SOME THOUGHTS ON DREYER

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries art reached an awareness of itself that developed contemporaneously with the need for a new kind of criticism, one requiring a judgement not simply as to whether a given work is deficient in this or that respect but as to whether the work in question is art at all. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the onset of Romanticism, art began to make the matter of its own status central to what constituted it, and by so doing incorporated the problematic and ambiguous into its very essence. One need look no further than the titles of the early masterpieces of European horror cinema, Nosferatu and Vampyr, or the American classics, Frankenstein and Dracula, to see that horror cinema is also a product of the Romantic movement. And it too confronts us with the question of its status: films were, and regularly still are, found to be offensive and trivial. Lacking the redemptive powers of art, they are thought especially worthy of censorship. Within this ethos, horror films are frequently linked with pornography, by critics and the censorious generally, as well as by the filmmmakers themselves, obvious examples being Franco and Buttgereit.

Condemned as trashily exploitative and sadistic, the films suffer as a consequence from mutilation, neglect and, what is worse, contempt. It is not to be denied that extreme violence, sexual degradation and grotesque forms of death are legion in the films of Argento, Cronenberg, Craven, Hooper, Fulci, Deodato, and many others, and yet I would argue that this is precisely the point: its confronting us with death presented in especially offensive and unacceptable ways, and its provoking of scandal and outrage, are what constitute the real significance of the horror film in our culture, and what of authentic value attaches to it attaches to these very images of death and dying.

*

Horror films have, on occasion at least, addressed themselves to the procedures and forms whereby they create what they create, and it is not too extravagant to suggest that films like Vampyr, Peeping Tom, Tenebrae and Dead Ringers exhibit an order of self-interrogation that has many features in common with the literature of modernism, features brought out by questions such as `why write all?' and `how can the act of writing be justified?' Within modernism, literature becomes literature only as it becomes a question as to what counts as literature, and in order to show something of the significance of this degree of self-questioning, both for literature and cinema, I want to begin by considering what I have already pointed to as one of the abiding preoccupations of Romantic and modern writing, the ground of representation itself.

To take a cinematic instance, the exploration of this issue is central to the project of Dreyer’s Vampyr. Aporia and contradiction are fundamental to it, and Dreyer accords them a particularly vivid and focused expression. The action of the film is situated ambiguously, in a world poised between life and death, in a landscape self-consciously created out of cinematic effects. For instance, Gray’s first walk to the mill is both a narrative event and at the same time a disruption of the logical sequence of that narrative event. The disruption of the intelligibility of the relations between the shadows, as the corporal’s shadow separates itself from his physical body, the sudden irruption of dance music and the appearance of what seem dancing cut-out figures, the commanding voice of the vampire, these and similar elements compromise the narrative order, rendering the narrative presentation suspect. This means that the narrative order of the film in its totality can no longer be trusted. The status of what we are seeing has become undecidable, and as a result the temporal progression of the events we see has also become uncertain, if not discredited. The only order of time that we can trust is the time it takes for the film to be seen, the time it takes for the reels of film to pass through the projector and to cast an image on the screen and to bring up sound through the speakers. It is in this sense that Vampyr can be said to resemble music. The action that is represented and the process of representing that action have been collapsed into one, so that the time it takes the events we see to elapse and the time it takes show us those events are the same. What Vampyr narrates, we might say, is the occurrence of the events that compose it, in the very instant that it is narrating the events themselves.

It is writing conceived of on the model of post-symbolist procedures that Vampyr most nearly answers to. It is when the events a poem narrates are the events that constitute its own unfolding that we are cast into what the French critic, Maurice Blanchot, has called a time before the world, before the beginning. In the symbolist poem, the work says what it says in the very gesture of saying what there is for it to say. The only happening in the poem is the happening of the poem itself: a world is described, and, in that same act of description or definition, created. Here, the act of creation turns back upon itself, becoming other than, and exterior to, itself. Hence it is possible neither to begin nor to end, since the words of the poem are already beyond themselves, elsewhere. As Eliot has it, in Burnt Norton: `the end precedes the beginning,/And the end and the beginning were always there/Before the beginning and after the end./And all is always now'. We cannot begin, since the beginning is always already begun, and we cannot come to an end, since the end is always already completed, in a time before the beginning. If, with Blanchot, we think of names on the Hegelian model, as effecting the murder or annihilation of the things they name, then the negation, by which the poem sustains itself and which in turn it sustains, must enter paradoxically into the poem, effecting its failure, and (in Blanchot's idiom) betraying the work of the poem to worklessness (désœuvrement). By this he means that the poem is split from itself, in a movement of double negation that turns it towards the outside, the exterior, beyond language and concept, where, as he puts it, there is no intimacy, no place to rest. The work says the nothing that is the condition of its simultaneous possibility and impossibility:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images . . .

The Waste Land, exemplary in this regard, is nothing other than what it constitutes itself as, namely `this stony rubbish', and the reader, caught within the language of the poem, unable to move beyond it, is, at the same time, exterior to it as it narrates the passage of its own negation:

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

Blanchot's prose, which often reads like a rhapsodic commentary on The Waste Land, says of this mode of writing: `The work declares being - and says choice, mastery, form - by announcing art which says the fatality of being, says passivity, and formless prolixity'. At the conclusion of Vampyr, the mechanism driving the mill wheels that are drowning the doctor in flour finally stops, under its own volition and without visible cause. The doctor has been assimilated to the whiteness of the flour, a whiteness which is finally inseparable from a whiteness that has come to dominate the balance of light and shadow across the whole film, a fact made evident in the penultimate sequence, when Gray and Gisèle move across the water into the light of the dawn sun. As they step out of their boat onto the river bank, they walk into, and are transfigured by, the intensifying rays of light streaming through the forest. Suffusing the mist rising around the branches, the light comes to acquire almost as palpable a material presence as the objects it illuminates. And at this juncture, we cut back to the mill. The whiteness of the flour has by this time so filled the projected image that there appears no discernible difference between it and the whiteness of the screen behind the image, and it is in this moment of assimilation of the image to its support that the movement of the mechanism comes to a halt. The seeming coincidence of the image and the screen behind it is doubled by the fact that the movement of the mill gears and that of the projector showing the film also appear to coincide. The two movements collapse into a single duration, as the teeth of the gears and the sprockets of the projector gears appear to mirror one another, in a concurrence that effectively links an action internal to the film with an action external to it. It is as though the film were being completed in a time that had already been superseded, inasmuch as it has been this same action, the action of the mechanisms of the projector, that began the film and that has continued to sustain it throughout the time of its showing.

ON THE QUESTION OF THE HORROR FILM

The temptation to seek for a systematic explanation of how it is that horror films affect their viewers seems irresistible. Not only does Psycho, for example, combine to enduring effect the visceral destruction of the human body with a comedy of errors, it also succeeds in producing a sense of enigma such that the film may be found endlessly elusive and yet almost within reach. The paradoxical condition that is Norman’s self—Norman is the son of a mother he has both destroyed and become, a self created anew out of an origin he has himself engendered—seems to embody the dynamics of artistic creation as such. It is as though Hitchcock had found in him a figure through whom he could elaborate a dialectics of conflict which so shapes time that we can live—can participate in—the passage of the film’s elapsing, its duration, with unusual attention to the elaborate interweaving of its end and its beginning. Earl Wasserman has noted how, since the end of the eighteenth century, ‘the poet has been required to conceive his own structure of order, his own more-than-linguistic syntax, and so to engage that structure that the poetic act is creative both of a cosmic system and of the poems made possible by that system’ [Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), p.172]. On this view, poetry is addressed to the construction of the syntax that makes it possible, a process seen at its extreme in Mallarmé and T.S. Eliot. One might say that, whatever else may appear to engage the poem’s interest, its fundamental concern is with its own processes of coming into being. The crucial analogy is, of course, with music, a condition to which Psycho unquestionably aspires, an aspiration emphatically reinforced by Herrmann’s score. In other words, Psycho invites over-determination. Both its openness to a complex of literary traditions, and the obvious invitation posed by its title, encourage the search for some more abstract and unifying act of interpretation within which the film may be comprehended. However, such an act of interpretation is incorporated within the film itself, only to be dismissed in the moment of our encounter with the reality of what Mrs Bates actually is—an impossible being, whose mode of existence is that, not of a human psychology, but of cinema. It is as though Hitchcock were reminding us that the meaning of what takes place in Psycho is inherent within the totality of the film, and is not separable from it. It is the film itself which is constitutive of the myth that gives rise to it, and not an externally given system or a set of explanatory paradigms.

Given this order of subtlety, it is hardly surprising that Psycho should have drawn so forcibly to it writers whose conceptual structures were built on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The complex of attraction and repulsion embodied in Norman can be mapped onto the dialectic arising out of the nightmare’s expression of incestuous desire. Similarly, Norman’s mode of being, that of the ‘ne-uter’, his being neither woman ‘nor man’, can be re-described in terms of the objet petit a and the algorithms of fantasy, or the function of lack engendering desire. Norman, one might say, is differánce incarnate. Or, in another idiom, he just is the divided subject. A recent example of the assimilation of Psycho to psychoanalysis is Laura Mulvey’s attempt to locate it in relation to the death drive. She speaks of how the film moves towards death, as it ‘reaches towards stillness and then towards the dead: Mother’s skull appears superimposed briefly on Norman’s features and they merge’ [“Death Drives: Hitchcock’s Psycho”, Film Studies 2 (Spring 2002): 8]. There is, according to Mulvey, a homology connecting terms like ‘stillness’, ‘death’ and ‘ending’, as applied to cinematic narrative, which takes the cinema back to its own secret stillness and the death inherent within it. She would seem to be saying that the achievement of Psycho is to have made this ‘homology’ explicit, inasmuch as it has found for it what Eliot called ‘an objective correlative’—the Bates’ mansion, reverberating with archaic and gothic echoes of the House of Usher and other unheimlich dwellings of the Romantic imagination. However, if one responds in this way to the aesthetic achievement of the film, the claims of the psychoanalytic reading to explain that achievement dissolve. This emerges in relation to the Freudian account of the uncanny. Here, the persuasiveness of the notion, as Freud describes it, derives, not from Freud’s account of incest or the theory of castration, but from the power invested in the tearing out of eyes and sexual ambivalence by the achievement of Hoffmann’s story, ‘The Sandman’. If conviction does result from Freud’s analysis, it arises out of the effective and compelling realisation of the horror of the Sandman in the story itself, a power Freud appropriates as evidence for his explanation of it. In other words, it is Hoffmann’s story which constitutes the imaginative potency of the notion of the uncanny, and so the meaning of its psychic reality, not the Freudian exegesis. So with Mulvey’s essay: the theoretical body of her reading is parasitic on the film, and it is Psycho itself that gives life and illumination to her concepts. It would seem, then, that so far as aesthetic appreciation is concerned, psychoanalytic explanation cannot give us what we are looking for—what we need. This is not only a matter of reductionism, or of confusing a causal explanation with giving reasons for responding as one does. The point is that only for someone who has responded to the aesthetic life of the work do psychoanalytic explanations of that life have pertinence. Psychoanalytic readings presuppose what it is they seek to explain, and they do so by projecting their methods of explanation onto the objects they address. Just as Freud projects onto ‘The Sandman’ a reading whose plausibility the story has already established, a manoeuvre he achieves by re-describing the actions of the Sandman as those of the ‘castrating father’, so Mulvey projects onto Psycho a dynamic that is already internal to the film’s organisation—a drive towards death. The result is not in any sense an explanation of the film, but an attempt to construct what might be called an immanent experience of it. The idiom of psychoanalysis is deployed in a ‘creative’ recounting of the film that seems intended to suggest an empathic fusion between the director’s consciousness and that of the critic.

*

An approach I find exemplary for a clarification of what is involved in the critical appreciation of art is Wittgenstein’s response to the account in The Golden Bough of the Beltane fire festivals in eighteenth century Scotland. His comments come in the latter part of his Remarks on Frazer’s 'Golden Bough', and were probably written around 1948. The Remarks were not intended for publication, and they should not be read as though they made up a systematically revised body of work. Nonetheless, they are of great interest, especially for their treatment of a theme that is also crucial to Frazer, that of religion’s deep roots in human nature.

The pagan Celtic year was divided into two periods, with the new year celebrated at the beginning of November, at the festival of Samhain, or Hallowe’en. The second festival took place six months later, on May Day, or Beltane. They signal changes in the weather, Samhain preceding winter and Beltane the return of summer. Frazer was interested in the Beltane festivals in Scotland, particularly the lighting of huge fires, which took place on this day. He cites a description given by John Ramsey, laird of Ochtertyre, near Crieff, the patron of Burns and friend of Sir Walter Scott:

Towards the close of the entertainment, the person who officiated as master of the feast produced a large cake baked with eggs and scalloped round the edge, called am bonnach beal-tine—i.e. the Beltane cake. It was divided into a number of pieces, and distributed in great form to the company. There was one particular piece which whoever got was called cailleach beal-tine—i.e., the Beltane carline, a term of great reproach. Upon his being known, part of the company laid hold of him and made a show of putting him into the fire; but the majority interposing, he was rescued. And in some places they laid him flat on the ground, making as if they would quarter him. Afterwards, he was pelted with egg-shells, and retained the odious appellation during the whole year. And while the feast was fresh in people’s memory, they affected to speak of the cailleach beal-tine as dead. [J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 618]

Frazer sees the festivals as rituals of purification: the fires, he believes, were thought to burn up and destroy all malign influences, the chief evil being that of witches:

Again and again we are told that the fires are intended to burn up or repel the witches; and the intention is sometimes graphically expressed by the burning of an effigy of a witch in the fire. [Frazer, op. cit., p. 648]

Thus the pretence of throwing someone into the fire, or the burning of an effigy, are traces of something darker. As Brian Clack puts it, ‘previously human beings thought to be witches, or else representing evil forces, were really burned in the flames’ [Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 139]. For Frazer, what remained of the Beltane festival in the eighteenth century was a survival of an earlier practice of sacrificing human beings regarded as witches in the fires.

Wittgenstein does not dismiss Frazer’s views, nor does he dismiss the worth of historical enquiry. As he says: ‘It is now clear that what gives this practice depth is its connection with the burning of a man’ [Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis and Cambrdige: Hackett, 1993), p. 143]. Were it the custom at some festival for men to ride one another, we might see nothing in this but a harmless game reminding us of men riding horses. But if we were to be told that in the past it had been the custom to use slaves in this way, we should then see in the harmless practice of our own times something deeper and more sinister. In other words, historical investigation may reveal sinister antecedents for what survive as apparently simple and homely customs. These antecedents may in turn colour our sense of the customs and make them appear darker and more sinister in the present. However, while this is so, it is nonetheless the case that, as Brian Clack points out, ‘what is crucial for Wittgenstein is that no historical research is required to show that the Beltane festival is sinister’ [Clack, op. cit., p. 142]. For Wittgenstein, what is at stake is the impression made by one specific festival—the Beltane festival—and beyond that impression no further justification for seeing it as sinister is required:

The question is: does the sinister, as we may call it, attach to the practice of the Beltane Fire Festival in itself, as it was carried out one hundred years ago, or is the Festival sinister only if the hypothesis of its origin turns out to be true? I believe it is clearly the inner nature of the modern practice which seems sinister to us, and the familiar facts of human sacrifice only indicate the lines along which we should view the practice. [Philosophical Occasions, pp, 143-145]

The Beltane Festival is a practice exhibiting what Frank Cioffi has called ‘a physiognomy of terror’ [Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer (Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 87], and its meaning is revealed through that same physiognomy. Its ‘inner nature’ is such that the festival simply strikes us as having to do with human sacrifice, whether or not it actually originated there. Clack remarks: ‘the Highland custom strikes us as being like human sacrifice, and it is this which imbues it with its sinister atmosphere’ [Clack, p. cit., p. 144]. The aspect under which we see it just is that of human sacrifice. And this of itself impresses us, because what I see impresses me directly, without the intervention of a hypothesis: ‘If I see someone being killed,—is what makes an impression on me simply what I see, or is it only the hypothesis that here a man is being killed?’ [Philosophical Occasions, p. 149]

Wittgenstein compares the enactment of the festival with a play, since the Beltane festivities have something in common with a piece of theatre. Yet, despite the similarities, the events of the festivals are infused with a mood or state of mind that differs from that of a theatrical performance. Even were the festival performed in the manner of a play, we would still want to ask: what is the meaning of this performance? And irrespective of any interpretation we might give of it, our unease would not be wholly assuaged. The impact of the Beltane festival is not expressible solely in terms of an aesthetic appreciation. There remains inherent in the proceedings a strange meaninglessness (Sinnlosigkeit)—a queer pointlessness. The festival seems to embody an excess or expenditure that eludes conceptual grasp, and to this extent it strikes us as being in some way uncanny (unheimlich) or weird. Cioffi seems to have this in mind when he speaks of how the festival brings about an ‘eruption of the demonic into the quotidian’ (Cioffi, op. cit., p. 92). Clack elucidates Cioffi’s point by reference to two facets of the Beltane rite: the use of a cake to select a victim, and the carnival atmosphere that pervades the event. Wittgenstein finds the manner of drawing lots especially chilling:

The fact that the lots are drawn by the use of a cake is particularly horrible (almost like betrayal by a kiss), and that it strikes us this way is again of fundamental importance for the investigation of such practices. [Philosophical Occasions p. 147]

Something that has homely and convivial characteristics is being used in a new and threatening context. It is not surprising that the familiar takes on a sinister aspect. Similarly, as Clack suggests, ‘the uneasy balance between violence and merriment’ is also what ‘impresses us here, and it comes to the fore in certain accounts of actual human sacrifice’ [Clack, op. cit., p. 146]. He notes, in this connection, accounts of the gaiety of the crowds attending the sacrifice of human beings in Mesopotamia and Mexico, a point reinforced by Wittgenstein:

The concept of a ‘festivity’. We connect it with merrymaking; in another age it may have been connected with fear and dread. [Clack, op. cit., p.147. Cited from Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 78]

Beyond these two points, there is a further aspect of the Highland festivals, having to do with the nature of those who participate in them. To get a sense of the horror of human sacrifice, one has to recognise the kind of creatures human beings are. Wittgenstein asserts that ‘what I see in these stories is nevertheless acquired through the evidence, including such evidence as does not appear to be directly connected with them,—through the thoughts of man and his past, through all the strange things I see, and have seen and heard about, in myself and others’ [Philosophical Occasions, p. 151]. The rites of Beltane are not isolated or idiosyncratic actions of a remote group of people in a distant age. Those who performed them reveal tendencies within ourselves, and their propensities are ones we also share. Clack compares Wittgenstein’s perception here with that found in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel in which two men of high civilisation, Marlow and Kurtz, experience the awakening of brutal and forgotten instincts.

To give a more general characterisation of Wittgenstein’s discussion of Frazer and the fire festivals, one might say that what he is considering is the seeing or dawning of aspects. At one point, Frazer describes how the participants in the Beltane festival divide a cake into as many portions as there are people present. One of these portions is daubed in black, and all the bits of cake are placed in a bonnet. Everyone, now blindfold, draws out a portion, and whoever draws out the black piece is the devoted person, to be sacrificed to Baal. Wittgenstein remarks of this account that there is ‘something here that looks like the last vestige of drawing lots. And, through this aspect, it suddenly gains depth’ [Philosophical Occasions, p. 145]. Again, after comparing the drawing of lots to betrayal by a kiss, he says:

When I see such a practice, or hear of it, it is like seeing a man speaking harshly to someone else over a trivial matter, and noticing from his tone of voice and facial expression that this man can on occasion be terrible. The impression I receive here can be very deep and extraordinarily serious. [Philosophical Occasions, p. 147]

Rush Rhees has noted a connection between remarks of this kind and Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspects in Philosophical Investigations II, xi, where he speaks of ways in which ‘thought’ and ‘seeing’ run together, ‘not as components of a complex have to be thought of together, but as concepts may “run together”, and what we should mean by “seeing” is also what we should mean by “thinking” here’ [Rush Rhees, “Wittgenstein on Language and Ritual”, in Wittgenstein and his Times, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 101-102]. The further significance of Wittgenstein’s position on aspect dawning has been drawn out by Avner Baz:

The most important thing about the aspect is that there is a sense in which it isn’t really there and a sense in which it is very much there; a sense in which to speak about ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ with respect to it is to miss its point and yet another sense in which in seeing it and in giving it expression you are truer to the object than if you stick to objective terms – the terms, that is, of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the language-game of reporting’, or ‘the language-game of information’. [Avner Baz, “What’s the point of seeing aspects?”, Philosophical Investigations 23:2 (April 2000): 106]

The seeing involved in aspect seeing is not seeing in general, but seeing (the emphasis is one Wittgenstein employs throughout his discussion). The ordinary sense of ‘seeing’ goes hand in hand with ‘knowing’ and is to be distinguished from aspect seeing. This is clear from the fact that aspects do not teach us anything about the external world, if ‘teaching about the external world’ is understood on the model of giving objective information. To see an aspect is not see a property of an object, and so the expression of a change of aspect (as in what is perhaps an over-worked example, from duck to rabbit or back again), while it may have the form of a report of a new perception, is not quite such a report. As Baz indicates, Wittgenstein also says that the criterion for what you see, when ‘seeing’ in the sense of seeing aspects is involved, is your representation of what is seen. Thus, when Wittgenstein tells us that he sees a resemblance between the drawing of lots by using pieces of cake and a harsh manner of speech he could be lying, but he could not be mistaken. In this respect, then, the expression of the seeing of an aspect is not a report on objective fact: it is an Äusserung, an avowal.

As Baz notes, there are connections with the Kantian account of aesthetic judgement, and, more specifically, with Cavell’s reworking of that account: ‘Aspects, like beauty, hang somewhere between the object and the subject, and that position is constituted by the expectation, the demand, from our partner to see what we see, in spite of the fact that we have no way of making him realize that he should’ [Baz, art. cit.: 107. The reference to Cavell is: Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy”, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1969), p. 89, footnote]. Though the expression we give to the seeing or dawning of aspects may look like giving a report, it is not used for that purpose. Rather, its aim is the seeking of intimacy. This is not the intimacy in which one reveals something about one’s heart or inner feelings; in giving expression to the seeing of aspects we seek intimacy with someone else by trying to reveal, to bring out, something about the object [Baz, art. cit.: 108]. When we say ‘It’s running!’ in front of a painting of a running horse we are not doing so in order to inform other people: it is a reaction in which people are in touch with one another. It is intimacy in this sense that characterises the predominant tone of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer, many of which are cast in the form of avowals. The idea of intimacy hangs together with two further points, both of which have relevance to Wittgenstein’s discussion. The first is that aspects are subject to the will. The second is that an aspect is something that strikes us. Dependency on the will means that it makes sense to say: ‘Now see the figure like this’. In real life situations, it makes sense for me to ask you to see, or at least try to see, the resemblance between two faces that has struck me, and it makes sense for Wittgenstein to ask his readers to see the resemblance between the drawing of lots and a manner of speaking. Thus, if there is an air of paradox attaching to the dawning of an aspect, it derives from the fact that the aspect ‘appears over there, in the object, and yet we know we must have had something to do with that appearance’ [Baz, art. cit.: 110]. We know that what has so radically changed, now that we have seen or been struck by the aspect, has in another sense not changed at all. It is as though we were bringing a concept to bear on the object, which is why, as Baz points out, ‘the aspect cannot be our (or the) usual, obvious way of seeing the object, but rather has to be new to us’ [Baz, art. cit.: 111]. The aspect is not obviously there, as a property might be, but neither have we placed it there by a pure act of the imagination. Baz writes:

It is this peculiarity of the aspect – its being something that fits the object, and at the same time something that we bring to the object; its being a way of seeing something anew while remaining faithful to it – that gives expressing it its point in ordinary contexts. [Baz, art. cit.: 111]

It is precisely this dynamic that Wittgenstein respects in his account how he stands towards the fire festivals. His consideration of them is subtly balanced, between the ‘inner nature’ or physiognomy of the rites themselves, and the character of the people who celebrated them. It is for this reason that the festivals can only be understood in a certain spirit, one which we impute to those who performed them from an experience in ourselves.

*

The pertinence of the discussion thus far to the manner of our response to horror cinema may, I think, be established by reference to the work of Jean Louis Schefer. Schefer writes:

It’s true that we – all of us – go to the cinema to see simulations that are terrible to one degree or another, and we don’t go to partake of a dream. Rather for a share of terror, for a share of the unknown, things like that. . . . . Which is to say that, at bottom, the cinema is an abattoir. People go to the abattoir, not to see images coming one after the other. Something else happens inside them: a structure that is otherwise acquired, otherwise possible, painful in other ways, and which is perhaps tied inside us to the necessity of producing meaning and language. [The Enigmatic Body, ed. and trans. Paul Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 120]

Cinema appears, for Schefer, to be less an art-form than a kind of public spectacle of death and deformation—an abattoir, or perhaps a freak-show, or even an execution. An instance of his approach is his discussion of Tod Browning’s Freaks. It is a film that puts before us the tantrums, pain and anger of dwarfs, their emotions expressed in high pitched voices, and reduced, as Schefer puts it, to tiny clenched fists and minuscule tears. And because of the reduction in scale of the persons who suffer, there is invoked in us a sense of revulsion. Our bodies are not like theirs, and the pain of their unrequited love ‘is for us nothing more than the fate of painfully small dolls’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 121]. This he condemns as frightening—the worst kind of butchery. In the cruelty of our sarcasm, we look down on them, and it seems that there is no way for the small protagonist, a being in the process of discovering the world’s bitterness, to escape his fate, when he can’t even reach the door handle. The meaning of the scene dawns on us only later, ‘in the wake of the emotional instability of such tiny bodies. It arrives when we begin to ask, “Why is our hell so small?’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 121].

These comments read like a gloss on a remark Schefer makes elsewhere: ‘The image can only be seen by way of what it lacks’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 120], in which he seems to be giving voice to an idea not unlike Wittgenstein’s, concerning what it is to be struck by an image. For Wittgenstein, there is a kind of double movement, whereby we bring a concept to what we see, so that seeing an aspect might be likened to an echo of a thought in sight or a palpable reverberation of such a thought. And so it is in the case of Freaks, where, according to Schefer, we come to see the film later, as though our thought were echoing from it back towards us. In a subtle and intricate passage, Schefer develops this idea, suggesting that there is a mystery attaching to the meaning we add to an image, which is linked to something we can never be sure about: what we are adding to the image may simply be ‘ourselves’. There is meaning in what in what’s projected, a meaning that is not simply an extension of ourselves, and yet we recognise ourselves in it. Schefer wants to say that words like ‘guilty’, ‘criminal’ and ‘sin’ attach themselves to our involvement in this spectacle:

Crime isn’t the act of extortion in the world. It designates a man tied by signs to the limits of his universe, and this man, guilty even before infringing any laws, is guilty because he reveals himself as a subject in this universe, and because within him there is the consciousness of this world without freedom to which he himself is the link. [The Enigmatic Body, p. 130]

The guilt here is that of an ‘original sin’, arising from the primordial separation that makes meaning possible: guilt is inherent in the very fact of signification. It is this truth that the monsters and freaks of cinema embody. They exist frequently as impossible figures outside conventional meaning who return us to what Schefer calls ‘the interior body’, the enigmatic uniqueness of the individual existence of each one of us that is essentially paradoxical, a grounding of our being outside the law in what is ungraspable. It is this, the being of my being, that the freaks Schefer discusses make me aware of. Dudley Andrew has argued that Schefer ‘lodges the dialectic at the very heart of this primary fact of viewing: at the cinema we are both ourselves and the representation built for us’ [Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 189]. We are, so to speak, subject to the representation and yet at the same time have dominion over it. Hence, the viewing experience is, as Schefer presents it, an interminable repetition of the dawning of aspects, inasmuch as it involves a developing interplay between the confined and the excessive, the doxical and the paradoxical. It is to explore this that he turns to concrete instances, in the manner of the later Barthes, eschewing the systematic structures of explanation to be found in Metz and other film theorists of a similar psychoanalytic persuasion. Again like Barthes, he is prepared to give himself over to the fascination of the image, a memorable example of which is the section entitled The Sausage, another consideration of a moment from Freaks.

A white man, in medium shot, on the right of the frame, stands casually, addressing a black man lying on a table. His right hand is extended, having just placed a cigarette in the black man’s mouth. The figure on the table lacks arms and legs, and is dressed in a white woollen sweater, with a darker woollen strip like a cummerbund around his waist. The sausage man has just lit the cigarette, using only his mouth to strike a match from a box placed on a small plinth in front of him. Schefer asks: ‘Is this still a man, or a monster? Is it a man other than in the face, where he can seem indifferently sublime or horrible?’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 123] Then something strikes him. The figure, reduced to a single swaddled member, suddenly evokes the idea of the Husserlian reduction, or bracketing, of phenomena, that allows us to get at essences. This avowal is then developed further, into a series of more disquieting questions. ‘What does such a sausage do, not about his desires or about sleeping, but what does he do with his excrement?’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 123] Do we not feel our own arms stuck to our sides as his are? Could it be that we too are that larva, without arms or legs? Could it be that maybe what we see here in this primordial form is a being that is also profoundly ours? Perhaps the cigarette stuck in his mouth is meant to prevent him speaking to that part of ourselves that is indeed that. Did this man ever know the pangs of love? It may be, says Schefer, that a monster is nothing other than a perpetual suffering of love, and its animal lament.

This account of The Sausage corresponds very precisely to Dudley Andrew’s description of how Schefer’s writing ‘answers to the call expressed by the text in the aspirations and gutturals of its voice. To utter an expression is more than to designate a meaning; it is to respond to a situation with a certain cry’ [Concepts in Film Theory, p. 190]. There is evident in Schefer’s avowals an expressive and unhesitating response which is inseparable from being struck by an aspect of something, and it is equally clear that his basic response is one of horror. According to the tradition within which Schefer situates himself, a tradition deriving from Hegel, and whose literary exemplars include Mallarmé, Valéry and Ponge, the act of writing is inseparable from death—the death of things as things. The act of naming, of substituting a word for a thing or sensation, delivers things to us, but only at the cost of subordinating them to concepts and so depriving them of their being. To write is therefore to murder, and every poem is—as T.S. Eliot has it—an epitaph. Maurice Blanchot has made the position clear:

For me to be able to say, “This woman” I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost its being─the very fact that it does not exist. [Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill, 1981), p. 2]

Tzvetan Todorov takes a similar view. He argues that literature cannot be simply a tracing or image of reality, of what is not itself. Words do not have their life in relation to the things to which they refer; for writing to be possible it must be born out of the death of what it is speaking about. And yet this death makes writing impossible, since there is no longer anything for writing to engage with.

Literature can become possible only insofar as it makes itself impossible. Either what we say is actually here, in which case there is no room for literature; or else there is room for literature, in which case there is no longer anything to say. [The Fantastic, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 175]

The conclusion is inescapable: for writing to be literature it must be literature, and, at the same time and in the same sense, not literature. It seems obvious enough that a statement of this kind amounts to a violation of the law of non-contradiction, that is, that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true. Todorov would thus seem to have committed himself to a genuine contradiction, saying of the same thing that it exists and does not exist. It is, however, a contradiction that is more apparent than real. The position derives from an identification of a Kantian concern for the possibility of meaning with the ‘transcendence’ of meaning, with that which is taken to lie beyond meaning. It is an identification—or slippage—that serves to locate the possibility of meaning in its impossibility, and the resulting equivocation, while important for Todorov’s critical endeavour concerning the modern fantastic, is no less fundamental to Blanchot, especially in relation to his exploration of romantic, symbolist and post-symbolist poetry, a poetry he encounters crucially in the work of Hölderlin, Mallarmé and Rilke. What contradiction amounts to here is the proposal that within the actual practice of specific poets a set of conflicting assertions is put into play, and the resulting self-conscious juxtaposition of different perspectives on what is represented calls the status of literature into question. Hence, the modern fantastic does not induce hesitation concerning what it represents; it stands in a hesitant relation to itself. It is an art based on equivocation and ambivalence, and like the poetry of symbolism it attends above all to the process of its own coming into being. In this sense, it may be said to articulate its own impossibility. As Rosemary Jackson has noted, the fantastic understood in this way is based on a split between things that have no names (It, The Thing, and so on) and empty signs, which are devoid of meaning (names such as Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu’ or ‘Nyarlathotep’, or Poe’s ‘bobok’), and whose only reality derives from their own palpability as words [Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy:The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 38-40]. Jackson quotes Sartre, who considers the modern fantastic, as exemplified by Blanchot’s Kafka-like récit, Aminadab, to be a language of non-signifying signs, which lead nowhere. They are means without ends, which appear full and yet are capable of achieving only a terrible emptiness. In Sartre's words:

The law of the fantastic condemns it to encounter instruments only. These instruments are not…meant to serve men, but rather to manifest unremittingly an evasive, preposterous finality. This accounts for the labyrinth of corridors, doors and staircases that lead to nothing, the innumerable signs that line the road and that mean nothing. In the ‘topsy-turvy’ world, the means is isolated and is posed for its own sake. [[Jackson, op. cit., p. 41. Cited from Situations 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 130]

As with the Beltane Fire Festivals, we experience a mode of uncanny meaninglessness, an experience part of whose horror lies in its lack of purpose.

*

I will seek to bring the themes of this essay together by reference to two films, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s masterpiece of 1943, Day of Wrath. Hooper’s film contains in its last reel a scene of extraordinary ferocity and madness, in which Sally Hardesty, the one person left alive after the depredations of Leatherface, is subjected to a horrifying ordeal by the crazed family whose captive she is. The living members of the family would seem made up of a grandfather and three grandsons, the old man having worked in his younger days killing cattle in the slaughterhouses of Texas. The grandsons urge him on to repeat his exploits by killing Sally in the same fashion, by hitting her on the head so hard that she drops dead. The old man is too feeble, however, and the hammer falls nervelessly from his withered hand, clattering into a tin bucket, above which Sally is held by the brothers. Her screams are piercing and interminable, driven as she is to unmitigated dementia by fear and horror. The power of the scene derives in part from its combination of the domestic—the brothers are sitting down to a dinner of meat cooked by Leatherface, who takes on the role of mother—and utter derangement. It is quite possible see the film against the background of the Western, and to contrast the heroics of Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking with the abject degeneration of Leatherface. [Compare Horror, ed. Phil Hardy (London: Aurum Press, 1985), p. 298.] One might also contrast the themes of wilderness and civilisation, in order to suggest how the degeneracy of the family involves a confusion of that opposition. Degenerate descendants of the pioneers though they may be, they also represent the values of business (the older brother complains bitterly about the power of big government and the burdens of taxation) which have destroyed the wilderness the pioneers opened up. Nonetheless, the film reaches beyond these possibilities of interpretation and meaning, into a weird carnival of human destruction. The scene is protracted beyond the needs of the narrative, until the exuberance and jubilation of the family and the monotonous screaming of the girl combine to create an effect of suspension. The film seems to fold back on itself, as its kinetic energy slows down in response to the repeated actions of the family and the unvarying agony of the girl. An uncanny meaninglessness attaches to what takes place, and the viewer is brought—as in Schefer’s tableau of the abattoir—not to see images following one after the other, in narrative order, but to share in the unknown, and to sense something of what exists there. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre creates a parodic vision of tribal transgression, in which, for the duration of the festivities, the forbidden becomes the norm and the appeasement of the divine urge to ruin and destroy becomes the ground of action. The sublimity of so outrageous a pretension is acknowledged in the film’s final image, as Leatherface swings his chainsaw in great sweeping arcs above his head in salutation to the rising sun.

Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, is set in 1623. Witchcraft and the burning of witches are central to it, an issue that ultimately focuses on the figure of Anne. She is the young wife of an elderly priest, Absalon, living in his house with him and his mother, Merete. The first part of the film lays out the indictment for witchcraft of an old woman, Herlofs Marte, and her subsequent capture, trial by torture and burning. Absalon plays a crucial role in this, authorising the indictment, overseeing her trial and signing her death warrant. Following the old woman’s death, the second section of the film centres on the love between Anne and Martin, Absalon’s son, concluding with Absalon’s death. In the final sequence of the film, Anne, Martin, Merete and the elders of the church are gathered around Absalon’s coffin. It is here that Anne is accused of the murder of her husband by witchcraft, and the bewitchment of Martin. The accuser is Merete, the priest’s mother. On hearing the denunciation, Martin abandons Anne, moving around his father’s coffin to stand alongside his grandmother. Anne herself has been a figure of ambivalence throughout the film: there has been a consistent hesitation in the manner of her presentation, and we are never certain as to whether or not she is possessed of demonic powers. In effect, the film offers in Anne a clear focus for what Todorov defines as the classic dynamic of the fantastic—we hesitate between a natural explanation for her actions and a supernatural one. This same hesitation continues now, as she confesses to the crime, a confession that must send her to the stake. The motivation for the confession remains unclear and Dreyer does nothing to establish it more certainly. At the very end, Anne raises her eyes from her dead husband, lying before her, and looks off-screen, an act David Bordwell reads as follows: ‘The look, at nothing, breaking once and for all from the gazes of the social and natural worlds, defines her entry into a new realm’ [The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of califormia Press, 1981), p. 139]. Bordwell takes this view to be supported by the film’s transition at this point to the Dies Irae scroll, which intervenes finally to break off the narrative in a moment of abrupt intervention, as the words of the scroll move up the screen, accompanied by images and music. Bordwell contends that the image supplementing the first verse, showing souls being transported to heaven, and that supplementing the second verse, of men and women kneeling at the foot of the cross, is an implicit act of absolution. Anne is absolved in this way of whatever she has done, and the film’s hesitations about her motives are negated by fiat [The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, p. 140]. However, the final image of the film is of the black cross superimposed over the scroll. The cross remains after the scroll has left the screen, placed on a white ground (in a manner reminiscent of the ending of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest). As we watch this final image, two diagonal pieces appear at its top, pointing downward, a witch emblem, evoking the cross present at the immolation of Herlofs Marte. The cross signals to us that Anne has similarly been burnt alive in the name of the cross. The question of absolution remains as uncertain as the question of Anne’s spiritual powers, and the juxtaposition of these images in no way resolves it.

Day of Wrath points in exactly the same direction as do the descriptions of the Beltane Fire Festivals. What is deep and sinister in Dreyer’s film arises from the eruption of the demonic into a world that is recognisable in its stability or order, while in the people themselves there is something that induces an impression of terror and sense of dread. The awfulness of the solemnity with which the torture of an old woman is conducted, the fact that when she is burnt her immolation is accompanied by a choir of young boys, the grave hypocrisy of Absalon’s piety, the implacable hatred visible in Merete’s face whenever she sees or speaks to Anne, the failure of Martin to support the woman whom he has assured of his love when confronted by Merete’s denunciation—these confirm one’s sense of how human beings are, ‘of what I have seen and heard about, in myself and others’. The meaninglessness of what we see, and the lack of redemptive significance in it, return us to the darkness within ourselves. In other words, Day of Wrath betrays itself to its own undoing. The film is split from itself, in a movement of double negation that turns it towards the outside, the exterior, beyond language and concept, where there is no intimacy, no place to rest. The work says the nothing that is the condition of its simultaneous possibility and impossibility. And this nothing is made palpable in the final image of the cross. Here, too, we may be struck by the pertinence of Freud’s discussion of the uncanny: das Unheimliche, in art as in life, is the occurrence of a consciousness that is attenuated, incapable of mastery over its own negativity. Like the narrator of Poe’s 'The Premature Burial' or the protagonist of Dreyer’s Vampyr, it is as though in certain horror films we were solicited by images from which we cannot escape, and which condemn us to the ultimate horror—that of the impossibility of dying.

THE LETTER OF LORD CHANDOS

In 1901, the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote two works of prose, ‘Colours’ and ‘The Letter of Lord Chandos’. In ‘Colours’, Hofmannsthal sets out what he calls ‘the crisis of an inner disposition’, a ‘crisis’ which takes the form of an almost indescribable experience of what he calls ‘Next-to-Nothing’:

But how enumerate these occasional attacks of a Next-to-Nothing? . . . Now and again in the morning it happened, in these German hotel rooms, that the jug and wash-basin—or a corner of the room with the table and the clothes-rack—appeared to me so nonreal, despite their indescribable banality so utterly not real, ghostly as it were, and at the same time ephemeral, waiting, so to speak temporarily, to take the place of the real jug, the real wash-basin filled with water. . . . it was like a momentary floating above the abyss, the eternal void. . . . such an indescribable wafting of the eternal Nothing, the eternal Nowhere, a breath not of death but of Not-Life, indescribable. . . . all in all [things] took on an aspect, a peculiar ambiguous air so filled with inner uncertainty, malicious unreality: so transitory it lay there—with such ghostlike transitoriness. [Selected Prose, (New York: Pantheon, 1952), pp. 142-44.]

While in this state, the narrator enters by chance an art gallery, where he sees some paintings by Van Gogh. As he stares intently at the paintings, his earlier sense of the ghostlike quality of reality seems taken over, as it were, by the paintings themselves, in an oddly displaced experience exposing the narrator to the sheer existence of things, an experience made all the more curious by the fact that the substantial and voluptuous quality—the sensuous presence—of the things depicted seems, in some way, withdrawn from them:

And this innermost life was there, tree and stone and wall and gorge gave of themselves their innermost, almost casting it at me—not, however, the voluptuousness and harmony of their lovely inanimate lives, as sometimes, in days gone by, like a magic atmosphere it had flowed towards me from old paintings: no, only the impact of its existence, the ferocious wonder of its existence surrounded by incredibility, made a dead set at my soul. [Selected Prose, p.147.)

The experience is one of something taking place that is impersonal, neutral: the ‘loveliness’ of the old days gives way to what is quite other, whereby ‘ferocious wonder’ replaces the familiar and magic atmosphere flowing forth from older paintings with ‘an existence surrounded by incredibility’. In the narrator’s experience of the art of Van Gogh, the familiarity of the object disappears under the impact of its existence, and with that disappearance there emerges something that is there but not visible—the presence of an absence, the density of a void.

What Hofmannsthal undergoes in his engagement with Van Gogh’s art, as he describes the matter, is an experience of fascination or captivation. Emmanuel Levinas has contrasted this with ‘being-in-the world’, a life lived with concepts. A concept is the object grasped; the object becomes intelligible by way of the concept. In our actions, in our lives with words, we maintain a living relation with objects; we hold and understand them. However, ‘the most elementary procedure of art consists in substituting for the object its image. Its image, and not its concept’ [Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 3]. Art implies a blindness to concepts, inasmuch as art does not engender them. The image is not a concept; it takes hold over us, and instead of us grasping it, as with a concept, the image effects a reversal of intention and grasps us, thereby inducing in us a fundamental passivity. For this reason, Levinas regards the image as musical: possessed, ‘inspired’, when we hearken to music, ‘we become’, as T.S. Eliot puts it, ‘the music while the music lasts’. The passivity of our possession is made visible in the very magic, music and song that possess us.

This is the captivation of poetry and music. It is a mode of being to which applies neither the form of consciousness, since the I is there stripped of its prerogative of assumption, of its power, nor the form of the unconscious, since the whole situation and all its articulations are in a dark light, present. [Op. cit., p. 4]

To be confronted by an image, by the ferocious wonder of its existence, is to be no longer a being-in-the-world. It is to exist in a waking dream, in whose light habit, reflex and instinct operate no longer.

In ‘The Letter of Lord Chandos’, Hofmannsthal describes a similar standstill or fascination with respect to language, in which words are immobilised, thought and concept banished. The text purports to be a letter written to Francis Bacon by an Elizabethan nobleman, explaining why the writer has renounced all literary endeavour.

At first I grew by degrees incapable of discussing a loftier or more general subject in terms of which everyone, fluently and without hesitation, is wont to avail himself. I experienced an inexplicable distaste for so much as uttering the words spirit, soul, or body . . . the abstract terms of which the tongue must avail itself as a matter of course in order to voice a judgement—these terms crumbled in my mouth like mouldy fungi. [Selected Prose, pp. 133-34]

The distaste for abstract terms, for concepts, comes to a climax when Chandos, trying to reprove his daughter for lying, finds himself incapable of distinguishing between—or at any rate of communicating the distinction between—truth and falsehood. Gradually, these attacks spread ‘like corroding rust’, until familiar and humdrum conversation seems to him ‘ as indemonstrable, as mendacious and hollow as could be’. He is on longer capable of comprehending things with the simplifying eye of habit:

For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back—whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void. [Ibid]

Chandos comes into contact with a fundamental passivity, wherein language is no longer the expression of a subjectivity, but a reversal of that, whereby he is exposed to language in its exteriority. The words that confront him are no longer words as signs or symbols but words in their existence as words, without meaning, on the hither side of signification. He seeks to rescue himself from his plight by seeking refuge in the Ancients, not in Plato, but in Seneca and Cicero, writers notable for ‘the harmony of their clearly defined and orderly ideas’. But to no avail.

These ideas, I understood them well: I saw their wonderful interplay rise before me like magnificent fountains upon which played golden balls. I could hover around them and watch how they played, one with each other; but they were concerned only with each other, and the most profound, most personal quality of my thinking remained excluded from this magic circle. [Ibid]

A terrible solitude afflicts him, as though he were locked in a garden surrounded by eyeless statues. As Donald Davie has noted, what Chandos goes through is a loss of faith in language as an instrument of articulation, as an instrument able to establish and sustain relationships. In effect, he has lost his faith in syntax: ‘[t]he only language he can trust is a language broken down into units of isolated words, a language which abandons any attempt at articulation, because that articulation seems to take place only inside a closed system—“they were concerned only with each other”’. [Articulate Energy, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 4.]

At the same time, Lord Chandos describes another aspect of this transformation: as words lose their coherence, and objects become useless, he is drawn outside language into a new intimacy with things in themselves, with things in their existence. Maurice Blanchot puts it in the following terms:

a new contact forms with things’ intimacy, a presentiment of unknown relations, of another language, capable of expressing the infinite acceptance which the poet is when he becomes the refusal to choose—capable also of enclosing the silence that lies in the deepest recess of things. [The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 183]

Hofmannsthal in this way accedes to the demand or exigency of writing itself: it is a demand that ‘assigns to the artist—to the most irresponsible of men—the responsibility for what he cannot accomplish, and makes him guilty for what he cannot say, for what cannot be said’ [ibid]. Hofmannsthal himself writes:

I felt, with a certainty not entirely bereft of sorrow, that neither in the coming year nor in the following nor in all the years of this my life shall I write a book, whether in English or in Latin: and this for an odd and embarrassing reason. . . . [T]he language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, neither Italian nor Spanish, but a language none of whose words is known to me, a language in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may one day have to justify myself before an unknown judge. [Selected Prose, pp. 140-1]

It is not surprising that, as Blanchot remarks, Kafka felt ‘The Letter of Lord Chandos’ to be kindred text. Kafka also, when he wrote, ‘felt judged from deep down in his words by that unknown tongue of which he was not the master, but for which he was responsible, and which, with torments and preposterous accusations, removed him more and more from the authority to write . . . and condemned him to a language whose understanding was refused him but whose justification was required of him’ [The Space of Literature, pp. 183-84]. The writer is drawn, by too strong a movement, into a space where truth is lacking, where limits and boundaries have disappeared, and where he is handed over to the immeasurable and the illimitable.

The exigencies to which Hofmannsthal, and Blanchot after him, attend, are complex and difficult to characterise. To make a beginning, I turn to a book by Levinas, Existence and Existents, published in 1947, which exercised a considerable influence over Blanchot in his earlier criticism, and which has features in common with his early novels, such as Thomas the Obscure (1941). Levinas asks us to imagine an event which is, we may believe, unimaginable. Let us imagine, he says, all things, being and persons, reverting to nothingness. There would be an experience, but not the experience of something. It would be an experience of the nothingness that remains, the silence of night and of nothingness, what Levinas calls the experience of the ‘il y a’, the ‘there is’. The ‘there is’ is like the third person pronoun in the impersonal form of the verb—‘it rains’, ‘it is night’—and it designates not the unknown author of an action, but characterises that action itself, which has no author. Levinas speaks of the ‘impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable “consummation” of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself’ and which ‘we shall designate by the term there is. The there is, inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is “being in general”’ [Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), p 52]. The there is derives neither from the exterior nor the inner world, or from any ‘being’ whatsoever. It transcends the inner and the outer, and makes the very distinction impossible. It is here, perhaps, that we may locate Hofmannsthal’s experience of inanimate things, as they speak to him, in an unknown and anonymous ‘language’.

One might be inclined to take the experience of the there is to be an experience of the night, but if it is it is not an experience of night as opposed to day. The night in question is what Blanchot has called ‘the other night’: in their common usage, day and the night that belongs to it are part of the world within which communication, meaning and understanding have their places, whereas the night of which Blanchot speaks, the night of the there is, is what emerges as an elsewhere, as a radical otherness, as a neutrality that is the realm neither of things not of concepts. When the forms of things are dissolved in the other night, the darkness of that night, a darkness which is neither an object nor has the quality of an object, becomes a kind of invading presence. The notion of experience is not, however, applicable in the context of this presence, since, according to Levinas, the darkness of the night excludes all that might present itself to mind or body. It is a darkness beyond or other than anything that might be possible; in the night, we are not confronted by anything that might, or might not, be. The darkness is the darkness of a nothing. And yet it is not a nothing to be identified with an idea of pure or transcendental nothingness. The place of which Levinas speaks is a place where there is no longer ‘this’ or ‘that’—there is no longer ‘something’—but nonetheless the nothing, the darkness, is in its turn a presence, an utterly unavoidable presence. It is not a presence that can take its place in a dialectic relation with absence, nor can it be grasped by thought. It is simply there, beyond mediation, beyond language. ‘Nothing responds to us but this silence; the voice of this silence is understood and frightens like the silence of those infinite spaces Pascal speaks of. There is, in general, without it mattering what there is, without our being able to fix a substantive to this term. There is is an impersonal form, like it rains, or it is warm. Its anonymity is essential’ [op. cit., pp. 52-53]. The well-worn opposition between the inner and the outer, the world of objects and the world of subjectivity, is thereby rendered irrelevant. The mind no longer faces an exterior world, since no such world exists. The self, the I, is submerged by the night, invaded and depersonalised by it. All things disappear and the I with them, leaving behind what cannot disappear, ‘the sheer fact of being in which one participates, whether one wants to or not, without having taken the initiative, anonymously’ [op. cit., p. 53].

The experience is one of horror and menace. Nothing approaches, nothing comes, nothing threatens; and yet this silence, this void empty of sensation, constitutes a mute and absolutely indeterminate menace. As Lord Chandos found, in the deepest recess of things, there is here, in this nowhere, an ambiguity and indeterminateness, where one thing can count as another. As things in their being are delivered over to us, so we are delivered over to things, and are exposed to them. The darkness does not simply change the way things appear to us: it reduces them to undetermined, anonymous being; and it so reduces us. Things strike us ‘as though they no longer composed a world, and were swimming in the chaos of their existence’ [op.cit., p. 54]. Levinas cites as examples the ‘hallucinatory’ poetry of Rimbaud, or the calm and smiling horror of de Maupassant’s tales, in which beings and things collapse into their materiality, whereby a terrifying presence accrues to their density, their weight and shape. For Levinas, it makes things appear to us in a night, ‘like the monotonous presence that bears down on us in insomnia’ [op cit., p. 55]. This is the ‘rustling’ of the il y a, and it is horror. Horror is in no sense an anxiety about death. The subject is stripped of its subjectivity, and in being so stripped loses the power to have a private existence: the self, the I, is depersonalised. Horror is this turning of the subjectivity of the subject, its particularity qua entity, inside out. Levinas describes the process as ‘a participation in the there is, in the there is which returns in the heart of every negation, in the there is that has “no exits.” It is . . . the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation’ [op. cit., p. 56]. The point Levinas is making here is crucial: to kill someone else, or to seek to die oneself, by risking one’s life, or by attempting suicide, is to seek an escape from being, to enter a realm in which negation and freedom can operate. Negation, by denying the world, allows us mastery over it, and hence freedom. As Simon Critcheley has noted, ‘[t]he work of negation, whereby the in-itself becomes transformed into the for-itself and the immediate mediated, is likened by Hegel to death. . . . the Subject produces itself through a relation with death; the life of the Spirit endures death and maintains itself in death’ [Very Little…Almost Nothing (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 53]. For Levinas, then, to experience horror is to experience, at the very heart of the negation that founds and sustains the world, a return of being, an event that makes it seem as though that negation had not taken place. The world—founded on negation—is itself in turn negated. For Levinas, as for Blanchot, the corpse is an especially pertinent icon of what is at stake: the corpse, the very embodiment of death’s negation, already bears within itself its own phantom; it presages its return. ‘The haunting spectre, the phantom, constitutes the very element of horror’ [Existence and Existents, p. 56].

Levinas finds in Shakespeare a potent exemplar of this position. It is the return of presence in negation, the impossibility of evading anonymous and incorruptible existence, that for Levinas constitutes the final depth of the tragedies, in which ‘[t]he fatality of the tragedy of antiquity becomes the fatality of irremissible being’ [op. cit., p. 57]. The spectres, ghosts and witches of the plays are not simply elements deriving from the folklore and shared iconography of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries, or from the original material the dramas are derived from; they are what allow Shakespeare to move towards the limit between being and nothingness, where being insinuates itself even in nothingness. Hamlet recoils before the ‘not to be’, because he has a premonition of the return of being (‘to dye, to sleepe, perchance to Dreame’). Macbeth comes to experience in the apparition of Banquo’s ghost, of ‘its phantom return through the fissures through which one had driven it’ [ibid.], the impossibility of escape from existence. ‘The times have been/That, when the brains were out, the man would die,/And there an end; but now they rise again,/. . . And push us from our stools: this is more strange/Than such a murder is’ (III, iv, 78-83). The horror for Macbeth derives, not from fear, but from the shadow of being, ‘the profile of being [as it] takes form in nothingness’ [ibid]. What emerges from these considerations, Levinas wants to insist, is that the horror of the night, as an experience of the there is, neither reveals, nor derives from, the danger of death or pain. Nor does the pure nothingness revealed by Heidegger’s analyses of anxiety in Being and Time constitute the there is.

There is horror of being and not anxiety over nothingness, fear of being and not fear for being; there is being prey to, delivered over to something that is not a ‘something.’. . . . Horror carries out the condemnation to perpetual reality, to existence with ‘no exits’. [Existence and Existents, pp. 57-58]

Here, Levinas refuses the ontology of Heidegger, and, indeed, epistemology in general. The horror of the night, ‘the silence and horror of the shades’, is simply opposed to Heideggerian anxiety, the fear of being to the fear of nothingness. Anxiety, in Heidegger, is concerned with ‘being towards death’, in which death is somehow grasped and understood, mastered, while, for Levinas, the horror of the night is the horror of the impossibility of dying. There is no exit from the horror of the night, and the unavoidable demands of existence make no answer. Horror is the horror of immortality, the perpetuity of the drama of existence, the necessity of forever taking up its burden.

At this point, Levinas refers, in a footnote, to Blanchot’s novel, Thomas the Obscure, a text which, he insists, captures precisely that ‘presence of absence’, that negativity of ‘the other night’, and the dissolution of the self, the subject, in the night, which constitute the il y a. What is crucial is the sense the novel gives of the horror of being, of what Levinas calls the return of being at the heart of negation, the reality of irreality.

Soon the night seemed gloomier and more terrible to him than any night, as if it had in fact issued from a wound of thought which had ceased to think, of thought taken ironically as object by something other than thought. It was night itself. Images which constituted its darkness inundated him. He saw nothing, and, far from being distressed, he made this absence of vision the culmination of his sight. [Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton (New York: David Lewis, 1973), pp. 14-15]

This is fascination, or ecstasy, in the sense that the subject is evacuated, standing out beyond itself. And across the void thus opening up, sight and the object of sight mingle themselves together. What is seen imposes itself upon the gaze, and the eye’s own glance enters it as an image, as though the gaze were its own object. In this torsion of the subject, a torsion which is fascination, everything is withdrawn from the world, including the powers of language. ‘What fascinates us robs us of our power to give sense. It abandons its “sensory” nature, abandons the world, draws back from the world, and draws us along. It no longer reveals itself to us, yet it affirms itself in a presence foreign to the temporal present and to presence in space’ [The Space of Literature, p. 32]. Fascination is not a cognitive relation. As Gerald Bruns points out, ‘it deprives us of our concepts and leaves us powerless to grasp what we see. It is our seeing which is grasped and held: neutralized’. [See: Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1997), p. 60]. It is ‘solitude’s gaze’ and to enter into this gaze is to enter the impersonal and neutral space of the il y a. Writing is a movement into this space, since to write is to allow fascination to rule language, and the space of writing is that of the impossibility of dying. Thomas the Obscure is a shade, doomed not to rest but to wander through the pages of the text in a caricature of immortality. He cannot die. Thomas digs his own grave and hangs a stone about his neck as if to obliterate himself in the earth, and to become his own corpse, yet he continues to ‘exist’, to stand outside himself until the end. The condition is like that of a man who is hanging himself: after kicking away the stool on which he stood, he feels, instead of the leap into the void, only the rope which holds him around his neck, so that he is bound more than ever, bound as he had never been before, to the existence he had sought to leave. So Thomas ‘felt himself, at the moment he knew himself to be dead, absent, completely absent from his death’ [Thomas the Obscure, p. 36]. He was indeed dead, and yet rejected from the reality of death, and as he leaned over the void, he saw his image in the total absence of images. He saw the fascination of the il y a, and like a man waking up alive in his coffin (a theme familiar from Poe) he saw the impalpable air where he floated transformed into an air without air, ‘filled with smells of the earth, of rotten wood, of damp cloth’ [op. cit., p. 37]. Like Lazarus, he comes forth from the tomb, not resurrected, not risen, but dead, taken at once from life and from death. He walks, a painted mummy, in whom death itself has been resurrected.

This condition Levinas sees as characteristic of modern art, as is clear from his account of cubist painting:

The breakup of continuity even on the surface of things, the preference for broken lines, the scorning of perspective and of the “real” proportions between things, indicate a revolt against the continuity of curves. From a space without horizons, things break away and are cast towards us like chunks that have weight in themselves, blocks, cubes, planes, triangles, without transitions between them. They are naked elements, simple and absolute, swellings or abcesses of being. In this falling of things down on us, objects attest their power as material objects, even reach a paroxysm of materiality. Despite the rationality and luminosity of these forms when taken in themselves, a painting makes them exist in themselves, brings about an absolute existence in the very fact there is something which is not in its turn an object or a name, which is unnameable and can only appear in poetry. [Existence and Existents, p. 51]

The materiality in question here is not that of classical materialism, or of scientific determinism. What Levinas is pointing to is matter in its coarsenss, thickness, massiveness, wretchedness. He is concerned with the brute and implacable presence of things, with what is humble, bare and ugly. Matter in this sense is the very fact of the il y a. Hence, as Bruns notes, it is important not to miss the import of Levinas’s remark: ‘there is something which is not . . . an object or a name, which is unnameable and can only appear in poetry’. This ‘something’ is what lies at the heart of Blanchot’s concerns also. ‘Blanchot’s question is what sort of thing poetry would have to be in order to be that (and only that) in which this materiality of being, this anonymous, oppressive, invasive power of existence, this implacable density of the il y a, can appear’ [Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, p. 61]. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot says that the writer ‘belongs to a language no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing’ [The Space of Literature, p. 26]. But the question then arises as to what is it to belong to such a language, a language that is no longer a language, no longer used for expression or to make statements, no longer the language of negation or assertion. As Bruns remarks, this is ‘[a] language not for use: a language that can only be described by a kind of topology, not by grammar and rules’ [Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, p. 62]. Though poetry may be made out of words, it is not a use of them. To belong to language understood in this way means to lose one’s subjectivity. To belong is not to belong, to belong nowhere, and to lose what we understand by position, and so to be deprived of perspective or standpoint. One is not free of the world, but deprived of it.

Kafka’s novels, and in particular The Castle, exemplify for Blanchot the exigency or demand of writing, thus conceived. A similar exigency or demand is manifest also in The Waste Land. Eliot places at the beginning of the poem an epigraph, from the Satyricon, that is very pertinent to the issues at stake here. Trimalchio claims to have seen the Sibyl hanging up in a bottle at Cumae (in a condition similar to the protagonist’s, in Beckett’s The Unnamable). Apollo had granted her request to live for as many years as there were grains of dust in her hand (‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’), but she forgot to ask the god for eternal youth. Her one wish now is to die, and yet this is impossible. Trimalchio reports her state thus: ‘For I with these my own eyes have seen the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar; and when the boys said, ‘What do you want, Sibyl?’, she answered, ‘I want to die’. Hugh Kenner has noted that the passage from the Satyricon is given in ‘macaronic Latin, posterior to the best age, pungently sauced with Greek’ (the boys’ questions and the Sybil’s answer are in Greek [The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 136]. He has also suggested that she is a figure of shifting identity, who functions much as the consciousness of the writer, and is to be associated with the fragmentary, the sibylline leaves. The Waste Land is, one might say, prefaced by a figure embodying the aesthetic of the poem to come, and it is an aesthetic of horror. The impossibility of dying is an extreme limit, as it were between life and death, an experience of the interminability of existence: here I lose the ability to die and the dead rise up from their graves. This condition is, for Blanchot, the condition of writing, and one may perceive a most powerful instance of it in The Waste Land. The experience is related, as we have seen, to the experience of the il y a, in which one experiences the horror of the absence of the world, of an absence of meaning in which I can no longer act or say, and where I myself disappear in the passivity of dying. Heidegger’s conception of the authentic death, as the origin of my knowledge, is changed into something quite other, into the experience of the impossibility of dying, an experience inseparable from the experience of the loss of subjectivity and so of the impossibility turning the world into a place of meaning. This is the space of non-origin, where I have lost the right to my own death, ‘that unique event which answers Rilke’s prayer: “O Lord, grant to each his own death”.’ [Quoted in The Space of Literature, p. 241.] What I find is that death exposes me to an anonymity in which it is not ‘I’ but ‘they’ who die. Men die always as other than themselves, at the level of the neutrality and impersonality of the They.

They die: he who dies is anonymous, and anonymity is the guise in which the ungraspable, the unlimited, the unsituated is most dangerously affirmed amongst us. Whoever experiences this suffers an anonymous, impersonal force, the force of an event which, being the dissolution of every event, is starting over not only now, but was in its very beginning a beginning again. And in its domain everything that happens happens over. From the instant “they die,” the instant is revoked. When someone dies, “when” designates not a particular date but no matter what date. Likewise there is a level of this experience at which death reveals its nature by appearing no longer as the demise of a particular person, or as death in general, but in this neutral form: someone or other’s death. Death is always nondescript. [Ibid]

‘I’ may hope that my death will prove the moment of my greatest authenticity, the moment towards which ‘I’ propel myself as towards the possibility that is my own-most, as to what is most proper to me, and which will secure me in the solitude of what I am, of the pure ‘I’. But the anonymity of death refuses this accomplishment: dying is intransitive and interminable, where what is intelligible is translated into something unspeakable and alien, and where the law has become absence or impossibility as such. Levinas writes: ‘The time of dying itself cannot give itself the other shore. In dying, the horizon of the future is given, but the future as the promise of a new present is refused: one is in the interval, forever an interval’ [Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 11]. It is as though death were never dead enough, as though it were prolonged in the horror of the interval, as in the horror of being buried alive. This is the experience of certain of Poe’s characters, and it is that of the Sybil.

It is the Sybil’s experience, the horror of her being unable to die, which informs the poem throughout its movement. We remember that Eliot had proposed initially to begin his text with a citation from Heart of Darkness, concerning the death of Kurtz, which makes explicit the connection between the poem’s writing and the sense of horror: ‘Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—“The horror! The horror!”.’ Like the Sybil, Kurtz experiences that interval, in which knowledge, the ‘supreme moment of complete knowledge’, is transformed by a slippage of language into ‘some image’, the very image of fascination itself, which works on him its effect of horror. By placing these two citations together, we may perhaps glimpse something of the strategy of the poem—to explore the dread of being held to existence without an exit. True horror arises from an ineluctable awareness of the irremissibility of existence, of immortality within life, from the dread of existence itself. The Sybil is the locus of that mode of consciousness which is appropriate to this space or region of language, where subjectivity is lost.

The Sybil is a prophet, as is Kurtz, in his own way, and Tiresias, that figure inseparable from the poem of whom Eliot writes in a note: ‘Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem’ [The Waste Land: a facsimile and transcript, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 148, n. 218]. In Eliot’s poem, the cognitive or expressive subject is dispersed in a fission of its inwardness, as though it were possessed, speaking, in the manner of a prophet, under inspiration, its breath taken from it. This is the condition of the ‘I’ of writing in The Waste Land, where what Tiresias sees is the condition of the poem’s existence, and, as it were, of his own existence in it. The consciousness constituted within and without Eliot’s text is the consciousness of an elsewhere, where that elsewhere is not a private, interior, subjective space; nor is it an imaginary space, the space of aesthetic differentiation. It is the space opened up by writing. One may set against the background of these claims Eliot’s citation in the Notes of Bradley’s remark, from Appearance and Reality, to the effect that ‘regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul’ [op. cit., p. 149, n. 411]. The interior, private space of Bradley’s self is turned inside out, through the effect of iteration, in the very note that cites it. For the whole world to be peculiar and private to each soul that apprehends it would require that language similarly be private. For Bradley to say what he wants to say is therefore impossible, since the notion of a private language is unintelligible, as the fact of iteration, here instantiated, makes evident. We are, so to speak, required to understand what is not intelligible and to see sense in nonsense and vice versa. The inner world and the outer are thereby troubled in their relations, each undecidably moving through and beyond the other, in a play of uncertainty that affects in like fashion the relations between the Notes to the poem and the poem itself. Does The Waste Land comprise the ‘poetry’ and the Notes, added at publication to make up the book’s length, or not? The Notes are both internal to the poem (they are inside the book’s covers), and external to it, inasmuch as they stand apart from it and comment explicitly on it, from a point beyond it, while at the same time they also contain poetry, as does the ‘poem’ itself. The world of The Waste Land is the world of the non-identical: suspended between what is and what is not, it is linked to what is outside the world, to the ‘Unreal’ city and to that place where ‘We who were living are now dying/With a little patience’. The poem expresses ‘the profundity of this outside bereft of intimacy and repose—this outside that appears when even with ourselves, even with our death, we no longer have relations of possibility’. The Waste Land, with its multiple voices and persons, sets out the situation of one who has lost himself, ‘who can no longer say “me,” who in the same movement has lost the world, the truth of the world, and belongs to exile, to the time of distress when, as Hölderlin says, the gods are no longer and are not yet. This does not mean that art affirms another world, at least not if it is true that art has its origin, not in another world, but in the other of all worlds’ [The Space of Literature, p. 75]. It is rather that The Waste Land brings about a confrontation with the process from which all poems derive, with what Blanchot calls ‘the original point at which the work is inevitably lost, that always destroys the work, recreates endless idleness in the work, but with which too, if anything is to come of it, an ever more primal relationship has to be established’ [The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia David (New York: Station Hill, 19810, p. 195).

The ‘time of distress’ is precisely what Eliot invokes at the end of the poem, by way of juxtaposed fragments of literature and the Upanishads. The last words of the poem are ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ (a formal ending to an Upanishad, according to Eliot's note) and, as the text shifts from ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ to the gloss offered there (‘“The Peace which passeth understanding” is a feeble translation of this word [shantih]’), we can hardly fail to hear at the same time the word ‘shanty'—or rather, two words, one originating in nineteenth century French (chantez,) the other in nineteenth century North American (perhaps also in the Irish sean tig (toig) ‘old house’)—in which song and shack are combined. The text, like an old house, haunted and uncanny, opens a space of echo and redoubling, where it is not someone, some one person, but rather the unknown space itself which speaks, that speaks without speaking. It is as though the voice itself spoke, in the manner Conrad ascribes to the voice of Kurtz: ‘A voice! A voice! It was grave, profound, vibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a whisper’. ‘Shantih’ contrasts with the ‘feeble translation’, as the voice contrasts with the feeble whispers of the dying man. In this way, the text seems to turn back on itself, even as it withdraws from itself, inscribing itself as an interminable torsion, without beginning or end, or rather, as a torsion like that of the Moebius strip, whose end precedes its beginning and whose beginning comes after its end. This self-surpassing operation can be found throughout the poem, as its principle of movement, a principle that the last forty lines or so bring to the fore. Of these lines, beginning after ‘Then a damp gust/Bringing rain’, Kenner has remarked, in The Invsible Poet, that they recapitulate the poem in terms of the most ancient wisdom accessible to the West.

Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed

An ancient wisdom is evident and at the same time troubled somewhat here: the lines give not only a reminder of sexual surrender, or of the greater spiritual surrender attendant upon ascesis and self-abandonment, they give the very movement by which they are the lines, the writing, they are. Surrender and retraction open up the space in which to inscribe the limits of the human, a limit we can respond to only by forsaking the selves in terms of which response is possible. The existence of which the poem speaks is thus an existence exiled from itself: we are not there, we are elsewhere, and we never cease to be there. The present does not flee into the past, but remains open, an unfinished present, as if not part of a sequence.

By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

Eliot evokes here an entrance into the passivity of time, outside the possibility of narrative, ‘disappearing through the lack of mediation between past and future when time is prolonged, incomplete and unceasing’ [Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, p. 68]. Eliot’s invocation of the founding language of Europe, given as ‘DA’, the word prior to all words, and spoken by the thunder, bringing rain, is no less and no more than the other words and languages of the poem, the language of exile. As Blanchot says of Saint-John Perse (a translation of whose Anabasis Eliot first published in 1931), ‘[w]hen Saint-John Perse named one of his poems Exile, he named the poetic condition as well. The poet is in exile; …. The poem is exile, and the poet who belongs to it belongs to the dissatisfaction of exile. He is lost always to himself, outside, far from home; he belongs to the foreign, to the outside which knows no intimacy or limit’ [The Space of Literature, p. 237]. Exile thus characterised is inseparable from what Blanchot calls the experience of the passivity of dying, an experience ascribed in the poem to the Sybil, as well as to Tiresias, the experience of an afterlife lived in time. This between-time is the time of a neutrality, which Tiresias, ‘throbbing between two lives/Old man with wrinkled female breasts’, is the embodiment of: it is the time which the prophet, though blind, can see, the time of the ‘violet hour, the evening hour that strives/Homeward and brings the sailor home from sea’, lines that enact a syntactic displacement in which and by means of which the ‘hour’ comes to be, a time in and of language. It is this order of time that emerges at the moment when Orpheus turns to look at Eurydice, a moment alluded to in the line Eliot cites from de Nerval: ‘Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie’. The speaker of El Desdichado assumes multiple personae, in the manner of the speaker of The Waste Land, and as Orpheus enters the shades to call back his love. The task of Orpheus here, as in the myth, is to bring Eurydice into the light, and his work is the production of beauty. As Simon Critchley puts it: ‘Orpheus must submit to the law of the underworld in order to produce the artwork. Thus, the presentation or unconcealment of the beautiful form in the daylight—what one can call, with Heidegger, ‘world’—can only be achieved by submitting to the prohibition against looking Eurydice in the face, by recognising that she can only be approached by turning away’ [Very Little….Almost Nothing, p. 42]. But in Blanchot’s reading of the myth, what is crucial is Orpheus’ gaze, the moment of his turning back to see Eurydice in the night, the transgression of that prohibition. Orpheus desires to see Eurydice in her concealment, as the darkness, as the essence of the night, the other night. As Critchley describes Blanchot’s account, Orpheus does not desire to make the invisible visible; he desires the impossible, ‘to see the invisible as invisible’ [op. cit., p. 43]. And it is this desire, which destroys his art, losing him Eurydice, that is also the source of his art. This act, the act of inspiration, is at once the ruination of the work and its impossible origin. Blanchot writes:

Does this mean that inspiration changes the beauty of the night into the unreality of the void, makes Eurydice into a shade and Orpheus into someone infinitely dead? Does it mean that inspiration is therefore that problematic moment when the essence of the night becomes something inessential and the welcoming intimacy of the first night becomes the deceptive trap of the other night? That is exactly the way it is. [The Gaze of Orpheus, p. 102]

Inspiration leads to the other night, in which one can neither sleep nor die: this night is the night of The Waste Land.

The issues at stake in this kind of writing may be illuminated by consideration of the poem’s temporality. It is when the events a poem narrates are the events that constitute its own unfolding that we are cast into what Blanchot calls a time before the world, before the beginning. A later poem, East Coker, opens with the words `In my beginning is my end', and it concludes: ‘In my end is my beginning’. Here, the work says what it says in the very gesture of saying what there is for it to say. The only happening in the poem is the happening of the poem itself: a world is described, and, in that same act of description or definition, created. Here, the act of creation turns back upon itself, becoming other than, and exterior to, itself. Hence it is possible neither to begin nor to end, since the words of the poem are already beyond themselves, elsewhere. As Eliot has it, in Burnt Norton: ‘the end precedes the beginning,/And the end and the beginning were always there/Before the beginning and after the end./And all is always now’. We cannot begin, since the beginning is always already begun, and we cannot come to an end, since the end is always already completed, in a time before the beginning. If, with Blanchot, we think of names on the Hegelian model, as effecting the murder or annihilation of the things they name, then the negation, by which the poem sustains itself and which in turn it sustains, must enter paradoxically into the poem, effecting its failure, and (in Blanchot's idiom) betraying the work of the poem to worklessness (désœuvrement). By this he means that the poem is split from itself, in a movement of double negation that turns it towards the outside, the exterior, beyond language and concept, where, as he puts it, there is no intimacy, no place to rest. `The work says the word beginning from a starting point - art - which is complicit with the futility of starting over', and so, like a tautology, the work says the nothing that is the condition of its simultaneous possibility and impossibility:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images . . .

The Waste Land, exemplary in this regard, is nothing other than what it constitutes itself as, namely `this stony rubbish', and the reader, caught within the language of the poem, unable to move beyond it, is, at the same time, exterior to it as it narrates the passage of its own negation:

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

Blanchot's prose, which often reads like a rhapsodic commentary on The Waste Land, says of this mode of writing: ‘The work declares being - and says choice, mastery, form - by announcing art which says the fatality of being, says passivity, and formless prolixity’ [The Space of Literature, p. 244].

. . . I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding to meet you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The poem comes, not to an end, but upon a series of fragments: `These fragments I have shored against my ruins'. These ruins are the ruins of the kingdom, the wreck of its earlier kings, on whose fortunes I have pondered, `Musing upon the king my brother's wreck/And on the king my father's wreck before him'. The fragments I have shored against my ruins are in effect those very ruins themselves. They are the ruins of a realm in which, except for ruin, there is nothing sure. As Blanchot has appositely put it, ‘By turning itself into an inability to reveal anything, literature is attempting to become the revelation of what revelation destroys’ [The Gaze of Orpheus, p. 47].

In The Waste Land, conditions of possibility and impossibility are registered in successive reversals of syntax, which occur as the poem unfolds in the time of reading:

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

As we first approach them, coming around the end of the preceding line, the words ‘Spread out’ have the force of a verb, a past indicative; but, after we have reached ‘Glowed’ in the next line, they retroactively become a past participle, governed by ‘hair’. However, there is no question of deciding which reading is correct: the phrase has to be taken as both things at once--verb as we approach it, participle as we look back to it--in what is a sustained and ambiguous suspension that leaves us interminably divided between the two. Again, in the last line, ‘would’ hovers ambiguously between being a transitive verb, expressing the desire or wish that the hair be `savagely still', and an auxiliary, expressing a conditional statement, saying how the hair would be if such and such were the case. What this condition is or might have been or might yet be is not specified. What we can say is, with its language organised in this manner, the poem will never have completed its passage into the future; impotent to situate itself securely in time, it will exist in a quasi-eternal moment, unable to go beyond itself, unable to pass on. The opening section of Burnt Norton exemplifies this exactly, as it narrates the passage from past to future, and so back into the past, of the words that occur in it. This is to sustain a present in which the future is imminent, but never realised, a present stripped of what makes it the present, its passing. The linguistic events of the poem are the only happenings there are.

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

Something has disappeared, as the writing, seeking to register what comes before, makes of it what comes after, undermining our usual understanding of temporal succession, and dispossessing words of the power to name, or state. Nonetheless, words may take from this dispossession a power of their own, an obscure power almost that of incantation, so that things become really other than they are. Words become ‘one moment in the universal anonymity, a bald statement, the stupor of a confrontation in the depths of obscurity’, and through the action of language itself, it becomes possible to achieve a passage beyond language and to enter upon the presence of things before the world exists, in what Blanchot calls ‘the lucidity of the depths of torpor’ [The Gaze of Orpheus, p. 47].

If we are to accord this way of thinking its due weight and seriousness, then we must recognize that Blanchot and Levinas have come upon states of mind and modes of experience that are accessible only by virtue of a specific employment of language, that typified by what is, in effect, post-symbolist poetry. And what this kind of experience gives onto, for Levinas, is the true horror, the horror of the uncanny and the fantastic. It is the return of being in negation, the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation. It appears to us in the obsessions and insomnias of the night, and it is fear of being, not fear for being, fear of death. In Levinas's words, ‘it is a density of the void, like a murmur of silence’, and it is beyond contradiction [Existence and Existents, pp. 63-64]. It is the condition described by Eliot in ‘The Hollow Men’: ‘Shape without form, shade without colour,/Paralysed force, gesture without motion’. And we find it also explored in Lucio Fulci's horror film, The Beyond.

Released by Fulvia Film (Rome) in 1981, the film takes up the motif of the gateway to hell from The Sentinel (Michael Winner, 1976) and living dead imagery based on Romero's first two zombie films. The story opens in Louisiana, 1927. A posse, bearing torches, rifles and chains, is rowing across a lake towards an isolated hotel. Inside the hotel, Schweik, an artist, is completing an indistinct landscape, littered with grey shapes, perhaps corpses. The men burst into the hotel and seize him, the leader of the group accusing him of being a warlock, or satanist, and beating him mercilessly across the face with a heavy chain. Ignoring his warnings, the men carry him to the hotel's cellar, crucify him, and throw acid over his head, watching him as he dissolves in agony. As this is happening, a young woman, Emily, is elsewhere in the hotel, reading from the book of Eibon, which contains ancient prophecies concerning the seven sacred gateways into hell. Schweik is then walled up. In 1981, Liza Merril arrives from New York to claim the hotel which she has inherited. Assisted by Martin Avery, she decides on its renovation. On a long causeway, resembling that between the Florida Keys, Liza meets Emily, who now is blind. Emily takes Liza to the house where she lives, and warns her to leave immediately. At the same time, Martha, the hotel's Mrs Danvers-like housekeeper, guides Joe, a local plumber, towards the far end of the hotel's cellar, which is flooding, to find out where the water is coming from. He knocks down the wall entombing Schweik's body, and is killed by a hand that reaches out and seizes him. Subsequently, two corpses are discovered. Mary Ann, Joe's wife, goes to the hospital mortuary to prepare her husband for his funeral, when she too is killed. She falls, and lies unconscious at the foot of a cupboard, on which stands a large bottle of acid. The bottle falls forward, spilling its contents over her head, which dissolves into a sea of bloody foam. Her daughter watches in fascinated horror, as the foam creeps towards her. Martin Avery dies in the town library. When he comes upon the original plans for the hotel, he falls from a high ladder, and is bitten to death by giant spiders. During his death agonies, the plans, of a vast and elaborate building, dissolve into the whiteness of the page. John McCabe, a doctor, who has become friendly with Liza, is increasingly puzzled by what is happening, and is especially perturbed by the fact that he has never heard of Emily, despite living many years in the town. He goes to her house, only to find it abandoned and in ruins. Here he discovers the book of Eibon and reads in it that the hotel stands on one of the seven gates to hell. In the hotel, Martha is cleaning the bathroom of room 39, Schweik's former room. She puts her hand into a bath of foul black water, and frees the plughole. As the water drains away, Joe arises from the water, rather as Schweik had done earlier in the cellar, after Joe's death. He drives Martha before him, until the back of her head is impaled on a large nail sticking out of the wall, a nail similar to those used in Schweik's crucifixion. She will join the undead. Schweik appears before Emily, summoning her back with him, presumably to hell, a summons she passionately refuses to obey. Her guide dog turns on her, and tears out her throat. Liza is set on by the dead in her hotel, and is rescued by McCabe. Together, they flee to the hospital, which they find strangely empty and unreal. They are pursued by `living' corpses from the morgue. They escape down to the basement, only to find that they are back in the cellar of the hotel. They pass through the holes in the walls, into a landscape that seems everywhere the same. It is the landscape of the painting Schweik completed at the time of his destruction, and it is the site of hell. Liza and McCabe appear to merge into the landscape, and the painting comes to dominate the screen.

As this summary should indicate, the plot is anything but concisely organised. Elements are pulled in from many sources, and strung together in a series of set-pieces, involving various degrees of violence and bodily mutilation. Of these, the opening sequences are the most striking, as Schweik is crucified by the posse and dissolved in acid. The score, by Fabio Frizzi, dominates the sound track, carrying over to the reading by Emily from the book of Eibon. The same musical motif recurs throughout, especially at moments of violent death, such as Mary Ann's and Martha's. The music, rather than the narrative, is the cohesive force in the film, through its repetitious insistence drawing the disparate narrative events together, and emphasising pace and rhythm at the expense of motivation or psychological insight. The effect is of visuals and music seeming to cohere in a unified sound-image. This is brought home at the end of the film, when Schweik's painting has come to fill the screen, accompanied by the throbbing musical score. It is precisely at this point that Liza and McCabe are recognised as having become part of Schweik's landscape, which he completed as the film began, a painting which does not simply depict hell, but is it. The film's end is established at a point prior to its beginning, and the organisation of its temporal development identified with that of a painting internal to it. The role of music and rhythm in achieving this effect of reversal, whereby the end becomes the beginning, and the exterior the interior, is similar to the role of rhythm in The Waste Land, where, as we have seen, words impose themselves on us, disengaging themselves from reality, and (we may want to say) making us part of them. For Levinas, rhythm understood in these terms is what constitutes the duration of the interval. Words in poetry impose themselves on us without us assuming them:

Or rather, our consenting to them is inverted into a participation. Their entry into us is one with our entry into them. Rhythm represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it. [The Levinas Reader, p 132]

Levinas is speaking here as we saw Blanchot do earlier. He believes that in poetry the subject enters into its own representation, so that the self exists no longer, having become an anonymous or impersonal shadow of what it formerly was. What this means becomes clear if we think of the way the reader is captured by the incantatory movement of Eliot's writing: ‘. . .you are the music/While the music lasts’. Our consenting to the music, or the poetry, is inverted into a participation, in which initiative and freedom are lost. The condition is that of a waking dream. As Blanchot insists, this is a mode of being which is neither that of consciousness, since the self is stripped of the ability to assume its powers, nor that of unconsciousness, since the whole situation is there, in what Levinas calls a dark light, present. Blanchot identifies this condition with that of hell, though not the hell of traditional Christian torment. He makes this clear by citing a passage from Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism on Kabbalistic speculation. Scholem argues that, after the Expulsion from Spain, religious thought attempted to overcome exile by pushing it to its limit, ‘enhancing its torments’ and ‘savoring its bitterness to the utmost’:

The horrors of Exile were mirrored in the Kabbalistic doctrine of metempsychosis, which now won immense popularity by stressing the various stages of the soul's exile. The most fearful fate the could befall any soul--far more ghastly than the torments of hell--was to be “outcast” or “naked”, a state precluding either rebirth or even admission to hell. . . . Absolute homelessness was the sinister symbol of absolute Godlessness, of utter moral and spiritual deprivation. [Cited in The Space of Literature, p. 70, from G.G. Scholem, The Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), p.250]

Such absolute homelessness was, for the Kabbalists, the worst nightmare of the soul. Liza and McCabe are submitted to this fate, not in punishment of their sins, but by virtue of their being what they are, creations of the film. Fulci's hell is a revelation of the fact that art ‘describes the situation of one who has lost himself, who can no longer say “me”, who in the same movement has lost the world, the truth of the world, and belongs to exile’ [The Space of Literature, p. 75].

The disruption of tenses in a symbolist poem disrupts and discredits retrospectively the whole tense sequence of the poem, so that the reader has nothing to fall back on except the duration the poem takes in the reading. The symbolist poem is `a falling movement on the hither side of time, into fate' [Existence and Existents, p. 139]. A disruption of comparable order takes place in The Beyond, but it does so at the level of the image, not the word, when image and what is imaged become one, as the film concentrates at the end on Schweik's painting. This echoes a point basic to Levinas' conception of art. For him, the most elementary procedure of art is to substitute an image for an object. And an image is not a concept. `A concept is the object grasped, the intelligible object. Already by action we maintain a living relationship with a real object; we grasp it, we conceive it. The image neutralizes this real relationship' [The Levinas Reader, p. 132]. Like the Hegelian name, the image neutralises, annihilates, the object. The effect of Schweik's painting is to incorporate into the film the symbolist logic of the word, discrediting the narrative, and revealing its bondage to the inexorable duration of the interval. Seen in retrospect, the elaboration and spectacle of the film's many deaths reveal the film's fixity and subordination to a time impotent to go anywhere except interminably back to its beginning. A corpse rises from the foul water of the bath, in an obvious reminiscence of Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, and Martha steps back before a horror she is unable to escape. She is held by the fact of its presence, by the fact that it is dead and yet before her: confronting it `alive', she confronts a death that is not dead enough. For the viewer, this effect is reinforced by the Clouzot reference, inasmuch as the corpse seems summoned forth, not so much by the powers of hell or Schweik, as by the cinema itself. Death has become a sound-image, composed of elements we have seen or heard before, including the nails, the corpse rising from the black water, the music, the violation of the head, the moaning, as well as elements deriving from other films. These are the plastic elements which fix and immobilise the characters in time. The death we see is a death effected, not by motive or significant action, but by the image understood as Levinas and Blanchot understand it, as the site of a repetition, which the characters in the film and we, the viewers of the film, are equally impotent to resist. The housekeeper takes her place among the undead. Emily refuses the summons of her fate, and her death, her throat torn open by her guide dog, is the repetition of a similar episode in Suspiria.

Films of this type disengage us from the world, not in order to go beyond it, since this requires meaning, and the complexities of human action, but so that we may enter an interruption of time, similar to that effected in Eliot's poetry, where a quasi-eternal instant is created, aside from time, offering the horizon of a future which will never come. `Words, after speech, reach/Into the silence.' In this realm, the priority of the concept is displaced, and we find ourselves submitted to fate. This is not the fate of rational law or universal necessity, but of a present, where `all is always now', constituted by the eternally suspended future of poetic rhythm and the image. Fate has no place in life. The fate of art is that of the statue, suspended in an immobile instant, where, according to Levinas, `the power of freedom congeals into impotence. And here too we should compare art with dreams: the instant of the statue is a nightmare' [The Levinas Reader, p. 139]. The fate of art is also that of the narrative. The being of a character is immobilised in it, committing characters in novels and films alike to the infinite repetition of the same acts and experiences. Nothing in the narrative initiates life, and in The Beyond Fulci acknowledges the fact, immobilising death and forming it into a series. Death subordinate to repetition is impossible, and just as Liza and McCabe are fated to wander endlessly through the world of Schweik's hell so under Fulci's direction freedom congeals into impotence. The characters of The Beyond are fated to a death that is always the same, suspended in the fixity of the film, not only because the film can be seen over and over, but because they each experience in their dying the nightmare of the interval. The Beyond does not reproduce time; it has its own time, a time of fixity. Time cannot shatter this fixity, despite the fact that cinema unrolls in time, since it is the fixity of the interval, and the interval stands aside from time. In The Beyond, the work is lost; going beyond itself it unites with its origin, establishing itself in impossibility. Fulci has created a cinema out of an image of writing. He has taken narrative beyond itself, as a condition of its existing, and it is only because the being of the characters can be doubled into the beyond that he finds their actions worth narrating at all.

Seen in this light, the film is nothing other than a catalogue of notations of its own aesthetic, and it exhibits them everywhere, in the blind yet seeing eyes of Emily, the appearance and disappearance of the hotel plans, the hotel itself, the undead, and, most significantly, Schweik's painting. The characters become elements of its plastic composition, in a transformation that defines the aesthetic undertaking of the whole film. Characters constantly die into the beyond constituted by their images, a doubling we first see in the death of Schweik himself, who returns from the dead, still in the atrocious condition in which he died. Like the Lazarus of Blanchot, he is not resurrected into the sunlight; he remains in the tomb, and of the tomb, and is evil, lost. Similarly with the hotel: putrescence and rot pervade it, and the dead dwell there. As with the `old houses' in Suspiria and Inferno, the hotel exists suspended in the empty place between life and death, inseparable from an image of itself that has disappeared, and ultimately no character is possessed of the power to escape it. The degradation of the world represented in Fulci's film is in effect a degradation marking the reversal by which reality is removed, and replaced by the shadow of the image. All darkens into the shadow of the beyond, and this peculiar death of the shadow serves in Fulci's hands to undo the narrative from within, inverting it into what is at once an image of death and a dead image. This view of the film is supported by the longest Italian version of the film's title: ...E Tu Vivrai Nel Terrore! L'Aldilà. Reading this as `...And you shall live in terror! The beyond', it points towards the notion of a future conditional on the past, a terror beyond, beyond the grave, beyond the end and before the beginning, in which you shall live. This is the threat that for Levinas appears in the approach of the interval; there can be no retreat from it, but the approach never ends.

The Beyond has been seen as in many ways a failure, or so its detractors have been quick to insist, remarking on its haphazard and derivative narrative, and its often crude effects; however, I would argue that its concluding sequence acknowledges it to be a failure in a more profound and far-reaching sense. Liza and McCabe are lost in a place where to go forward is to go back, and where every beginning is simply a repeated end. `If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable': Eliot's words are an exact definition of Fulci's hell. And yet the film at its end pulls back, with a crane shot, away from the place of darkness, which the voice of Eibon tells us we are condemned forever to explore, into the painting, and finally away from that also. Here is the final ambiguity, that to dwell beyond, in the place outside, in the impossibility of the possible, is possible only at the cost of the impossible: to achieve this final ambiguity, for Fulci, as for a post-symbolist like Eliot, would be to achieve a condition of `complete simplicity/(Costing not less than everything)'.