Thursday, August 8, 2013

despair is to lack infinitude



He isn't going to find any perfect words and he'll keep the ones he has, relentlessly he goes on, and there are those well-known phrases from the end of The Unnamable: "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on," which may describe or hint at the despair of discovering that you can't stop, you can't get to a void: you sense or imagine the void beyond yourself, which you might reach if you stopped talking or engaging in this struggle to reach some sort of void of nonexistence or stoppage that can't happen though it can be imagined, but as long as the character is speaking then they are only imagining it, only when they stop forever have they reached the point of not being able to go on, which means that they won't be able to assert their state: the person who has struggled successfully towards the point of not being able to go on, is silent, is no longer the narrator: does not exist.

Silence is the material of which the universe is made, states Moran at some point though he cannot reach it himself, being compelled to write and not stop speaking like this through the pen. A sick joke. The fact that all these narrators' voices have to stop eventually in their forward motion (stories not infinite) is a contradictory situation built into the books, with their people who insist they can't stop, and the idea of voices entering and exiting their existence is on the author's mind because he builds the story like a pretzel or a fog: Moran is aimed at Molloy and Molloy at Moran, they don't go forward and then stop in the imagination, they go into one another, they commit their similar murders so that each murder is a reference to the other. The white space takes over from their voices on the page but if the reader contemplates the memory of them then their actions will go on relaying back and forth within a closed loop.

So nonsegue but also segue, an untouching segue, a movement at one another, not an utter merging, but an intermisting of mutual atoms. I could say that several different ways.

Myself thinking now of Kierkegard writing for one heading, "Infinitude's despair is to lack finitude," and for the next heading, "Finitude's despair is to lack infinitude" (The Sickness Unto Death, translated by Alastair Hannay).

Maybe it is better to be able to identify your despair, Kierkegard suggests. Maybe it is better to be able to look at it.


2 comments:

  1. A very nice post.
    Cheers, K

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    Replies
    1. Thank you kindly. I am grateful to you, for suggesting these.

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