The Ink of Melancholy by Bleikasten André;

Author:Bleikasten, André;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

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THE REAL AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS

Wir wissen sehr früh, denke ich, dass wir mit unserm Gehirn nicht denken und mit unserer Sprache nicht sprechen können, denken aber doch immer mit unserem Gehirn und reden mit unserer Sprache, das Leben lang.

Thomas Bernhard

Words for things

Through another tour de force, As I Lay Dying manages to tell of people’s lives while saying nothing about them. One after another the characters appear out of no definable place or time and speak as if on an empty stage, telling what they have to tell; then they vanish as suddenly and as inexplicably as they arrived. They all tell fragments of their own or others’ stories, voice wonder at their life or outrage at their miseries; but somehow their speeches do not add up, do not fall into place, do not quite make sense. Even if they end up telling a complete story, their words seem to arise from and fade into a strange silence, and once we have read the book it is almost as if we had been watching a mystifying pantomime.

As to the novelist himself, he no doubt pulls the strings of his marionettes, controlling their every gesture and lending them his words. But for once he seems to have left himself out of the telling, as if to remind us that his own voice can exist only as writing, as text, that is, as nonvoice, apart from and perhaps above the “dead sound” of everyday language, in the inked silence of the printed word. Yet As I Lay Dying also reminds us that the writer’s worded silence may somehow accommodate the stubborn silence of reality itself. For if reality as such, the ultimate reality lurking behind all our symbol systems, is by definition beyond meaningful articulation, if it has absolutely nothing to say, the truest language would be one which allowed the world to come noiselessly in on its own. As I Lay Dying is a rare sample of such language: a text of fiction doubling the opacity of the real with its own enigma.

Yet in its very enigma it also interrogates the relationship—or lack of relationship—between world and language. What link is there between reality as such and our representations and interpretations of it? And how do our feelings and actions relate to what we think and say? These questions are explicitly posed by Addie Bundren, the novel’s focal figure, and we know her disillusioned answer:

I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other. (160)

Verticality and horizontality, air and earth, lightness and weight, all the contrasts point here to an irreducible chasm between word and world, saying and “doing.” Addie protests against the unbearable lightness of language. Words, for her, are lifeless abstractions, forms devoid of substance; like children’s balloons, they rise and vanish into thin air.

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