the nihilist tempted by the appearance of the Virgin. For others it was euphoria, and the conviction that they should take advantage of the opportunity ( they had been, up until that point, jealous of the Dante specialist who had fallen into the seventh circle of Hell ) : for a cetologist, falling into the belly of the whale could be seen as a promotion, an achievement after years of service, getting tenure, what they’d coveted for so long, tenure with an envelope, not to mention porphyry — they compared themselves to old Victor Bérard who finally swam to Calypso’s island after having reread his Odyssey one hundred and fifty times in half a century. So they didn’t hold back : the pleasure of success, of having honors at last, a favor reserved for the few, or even for one ( this pleasure, they tasted it, then they analyzed it, which amounted to misusing it ) — the legitimacy, the sinecure in addition to the triumph of theory
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thanks to practice, this was it, getting swallowed up by the whale and remaining there as one would stay at Harvard as a perpetual fellow. ( And then, the walls of his belly bounced back & forth, as did the speeches about the whale. ) 143
Several versions of the self to throw off the pursuer All the versions of his adventures, those he’s shared, those that were peddled with his permission, those stolen from him and that exist as plagiaries, those that come back to him as the latest joke, Ahab allows them to prosper, acting as a strategist ( one would never have thought him capable of it ) : at the right moment, the false rumors about him can serve as red herrings. On one condition, however : his pursuer will have to have a curious resentment, a resentment full of appetite, he will have to be excitable and want to follow all these leads, as one sometimes wants to embrace all careers, clown and neurologist, and deprive oneself of no pleasure : the resentment of the you-never-know and the eternity-before-self. The ex-captain knows from experience that grudges are curious and syncretic, that hunting a single prey does not prevent it from experiencing moments of great and generalizing passion : if it does not have a little universal paranoia, a grudge is worthless ( it greatly benefits from imitating the poorly conceived amateur encyclopedism in the style of Athanasius Kircher ). And then, the grudge-holder gripped by the demon of revenge, who loves oceanography books for their indecipherable content,
143. Here and there are arguments that the relentless study of Moby Dick ( not just the reading, but the interpretation when it returns to its object ) is another form of resentment.
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hates choosing : he would like to stand at the corner of all the crossroads of all the street corners waiting to get even, waiting indefinitely, reciting to himself four lines of a poem by Saigyō, the bludgeon raised, this also eternal ( it is useful to learn of the eternity of one’s bludgeon ) ( bludgeons have much to teach us, they know what connects reflective consciousness to inanimate matter ). As long as he still knows he’s something of a narrator of his own self, as long as this lasts, the old captain takes advantage of it, he sketches out paths and follows them halfway, and then other paths before he reaches the end of the first ones, once again turning back ; he tricks his insomnia by granting it the faculty of having dreams contain each other and freeing themselves from duration ; he is resurrected after each one of his disappearances, like Rocambole ( only less boastful ), like Sherlock Holmes ; he ends each day with irresistible suspense that is partly ( only partly ) resolved the following day ; he exaggerates his little colds to make them the first signs of tuberculosis, he pretends to be close to death ten times in a row to flee elsewhere, to an alley, beneath his bed, inside an elevator, on top of the roofs, under a skirt, and even, once, in another’s coffin, fingers crossed over a braid of garlic.
The white whale as container ( end ) Some of his tenants had taken refuge with him following a suicide attempt, following their near-drowning : they had approached the shore, they had weighted their pockets, some had saddlebags at their sides, a collar around their necks, at any rate, clutching a stone weighing a ton to their heart ; they had left their beds at dawn, found their way back to the sea, distinguished the water from the night ( not so easy ) ;
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they were preparing themselves to suffocate in something glacial, embracing everything that presented itself, which was nothing, not even tentacles, water, “deceptive fluidity,” “welcoming but deadly” ( this is how they express themselves ) ; they were about to die in a great chaos of black and blue that had gathered around them, for them, with the lighthouse in the distance periodically signifying distress and the opposite of distress ; they thought they were running out of air and sinking, as per the custom, letting themselves be invaded by the representation of death before death itself, the depth & faces of rays ; they had worn boots so as to sink to the bottom, to the lunar surface, they hoped or dreaded the narration of their life as an expedient, humiliating, and in any case obligatory recap ( all the same, they hoped to find in a whole life a reason for pride, and an hour of simple happiness, experienced by chance, on a terrace, without noticing — at the idea of dying soon, they accused themselves unfailingly and forgave themselves entirely ). They imagined nothingness, after all the unpleasant obstacles, as a pinhole in a web ; instead, they have the right to survival, even more painful than drowning, at the moment : living no longer appears to them as a marvel of daisies and tangerines, but as the result of insistence — in the impossibility of dying here and now is expressed a form of relentlessness that one will have to come to terms with, year in, year out. The whale cannot claim to be the salvation via the belly, but deception, under the auspices of the onerous rescuer — the suicidal melancholics come to their senses on his tongue, in his stomach, which is a boundless boudoir ; they miss no opportunity to curse him, some try to strangle themselves with both hands ( the suicidal relapses have something willfully comical ) ; he feels them stomping, cursing again, and later they wonder if this rubbery world
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is not actually what was awaiting them on the other side of their suicide — death itself, “in its domain.” Then come long ( more or less ) periods of doubt, the lone individual summons being, not-being, the incongruous prolongation of being in nothingness, the persistence of images and sounds, the faithfulness of the body to the spirit of the deceased ; the individual wonders whether or not time is suspended, and as he feels the ground with his heel he questions the relevance of such a soft afterlife — is it comfort, or damnation ? A few persist in believing they are dead, with reasoning that refutes Descartes, but none of them knows — after fifteen days, most of them arrive at what is called the obvious : they close the book on their suicide, it was a teenage whim ; they accept the legendary stomach, viewing it as an extension of their life’s pain, only much better ( the time ahead, replenishment, the constant temperature ). ( As an aside : the whale makes it a point of honor not to chew anyone up, and then not to digest : digesting the publishing director of Tolstoy’s Complete Works, for example, would be in poor taste, not only for Tolstoy : it would violate the rules of hospitality. )
Ahab and the cities — concealment There must be a link between this revelation transmitted by Thomas Browne ( according to which the city of Rome had a secret name, the only true one, in addition to the usual name used by its citizens ), and this other motto, read somewhere, heard one fine day, forgotten and then rediscovered spontaneously ( this spontaneity without cause making us, in the middle of a day without grace, inventive creators ) : the shape of the world is the imprint of the departed God. In other words, there must be a connection between the city’s
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secretive cunning and the good Christian God’s habit of disappearing at every turn, “when least expected,” leaving behind him a people who are half-delighted, or tranquil, and half-desperate, raising altars in flames to express their dereliction. What is meant by cunning, tactical and strategic city, what is meant ( this is what Ahab tells “whoever wants to hear it” ) is one of these trap cities, cities of Daedalus automatons, deceptive, and with junctions, cities with one thousand doors followed by one thousand doors, with ten thousand streets lacking any order, with false perspectives, with revolving doors, with trompe-l’oeils painted on blind facades, with one-way streets changing direction in the course of the night ; and cities like elasticized boxes that close if you put your finger in them, or like mechanisms one doesn’t dare to study too closely for fear of becoming a part of them — that is, also like traps for marine mammals developed on a large scale with the help of jib cranes, sails, and ropes, swinging bridges, cages similar to those of Louis xi called fillettes, chairs with coiled springs as they were made in London at the time of George III to capture young girls and serve them to libertines — or cities that the captain compares this time to the traces of Roman prostitutes’ sandals, imprinted in the sand with each step from the square to the brothel : the words engraved backwards on the sole, follow me, follow me, follow me ( etc. ). All of this is what is meant by trap city & strategists’ mechanism city, 144 the mousetraps, the beehives, the containers of sugar syrup to attract the hummingbirds, the false-bottomed boxes for making a scarf disappear and a dove emerge, never the same one ; the city with three ramparts like the three walls 144. The corner of Broadway and Chestnut Street, the corner of Wapping and Water Street.
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of the model prisons, and, why not, this purely hypothetical city also entirely emptied of its inhabitants, serving as a supreme decoy ( old Ahab found this entirely empty city under number 32 of the Stratagems of Battles Nearly Lost in the Secret Manual of Chinese Strategy ). The city as the effigy of a cow drawn by Daedalus to lure a bull that was sure of the strength of his desire ; the city according to the treatise on the aqueducts of Rome written by Frontinus before or after his Art of War ; the city as the villainous cruise ship Nero prepared to please his mother the empress, meant to split open in two right in the middle of the Tiber ; the city the Hebrews built and named Vengeance ; the city of Sodom, famous but refusing to be known, drawn in its entirety from the flight of the last righteous man, because he wanted above all to escape from that simpleton Lot who had gone looking for him : to be found, to be spared, to illustrate excellence, “Lord have mercy.” The city of secret passages, authenticated or legendary, between the palace of a king and the apartments of a spinster ( between Messalina’s room and a hall of nine hundred stallions ) ; even better, the city of secret passages turned over to the general public, and dug by the historians themselves, each strike of the shovel in the loose soil reinforcing a part of their hypothesis ; and while on the subject of legends worked by folklorists, the city gives hospitality to all the dungeons invented by the history books on the time of Malet and Isaac, & which could now serve as caves for growing mushrooms. On the back of a magazine page ( an advertisement : the promise of hair growing back on a desert island ), Old Ahab tries to demonstrate how the city of Troy could have tricked its way into the wooden horse left by the Greeks, how this would have changed the face of the world ; then, from an already faded copy of Reader’s Digest, he copies a paragraph
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about Li Guang, general of a handful of Han cavaliers, on the day when he found himself confronted by several thousand Xiongnu fighters : in order to win an impossible victory, instead of spreading out, fleeing, sacrificing himself foolishly, or lighting fireworks, the general ordered his men to stay put on the plain, to hide nothing of their weakness, and to prepare to sleep, to make those raging on the other side believe that they only served as bait, placed in the exact center of a great ambush. On another sheet of paper, actually a paper napkin with a trace of mustard, he copied a few lines from a book about the deceitful God, according to which if God is not an evil genius, he provides mortals with nothing to make them think he is not — which, from a certain point of view, is actually a way of being one. And a little further on, this remark made no doubt by a great, or at least intermediary, thinker : our world is the imprint of a fleeing God — at the time, Old Ahab feels he is the only one who understands the meaning of fleeing God and shape of the world, but he doesn’t feel any prouder for it : more lonely. He thinks of the city’s secretive tricks and goes from ergo to ergo : the shape of the ocean was the imprint of the whale when he was away for months, and all modesty aside, the city could now become the set of traces left by an old captain constantly on the run. So, yes or no, is the shape of a city, this city and not another, the imprint of fugitive Ahab ? it would be presumptuous to confirm it, and Old Ahab would be loath to say so, since the streets were already there before he came —. & yet there’s a bit of that : after his final departure there should remain something of his discretion, his anonymity, his numerous heteronyms, his skeleton key attached to the end of his wooden leg, his changes of address, his passing through the artists’ entrance from one side and the other,
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his paranoid Sunday walks through the corridors of the subway ; there must be a name, his own, left somewhere on a mailbox, cut from a page of Henry James’s Notebooks, a lord’s name ; and not far from the mailbox, a hole in a door plugged with a magnifying glass to warn of unwanted visitors ( it doesn’t ward off fate, and it gives the door-to-door salesman the face of a grouper, which does nothing to help ease the captain’s anxieties : he sees the merchant, the monkfish, or the grouper, as the herald come to announce the coming of the white monster ). 145 But in the end, why not be presumptuous : designate the city as the imprint of his escape, so as to sublimate his escape, pin a map of the metropolis, all in vertical lines, on a wall in the room on the 13 th floor of the building, and find something of his style there 146 — and in the meantime, to give historical depth to what he is in the middle of saying about the city and the escape, Old Ahab reminds one of his neighbors of a truth that has been known since the beginning of time but passed over in silence ( as part of a secret ? or as evidence ? evidence, really ) : the first city was invented by Cain so it would be impossible to find him there ( it was in the land of Nod, unknown to geographers ).
145. The presence of John Shakespeare ( the name spelled in a number of different ways ), the father in the good city of Stratford, has been traced back to a misplaced pile of garbage, along with an official report. 146. He sees in the trickery of the Hebrew word of the Kabbalah ( an old formula ), arba dac arba, dissimulated in his language, another possible description of the city and of evasion in the city — a fugitive perceives his portrait there, he would be tempted to use it to deduce a map of possible routes, and he also tells himself that it is the answer to everything.
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Predator paranoia The grudge is also syncretic, it sees everything and accepts everything to achieve its ends, an active ( positive ) version of paranoia, the strange but rich paranoia of the predator, still unexplored, offered to the curiosity of psychologists and more generally of aesthetes, or of zoologists. As paranoia of the predator, the grudge is insistence, it reinvents forms of insistence : from a distance, it looks like dazed repetition, like the return of the fly to the table, always the same fly, the same table ; some speak of the obstinacy of centenarians when they are no longer in their right mind —. there is a bit of that : old age is accompanied by repetitions, after a certain point. On closer inspection, the predator’s paranoia is an artist of variation : insistence perhaps, but insistence is only worthwhile if one takes the trouble to make the slightest shift, as if one wanted to exhaust the world by exhausting its combinations, and walk away scot-free. The predator’s paranoia leads to travel, but it doesn’t make anyone younger : for the whale, it’s the Persian Gulf & then the Gulf of Mexico, the impression of ubiquity with each occurrence but real fatigue, another way of growing exhausted by following a fixed idea to its end. Each day with more softness, more languor, almost tenderness, soon perhaps fatigue, the whale captures — he captures his Ahab, this time the right one, this time again the wrong one, he spits him out at once, the satisfaction of victory is intimately combined with the certainty of being wrong. Nobody sees there a lesson of the existence ( for a long time, the failures will remain indecipherable objects ) : neither the whale, nor the false Ahab, swallowed, refused, passed in an instant from capture to abandonment. ( Ahab and Moby Dick have this in common : the failures do not serve them as lessons
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( or else, by taking which detours ? what sandworm tunnel would the failures have to pass through to go from being inane failure to father-of-all-teachings failure ? what contrition, what Freudian self-analysis ? or else a long and hypocritical wheeling and dealing. Ahab, from the depths of his multiple failures, like an outcast, has arrived at this idea : to make a positive lesson of failure implies contortions more painful than the failure itself. ) For him as for the whale, the failures, at least those of the hunt, are small monoliths, they can have the beauty of the pebble, none of its immediate qualities, neither the gentleness nor the gleam, they are only independent of each other, forgotten, derisory, mute & cold, impenetrable, ungrateful, macabre, and once redeposited on the ground they are a sign of abandonment. ) The paranoia of the prey, we know, it has its classifications and also its masterpieces ( there is not just Christianity, a Spirit of Paranoia must also exist ) : the principle of persecution, the traps recognized everywhere, the constant surveillance, adversity disseminated in order to be miniaturized and to make itself simultaneously effective and imperceptible, the universality of the conspiracy but the presence of a unique target called “me,” the extreme refinement of the mechanisms, sometimes restored, or even improved, by the victim themselves, the translation of everything into proof, paranoia being a subset of semiotics. The predator’s paranoia is something else : the certainty of dealing with cowardly and incompetent prey, bungling all the traps it falls into, and the rest of the time larval, weakwilled, never ready for combat, ready according to savage criteria, always appealing to a certain morality in order to justify hypocrisy ( and when morality is no longer appropriate, one appeals to ethics ). The predator’s paranoia laments
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the mimicry of the prey, it laments & fears it, it denounces it whenever possible, it obviously sees it everywhere, where it is, where it is not, the same brown spot on a brown background, it considers animal mimicry as a cowardly violation of the Geneva Conventions ; it fears recourse to Habeas Corpus, it fears the cadavers of prey, more virulent than living bodies, it wonders what trap awaits it once it has triumphed.
The cat with respect to Ahab The ferocity of the cat on the prowl, but profoundly calm, almost asleep : at least that’s how he would like to be : the idea of retractable claws, the desire to possess retractability in addition to claws : not to acquire it, to have it all along.
Predator paranoia ( continued ) Freed completely of fear, it could be not crazy, not irrational, and therefore, joyfully, with pride, could rid itself of all the accusations made against paranoia in general : the predator’s paranoia has everything it needs to be serene ( serenity does not mean dullness or irenicism — imagine irenic paranoia, imagine it courteous, with the manners of old France ), its calm is an additional pledge of meticulousness, of more devious calculations, of hostility freed of hatred & therefore respectable, as a challenging book would be, ungracious, guardian of a wealth kept behind black print. The predator does not flee but still rushes all the same, its course sometimes passes for a reinterpretation, in another style, of the course of its prey ( whoever walks right behind a fugitive interprets his way of running, sometimes supposing, if the chase gives him the opportunity, that the prey’s escape is
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an inverse form of reading : reading by anticipation of the predator’s path ( but let’s not complicate everything ). 147 The predator’s paranoia has the qualities of the prey’s traditional paranoia, if the captain’s shaky notes, written in the evening, are to be believed ( to betray his attempts to write a How to Escape the White Whale ) : it has acuity and permanence, it names incessantly, it invents names for the sake of naming, it loves classifications, it unconditionally loves books that resemble dictionaries, it loves what is hidden and seeks like an impossible happiness ( or impossible key ) the means to reveal while preserving for the revealed thing all the graces of its concealment ( the true paranoiac does not bring hidden truths to light, rhetorically evokes the concealment of the truth, which is not quite the same job ) . 148 For the paranoid predator, fear counts for nothing, it fades away to make room for other, more ordinary, superfluous fears, such as the fear of doing things wrong — or else it disappears once & for all, metamorphosed into a desire to succeed ; then the predator’s paranoia can speculate for as long as it wants. The prey’s paranoia is made of caution, obsessed with its traces, the predator’s paranoia is made of projects & plans : it has time for itself, hostilities rely on its focus, it does not foresee constant hostility, it gives itself time — the predator’s paranoia has to find out what foodstuff to replace the threat with : it discovers, because it is a great discoverer,
147. Better to hear this than to not hear. 148. One talks about the mask for days, inspired, glowing, promising to finally talk about the face underneath — it would be painful to actually do so : besides, when a paranoiac inadvertently comes to talk about truth, this is habitually done, with words employed to deal with lies.
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then it’s a desire for justice, archaized to the point of resembling the very ancient desires for revenge, a form of appetite with traces that one finds in books of comparative zoology ; the paranoia of the predator draws on books of strategy to perpetuate itself, to give itself a new countenance ; it allows itself to be confused with the artist’s ambition under the pretext that it outlines motives and claims to see the work accomplished where there is nothing yet 149 — it is said that as it pushes forward over its hunting grounds, it leaves traces then left to its own interpretation ; this means it is also afraid of being bored.
The city as a machine to be everywhere at once A machine to be everywhere at once, a vast machine — well, what is it then ? the city : Old Ahab had come to this conclusion after six months as a survivor, as a survivor and as a returning prodigal sailor, and ever since, he’s never refuted it. With age, when he gets that feeling of being hunted again ( he infers the fear of being hunted from his former enthusiasm ( his ex-joy ) as hunter, furling it — in the same way, if he has the patience, he sketches the prey based on the predator’s face ), he does hope that the city will definitively become that damn machine to be everywhere at once : he won’t complain about it, nor will he deprive himself of it, Ahab will make himself small and round, spherical, like a pea ; he will imitate the marble he’s seen rolling backwards so many times on the numbered turn of the roulette wheel.
149. Macbeth’s heath without the witches, good riddance.
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The old captain takes note of his longevity 150 By adding relentless grudge to unfulfilled vengeance, we get one of those cantankerous lifespans of an old man still capable, after a hundred years, of keeping at least one fingernail to stick in his enemy’s eye, by way of a farewell — but the grudge does not explain everything : when Captain Ahab discovers his presence in the world yet again upon awakening and then when awakening again,151 he cannot chalk his survival up to a desire for revenge alone, nor on an iron constitution, the legacy of a knightly forefather and an Irish foremother — his own absent-mindedness, perhaps ? the inability to die as the tactlessness of a peasant who doesn’t know how to stand up straight and mistakes ballrooms for high-ceilinged barns ? “There’s something else,” says a voice at the counter, somewhere between fortune teller and wise drinker, and this is not such a bold assumption : there’s always something else — so, for days,152 Ahab takes his “there’s something else” out for a walk through the city streets, one would think he was parading his blood test, clutched to his chest, for the moment indecipherable but already filled with the figures of his salvation or else his condemnation, if you know what I mean. ( Or else it’s his wooden leg : Ahab has used it for support so often, and over the years it has become his final possession : this stability of an object, the unconscious & neutral hardness of the thing, the steady morale, never any mood swings, etc., to the point that it hopes one day to become an appendix to his false leg as it had become the ornament of his grudge. ) 150. Not a moment too soon. 151. In his own words, not to be taken seriously. 152. For days — to the tune of Pinocchio.
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The relentless and ridiculous difficulty of dying It seems to him now, in retrospect, so easy to die when an adolescent, a little before, a little after : you know, the gambles of the young romantic, the weakness of the flesh, the triviality of the metamorphoses, each change associated with a current event as with chance encounters, and after that one starts to think of death, fundamentally, as yet one more minor metamorphosis. In this, there is a lot of audacity without the slightest risk, of posturing, what it is necessary of posturing to live, gullibility, also necessary, the negligence of all things, precious, worthless, serious, or sordid, and of the self in the category of the jumbled things ; there is the presumption associated with ignorance, the certainty of having too much time ahead, a horror of boredom, which old age will not come to correct or absolve, a frivolity that depends on the flexibility of the body in some of its parts, and that one will not be able to reconstruct later, ceremonies that are falsely pagan, falsely satanic, falsely everything, including falsely false at an age when the timbre of the voice itself is still not yet right, the taste of experience in a form still poorly thought-out, too few meditations and then when one does meditate, the impression of peeling a grape for no reason, the taste of disproportion, heroism passing as a last resort through the refusal of the absurd ceremonies of existence, the refusal of the life force. At the age of fifteen, at eighteen, and even at twenty-six, Ahab would have offed himself with a natural ease ( not the ease of the Virtuoso exhausted by the Exercise ), as he had invented the means for giving himself complete satisfaction, under the sickly aegis of Prince Hamlet, with a simple stab of the blade ; he would have straddled bridges, he would have found dazzling poisons, he’d have had the time ( one is
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keen at that age ) to appreciate the taste, its novelty, before collapsing, he would have confronted racecars, either from the front or from the inside, he would have known spontaneously how to convert a vehicle into a death machine, he would have gathered enough charisma and strength of conviction to provoke in a duel the men of his conscription, the same ones, as obscure, as brilliant. The duel, so easily raised, holding a bouquet of flowers picked on the way, expecting summer ; death would have come without pain, no need to undergo twenty-eight days of death throes, reciting Alexander Pushkin, and clinging to family pillows : no, immediately ( with this immediacy of adolescence, precisely, on a bed of early fruit ), right in the middle of the meadow, because a meadow was needed, poppy in the buttonhole, the best there is of its kind from among young soldiers of 1830 France, for example — the sigh to the friend, a letter to the old mother already plastered to the body, and the look for the pale blue infinity, in the sky, of which we’ll never know anything.153 And if the duel doesn’t take, there remains the fall and all of its variations : according to so many postures, between the top and the bottom, from the angel & Pegasus down to the sack of plaster that crashes, leaving white behind. Oh, no problem, it’s possible to die while sneezing, the will does not counter a meteoric death, one saw it at the age of eighteen as it crossed the window for the pleasure of crossing the window, making the leap out the window coincide with the definitive interruption of a life spent looking at the curtains, without meaning to ? meaning to ? at any rate, spontaneously. At forty, at fifty,154 no matter how you slice it, inspiration is no longer there, nor the spirit of the body, 153. Or : who does not return it to us. 154. Against all statistics.
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still so reactive yesterday, a whole literature thinks it’s good to attach us to life, as well as the insistence of the family, symmetrical with the heirs’ appetite — or the idea of revenge to accomplish. One becomes difficult, became so long ago, without realizing it, thanks to something or other, on principle, because old age resolutely dictates it to those who are aging — the adolescent’s self-esteem was fickle, it could be a monopolizer but was exchanged for anything else, a candy, & in this candy, the secret of death as a lived experience — Ahab’s self-esteem after seventy is more powerful, his old momentum makes his existence a heavy thing that is hard to interrupt, and that aspires to the poor glory of moving forward. And even if one were to desire it, one does not desire as effectively as at twenty ( the dissatisfaction of desire at twenty is sometimes more fruitful than fulfillment at sixty ), even if one wanted to, one would not give oneself death just like that : the veins have become thick ; they have their sensitivity, they want to have the hardness of the old bronzes that one admires in the museums open from morning until noon. If he were twenty years old, just like that, or if he had the fire of a young man of twenty, he wouldn’t have any trouble dying, it would be something like fireworks, he would do it all the more willingly, while dancing, in having the conviction that he would rise again tomorrow, yet another triumph & the friendships of Lazarus distributed to the living — now, he would have closed the windows and the shutters, drawn the sheets up to his chin, watched the candle melt, detected the smell of the extinguished wick in the dark, waited for a finger to show him a door to pass through — nothing would happen, the events ( what events ? ) would no longer have the ability to happen as they did half a century ago ( and they didn’t hold back, ten or twelve times a day ), no finger & no
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door, the candle would have to be relit, the rising ceremony resumed where it had been interrupted, say hello to oneself in the bathroom mirror and then perform one’s duties.
Death and life of the captain The captain, back in the good city of New York, increased by one million souls, sometimes tells himself that to remove death from existence is to remove the tragic and leave it with the sometimes amusing ( not always ) sordidness, the sordidness of the can of tuna in oil, the sordidness of the weeks that follow one another — after having fled the tragic as well as the heroic, like the whole pompous ocean, and the whale, also pompous, he wonders if what he needs now ( the time has come ) is a tiny dose of the terrible to put an end to this terrible longevity : to finally die, out of politeness. ( He in fact hides, he’d be a little ashamed to outlive his neighbors, to be in this unviable situation of the old man of sinews ( or stretched out with cat-gut ), of a solid design to bury everyone : nothing like that to attract antipathy — so he cheats, he does as Zsa Zsa Gabor did and cuts ten years off his life, he erases his date of birth on his identity papers with a cotton swab and bleach. ) Cervantes had the goodness to make the knight Quixote die in the last chapter of the second volume, five hundred pages after having made him pronounce the beautiful line “is it true that my history exists ?”, disingenuous for the circumstances — seventy years later, his translator François Filleau de Saint-Martin is not so indulgent : he does not have Quixote die, he does not grant him any gentle literary form of death, he leaves the hidalgo to hildalgate alone beyond the last page, against a background of white. According to one Shakespeare scholar, Hamlet did not succumb
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to poison either, which implies ( knowing Hamlet ) that there is a man paler than all his ghosts wandering Denmark, it being tedious to remain like stagnating water on the sites of his torments. When he became a storyteller of himself on Broadway and then in Hollywood, the captain had the presence of mind to make himself disappear together with the whale, a fine ensemble, a beautiful final flourish, or spray of flowers, of monster’s mouth & hero’s death — but it took one clever little scriptwriter, of the same ilk as François Filleau, to deem it more appropriate to make a survivor of him. Overnight, Ahab the captain, as a character, as a subject, as a tap spouting marine stories, became profitable : by what miracle ? a poetic license, or an unforeseen infatuation, that of the crowd, qual piuma al vento — and all of this of course without warning the captain himself : Ahab not receiving a penny of the royalties generated by Ahab, captain of the serial. Now that he’s returned to the East Coast, having had his ideas, his character, and all his synopses, whale included, slyly stolen from him ( he’d misread the contracts, he signed seventy of them, the seventy-first was a trap, with the figure of 500 dollars in the middle of the page – small sums of money send simple souls into a panic ), he’s scarcely aware of fifteen scriptwriters’ work, day and night, for the cinema, for television, sitting around a table, perpetuating him. The Adventures of Captain Jethro ( his name had to be changed ) lasted for thirteen episodes, then thirteen again the following season, the whale escapes the hunters half a dozen times, the captain has brushes with death just as many times, he comes to shore on lands that are marvelous and hostile ; in the third season, a romance develops between him and a shipowner’s daughter, only to be interrupted in the thirteenth episode when the captain suddenly sets sail for Borneo, where a Jesuit archaeologist has purportedly found the
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bone of his leg ( he had been looking for the bone of St. Francis Xavier ). And it continues — Old Ahab desperate to read a snippet announcing the end of the serials, he calculates the ratio of his character’s success to the absence of royalties, drawing from it an astronomical figure which, according to him, is commensurate with his bad luck, his poverty, his inability to negotiate, and finally an expression of the irony of fate — as if fate had ever been anything other than ironic. ( He imposes limits on his jealousy, so as not to be sublimated into failure, as a way of saving his honor : fine, the usurper Jethro, played by a second-rate actor at Universal, knows non-Ahabean glory, he has married several Jezebels, who are several Hollywood Salomés, and his swimming pool is deeper than the Sea of Japan,155 but he must be recognized for his vigor : he still has the energy to perpetuate himself, supported by twenty co-screenwriters, his valor commands respect : one wonders where he finds the energy in the morning to fight an octopus for the thousandth time. ) 156 ( At the beginning of the century, Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, hires a young actress who until now has gone by the generic name of Biograph Girl ( an anonymity clause : actors were displays in black & white ) —. Laemmle wants to put her under contract, it will bring him a profit, he has the announcement of her death published in newspapers, he lets a week pass and then publishes a denial, in the same pages ; he takes advantage of this to offer her name, Florence Lawrence, to the whole world ( the whole world of the spectators ) ; he announces her reappearance, as if resurrected after three days of hesitating, in a district of Saint Louis, at such and such an hour, at such and such a 155. The trench of the Sandwich Islands. 156. “So I am immortal and on land and sea.”
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street corner ; thousands of onlookers gather to witness the lovely miracle or to see from up close just how credible it is, no less extraordinary ; the first star has just been born, she immediately makes her debut, she brings Laemmle the money as agreed upon by his oracles and contracts ; she gives herself up to death a few years later, finally caught up in another of those prophecies randomly foretold. ) Sequels and sequels of sequels : Old Ahab follows his adventures from afar, on the television, he prefers the crossword puzzles in newspapers, he can count on not having any unpleasant surprises, unless he writes Moby Dick’s name horizontally and his own vertically, where they cross at the b ; he knows that the other Ahab, rechristened Jethro, continues to jump about so as to keep him alive artificially : a bag of serum, sparing and faithful to the final day — but his marriages, his remarriages, his Robinsonades, his relentlessness, and his splashing are no longer his concern.
Ahab benefits from the reprieve granted in London to the detective Sherlock Holmes, supported by admirers’ letters, defended by underwriters, loved by children and their grandmothers — all the way to the Queen of England, who will order her subject Arthur Conan Doyle to bring Sherlock back to life It is hard to imagine Conan Doyle’s hatred for his creation : Sherlock Holmes was stiff, dry, he was mercurial, but he was acerbic, he had very little enthusiasm, the catalog of his dislikes was vast and painstaking ; he inoculated himself with poisons without suffering from them, he mastered Sanskrit and the viola da gamba ; if he’d wanted to, he could have collected ladies in England, and a few daughters, or even married women, and Scotland after England, but he hadn’t wanted to ; every time Arthur Conan Doyle passed a cobbler, he was asked for news of the man with the unforgiving violin
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.— having him die eight hundred meters below at the bottom of a chasm must have been for him an unparalleled joy ( never repeated since ). A true delight, followed by a great vacation, but the mistake of a dramatist, and, in terms of money, the gravest mistake ( because Sherlock sold papers : you can’t forgive yourself for giving up on mining a vein ) —. he had a crafty air, ten years later, when he had to resurrect his handsome cadaver with a cap from the Reichenbach chasm in Switzerland : and to cobble together a mixture of conspiracy, miracle, careless machination, etc., to justify the death & resurrection. Sherlock Holmes must have smiled as he listened to Arthur the Pathetic explain himself to his editor — oh, that Sherlock smile, the murderous smile in the presence of the ridiculous good guy, as he liquefies himself in an effort to lose none of his elegance. ( Justifying the resurrection of Sherlock Holmes was, in short, no more & no less flawed than the usual chain of deductions, from tobacco leaf to ideal culprit by way of Hindu figurine. )
Ahab and Baron Münchausen — lessons in mortality Among the immortals, there are those who are lucky, those who are forgotten, those who are saved by mistake, there are the men and women dragged into the opposite of a danse macabre and who still continue today to turn counter-clockwise ; there are the hidden ones, the deferred conscripts with skin of birch bark, who keep on by making their eternity a form of forgiveness or private immunity, there are the pact-makers, Faustians, Mephistophelians, the little merchants of survival selling off pieces of themselves for pieces of eternity ; there are the mischievous, there are the identity resellers, there are the clandestine survivors taking advantage of somebody else’s passport ; there are imams,
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kings, and emperors kept alive by their partisans, there are the embalmed ready to get back to work, there are also the unfortunates impatiently hoping for death : their profound but derisory disappointment (disappointment de boulevard) when they open the door with the twelve strokes of midnight onto a vacuum salesman — there are those who hide in a neighbor’s bed, those who get on their knees to beg, or to bribe the executioner, or go off to live again on the opposite side of the world, there are Roland & Quixote, capable of overcoming their own deaths and whom one is no longer surprised to encounter on horseback, and Münchhausen, the baron, who is clever enough to situate himself between the reality of his life as a baron and the other reality of his life as a character. He rises up from his deaths better than anyone else : death from the hot-air balloon, the Turquerie death in the style of Mozart, and even, one evening, the good night from the femme fatale — each time, after the heart stops for half a second, interpreted as the clap of the tongue a rider makes to his horse, the baron shows renewed vitality, inventive, mocking, without hiding from the circumstances : a vitality so entire that it claims to be autonomous, independent of any previous life. His survivals are sidestep and resurrection, but a resurrection without any of the pomp of Christianity – sometimes, they are the stubbornness of the mule refusing to admit the obvious : the baron, who spent time with the Jesuits and knew Humboldt, also knows how to argue : several times, varying the course, he had been able to convince death that it was wrong, and he, the living man, was right. He was seen emerging from a fire, dusting off his shoulders, rubbing his eyes and mouth to describe three white circles, then leaving with a smile on his face, finding a way to make the ashes into a silver lining, and relighting
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his pipe with the last flames of his pyre : his pipe then lively and ironic, brandished with nonchalance as well as pride as if it were about to bridge the gap, still blazing, between this fire and the next. He was seen in the streets of Vienna, London, & Moscow a century after his official death, a little old-fashioned perhaps, astonished by the rigors of the modern winter, but alive, the autumnal colors of nicotine in his moustache. ( How to survive his civil status ? with elegance, no trophy, no dance, no hullabaloo beneath the windows of the dispossessed heirs ; a discretion of the specter of Henry James, a duster of libraries, meditating on the two sides of existence. ) ( The gaze that Baron Münchhausen casts on an official death notice : the same gaze on the beard of the prophet Mohammed exhibited in Topkapı, magnified thirty-five times by a magnifying glass like the one of Sherlock Holmes : the magnifying glass makes it possible to note the reality of real things, it does not call into question the little hair, though it does seem to doubt, on the other hand, the eyes and the faith of the curious who are stooping over to take a look. ) Ambitious young people, others delighted to be who they are, others proud on principle, and others who are older, burgomasters, archbishops, margraves, duke of the duchy, went knocking on Baron Münchhausen’s door, one after the other, the archbishop on a Sunday, the law student on a Monday, discreetly, taking advantage of the rain to hide under a raincoat, or at twilight by looking over the shoulder. They see in Münchhausen a descendant of the thaumaturgist kings, through maids : they intend to win him over in exchange for advice on resurrection — they don’t expect a lesson in the style of Montaigne or Boethius, they don’t want this dark nectar, they’ll be content with tips : resurrection
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must well be a matter of a trapdoor or a trick with a cigarette lighter, or a forced deck of cards, or it’s an ointment, the juice of Priapus’s vine, or the like, or the false ligatures that will one day allow Houdini to make his spectacular escapes. What they want, most of the time, is this mixture of cantharide ointment, the prince’s pass, and a password to slip to the concierge. Münchhausen does not like these tactics, but his Münchhausenism makes him generous out of a sense of duty : he delivers, he superimposes false & true advice, because he has learned by frequenting the best doctors to alternate active drug and placebo — he retells his seventeen resurrections, he attributes the miracle to himself, he would wake up Lazarus and all the dead Lazarenes with a single sneeze, he could become the conductor of the Resurrection of the Glorious Bodies, all on his own, taking God by surprise, standing before the Innocents’ cemetery with his Toscanini baton. He recounts how he escaped shipwrecks, lightning, and three other cannonballs, and it is up to his listeners to draw a lesson from tales that do not contain one. Just as if he agrees to explain how, amidst the Turks at war, he spent a whole night sewing back on his head, which had fallen off from the blow from a saber ( this had been purely accidental, and the Great Turk had apologized ), using a thread stolen from the turban of the Pasha, an endless thread : storyteller Münchhausen interrupts his sewing story when he approaches the threshold of a meta-Münchhausenian implausibility, & when he risks having his exploits confused with pages of saints’ lives : he wouldn’t want to plagiarize from a saint from the calendar. If ( several successive ifs ) Münchhausen master of coming back to life ( inventor of a clyster like a saxophone that makes it possible to bring the soul back into the body of the
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dead ), if Münchhausen is still alive at the time when the captain drags his old shoes through the streets of New York, and if ( here is the second one ) the captain finds a way to pay him a visit, it is not to ask him for advice on immortality — on the contrary ( Ahab likes these “on the contrary”s when they come up in the course of an argument ) : to humbly ask, like any good neighbor, for the secrets of inevitable death. Hoping the baron will be moved, he shares his misfortunes as a character in an iterative and repetitive fable, multiplied a hundred times, repeated from one year to the next ; the baron should understand this immortality of a figure from a book, at first euphoric, then routine, then painful, as a hereditary burden, he has experienced it himself : initially, one takes advantage of it, one is the pioneer of all things, and then quickly the presence of oneself to oneself becomes deadly dull. So, yes, if all this happens, the baron offers his advice, which is allusive and allegorical, resembling the yet and yet of Issa’s poem and Saigyō’s here very far away where nobody can see me, I will think of things, written centuries ago ; counting on the captain’s distraction, on his difficulty following Issa and Saigyō, Münchhausen slips in his last and only good advice, with the crudeness of a tooth-puller, before resuming his allusions and allegories — he rises to lead his visitor back home & ends with the story of the Jesuit, the Dominican, and the lady of the night standing before the door of Paradise ( Ahab did not remember the punchline ). ( Since the baron is not available, the old captain will have to turn to another neighbor, who will talk to him in vain of the hangman’s rope, and then he will go to the corner of 128 th Street under a Chinese lantern to find the opposite of an aphrodisiac. )
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How to survive Münchhausenly ( formula ) ( How to survive his death Münchhausenly : to make it to the end of a branch of a tree in the Indian jungle, that is, the end of his path of escape, turn around, confront a tiger, it doesn’t matter what tiger, provided it works from a narrative point of view, try to reason with it, put an end to these misguided attempts ( not all that ridiculous : diplomatic ), admire the tigery savagery in the animal’s eyes, its determination, and something, on a smaller scale, like its greed, accept the joys of nature ( once won’t hurt ), and let himself be devoured after a stifled cry comparable to the little groan sometimes uttered from the deepest sleep — and after that, to tell his story from the beginning, from the tip of the tree branch to the muffled cry, while making it clear that the death of the fugitive on his branch and the story of the survivor before dazzled listeners follow each other without any interruption, not even that of the branch. As for the skeptical little man sitting in the middle of the audience ( there’s always one of them ) asking about plausibility, Münchhausen finds it easy to advance the argument of authority, according to which he is the storyteller, he alone has decided on the color of the tiger, the circumstances of his death, and the skeptical little man’s very presence among his guests. )
Ahab and the plagiarism lawsuits
[ 1965 ]
Ahab has never been in the best position to observe changes in time ( already surprised, some mornings, to see cherry blossoms replacing the Christmas snow, or the opposite ) : he willingly leaves to others the task ( the honor ) of announcing the change in times aloud in a tone of a commentator and provisional oracle, or better still ( greater honor ) to bring it
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on by saying it, in the voice of a severe obstetrician : then they’re clever, lucid, expert, they have the lookout’s concern and the charm that goes with it, they want to be reassuring but not overly so, they testify to an intimate pain, it is their property, the new era makes itself known through it the same way the rain signals itself through the rheumatism of certain hand-picked old-timers — they excuse themselves for being extra lucid & forgive us for being as blind as dolls stuffed with cotton ; they are like the Indian on the rocky outcrop listening to the centuries : their joy is such that they start over again the next day : another day, another change of era. So, when the porthole of the television appeared, first in the big houses, then the small ones, all that Old Ahab saw was a variant of the aquarium, and he didn’t imagine the legion of artists & journalists, electricians, engineers, acrobats, circus men, contenders, honey merchants, & storytellers, all of them, on the other side ( the other side of the pane ) : it was still a gray lantern protected by thick glass, with alternating glimmers and shadows that didn’t do justice to the figures it was supposed to convey — he had trouble congratulating the engineers, even at his most indulgent : a cathode, a blast of electrons, an electric field, a little phosphorescence, this could never replace a bowl of gruel. He does not see it coming & yet here it is, the day when Ahab and the wooden leg borrowed from Long John Silver, his harpoon from Nanook of the North, becomes the hero of a serial with a thousand sequels — he has nothing to do with it, he does not receive any dividends, for him the little c of copyright in its circle is an enigmatic stamp, an untimely Christmas bauble, attached to certain names, for the sole pleasure of pleasing the eye by having one more letter follow another one. He is not entirely sure he recognizes
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himself in this Ahab, or at least in this image of Ahab, seen for the first time in the window of a television shop : he has to superimpose his reflection on this blurred and changing portrait, but he never arrives at a firm conclusion, which would have confirmed him and outraged him at the same time ( he goes home and brings the doubt ( always the same ) back to his room with him, and a touch of vanity, and the impression of having been robbed by someone richer than him ). He hears stories being told, he finds them in the newspapers : some individuals more litigious than he is hire a lawyer because they feel robbed of their self, nothing less ; they believe they recognize their faces and the less epic fragments of their biography in the scene of a two-million-dollar movie, and so they sue, nobody really knows whom, as long as they sue and win against the devastating machines ; the lawyer goes to Chicago to check old lawsuits that establish a precedent : stories of Mr. Smiths claiming their share of dividends, a large share, on the pretext that they have recognized themselves entirely, inside and out, in the character of Robin Hood, or Zorro, when he wears his mask and when he takes it off. Many lawsuits, very few of them lucky, almost none : those who are dismissed return ruined, that’s it for them, to their desert, far from the judges, to apply a private & far better justice, proof that this country smiles on enterprising men — others, more procedural or with more striking resemblances, obtain an agreement for several hundred dollars : they are paid to get it over with, so they’ll go home, they take it as a knighthood : and from that day on, whenever Robin Hood reappears on television in the form of Errol Flynn, they recognize themselves there, but without resentment, twin brother to twin brother. ( Ahab could himself have tried to sue for plagiarism by unrolling pages of his diary and all his scripts at different
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stages ; he didn’t dare, he did the right thing, we wouldn’t have believed him, his meager sailor’s glossary lost over the years wouldn’t have withstood the scrutiny. )
On routine ( or The Peaceful Intermissions of Captain Ahab ) ( In the meantime, as is written in the serials, Ahab squeezes oranges, cooks himself an egg, hesitates between remembering and forgetting, continues to explore inside the city, reconstructs the map of it from memory, tries to deduce the psychology of men, or rather their humor, he continues to spend time in bars perched on a stool with his nose over a lemon pie, the same as always — the longer he stays on, the more he looks like a mortal among others ( perhaps a question of habit ). )
How Very Old Ahab gets with the times He does his duty : he gets with the times, he is a friendly neighbor, capable of complicity : he could talk about fossil fuel, about the immense reserves and their depletion, about encyclopedias and the denunciation of all encyclopedias, about the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, about conspirators, conspiracists and anti-conspiracists, about a gigantic mushroom raised at the opening of the seventh seal, about detoxification cures, about the prisons of Cuba, about the singer’s navel compared to her vocal cords ; he could then talk about advertising & the difference, so subtle, between bad and good fat, that only the clever know : the good fat for them, for others the bad one, taken from a steer or from a pile of seeds, poorly filtered, mixed with tallow from another steer — the good fat makes the skin lustrous, as does borage oil, it seems, the bad fat makes one walk like a duck.
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[ 1967 ]
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He talks about evangelists on television, men who saw Jesus the day before and meet with angels and know where the lost tribes of Israel have taken refuge, talk about the Book of the Dead & revelation in the desert, and re-do the countdown of the seven days of Creation — and on the same screens, much later in the evening, naked girls with open legs to make their labias blossom, then kneeling on a carpeted floor waiting for a muscular boy with very short hair & clean-shaven testicles to shake his member long enough to deposit a last remnant of semen on their face, then mimicking, as best as possible, at that moment ( a matter of timing ), a kind of gratitude — not quite orgasm, a gratitude comparable to nothing, detached like a smiling head detached from its body, and therefore amnesic. He talks about the fashion shows, the Christmas window displays, the women models always more deprived, of a weight we all have but want to spare them, to see, do we ever know, if such imponderability is viable, & if it helps us to be happy ; he talks about these female models, the shoulders in back, pelvis in front, but not too wide, in front only, so as to make flutter from the shoulders to the pelvis veils designed in the greatest secrecy by an artist of the clothingthing, now sitting somewhere, next to the show, tangent to the line from the shoulders to touch the hip bone. This thinness poised on a thread delimiting a world of inconceivable wealth ( so inconceivable, one wonders how they can still pass from one wallet to another ), he compares them to the opposite of thinness, to the obesity of the poor man : who walks with his legs spread, deforms his ankles with the vertebrae, without ever stopping to eat ( he continues, on the contrary, to perpetuate his curse of amplitude without hoping for any satisfaction : not everyone is the Minotaur, and there are so many opportunities to give up,
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so many priests to command us to, or doctors to teach it, or life itself, which is always saying it’s over ). He speaks of gratuitousness, the enchantment of the poor — next to which, the false enchantments of the Thousand Nights are honesty and frankness, hospitality, and absence of the will to harm. Of course, among these poor people, some, sometimes the same ones, know how to cling to value, to the penny that is a penny that is a penny : to acknowledge the laws of economics according to which money measures the time of work, this already shows to what extent one is eager to do well : they understand algebra, they respect simple, childish rules, finding the means during this time to feel clever, not just obedient, masters of the game, and even, in the long run, guilty : despoilment is their business. They go from understanding to understanding as if from trap to trap, and choose to put their foot precisely in the trap, proof of their skill : they get cheated to prove that they have grasped the rules of supply and demand —. less stupid than we thought. ( A good number of the rich have forgotten what chemistry binds the pride in the poor to the very heart of obedience ; they have forgotten it, but they know how to manage as if they’ve always known it, and they don’t need to use theory or ask oracles to achieve their ends : without thinking, they periodically give the poor the opportunity to experience this pride of obedience : it is then simultaneously new & atavistic, it looks like a round and white pebble handed down from the first servant at the time of Ashur, before which one goes into raptures, yet again. ) Work is elevated to the rank of virtue by those of private means, who are better placed to do so, just as the praise of equity is intoned by the one who has received an inheritance & then enjoys the perspective of Xerxes atop his hill, overlooking the battles ; other generous patrons,
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intelligent and judicious, wearing the suit of one who has founded foundations, develop contests ( they love contests ) to celebrate yet again “may the best man win,” to a great sporting tune : as soon as enough poor bastards ( the poor bastard is numerous by definition ) believe in this “may the best man win,” then the virtue of Equality exists, a point of convergence to their liking, the thing is accomplished, the virtue is there, the universe is one benefit richer, and a handful of crafty devils can win by using their handouts without fear of murdering Equality — if they abuse it, the legions of poor bastards on the same line, each in turn, each in his place, will be there to defend it. ( One must count on the unlucky to perpetuate the idea of fair play, on the customer cheated a thousand times to perpetuate the idea of healthy competition, on the swindled ones to prove the virtue of supply and demand, on the losers to guarantee the honesty of the juries ( their defeat is the final proof of it ) — one can see in this a form of natural harmony : one brings together enough poor people every year to collectively praise wealth, and the one whose place gets stolen goes home to write an apology for the waiting lines. ) He talks about supermarkets, not huge supermarkets, they all are by necessity, abundance must always push the walls to assert itself as overabundance and simultaneously conjure up the fear of scarcity, which is an intuition, the prophecy of nostalgia — with every announcement of a reserve on the point of going dry ( there are all kinds : nickel, fish, bluefin tuna, helium, heavy oils ), a store ten miles square opens its doors on the side of a road, even a desert road : & there are found, no joke, prices calculated accurately with the aim of celebrating not a contract, but brotherhood itself : humanity embracing itself, congratulating itself, thanks to commerce ( one has to get used to this dizzying idea :
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in this store as big as three hundred funeral homes built one up against the other, each little thing, the peanut bag thing, the coffee packet thing, the jar of pickled peppers thing, contains in itself and on its label the proof ( not only the proof : the catalyst ) of universal love through supply and demand ; the proof that it works in earnest, this absurd mechanism : yes, the accumulation of selfishness ends up generating a collective understanding, harmony from here ( the bag of peanuts ) to beyond the Indus River ). It was, resolutely, necessary to believe — and convinced, appeased, we end up accepting it, moved by the bag, the colors, the light diffused from the ceilings that are themselves hospitable, we can’t call it the light of the zenith, but it’s not far off, and by the music, and especially by the assurance of always finding behind the bag of peanuts another bag, & behind that another, a sign of generosity, a sign of the service watching night and day in a world of finitude. For our benefit, come on, our happiness, elves’ hands slip the peanuts one by one into a sterile bag : the obedient frenzy of Santa’s helpers from Walt Disney’s drawings serves as an explanation for what fills our shelves — less frequently as a metaphor. The universal agreement is celebrated there, in this store that spreads out over miles, with angels in blue or red coats that have badges on them, and announcing the amount to be paid, all the more angelic because they have no influence on this amount : purity and honesty preserved on both sides. He talks about gastronomy : the ideal of speed is not an order given by cars to cooks, it is a corollary of the spirit to the pragmatic doctrine : to be efficient, to achieve one’s ends, to concentrate all one’s logical and moral forces like a jealous eye toward the consequences, this is what leads the man of today to swallow his morsel of food more quickly : and this morsel, in turn, in order to be more expeditious,
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has over time assumed a round & slippery shape ; it offers itself as a mouthful before the mouthful, it anticipates the bite, soft by anticipation, it aims directly, vertically, for the stomach, its goal, without touching the walls of the esophagus — that would be an insult to them. Some inhabitants of the old stomping grounds of languor and inefficiency continue to chew for a long time, and they chew again, drawing Lord knows what juice, talking about flavor while they chew, comparing the touch of salt to the hint of vanilla : they don’t seem to be afraid of wearing their molars down to the gums from evaluating the merits of the floral note — good for them, these dining room antics make them sympathetic in an old-fashioned way, it’s the charm of countries still on the path of decadence, but it’s a sweet one, we know it : getting drunk, dancing The Blue Danube, keeping quarters of truffles in a jar, caressing the dust of an enclosed thingamabob as if they already missed it, long lamenting the disappearance of paper, rereading the final pages, so full of melancholy, of the Prince de Ligne deprived of his gardens, and searching suppliers for catgut for ancient instruments. Here, it’s the opposite : the drive-through restaurant, from a counter to the inside of a car, relies on speed : to be polite to customers who have come to slide something down their throats, it is advisable to short-circuit any idea of cooking : directly from the order to digestion without passing through the gastronomic stage. Eating there, it’s necessary to assume the air of one taking a break : the restaurant counters are always on the side of the road, either to account for a pioneering & nomadic reality, a reality of pilgrims, or else to maintain it, like a legend striving to remain young — in which case it’s an old ideal adapted to other circumstances : one eats leaning against a ledge, the gaze never far from one’s own auto-
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mobile, faced by the placid, eternal, patient manner of a cow on the other side of the fence ; and the steak itself seems connected to the automobile as the automobile doesn’t let the steak out of its sight.
Ahab’s death throes — hypotheses Let’s be optimistic, his last day will come eventually — out of meanness and by chance, again the accident of accidents, pure contingency, and Ahab, dying under the barely decipherable insigns belonging to no order or church, will be able to say to the witnesses ( the survivors ) “I knew it” : he always paid attention to the accidental, he always believed men were more responsive to accidents than to God 157 knows what destiny ( let’s not talk about essence ), and according to him ( always with his arms crossed tightly over a feather pillow ), those who develop a science of the accidental know a lot about our universe. The captain could have done justice to his good health, that of a Biblical patriarch, for another six hundred years, in which case he would have been said to have been “like an oak,” or rather “like the stele of Hammurabi,” he would have wound up reaching incomparable ages : following any mention of Herod & Abraham and the sacred crocodiles and the embalmed archbishops of Sicily captured in a false eternity of wax & bitumen, there would have been nothing more say, and moreover Abraham on the one hand, the Christian mummies on the other, would have returned home, as an image, back to where they had come from, leaving the old captain only with the idea of inaccessible figures ( when comparing an old man like him to Herod, to an old surrounding wall and to the last of the 157. Sic.
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sperm whales, what has been left has been nothing of the idea of growing old, nothing of age, nothing of time, even less — Herod & the sperm whale must therefore be restored intact to the world : virgin to our understanding ). Perhaps a chicken bone stuck in his throat — whatever it is, the captain’s death throes, his leg lying beside him, poised, the sword of Cato or the memory of his youth ; he contemplates the ceiling, he considers for the umpteenth time a few square yards of white plaster, as, all things consideres, his most familiar, most constant landscape, far ahead beyond the waves, and far ahead beyond the fields of corn ; he remembers the time when the face of Richard III, later the white whale’s, was projected against this same surface, let’s say a similar surface : one tone atop the next, it drew itself easily on the ceiling, it was enough to accept the ceiling as it was ( nights without sleep, eyes open, freely accessible, are favorable to this type of apparition — Ahab had noticed : it is at daybreak that insomnia most resembles a whale hunt ).
Ahab ’s death throes — other hypotheses Ahab has become the opposite of the captain : he is white and horizontal, there is no shouting, he hasn’t had an order to give for a long time, he hasn’t seen a seashell, he has a cloth on his forehead, he now stands far from himself, he no longer has a direction, he remains willfully ignorant of this word’s meaning & wants to enjoy for the last time the immobility of his bed, silly but so pleasant, the lack of parasites, he detects the smell of straw instead of the smell of whiting fish, and this reassures him, he thinks himself victorious. It is the hour when the doctor can do nothing more for him, except to talk & write about his anatomy, establish
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a catalog, not particularly dense, which the captain’s body is supposed to resemble ( then the disease, the death, going through the medical terms, will be the last bonds of a man alone with the rest of humanity : as the cancer unceasingly passes from the particular to the universal ) : one last time he applies his stethoscope, he hears a distant voice, the breath of the heart or lungs, comparing the breath to the silence of the room, he considered the old captain’s chest as a box that is already hollow, not even a chest, at the end of its rubber hose ; he sees a tangle of black veins along the length of the bones, he admits the appearance of solidity as evidence of the most extreme weakness — the last. Logically, there shouldn’t be a priest at his bedside, an ichthyologist if need be, one of those cetology specialists he invoked at various perilous moments of his existence ( when he missed catching the animal, for example, and suddenly felt a furious desire for theory : only it knows how to transform a sperm whale’s open mouth into a closed one ). All Ahab’s disbelief should ward off extreme unction, or deny it if it takes place : around a dying man so exclusively pagan, nothing but the insignia of materiality, the mortality of the soul, the absence of salvation and meaning, and the absurd distributed in small quantities to beings & things, in order to make itself bearable. If the priest arrives, it’s because he’s broken in, at night, because he heard talk of a doctor, of his visit, of the useless ( sugar mixed with starch ) but quite real pills present on a bedside table, to make a man pass granularly from life to, well, let’s say his demise ; the little God at the end of his crucifix, also passing for Jesus suffering his Suffering, does not recognize Ahab, nor can Ahab recognize this Jesus ( & if he does recognize him, it would be an exclusively intellectual encounter, or rather cognitive, not by any stretch the light of faith at the last
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minute — something like the famous Doctor Livingstone, I presume ? ). For us, seen from the outside, and for the Captain’s Battered History, it could be a priest of the Catholic Church with an altar boy, chasuble, stole, maniple, cincture, surplice, and his thin face stretched toward the poor lamb — for the Captain, the shadow before his eyes a neutral confidant, as on so many occasions those men & women next to him at the bar, in front of a glass of beer, have been : someone to talk to, a guileless, forgetful trustee, in a hurry to bury these stories under other, more important memories, such as memories of naked legs at the picture show. It would be, at that moment, in that room, the last version of his whale hunt : spoken in a low voice by an amnesiac to an indifferent man, it could fit into just a few words, because time is running out, it would go briefly from start to finish, almost motionless, as if going from start to end were, this time, reinforcing in pencil the same period at the same place on the page — the two words not of an appeal for mercy ( why did you get me into this mess ? ) but of the genus & species of a marine mammal.
Fred Astaire in the role of Captain Ahab Show time : 158 this is the moment when Ahab ceases to be Wagnerian, he is choreographic, he is descended from ragtime, he and Boris Karloff no longer have anything in common : Fitzgerald plans to assign his role to the young Fred Astaire, a tailored man in a whale of a petticoat : swing, swing at last, the Gene Krupa-style stick on the round of the snare drum, and such an aerial way of leaning on a false leg ( more on that later ). 158. Ricercare con obbligo di cantare.
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Fitzgerald died before he could bring this idea to the men at the studio, but the notion of a one-legged, fully choreographed Captain Ahab played by a professional tap dancer made the rounds, passing through the open window, to one office and then another, the boss’s. For weeks, Fred Astaire dressed as the captain was seen practicing in front of a large mirror, winding the phonograph every ten minutes ; Ahabism could then become all of this, a young man’s stage fright before the dance, the sidesteps of Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power, the art of walking as one dances and as one fights in a duel with the finest of swords, silver beams that sound like a fork against a champagne flute ( and then, the next moment, the sound of an axe ) ; Ahabism becomes controlled joy, exultation at the idea of imminent victory, the forgetting of all constraints, the acceptance of the world as an ensemble of sets & musical compositions, as a temporary masterpiece of MGM’s craftsmen, & as a revival of old hits.
Ahab discovers the book In one version of The Captain’s Travels, 159 the white whale does not put an end to his relentlessness or existence, Ahab survives, his momentary fight is revelation, surprise, disillusionment, appeasement of fortune ; the captain sees the sun rise on the day following the fight, neither victor nor vanquished, taking his place in a now that is comfortable but somewhat soft, a now of sand mixed with water where the foot sinks in, perhaps permanently. He has detached himself from the whale ( the “to each his own” and “it was good” of the Old Testament ), he has survived and since then he has been walking, he is getting older, he finds a job & then 159. The present.
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[ 1972 ]
loses it, then another, he goes from elevator boy to bellhop and from bellhop to cobbler, the more the years go by and the more the captain distances himself from the captain, natural forgetfulness adds to voluntary self-denial, born of elegance and of cowardice ; he tells of his misadventures as if he were talking about someone else, he wins ephemeral friendships, a small changing audience, he monetizes his stories, or tries to, on Broadway and then in Hollywood, he is fooled a hundred different ways and these hundred ways are a hundred shows among all those of show business ; he gives up the cinema, he packs his bags, he travels on a cannonball from Los Angeles to the Newark airport, he no longer wants to know how to furl a sail or how to write a third act ; he receives a miserable pension, which allows him to live on glasses of milk and round sandwiches made of soft bread ; he takes walks to give shape to his schedule ( a form of going and coming back ), until one day, in a bookstore in the north of the city, he discovers a copy of Herman Melville’s book : On the cover, a whaleboat uplifted by a whale fluke, a dozen men like twelve anchovies shaken into a frying pan. He’s attracted by the image of a whale’s tail on the cover of a book ( a few years ago, it would have been a repellent ), his attraction is curiosity and wariness : the captain hesitates, as he often does, between the simple joy of coincidences ( joy also of resemblances ) and the fear of seeing the first of a bad omen in this tip of a whale’s fluke. If the bookshop exists, if the faded book in the bookshop turns up, in the window or on a table, if Old Ahab has the courage to open it, and if the bookseller ( a gentleman in the shadows, unpacking boxes and wondering where to find room ) gives his customer all the time he needs to read — then Ahab can assess the other similarities, in addition to that huge sperm whale’s fluke and the twelve men : he retraces the letters
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of his name, he recognizes the elements of the Pequod, he gets lost at times, he can’t find his way back, he goes along with another’s story, then he finds his way back, he returns to Captain Ahab, the other one, the one from the book, who reappeared in chapter 28, who came out of his cabin in time to fluff his feathers as a rooster and peacock, but the black peacock, a cross between a peacock and a cormorant. ( Turning the pages, he recognizes the blacksmith, the steward, the salted beef, the molasses, Willoughby, Sibbald, the books of Lacépède, the macrocephalic whale, the huzza porpoise, he thinks he finds himself in there, on familiar ground, but of a familiarity that escapes him, as if the sailors of the book and he, ex-captain in town, had agreed to a reunion but refused to embrace one another : to give each other hugs that, after one long century of absence, without a letter, without a phone call, don’t make much sense anymore — he recognizes the Malacca probe, the hemlock fir, the Massachusetts Almanac, the Dismal Swamp, the Journey of the Other, the It’s an old Saxon word, it occurs once in Shakespeare, Cuvier’s sperm whale, which looks like a squash, the whales painted on the oil merchants’ signs & that look like Richard III, the admirable story of Perseus and Andromeda, the brigs freighted with pitch & brimstone, the ashes of Gomorrah & the blood of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral ; he recognizes the by-law of the Chinese Society for the Repression of the Desire to Meddle in the Affairs of Others, he remembers having seen it somewhere, having heard about it one day from a blacksmith, or having told the blacksmith about it, one or the other ; he recognizes the last grizzly bear in settled Missouri, the sleepers compared to last year’s abandoned sickles, he wonders if he is just now discovering these abandoned sickles, or if he met them a century ago somewhere, if he has seen some sleepers and if
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the absurd image of a sickle came to him at that moment, if he dared to make the comparison, if he entrusted it to a little foam, if it became proverbial & is found in these pages, naturally, without any explanation other than the presence of just about everything in this book ; he recognizes the undertow of commerce, the dreamy Sabbath afternoon, the curse of paying the marauders of the Earthly Paradise, the Shadbelly vest, the indigestion of apple turnovers, sordidness considered as the permanent state of man, Sami conjectures, an important idea occurring to the whale, delirious palpitations, the impresario Fates, the draft of a draft, and the story of the man happy to stagger under the heaviest words in the dictionary. ) Of course, under these circumstances ( which are hypotheses, but credible ), Ahab takes some and leaves some, he is wary of spotted mirrors, he has been ensnared too many times by the depths of an empty bottle producing a portrait of stretched glass, studded with thorns ( with the look of a panicked fugu fish ) : he wonders whether he should identify with this Ahab of the forecastle who first appeared in chapter 28 or whether he should keep his distance for fear of being drawn into evil tales. He finds him again in chapter 44 springing out of his cabin as if from a bed of iron, he sees him another time in chapter 91 leaning over the side of the ship ( just as soon gone ), another time in chapter 99 pacing within a given area — and once or twice more, hardly more, determined to identify with the long absences rather than with these appearances, so distantly spaced. The impression of having been robbed again : another knucklehead has taken his whale adventures and created this book to ensure a quiet old age in three country houses, one in Virginia, one in Dorset, one in Borneo. ( From his point
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of view as a pensioner with a meager pension ( borscht usually with mutton rather than beef ), these three houses are an inexplicable fortune, or an inexplicable swindle, but an inexplicable fortune, compared to his poverty. ) If that were all there was to it, the feeling of being fooled, Ahab the reader would slip the old book into the garbage can, ready to pay the bookseller for the price of a new one — but there is something else : the desire to catch more of Ahab’s rare epiphanies as they happen, to witness his silence, that of pagan priest of mystery confused by the light of day, then see how he walks, try to deduce which foot he limps on, to find the answer nowhere, any more than he would find the answer to the matter of the whale’s sex. If he puts his irritation aside, he even feels a certain pleasure in seeing the sailors climb up into the sails, as long as he doesn’t climb into them, greed when a mate eats his red meat, perplexity when it’s a question of Pythagoras & his metempsychoses, and a surprising nostalgia, without a specific object, for a time he is not sure to have known, stirred while reading a sentence where an hour is described as having been goldbeaten out to ages — nostalgia to encounter the old resentment, to proceed to the reunion. ( Here he is on the verge of being moved, which would not befit either captain — fortunately, in spite of his melancholy, the reader retains his dignity : onto the page that is his, in the name of an obscure copyright, he pours the sand that serves to dry the ink : the sand of his critical mind. ) It is because of this sand, no doubt, that the moment comes to indulge in a game of comparisons : Ahab compares his own way to the other’s, his hat to his, his acrobatic ease, his talent as a huckster ; he judges himself to be more flexible, but less skillful, more enthusiastic, but less consistent.
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Turning the pages of the last chapter, 135, a little before reading these allusions to the wandering Rachel, to Ixion, to the five-thousand-year-old sea scrolls, he notices ( he had expected it ) that the other captain chooses to throw himself into the water with the whale, and to die there : an emphatic death instead of survival comprised of a long series of anecdotes. Does he envy him ? no, if he takes into account his cabin, too narrow — yes, if he finds him elegant and heroic, wearing his hat better, holding his compass better, and the sextant at the end of his nose. Above all, he doesn’t like the idea of an usurper showing up in the square with the candor of an authentic sailor : would he who has taken so much effort and so many risks to invent his captain character let himself be surpassed by one of these authentic merchants ? ( Won’t public opinion designate him as the pale imitation of the other, comparing their merits : with what proof then, to defend his honor ? with his anonymity of an unemployed man who has been struck off the registers & with his flea-bitten sweater ? how to plead the value of oneself with a patched-up shirt & twenty-seven identity cards stored in a box ? ) It seems that, the day after the publication of a deplorable collection ( a few poems slain ), Nicolai Gogol the Uneasy ran around St. Petersburg for three days from one bookstore to the next in order to buy back his copies and burn them in the fire of the stove : may that be the last of it ( this kind of book burning was to become a custom ). Three days likewise for our captain, with fewer rubles in his pocket but a similar anxiety, and the tour of bookstores and libraries of New York, thousands of miles from St. Petersburg, to buy back all the copies of this usurper Melville and feed them to his cat — by which he means : toss them into the garbage chute. It’s a short-lived relief : the anxiety rears its ugly head the very next day, no
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need for a curse to feel threatened, just standing alone in his kitchen surrounded by a million paper Ahabs, more epic than him, ready to shame him. He collects the rest of his retirement, cuts back on slices of lemon pie, buys a book every time he finds one, doesn’t find that many, reassures himself that maybe there aren’t that many copies, perhaps one thousand, perhaps fewer, a paltry mass like the battalions at Gettysburg after the war, thinned out because of all the dead : the other Ahab has become rarefied, he too feels alone, a refugee in a territory that becomes ever smaller, obliged to climb into the basket at the very top of the masthead to take full stock of our solitude. Fifteen copies, then six, then only one, the last one, like the last copy of Giordano Bruno’s Noah’s Ark that fell from a pocket into the Mediterranean Sea — and aboard the final book is a circumspect captain ( he is no longer proud ), aware of his impending end, whale or no whale. In this version of the story, Ahab solemnly purchases his last copy ; his solemnity is not heavy, but lightened, rendered frivolous by all the circumstances, the clear and cold winter morning at the approach of noon, the comings and goings of workers, the conversations, and the casualness elegantly embroidered by these conversations, the gurgling of the stomach, the jingles on the radio, the stories in three boxes drawn on the last page of a newspaper — he buys it, he parts with a single dollar, but this time he doesn’t throw it away to feed the brazier improvised in a garbage can by three hermits but keeps it under his arm, later under his pillow ; he keeps his scruples and his embarrassment in check, he keeps it within reach, some days he looks there for the signs of a possible brotherhood, of a common destiny, & thus the first signs of a solidarity among castaways, an empathy of captain to captain & whale to whale, and squid to squid.
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( He underlines words to pass the time, promising himself to find a meaning for them later — for example, pyramidal silence, in chapter 79, and ten lines later the expression Egypt of each man, which would have to be deciphered. )
Exit Melville It is known that Melville returns to England, this time late in life, late Melvillean, long after he has published all the books he had taken the trouble to write for unknown reasons — in other words, once he was rich with all his failures, with, who knows, enough irony or sarcasm or boyish mischief to call this sum of failures capital, and to invest it, as they say, for the day when he decided to start again. Dragging his feet, he recognized the sloping street that led to the docks, the district on the south shore where the Globe burned down : he was no longer young, he had been spared nothing, he was walking along the port side after all those years of being a stupid customs inspector — but he didn’t want to look back on a past as a civil servant, for that matter : a past as a prose writer, even defeated & scorned, seemed more just, more honest, and he expected it to be more pleasant, he thought of folding a sheet of paper in two and prayed to be one of the halves placed precisely over the other. At that age, one doesn’t need to be sick to be unwell, coughing is practically evidence of good health, the dynamism of those who are still alive and furnishing proof of it at all hours in a spittoon — but were there any spittoons left ? If he were to sit at a table and let the foam of his beer fade away completely, without putting his lips to it, & if he became at the same time, along with his beer, a pale pint with no more effervescence, chances were that he would end up there, in that spot, reconciled with nothing — the wood of the table, perhaps ?
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Iago Years before setting to chase a whale, he had been introduced to resentment in the role of Iago : resentment secreted in a dark room, considered, devised like a trap of strings and harrows. In the time that it took him to memorize his tirades, to choose or invent ( out of nowhere ) Iago’s hair, find the six buttons on his shirt, then design his eyebrows, actor Ahab boasted that he knew Iago better than Iago would have if Iago had been a living being — a little more and Iago himself would have come to actor Ahab for lessons in how to conduct himself, like Napoleon did with Talma. ( In one of the versions of recollections the captain shared with some of his sailors, we find this very scene : the Visit of the real Iago to the actor in his role to learn from him who he is, his deepest thoughts, his desires, and perhaps even ( while we’re at it ) a little bit of his destiny. This Iago was actually an Argentinean lost in London, where he was transporting cheddar cheese on a handcart ; he saw his name on a poster, he wanted to recognize himself in a shirt & beard on the stage to the very last act, he came back several times to applaud and heckle himself, he found himself fully in this mixture of weakness, malice, keen intelligence, juggler’s skill, and desire to harm, he went to see the young actor Ahab in his dressing room after rubbing his soles on the doormat for a long time. His sailors listen to him tell the story until the end ; some see in this story the imitation of an old threadbare joke, others swear on the handle of their oar that they have heard it before, with the deceitful Volpone two times in the two roles of Iago. )
Ahab’ s rebounds What he would like now is either the uneventful ease of the pensioner, his ship between two armrests, the horizon
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through the bisected window, no trips to the Sandwich Islands ( it doesn’t matter which ones ) but just two blocks, to buy pastrami — or else it’s the interruption of everything & himself, also uneventful, a death not even worthy of a blurb in the parish bulletin : a hazelnut swallowed the wrong way, the hazelnut twist. While he’s between his armrests, hoping, a team of thirteen scriptwriters continue every day ( except Sundays, but even then ) to invent adventures for him, really for his double : slip a banana peel or a flying carpet under his foot, they have him find in the vicinity a childhood friend or a sworn enemy, or a certain Phil who is both at the same time. They throw ideas on the table, most will be lost, they know it, they have wide-open drawers and even bigger garbage cans, abundantly deep ( the abyss according to Democritus, where the Truth always buries itself ) ; they propose adventures in one direction and then in the other, they have him open and close doors, they create three characters and abolish them reluctantly before the morning’s done, they borrow from Maciste in Hell and Fantomas ; since they know the drawers and the garbage can are open and hospitable, they count on a certain immunity : here, they can imagine anything. But in the end, they perpetuate the captain, it’s Jethro or Ahab, the difference is not remarkable, the damage is done the same way ; the old ex-captain is forced to bounce back again & again as the days of the week continue. ( Ahab, familiarized with television sets, and none too soon, knows from experience that any maneuver is routine : he looks at his captain character at the very end of episode 32, above the void, clinging to the ledge of the 107th floor, by a single finger, the index finger, and this index finger ready to flinch — he will see him in a week’s time ( he knows in advance, one spontaneously becomes a prophet with this
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game ) in episode 33, safe and sound, back on his feet with a shrug of the shoulders : saving one’s skin being, under the law of soap operas, a casual matter. ) 160
Of a painting exhibited in the Spouter-Inn, turned black with the years The systematic visits to the painting at the Spouter-Inn, 161.. a painting probably of the charming daub genre, so meticulously covered with dust and ash, smoke, and hearty vapors from the kitchen, where the frying is done — and so dark now that its subject ( let us admit the existence of a subject ) disappears under contradictory forms and colors. Aesthetes and even connoisseurs have come here for the sole pleasure 162 of seeing how a subject endeavors to disappear, fading upon fading ( or on the contrary, from successive additions ) : the painter’s skill combined with the inn’s fine indifference, the total apathy of pipe and cigar smokers, the sovereign laissez-faire, & the other sovereign, the burnt fat of the kitchen, all of this deposited on the surface of the canvas, stroke by stroke. The darkening of the Spouter-Inn’s painting, say the connoisseurs, is the gift of the drinkers’ loyalty, the cigar smoke’s gift to the wallpaper, every day, consistently — finding 160. This was already the case — the same ledge, the index finger, the precipice, the shrug — back in the days of Dick Tracy, the multiple Zorros and others, when soap operas were in black and white and projected into common rooms. Whether Dick Tracy, passed out and in chains while in a racecar speeding alongside a cliff, will make it out of there in two weeks is not a source of unbearable suspense ; there are no guardian angels, there are tricks. 161. New Bedford, 41° 38 ' 8" North, 70° 55' 22" West. 162. This is also an education.
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the subject clearly drawn under the thickness of ash and fat means going through the routine again, the same and another : the regular’s return to his regular spot, the door of the inn opened and closed, the greeting to all pronounced in a common language, which is renewed by reconfirming itself each day — the visit to the painting, the visit to the Spouter-Inn, the same gestures for the two visits, patience, enough time and indulgence to cajole a painting that has become not very talkative as it has dimmed, no rushing, especially not the rushing of an expert, the refusal to judge the brushstroke before having weighed the pros and cons, the presentation of oneself & one’s clear head to the painting, exactly as one presents the painting to the experts, a loyal counterpart ; the progressive confidence born of a certain routine of thing & of human, without waiting for the miracle of the dawn but with the hope that the eye will, this time, end up getting used to the black, because it has always been able to grow accustomed to the rooms plunged in the darkness of night. Regulars, who are not distinguished from connoisseurs, have come to the Spouter-Inn, they have taken the trouble, drinking stout to match the colors ; they have looked at the painting, they have let the dark figures come to them, waiting for them to stand out, they have let the hours pass to see the light, from the east and then from the west, highlighting the very old brushstrokes ; they guessed at the profile of a face, or of a boat, but without saying it, without being sure, remembering the eyes painted on the prows of Roman ships to ward off evil, the tragedian’s examining but wide-open eyes — they sometimes came to a conclusion, which they confided “like a lump of sugar to the black beer.”
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Treatise on Eternity ( little ) 163 Why does the so-called ( call-me ) Ishmael claim to have written a ( I quote ) little treatise on Eternity ? and why this casualness, an announcement in passing, as if to say that treatises came to him in the succulent spring at the same time as cherries were falling ( or in September, little plums ) ? why this adjective little doubtlessly containing the greatness of an amateur philosopher ( a little lazy — René Descartes, for example : he didn’t always consider it useful to publish his book, nor even to write it, to what end ? it has already been thought ). And then, this call-me Ishmael postulated by Herman call-me Melville, when did he find the time to write his little work ? how does a sailor reconcile free time for writing and eternity, the subject of study ? what joke or slacker’s ploy allows him to articulate the meagerness of a human life, the brevity of holidays, the smallness of a book with the unfathomable thing : because when you really think about it, and Tristram Shandy won’t contradict us, an eternity is needed to exhaust the subject of Eternity — if it happens to be the same one. And what might it have looked like, this little treatise ? A meditation on metempsychosis, compared to rope splices ? A hermetic study on the doctrine of Pythagoras ? or a portrait of the captain as an Indestructible, “immortal on land and sea” ? or a thesis on cetology demonstrating not only the omnipresence but also the eternity of whales, because of their remarkable lungs, spermaceti, & the fat they preserve themselves in ( nothing like fat, cold, salt, and absence of air, to make themselves everlasting ).164 163. “While composing a little treatise on Eternity” — chapter 85. 164. “[I]t cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions ; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal ( for immortality is but ubiquity in time )” — chapter 41.
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The Treatise on Eternity is not really a treatise on Eternity — this is how the hypothesis is presented in the most brutal way ( an unkind summary with regard to the subtleties of thought ) : in truth, it is a chronicle of the captain’s existence during his last years on dry land, written by following him from afar, day by day, inch by inch, in a notebook, attentive to the human foot as well as the non-human one ; if the treatise is casual, it is because what appears to be a diary, which collects trivial data, also exhibits the sometimes casual attention of the objectivist poets ( solemnity will have its place somewhere in the casualness ). Any treatise on Eternity worthy of the name, done with seriousness, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, or Max Planck and Blumenberg, with a bit of Karl Barth, theological breadth and philology, would embrace the whole of Eternity, even if it meant going out of one’s depth — clever or lazy, or lazy & therefore clever, call-me Ishmael has chosen to evoke Eternity through his samples, the eternity of a single gentleman, in no way distinguished from others, within the strict framework of his daily life. ( It could have been worse — the false eternity of a false mystic, the even more false eternity of an embalmed man on Red Square, rich in formaldehyde and brilliantine, the false eternity of the great artists, in their works and in themselves, or the eternity of the old crooners of nihilism, who are obstinate ( the most suicidal, the most obstinate ) — there is also the immortality, coupled with impunity, of senators for life, centenarians in the palazzo of Rome, always there when their colleagues wake up, like Monterroso’s dinosaur, to witness and deplore ( the course of the world to this very day ). ) There was Jean-Henri Fabre leaning over June bugs ; one must imagine call-me Ishmael at the foot of the building where the old captain carries on without always being on
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his guard ; one must imagine him twenty yards behind him in the street, as they walk : a double agent’s reserve, cautious and voyeuristic, the impresario’s loyalty to his client, united forever, the troubadour’s virtues of the lover who is the champion of his lady but the vices of the nuisance and the department store supervisor, in plain clothes ; and the fastidiousness, the procedure, the certainty of reaching the end ( of what — of anything ) by passing from one stage to the other along a discrete sequence of numbers. With time, the familiarity of the spy walking twenty yards behind his client is all the more profound & sincere ( let’s say circumstantiated ) as it is silent, respectful, attentive, without missing a thing, knowing the latest on the intimate and the extimate, compiling habits, the little ones, the weekly ones, the Sunday ones, the counter-habits that have become second habits — the friendship of a shadowing agent, who would know perfectly well, at night and back at home, eyes closed and in a single gesture, how to draw the captain’s portrait, charcoal if there is charcoal, and failing that, the fountain pen that was used in the morning to note the exact time of breakfast. The portrait is instantaneous & abrupt ( it must be — a sketch, but no one will touch it again ), it looks like the gesture of the irascible pushing away his medicine, but there is nothing wrong about it, it does justice : the captain is summed up in two superimposed black lines, one more sloped than the other ; it’s a little slot that he entirely fits into ; to reduce him to so little was not an insult, he himself would recognize himself in it, a full-length portrait, or his last signature after extreme unction at the bottom of a will ( the pen165 of the one signing must make the very delicate connection between the definitive seriousness of the will, 165. The crenellated hand.
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fixed by a notary, and the frivolousness of the dying man : his otherworldly apathy ). Call-me Ishmael : he follows in his footsteps, he holds back, he assumes the respectful prudence and hypocrisy of a parasitic peeping Tom ; he gathers the ever smaller and more trivial elements of a treatise on Eternity ; he never loses sight of him, he wears out his soles : he adapts to his rhythm, if necessary he looks elsewhere ( how many times in a week does he retie his shoelace ) ; at the end of the day, of the year, and of his existence, he has his paws on thousands of miles covered by the old captain, day after day — and not only the number, but the exact pattern, each of his walks immediately re-executed. When he forgets the chapters of his Little Treatise, because his pages come loose, he becomes without knowing it a kind of distant and detached companion, stepping aside in case of trouble, but also willing to lend a hand, as the news blurbs will say : the brave guy who was seen rescuing the one-legged man at the crosswalk, perhaps it was Ishmael Mendesky, in a Harlequin costume — and the approximate soul mate replacing as best he could Sancho’s mule and Sancho on the mule, perhaps that was him, too.
Ahab will bury us all His rot-proof wooden leg, and he, on this leg, just as rotproof, staring at the Pole, collector of all forms of abstract and concrete immutability : this Ahab will bury us all : he will do it definitively, it will not be a proverb, but the most straightforward, the simplest of realities, observed by him alone surviving above the clods of earth studded with fragments of Yorick. He will be standing alone among so many lying dead, he will clash, he will protrude from a defunct
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world, he’ll have the somewhat brainless look of a standard, a milestone, or a maypole, decorated with lovely hams ; he will then wonder if he should pronounce a collective oration, one for everyone, or take his pickaxe, and assume in solitude the gravedigger’s grumbling / disillusioned / spontaneous / pragmatic wisdom. Ahab will bury us all : and he will take a malicious pleasure in burying the whale in the sand, quite the opposite of his beloved ocean : it will be a joke elevated to a titanic degree, it will take seven months to clear a hole of sufficient size — but to achieve this victory, Ahab would kill himself with the task. We didn’t necessarily believe him to be the type of man born to escape from everything ( the luck of scoundrels, or the skill of a dancer taking a sideways step at the right moment ), but nevertheless, he has survived his shipwreck and his final battle, and we must imagine him organizing the funeral for the world over : once alone, he reigns and mourns, he resembles Sardanapalus. He doesn’t look down on us, the gravedigger’s judgment can never be very lofty, he even finds himself quite often up to his chin in the grave and having a chin’s view of the ground level : humility that laughs readily, open to nothingness, but also attentive to details right on the ground observed very closely, a snail for example, the insignificance & the high geometric complexity of the snail. He may be triumphant, he may even be jubilant, the only heir to the ability to laugh directly over the open graves — while he walks on the flowerbeds, he wonders what attitude the one who outlives everyone else must observe, what genuflections, what protocols, what sailors’ funeral songs, what farewell drink in all solemnity — he does not know. He believes he has discovered the essence of humanity in this ignorance : the inability, since the beginning of time, to know what to do.
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The last survivor has no model : free to improvise, according to his amateur talents, juggling, tap dancing, requiem performed on the church organ, if there is one left in working order, or simple Kantian meditation accomplished with small steps on dirt roads. Nothing and no one will be able to say if Ahab as the Last Survivor succeeds in his interpretation : if he is worthy of an immeasurable task, if he does not heap poor taste on an arrogant beginning — imagine, the landscape is hieratic, it is Egyptian, with all the funereal necessities, it is the hour of reckoning, or at least of the enunciation of a motto that will strike home for an eternity deprived of all humankind : amidst it all, the captain is ridiculous. The survivor has the right to turn off the lights, with all of space available to unleash his displays of an actor in need of an audience, like a flood, himself covering the world ( & Ahab, as we know, can be a show-off : Orson Welles in his role would have been subtler what it was in reality ). Also entitled to distinguish trouble on his right & luck on his left, then resolving to walk in this deserted world in the manner of a narrator, accounting for the dead and the living and what has been done, an observer, without desolation ; he will make the final announcement, he will pronounce ultimate words, it is not yet known which ones, he will find a way to disappear ; he does not know yet how.
A letter from Cole Porter to Alan Broderick [ 1934 ]
Things ( I don’t have time to specify which things ; it would take a whole catalog, it would overlap with the world itself .— I’d rather let you draw from your own lists & make things mean whatever you think they mean when you read this letter ) — things sometimes change very quickly on Broadway :
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last night Howard Lindsay, as excited as if he’d found a winning lottery ticket instead of his coatroom ticket and as nervous as if he were running from Lucky Luciano’s men, was still shaking everyone up, me first, but also Guy Bolton, Wodehouse, Russel Crouse, and I don’t know who else, to put on his famous There She Blows — the story of a mad captain chasing a sperm whale ( I imagine Fitzgerald chasing after his old success ). This morning, there’s no more white whale, we aren’t sorry to have seen it go, There She Blows has become Anything Goes, which allows me to keep all my rhymes, prose, studios, gigolos, and most of the words that I let slip in between the rhymes. Howard Lindsay is still as excited, it must be said, the deadlines are short, the premiere in Boston is soon and the libretto is empty except for a vague outline of public enemy number 1 stowed away on a transatlantic liner from New York to London — as far as I’m concerned, I’m peaceful, I’m giving my body over to tranquility while I can, I’m letting it come, resting my hands on the keys, I’m having fun making three-beat melodies work on four-beat measures, a bit shaky ( and when I say I’m letting it come, I’m not talking about inspiration but about Howard’s next phone call and the next time he changes his mind ). No worries here, There She Blows or Anything Goes, my lines still stick, like And there’s no cure like travel / to help you unravel / the worries of living today — or A sailor’s life is supposed to be / a hell of a lot of fun, / yes, but when you’re a sailor, / take it from me, / you work like a son of a gun. 166 This worked very well with the whale story and will fit with this story, still confused, of the public enemy — and I bet you my Empire State Building against your horse and 166. Our gallant captain has told the staff / it’s time for killing the fatted calf / as he’s throwing a party on behalf / of public enemy number one.
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buggy that my old sailor’s song would fit any other situation, I mean any libretto : that’s the charm of Broadway, matching anything with anything, in a flash, for the fun of putting things together and then saying that’s good ( P.G. Wodehouse is right when he says ( he repeats it at every turn ) that the good Lord, when creating the world, must have been interrupted before the end by a phone call, leaving things undone — things again, damned things.
The advantage of being a wreck There have been hours of glory for the whales, these hours have been distributed rather approximately over immense areas, to the point where it could be said : a lot of those hours, or glory, has been lost ; it was not only a fight of fish versus sailors to compete for flasks of oil, but images, an incarnation of abundance and scarcity, both legendary, still striking all these years later, to the point that two or three of these whales taken individually could have replaced the Lord for Sunday gatherings, between the white wooden walls of the temple ( some pastors reopened their Testament to the page of Jonah to revive the attention of the faithful, renewing their faith by making a detour through the animal world ; others refrained from doing so, steering far from the Jonah chapter, either before or after, everything except that, precisely for fear of seeing the big fish take the spotlight ). And the hour of glory passed, or it was mixed with weariness, out of routine, or ( it is more likely ) the glory lost its vigor, it was given to others, for example to Rudolph Valentino and all the herœs interpreted by Valentino before dying at thirty of a hole in the stomach. The memory of the glory remains, its meaning is dwindling along with that of the epic, ever more approximate & lazy
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( what one knows of the epic in the corridors of a municipal aquarium ) ; the whales are becoming scarce, for good this time, the desire to be extraordinary has nothing to do with it, they are not more valuable, they do not sacrifice themselves for notoriety, they render themselves abstruse out of idleness and are one moment of great oceanic boredom. All ecological, animal-loving, cetacean-loving compassion can do nothing about it, the dead whale quickly sinks into oblivion, nobody is surprised at the idea of seeing creatures renowned for their gigantic size disappear without a trace — nobody is worried about how they scatter, either : to become dust, that’s all very well, easily said, it is a funerary formula awaiting our approval, but to fall to dust after being a whale is another thing : the Christian miracle of the resurrection of the bodies is not enough, there’s some work to be done. It is enough to lend them a psyche, not necessarily the psychology of an ex-grand duke of the music-hall : whales suffer from disappearing so wretchedly, in a bit of troubled water — they would prefer to have the fate of a wreck instead of the destiny of a marine mammal delivered in all docility to death : the lasting, enviable, desirable wreck of a caravel, magnificent in and of itself, and in its contents also rich, in all that people were willing to put in it when it was still afloat, rich also in its catastrophe, a catastrophic wreck as a terrible and infinitely repeatable story, as a human drama added to the royal collections ( grandnephews of the princes of Genoa sometimes foundered with the ship ), as a diplomatic catastrophe ( sunken gifts for the king, and long-winded apologies ), as a superb loss for financiers talked about for a long time to come ( and which gives rise to even more magnificent repayments ), as a moment in a naval battle, as a picturesque episode ( ever picturesque ) in the history of privateers, as a technical enigma, and finally
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as the pure and simple vanishing of precious cargoes ( the Elder Dempster Lines cargo ship, the Henry Stanley, weighed 5,036 tons and sunk in 1942 at 40° 35' 17" North and 39° 40' 32" West, with three boxes of diamonds : they still sparkle somewhere, wherever they are, and in the books that tell of them ). To be a wreck : to dwindle, certainly, to be forgotten, to lose substance delicately, in little pieces that merge with the plankton ( pure magnanimity : concession to the cycles of life and death that plague us most of the time ), to become waterlogged, to see it as a consequence of old age, to give hospitality to animalcules that one had no idea of before, letting oneself be populated, to become a passive compartment from one end to the other, passive the whole livelong day, to learn to recognize seahorses and hydras, which are imperfect jellyfish — with a bit of luck arouse the interest of researchers, real poet historians, curious to know what the wood of Cortés’ voyages looks like, or amateur treasure hunters who will assume an adventurous air. Everything, except becoming a whale carcass : this is the point of view of old Moby Dick, tired of being Moby Dick : and so he’d like to have the nerve to present himself to men as the magnificent relic of a shipwreck ; instead of having only pity, they will be admiring, they will put on flippers to pay homage to him by breathing through a tube, they will see the woodwork and look for the golden loot. There comes with this the promise of being set back afloat : after years of concealment, risking absolute oblivion, to come back to the surface — and then reappear, no longer as a vague whitish threat fallen into disuse but as a marvel of 16 th-century engineering, the era of frameworks, of shipyards, of unbeatable armadas, of soundness in the open sea contradicted by the storm — and the era of the embarked monks who prayed in the storm & camped atop porpoises.
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There won’t be any inspection of nauseating flesh, it will be far lovelier, a concerted concern of goldsmiths and carpenters, it will be an open-air museum, pulled out of the deep sea by a crane attached to the land — a docker’s prowess, a treat for the curators, a spectacle for the children and the inevitable pride of the public authorities. ( Among these wrecks, the 120-ton San Juan, grounded near the Bahama Channel in 1586 ; the Queen, grounded in 1800 off El Salvador ; the Stangarfoli, a beautiful Viking ship that sunk around 1189 off Greenland — and perhaps the Pequod, if it had also been willing to disappear through a trapdoor at the end of the final act : it would lie, without its men, scattering its cargo of precious oil over the course of the seasons. ) 167
The whale’s last voyage The whale, dazed by a meal that lasted too long, his belly full of usurpers ( the witnesses hear them complaining, or joking, or arguing, and singing in several voices — or else they hear nothing at all, and these rumors are the business of ventriloquists ), moves from the Pacific Sandwich Islands to the East China Sea, where he has been seen circling, then swims somewhere between Taiwan and the Philippines, to northern Malaysia, just narrowly passes between Java and Sumatra, and is then seen reappearing, still placid, off the 167. Sometimes seventeen sperm whales are seen stranded on the sand, including one genuinely suicidal, one followed by sixteen who were not but took his death drive for the ardor of the prophet on his way straight to the mouth of Paradise, and its all-you-can-eat buffets — we admire them, we walk around them, in majesty ; soon we’ll plug our noses, we’ll go and hide away from the corpses, between four walls, with our shame at having so quickly replaced admiration & sorrow with disgust.
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Cape of Good Hope, then farther north off the coast of Saint Helena, then before the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, after a sudden change of course, almost a detour, an oversight to be remedied, or a sudden idea to hastily greet an old acquaintance ; then it’s Cape Verde, the Canaries, the Azores ; we saw him for the last time, unless we confused him with another one, the same size, the same color, he was seen in front of Sandy Hook, with his head turned toward the Hudson river. On the route from Sandwich to Hudson, he seems to slow down from one hour to the next, always on the point of stopping where he is, not one mile more, tired of swallowing all that water, it’s understandable ; but he still moves on, for all that, and is never found the next day where he’d exhaled his ornamental blast the day before, melancholic by anticipation, as the preparations for farewells are melancholic ( more so than the farewells themselves ).
Epilogue To return to the old captain, the whale or what remains of him intends in turn to decipher signs of traces : he says to himself, there is no reason, the captain too has his seasons, his currents, his favored paths on the surface of the globe ; he too is sensitive to the tides, the big and the small ones, to the slight variations of the weather, he heads preferably where he will find, he’s sure of it, his three meals ; he tracks down the silhouette, the tip of his hat, then his coat, then his only shoe that’s shaped like the top of a cello ; he recreates several traces like the one from the sender to the recipient, also known as the postal route, or the one leading from a printing house to a doorstep, or the route of the local newspaper subscription ; he follows the rumors passed by word of mouth, learns to trace the captain back to a few words
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in conversations — he recognizes him, which is not so easy, as confusion comes quickly : Ahab contrasts, but once his exuberance, satanism, solitary excesses, and absolutism are put aside, he’s a regular man on the street. The whale approaches places frequented by men of his kind, what could be called his biotope : ancient history, today’s news items, and oracles remaining to be verified in due time tell of, among other extraordinary events, the entry of a whale into New York through the Hudson River, or the East River .— after all, gray whales have been found as far as London, swordfish under the Pont de l’Alma when the river was high, and sometimes alligators — now, the magnetic poles have been disturbed, the hot air opposes the cold air, immense masses against immense masses, the Gulf current pushes all the way to Thule to rediscover it one last time, and instead of mourning the ice cap, people rejoice at the idea of finally breaking through the legendary Northwest Passage at such little cost : then the anomaly becomes the norm, other sperm whales come to be stranded on beaches, seeming to sleep with the slumber of a monster before an audience of bewildered bathers ; black & white orcas run out of air, too, “to the sound of foghorns” ; a sperm whale as old as the oldest of the sequoias in America, or the oldest of its avenues, makes its way up the Hudson River laboriously : an allegory of the return to the sources, of the return to the fold, resigned and panting, of the disorientation of all things, of the cluttering of our paths, & prophecy of some event, terrible or liberating, like the birth of a calf with two heads during the reign of Julius Cæsar : an optimistic head, a pessimistic head. Then ( still, a prophecy : unfulfilled at the moment of being said, and at the moment when it is fulfilled, fulfilled because it was said one day ) : from where he is, his old
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bachelor’s pallet, the captain will hear the call ( no one knows how ) of the whale, none other, through confused rumbling from above, next door, and below, sometimes songs, sometimes broken windows, a symphony orchestra, Charles Ives and his marching bands, the Super Bowl commentaries made by one who is witnessing it for other witnesses who have stayed at home, and a version of Make ’Em Laugh, imitated from Be a Clown, on an old record player, which will sooner or later come to loop back on itself — the call will come through the open window, it will be necessary to distinguish it from the sirens, the captain will first think he hears a news vendor who has come down below where his room is to announce sensational news to him and his neighbors, another president assassinated, before a crowd ; and then, it will be magnificent, it must be, every effort made, Ahab first, like Abraham Lincoln’s march toward his destiny or Humphrey Bogart’s toward a final appointment ( or Gary Cooper’s, in the silence, under the sun ) ; there will be in each of his gestures the idea, choreographed, designed, of a calling about to be fulfilled, not triumph, but resignation, the punctuality of one with whom an appointment has been made : the true serenity of the dying man being not the accomplishment of some hitherto impossible feat but the astonishing adequacy of self to self ( natural, all things considered, despite the glaring artificiality : so many lies to finally be who we are ) — the identity of self to self, of here to here, of now to now, of love to the object of love, & of pedestrians to the scenery that surrounds them, stupidly. Ahab rises, “in the direction of the whale’s song” — different smells of soup on each floor of the building, by the stairs and through the corridors, Neapolitan, Roman, Hungarian, Polish, and Irish stew ; then the air outside, hardly less fragrant, and then the stroll of an elderly gentleman to-
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ward the shore at the hour when everyone calls back their own to sit down for dinner. He proceeds upstream with neither the ardor nor the aggressiveness of all those answering the dinner bell : in many instances, very young children carrying baseball bats wider & taller than themselves, and wider still gloves that could hold a whole family ; he also crosses men, satisfied, half-satisfied, at having been able to drink a beer with other men and share their thought of the day, which did not change the world, not this time, but at least the day, as an epilogue. Everyone, instead of going home, could witness Old Ahab’s walk to the Hudson or the East River, and then it would be a procession instead of a walk, it would certainly have that nonchalant solemnity customary in these old quarters, not elsewhere, one would find oneself in his pathway, not quite sure whether it was a funeral or the father of the bride : here is another one of those moments of uncertainty, when some names escape us, when we only see half-figures, and when it’s the beginning, we’re missing the end, where it is impossible to choose between mourning and rapture, the uncertainty holding the middle course obliges us to be a little more attentive, variously ; the casual lookout, not urgent but curious, of those who do not really know ( how many times have we stretched our necks to try to catch a glimpse of an event behind a forest of onlookers who were also stretching their necks when the crowd disperses, everything is over and those involved vanish into thin air ). Nevertheless, one finds oneself, Ahab advances, the hats fall & the youngest innocents tug at the legs of their fathers’ trousers to ask for an explanation that does not come. Or else, nothing is seen, there is no procession, Ahab walks in indifference, this indifference, so sweet and tender, of the city ( he was waiting for it without knowing it, he approved it
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as God approved his fiat lux, and now he knows he will miss it : it can be cruel, but how many times has it been comforting ? ) : he goes forward, the others go forward, each in their own direction ; if there is a witness, just one, he won’t know what to say the next day, just the neighbor’s stroll at the usual time of his little stroll, this old man with one leg supposedly old enough to have been able to meet Thomas Jefferson : he was holding a cheap British edition of the complete Works of William Shakespeare, he put it on the shore, before drowning himself. On the shore, in fact, an old book, annotations, now for nobody, the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” underlined twice, twice also the “Words, words, words,” as if it were more or less the same thing, a reminiscence with a ten-year interval, left as-is ; and in the river, a hat, a storybook hat, in a farewell gesture to each wavelet passing beneath, so much the worse or the better if the farewell repeats and contradicts itself by starting over again — it is also the hat thrown from the stands onto the stage to congratulate a diva ( Nancy Storace ), where it joins with flowers, and the painting of the remains of a shipwreck long after the shipwreck, and long after the storm : but all the world knows, there is no room in the Hudson to stage the tempests of the repertoire. Next to the hat, there is no drowned body, no matter what anyone says ; the river could be dredged but only old boots and a thousand other hats would be pulled up, evidence of a thousand other days gone by : the river reveals what it can, “it gives back what it is given” — indeed, no one will find the old captain, nor his remains, Ahab having taken care to leave more elegantly : he put his final patience, which is good faith, at the service of this reunion, in place of an age-old revenge, his own and the whale’s — the patience ended up faring far better than the grudge, we must believe, Moby Dick and the old captain
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AHAB ( SEQUELS )
meet at the precise place where their memories, their apprehensions, and the clumsy ideas they have of each other converge ; the whale thinks of the captain, he hopes for him after having cursed him for so long, he joins him to experience a form of reconciliation, above all to put an end to the adventures ( one day we have to stop living adventures ) .— the captain has water up to his waist, he resolves to get rid of the wooden leg, he sees a huge mouth opening in front of him, he does everything to make it huge, he has given it enough names, enough of himself for this, he would exorcise a demon to get it to open even more, he knows he can go in, straight ahead, and hold on there for centuries on centuries ; nothing more logical, all things considered, nothing more intimate, how Captain Ahab fit in the open mouth of his fish, the rest is none of our business, history is made of distances — it is up to us now to have projects of inventive revenge, to mix in memories and apprehensions, and misunderstandings born of hasty reading ; it is up to us to limp on one leg and keep silent, while thinking none the less.
550
COLOPHON
AHAB ( SEQUELS)
was handset in In Design cc The text font is OHno Swear Text The display font is Vanarchive Escritura Book design & typesetting: Alessandro Segalini Front cover design: Sergio Aquindo The chapters corresponding to pages 2-118, 226-227, & 387-392 are translated by Jacob Siefring. All other chapters are translated by Tegan Raleigh. Entries in the table of contents are translated by Raleigh or by Siefring accordingly.
AHAB ( SEQUELS)
is published by Contra Mundum Press.
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Ahab (Sequels) Pierre Senges
The reader will find here the true aftermath of the adventures of Ahab, self-described captain, survivor of his last fight against a giant fish. We will see how this retiree with a wooden leg tried to sell his whale story to the highest bidder — in the form of a Broadway musical, then a Hollywood script. Along the way, we will encounter Cole Porter & his chorus girls, but also Cary Grant, Orson Welles, Joseph von Sternberg & F. Scott Fitzgerald, drowned in his alcohol, as well as a host of producers, shady to varying degrees. We will remember the passage of young Ahab embarking at seventeen for London in the hope of playing Shakespeare there, and the circumstances that presided over the meeting of the librettist Da Ponte with Herman Melville in 1838. We will learn, ultimately, the best way to make the Manhattan cocktail a success and with what tenacity the indestructible Moby Dick seeks revenge on his nemesis.
isbn 978–1–940625–46–1
contramundumpress.com
Translated by Jacob Siefring & Tegan Raleigh
Pierre Senges
Ahab (Sequels)