Adventures In Immediate Irreality (2 page)

“Every Object Must Occupy the Place It
Occupies and I Must Be the Person I Am”

I’d like to introduce you to a book, an impressive book
that no one read when it first came out in Romania in 1936 or later when it was
reissued in 1970:
Adventures in Immediate Irreality
by M. Blecher. And when
the first German edition appeared, which wasn’t until 1990 in a translation by
Ernest Wichner, no one read that either, even though few books published in Germany
since 1990 could compare with Blecher’s novel for sheer literary intensity. But
perhaps that’s why the book never attracted a wider audience?

In order to convince you, I’d like to let the book speak for itself.

“The crowds, making the rounds, would pass from zone to zone, bright lights to
darkness, like the moon in my geography book” is how Blecher describes people
visiting a fair. And no other sentence better describes his own text. The external
plot isn’t easy to describe—it’s really the ongoing reflection of an interior
narrative, a manic inner monologue written in the first person, in which the
narrator’s striving for self-assurance becomes a confession. This narrator is a
nameless adolescent roaming through the summer heat of a small town. He has no goal
whatsoever, he is searching, as Blecher says, for the correspondence between himself
and the waxwork panopticon of places, people, and objects set in the world. The
search produces emotional upheavals that he calls
crises,
which all come
from the “terrible question of who I actually am”—a question whose answer
“requires a lucidity more basic and profound than that of the brain.” In the words
of Blecher’s narrator: “And I have returned implacably to the surface of things. . .
. Never, under no other circumstances, have I felt so clearly as in moments like
these when every object must occupy the place it occupies and I must be the person I
am.”

Places, persons, objects—and this vagabond narrator that speaks of himself so
perplexingly and so intriguingly that it goes far beyond being “a complete stranger”
to himself. Because what this person says about himself goes beyond what even a
person might say who feels split into two persons. And his powers of observation are
so ruthless it’s as though one person of flesh and blood were peering outside his
body, along with a second person in his head, and along with a third or fifth person
passing in and out of his own skin at will. Blecher’s protagonist turns the “crises”
into a kind of equilibrium: “I was tall, thin, and pale. My spindly neck rose
awkwardly out of my tunic. My long arms hung from my sleeves like newly skinned
animals. My pockets so bulged with papers and objects that I could scarcely extract
a handkerchief to wipe the dust off my shoes when I arrived in the ‘city center.’”
And about a suicide attempt with over thirty white tablets he says: “Since nothing
could go on as before, I had to make a clean break.” And: “It was as if it were an
everyday task I needed to do. All I could find were things of no use to me: buttons,
string, thread of various colors, notebooks—all strongly redolent of
naphthalene and none capable of causing a man’s death.”

In the end, the happiness being sought culminates in catastrophe, which unfolds with
drafting-table clarity but has obscure, inscrutable consequences. The lifeless
material of objects and the vegetative matter of plants stimulate the nerves to the
point of breaking. The “boundless melancholy” of the objects remains outside, while
the brain is flooded with hallucinatory images:

I dreamed I was walking through a town steeped in
dust but very sunny and full of white houses, an oriental town perhaps. There was a
woman at my side, a woman in black, in mourning, her face veiled. Oddly enough, the
woman had no head. The veils were tastefully arranged where the head should have
been, but she had only a gaping hole there instead, an empty sphere running down to
the nape of the neck. We were both in a hurry, following a cart with red crosses on
the sides: it was carrying the corpse of the woman’s husband.

I realized there was a war going on, and in fact we soon came to a
station. . . . Suddenly a man came out of a first class compartment; he was portly
and well dressed, had a decoration in his buttonhole, and was wearing a monocle and
white shoes. His bald spot was poorly hidden by several strands of silver hair. In
his arms he held a white Pekinese, its eyes like two agate marbles in oil.

For a while he paraded up and down the platform looking
for something. Finally he found it: a flower-girl. He chose several bouquets of red
carnations from her basket and paid her for them, taking the money out of an elegant
wallet of soft leather with a silver monogram. Then he went back to the train and I
could see him putting the Pekinese on the table by the window and feeding it the red
carnations one by one. The animal ingested them with obvious relish.

Blecher threads his observations into every page of this book just as densely and
accurately. The details go clicking by. Tiny filaments of hair, little balls of
agate, small tables, miniature dogs, petite bouquets—within the sweet
substance of the diminutive, the details head into the monstrous.

M. Blecher—in letters he sometimes wrote Max or Marcel, but as an author he
only appeared with the anonymizing initial M.—was a Romanian Jew, born in 1909
in Botoşani in the northeastern part of the country. His family owned a small
ceramic factory on the edge of town and a ceramics and porcelain shop in the center.
He traveled to Paris to study medicine. When he was nineteen he contracted osteal
tuberculosis, and spent the rest of his short life in sanatoria. When his parents
ran out of money for his treatment abroad, he had to return to Romania, where he
died at the age of twenty-eight.

When you read his books it’s hard to believe your eyes. The author of this
masterpiece was a twenty-five-year-old already weakened by disease.

Romanian literati lived in fear of Eugène Ionesco’s scathing reviews. But when
Blecher’s
Adventures in Immediate Irreality
appeared in a limited edition
in 1936, he praised the book. Unfortunately it never achieved commercial success.
And then came the years of fascism. And in 1945, after the annihilation of the Jews,
came Stalinism. And after that came the home-grown variety of socialism, which
entrenched itself behind a fraudulent ideology, never faced up to its own connivance
in the barbarity, and even had anti-Semitism built into the system as a matter of
course. Until the collapse of the dictatorship, national provincialism made it
impossible for a Romanian Jew to be recognized as one of the best Romanian authors.
And after 1989 the anti-Semites felt even more empowered, and anti-Semitism, having
hatched out of socialism, is now allowed the same blatant free expression, and the
same language, as in the fascist era. Once again the so-called intelligentsia is
busy picking up the pieces and hammering them into a narrow-minded “national
remembrance,” a little plywood box where someone like Blecher doesn’t fit. Most
likely they’re afraid of this book, because it addresses a nightmarish truth and
couldn’t care less for “national remembrance.”

“The certitudes I lived by were separated from the world of incertitudes by only the
flimsiest of membranes,” says Blecher’s protagonist. What makes the author’s view so
radical is the eroticism that lurks in every ordinary object, waiting to ensnare a
person. The narrator interacts with objects in a way one can really only interact
with people. His observations charge his surroundings with an eroticism otherwise
only possible between skin and skin. His flesh seems to creep into the substance of
the things, there’s a kind of promiscuity with inanimate ornaments. And the
substance responds with a similar promiscuity, coupling with the flesh of its
observer. Something forbidden pulsates between the person and the object, something
that smacks of incest, of overindulgence, of pleasure, and of sinful intensity. Time
and again, the search for the self ends in an exaggeration of identity. Time and
again it is driven to a new extreme until it is suddenly called off as though too
spooked to continue. The objects themselves, their features, become surrogates. They
offer no answer, yet they usurp the place of everything the narrator wants to
discover about himself.

Here is a description of a gypsy’s ring: “The extraordinary embellishments used by
birds, animals, or flowers for purposes of sexual attraction . . . the hysterical
lace of petunia petals. . . . It was made of marvelous tin—fine, grotesque,
and hideous. Yes, hideous more than anything. It got at love in its deepest, darkest
regions.” In an office with leather chairs and subdued lighting, “the screen of an
enormous pewter spittoon in the shape of a cat stood gleaming in a dark corner.”
“The glass windowpanes wobbled a bit in their frames like loose teeth.” And inside
the crystal coffin of a wax figure cabinet is “a woman with a pale, yet luminescent
face, lying in a glass box and sheathed in black lace, a striking red rose between
her breasts, her blond wig coming undone at the forehead, the rouge in her nostrils
aquiver. . . . It remained lodged inside me, still vague, like a word I wished to
recall.”

The adolescent vagabond falls for the objects, because he’s fallen for the eroticism
of sensory perception. And as the things themselves become increasingly transparent
through his close observation, he becomes less and less transparent to himself.
Particular details inflame or cool his ardor: his body is now attracted, now
repelled by the things. His flesh is a magnet. His organs alone are insufficient,
they need something else, and they lie in wait for the objects, which are likewise
in need. Their features entice the body, wresting away its feelings which they then
consume. The internal and the external engage in mutual indecent assault, and in the
end it’s impossible to say which side instigated the voracious
encounter—whether the person assailed the object to the point of breakdown, or
vice versa. The paths beneath the feet are constantly hoisted into the head. And
roaming through the space that exists between feet and mind inevitably leads to
lonely realizations. The differences between the beautiful and the ugly, the
anguished and the elated, are no longer possible in this book. The intensity of
perception climbs right through the skull, the “melancholy of existence” and the
“normally organized torture” render all the usual registries unfit. Here only
extremes combine to form completely new properties. To be sure, the objects retain
their familiar names, but their looks and features get reinvented. The newly
perceived sweeps away the familiar. And there’s no use opposing it, because in the
act of reading, the shrewdness of every observation acquires greater validity than
anything you might recall from your own observations of the familiar objects. In the
words of Blecher’s protagonist: “I had the vague feeling that nothing in the world
can come to fruition.” Nothing is ever completed. And this narrator is concerned
with much more than completion.

Blecher’s eroticism of perception requires the constant comparison of one thing with
a hitherto unimaginable other. In this eroticized world things venture into the
outrageous: “When I got to the marketplace, I found men unloading meat for the
butcher shops, their arms laden with sides of red and purple beasts glistening with
blood, as tall and proud as dead princesses. . . . They were lined up along the
porcelain-white walls like scarlet sculptures carved from the most diverse and
delicate material. They had the watery, iridescent shimmer of silk and the murky
limpidity of gelatin.” Or: “There were always nuts in a bowl, and Samuel Weber, who
was especially fond of them, would swallow them slowly, peacefully, bit by bit, his
Adam’s apple bouncing up and down like a puppet on a rubber band.” And Samuel
Weber’s son Ozy has “flute-like arms.” Or: “I felt the silence in me smiling calmly,
as if someone were blowing soap bubbles there.” While taking a temperature “the
slender glass lizard of a thermometer” glides under the arm. And of the doctor who
is treating the malaria stricken protagonist, Blecher writes: “His small velvet
eyes, fitful gestures, and thrust-forward mouth made him look like a mouse. The
impression was so immediate and so strong that I thought it perfectly natural that
he should give his
r
’s a long and sonorous roll as if he were munching
something in secret as he spoke. The quinine he gave me only increased my conviction
there was something mouse-like about him.” Behind the sewing machine shop was a
small room referred to as “the green room”—when no customer is around the
ailing protagonist hastily makes love with Clara. On one such occasion he spots a
mouse out of the corner of his eye, perched on Clara’s powder compact:

It had paused next to the mirror on the edge of the
trunk and was staring at me with its tiny black eyes. The lamplight had given them
two gleaming golden spots, which pierced me deeply and peered into my own eyes for
several seconds with such intensity that they seemed to penetrate my brain. Perhaps
the creature was searching for a curse to call down on me or perhaps for a mere
reproach . . . I was certain the doctor had come to spy on me.

This supposition was confirmed that very evening as I took my
quinine. . . . I found it perfectly acceptable: the quinine was bitter. The doctor
had seen the pleasure Clara could give me in the back room and to get even he had
prescribed the nastiest medicine on earth. . . .

A few months after he first treated me, he was found dead in his
attic: he had put a bullet through his brain.

The first thing I asked myself when I heard the gruesome
news was, ‘Were there mice in the attic?’ I needed to know. Because if the doctor
was well and truly dead, a band of mice would have to set upon his corpse and
extract all the mouse matter he had borrowed during his lifetime to be able to carry
on his illegal human existence.