Monday, March 26. 2012By Revealing the Existence of Other Worlds, the Book is a Subversive ArtifactVia The Funambulist
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de Léopold Lambert
Excerpt from Le Processus by Marc-Antoine Mathieu (Delcourt 1993) Following the three last articles in which I was preparing my reference texts in addition of those that I have been already writing in the past, this following article is an attempt to reconstitute the small presentation I was kindly invited to give by Carla Leitão for her seminar about libraries and archives at Pratt Institute. This talk was trying to elaborate a small theory of the book as a subversive artifact based on six literary authors that have in common a dramatization of their own medium, the book, within their books. The predicate of this essay lies in the fact that books are indeed subversive -and therefore suppressed by authoritarian power- as they reveal the existence of other worlds.
REFERENCE TEXTS/DRAWINGS ON THE FUNAMBULIST FOR CHAPTER 1 In his series Julius Corentin Acquefacques, prisonnier des rêves, Marc-Antoine Mathieu continuously explores and questions graphic novel as the medium he uses for his narratives to exist, and therefore to acquire a certain autonomy as soon as they have been created. In reusing the constructive elements of drawings within the narrative (preparatory sketches, vanishing points, framing bars, anamorphoses etc.) he creates several layers of universes that include our own, and therefore makes us wonder if our reality couldn’t be the fiction of a higher degree of reality. In The Trial written by Franz Kafka and published in 1929, the book as an artifact is not literally present. However, the existence of other worlds within the narrative can be found in the fact that the version we know is the one assembled by Kafka’s best friend, Max Brod who re-assembled the chapters of the unachieved book according to his own interpretation and on the contrary of his friend’s wishes who wanted it to be burnt. Brod, in a research for rationality starts the narrative by the scene in which K., the protagonist, learns that he will be judged for something he ignores, continues it by K.’s experience of the administrative labyrinth and eventually finishes it by K.’s execution. In Towards a Minor Literature, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze criticize this order, cannot seem to accept that such chapter about K.’s death has been written by Kafka and eventually consider that this event is nothing more than an additional part of the character’s delirium or dream within the story. As I have been writing before in an essay entitled The Kafkian Immanent Labyrinth as a Post-Mortem Dream, my own interpretation consists in starting with this ‘last’ chapter in which K. is executed, thus attributing the following delirium to the visions that K. experiences before dying. In other words, K. never really dies for himself even though he dies in the point of view of others, of course (to read more about this topic read also my review of Gaspard Noe’s Enter the Void). His perception of time exponentially decelerates tending more and more towards the exact moment of his death without ever reaching it: this is the Kafkian nightmare.
Jorge Luis Borges, whose filiation with Kafka is not to be demonstrated, is also well known for his quasi-Leibnizian (see previous article) invention of an infinity of parallel worlds through books. The Library of Babel (see previous post) is the most famous example as it introduces an infinite library containing every unique books that can be written in 410 pages with 25 symbols. At the end of this short story, Borges precises that this library could be in fact, contained in a single book which will be introduced later on in The Book of Sand (see the recent post about it): a book with an infinity of pages.
Many Borges’ readers will indeed know that himself lost his sight few decades after he wrote this story. What was this God that he was looking for in the many book of Buenos Aires’ National Library? Which kind of Kaballah did he create to find an esoteric meaning in the mathematics of the profane scriptures? Maybe did he have a glance to this infinity that he has been chanting for many years and became blind as a price to pay for it.
In 1962, Philip K. Dick writes a novel entitled The Man in the High Castle (see previous article) which dramatizes an uchronia for which Roosevelt died before ending his first mandate of President of the USA, replaced by an isolationist President who refuses to engage his county in the second World War. It results from this choice that the Nazis conquest Europe while the Japanese army colonizes East Asia (including Siberia) and eventually both combine their forces to invade the USA. Dick’s plot thus occurs in United States under nippo-nazi domination in which it is said to exist a book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy written by a certain Hawthorne Abendsen who would describe in it a world in which the Allies won the over against the Axis. The book is, of course, forbidden as it allows the depiction of another reality than the one which is imposed by colonial empires:
The ban of books depicted in Dick’s uchronia brings us to worlds in which books have been definitely suppressed from society. In the well known 1984, written in 1949 by Georges Orwell, the only remaining book is the dictionary of the Newspeak which, editions by editions becomes thinner and thinner as the language is subjected by a strict progressive purge. Language, indeed, allows the formulation of other worlds which can be punished as thoughtcrimes. The Book is therefore not destroyed literally but its principal material is voluntarily put in scarcity.
The quintessential narrative dramatizing the destruction of books is of course Fahrenheit 451 (see the recent article about it) written by Ray Bradbury in 1953. In this story, firemen are not people in charge of fighting against fire, but on the contrary, those in charge of inflaming books that have been banned as principal element of discord and inequality within society. Fahrenheit 451 (233 degrees Celsius) is indeed the temperature for which paper burns. Books are thus the object that allows the various human writings to remain archived for virtually eternity but which allow carry with them, their own fragility as their main material, paper, is vulnerable to the elements and fire in particular. Francois Truffaut, who released an excellent film adaptation of Bradbury’s novel in 1966, by showing a copy of Mein Kampf in his movie, did not miss to point out that a resistance movement that would undertake to save the books from fire could not possibly judge which books deserved to be kept and which one could be let to the institutional purge. In the theater play Almansor that he wrote in 1820, Heinrich Heine makes the following tragic prophecy: Where we burn books, we will end up burning men. On May 10th 1933, the Nazis who recently reached the head of the executive and legislative power in Germany will burn thousands of books including Heine’s, which do not fit within the spirit of the new antisemitic/anti-communist politics they are willing to undertake. About a decade later, they will industrially kill eleven millions people (including six millions Jews) in what remains as the darkest moment of mankind’s history: the Holocaust. Among the books burned in 1933, one could find the ones written by Marx, Freud, Brecht, Benjamin, Einstein, Kafka but also one of the father of science fiction, HG Wells. This last example illustrates well the will of the third Reich to annihilate any vision of the future that was not compliant with the one elaborated by the Nazis. The books are therefore agents of infection in the point of view of an authoritarian ideological power. Their authors place in them the germs of subversion that are then spread to whoever read them. Knowledge is power as Foucault was insisting, imagination is, in fact, power to the same extent. The virtual access to other worlds via books is the possibility of a resistance in this given reality. For that, books have to be salvaged at any price. They constitute the archives of a civilization as much as they are the active agents of vitalization of a society that accepts the multiplicity of their narratives.
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