Bloch experiments, Blecher edition

The following discussion of Max Blecher’s 1936 Adventures in Immediate Irreality is the second post in the Bloc experiments series.

The thematic thread in Max Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Irreality is so obvious I’m tempted to think it can’t be it. The basic idea—the overt idea, say—is this: Objects, and objectivity, and the subject’s relation to objects, are all vexing and complex things, and are all far more vexing and complex than (to give it a name) the obviously true view about the nature of reality, that it is full of objects. In fact, if it were not for the novel’s own emphasis on the language of objects, the thematic thread of Adventures might be said to be the very nature of obviousness, the clandestine way in which, to hazard a platitude, showing is always a way of concealing, too.

We learn immediately in Adventures that the narrator sees himself as an anomaly; he

envied the people around me who are hermetically sealed inside their secrets and isolated from the tyranny of objects. . . . I had nothing to separate me from the world: everything around me invaded from head to toe; my skin might as well have been a sieve. . . . [T]he world, as is its nature, sank its tentacles into me; I was penetrated by the hydra’s myriad arms. Exasperating as it was, I was forced to admit that I lived in the world I saw around me; there was nothing for it. (10–11)

But this anxiety is coupled to a second one, which “arose as a kind of truce between me and the world (a truce that plunged me even more hopelessly into the uniformity of brute matter),” namely that the objects in the world around him were “inoffensive” in the end. And this fact then gives rise to the recognition of “a universal lack of strength” in those objects, from which the narrator derives the worry “that nothing in the world can come to fruition, that it is impossible to accomplish anything” (11). Immersion in the world of objects yields the same sense of instability as separation from it.

There are a few different issues stepping on each other’s toes here. One is a question of separation between human subjects and the world of objects around them. The narrator can’t manage it. To ‘manage’ it can mean a variety of things. One is to view objects as merely derivative placeholders of experience. We assume the things are ‘out there’, owing to the nature of our experience, but whether they are ‘really’ is a matter of indifference. Another way of ‘managing’ the relation between subject and world is through an even more thoroughgoing attitude of indifference: the “hermetic seal” the narrator refers to. In this version of ‘object management’, we might say we don’t know if there are things out there, we have no need of positing their real existence, and it makes no difference anyway.

But the central ambiguity has to do with the three-term relationship between the subject, the world of objects she finds herself in, and the prospects of, say, doing. Having a plan to do something is one thing. Having a plan to do something and having also the expectation or hope that it can be done is quite another. It’s predicated on a distinct vision of, and conviction about, the nature of objects. For example, having the thought that you’d like to change the direction of the Chicago River is one thing, and stems entirely from the imagination, say. Having the thought that by doing this, this, and this the river will in fact flow the other way is entirely the opposite sort of thing; it’s a judgment about objects. This is just an elaborate version of the same basic thought undergirding the decision, say, to get up and walk across the room.

These two ideas—a certain to-be-qualified solipsism (a belief that only I exist) and the domination of nature (a desire to subvert nature to my ends, coupled with the requisite beliefs about the possibility of efficacy through doing)—are foundational to modernity and, on the surface, deeply, deeply in conflict with each other. If one is true, the other can’t be, and vice versa, and yet both turn out to have been, in one way or another, pummeled into reality after all. Now, in short, Adventures in Immediate Irreality inverts both of them. The narrator is compelled to recognize the existence of objects outside him (contra solipsism), and he has a resident skepticism about the possibility of anything at all happening or coming about in the world (contra the domination of nature).

What is mildly hilarious abourt Adventures is that turning the narrator’s anxieties inside out reveals entirely normal suppositions to be made about how to navigate the world, and yet they appear in that same light as totally bizarre. For example, when the narrator visits a doctor, the doctor prescribes quinine, treating the narrator’s “crises” as fever. But, the narrator notes, “I could not comphrehend how an illness, it, could be cured with quinine taken by a person, me” (13). Contrast the usual pattern of inference here: I take quinine, the illness is cured. A decision of a moral sort (one that can be done better or worse; one that is subject to praise and blame) effects straightforwardly physiological changes. Now, perhaps that is not weird yet. Perhaps it is weirder when we note that moral principles are being inferred from natural dispositions and states. The line separating subject from object is being crossed as if it didn’t exist at all. The ‘modern’ subject’s separation from the world requires a condition that the same subject’s desire to dominate nature (even in their own body) radically denies.

The relation to objects the narrator has stands in interesting relief to his capacity for free association. The doctor is mousy (14); a mouse witnesses the narrator with his friend, with whom he has odd sexual trysts with vaguely problematic contours of consent; the quinine the doctor prescribes is bitter; the narrator infers it must be the doctor’s (the mouse’s) revenge on him. When he learns that the doctor killed himself in an attic, he wonders: “Were there mice in the attic?” (22). In the narrator’s world, ordinary boundaries between thing and thing do not exist in any fixed way. The boundaries are question marks, as it were.

A problem of consent emerges with the narrator as both subject and object: first in his descriptions of sexual trysts with Clara in which she “remained as immobile and indifferent as a piece of wood” (21); and then later when he wakes up to find his penis in his friend Walter’s mouth (28–9; Walter’s explanation—“That’s the way Indians woke their wounded on the battlefield”—serving up a dish of other complexities). Walter is fellating the narrator after having explained, in one of the most surreal episodes of the book, “what all men do with women”—which, it turns out, is to caress them with a feather (27ff.). Passages here ooze obscurity and detachment, as if meaning and sense were leaking right out of everything.

If Walter had not taken the feather from his pocket, I might have been able to endure the atmosphere of complete and utter isolation to the end, but all of a sudden my isolation there in the cellar was deeply painful to me. Only now did I realize how cut off I was from the town and its dusty thoroughfares. It was as if I had cut myself off from myself, alone as I was deep down under the ordinary summer day. The shiny black feather Walter had shown me meant that nothing more existed in the world as I knew it: everything had fallen into a swoon, while the feather gave off an anomalous brilliance in the middle of this odd room with its moist grass and cold-mouthed darkness avidly drinking up what little light there was. (28)

And then no Walter. “There were times when I thought I had made up the whole feather incident and Walter had never existed” (29).

Isolation from the world of objects might be thought of as one of the constituents motivating the problem of other minds, but Adventures’ inverse condition—the subject fully immersed in the world—seems not to have resolved the problem. When the narrator goes to the cinema, he becomes “so involved” in the film that he thinks he’s in them (36). And yet when there’s a fire in the cinema, the audience members react, to him, like automata, as if they had been storing fearful cries inside them, as it were, in “batteries” (37). To the narrator, immersion in the world of objects doesn’t reveal their inner truths or natures; it reveals instead their modes of concealment. It’s fitting that the closest approximation he finds of authenticity is at a wax museum: “Wax figures were the only authentic thing on earth: they alone flaunted the way they falsified life, and their strange, artificial immobility made them part of the true spirit of the world” (40).

The continuity with the world of objects that the narrator experiences, pointedly, is of course just an intensification of a reality about subjecthood with which each of us lives more or less tenuously: the fact of embodiment. The tenuousness of this relation perhaps traces legacies of Platonism or something of that order; but I doubt it. It is more likely joined to an anxiety about becoming—in that other sense of the expression—subject to universal debility in the face of the modern bureaucratic gaze. Ancient and modern forces seem to clash deliberately in a scene that begins with the desparate, pastoral act of a man taking the care to wash his brother’s—the narrator’s grandfather’s—corpse. After he says he’s done, one of the professionals from the cemetery removes a giant piece of poop from the corpse, and berates the brother with attempting the work of a professional (60). The brother runs away, weeping. The modern shame of embodiment is less about Plato and Paul; more about avoiding humiliation in the dentist’s chair or the doctor’s office; more about being treated as a mere segment in the plenum of stuff.

But the narrator seems to find redemption—or something like it—in this in chapter 11, all of which is perhaps the emotional core of Adventures. In it, in short, the narrator crawls around in mud and cow manure. He comes upon a muddy field near a cattle market, and—“Why not? Why not” (87)—sinks his limbs in the mud (and poop) and rubs it all over his face and body. Rain comes and so on. But there’s nothing here of mud as a metaphor for the just desserts of immorality; nothing here of Dostoevsky’s underground man’s mud as metaphor for the conditions of unjust maltreatment from which he fantasizes emerging riding a white horse etc.; nothing here either of the connotations of filth as the condition and mark of poverty. Mud in Adventures has no inside or outside, no meaning or connotation. In particular, perhaps what distinguishes Blecher’s mud from his predecessors’ is that it is not a medium of or symbolic of passage. There is no Lieutenant Dan after the storm. In the end, when the narrator realizes, covered in filth, he can’t have a drink at a tavern (also because has no money on him), he is “overcome by an inexpressible bitterness, the kind that comes when one sees one can do absolutely nothing, achieve absolutely nothing” (90). In the following chapter he vaguely attempts—attempts is too strong a characterization; falls into an attempt—to commit suicide. In mud there is only despair—not the despair of not doing or the despair of impossibility, but the despair that there is anything.

As much as it is a departure from certain traditional associations, this non-instrumentality and persistence of filth remains a frequent motif of Blecher’s successors, and in that sense the episode of chapter 11 seems a critical site of orientation.

The fact that despair arises in connection with this confrontation with nature—with filth—is significant, too, if we consider in particular that there is no insight precipitating the narrator’s despair; no internal mediation between the event and the affection. The despair is immediate. There is no socially inflected impasse, generative of the usual resentment associated with the fact that social conditions are products of choice; there is also none of the intellectualization of the natural as a site radically outside the boundaries of the rational, as say in Nausea. There is no misalignment between inside and outside; just contact between the narrator’s body and the body of the world.

The inarticulateness of filth—its lack of constitutive parts—makes filth a sort of privileged site where the world becomes reachable. It is not like surveying a giant animal or countryside, where partiality and incompleteness persist. Once you touch mud, you have touched all of it. The narrator’s despair, if anything, arises from the more or less inarticulate recognition that more of life isn’t wrestling mud—and, at the same time, that it is.

Something deep inside me was struggling to find confirmation—as distant as it might be—superior to mud or even merely different. In vain. My identity had long been established and was now, as usual, simply reaffirming itself: there was nothing in the world other than mud. What I perceived as pain was nothing but a weak bubbling of mud, its protoplasmic prolongation in words and thought. (111)

Text

Adventures in Immediate Irreality was translated by Michael Henry Heim for New Directions in 2015.