On Marías and The Suspicion of Language

Anything is possible. (333)

I believe I've still never mistaken fiction for reality, though have  mixed them together more than once, as everyone does, not only novelists or writers but everyone who has recounted anything since the time we know began, and no one in that known time has done anything  tell and tell, or prepare and ponder a tale, or plot one. Anyone can relate an anecdote about something that happened, and the simple fact of saying it already distorts and twists it, language can't reproduce events and shouldn't attempt to, and that, I imagine, is why during some trials--the trials in movies, anyway, the  ones I know best--the implicated parties are asked to perform a material or physical reconstruction of what happened, repeating the gestures, the movements, the envenomed steps they took...The idea of testimony is also futile...(7-8)

Yet, in these pages I'm going to place myself on the side of those who have sometimes claimed to be telling what really happened or pretended to succeed in doing  so...Unlike those of truly fictional novels, the elements of the story I am now embarking  upon are entirely capricious, determined by chance, merely episodic and cumulative...because in the end no author is guiding them, though I am relating them; they correspond to no blueprint, they are steered by no compass, most of them are external in origin and devoid of intention and therefore have no reason to make any kind of sense or to constitute an argument or plot or answer to some hidden harmony, and no lesson should be extracted from them (nor should any thing be sought from real novels; above all, the novels themselves should not want it)--not even a story with its beginning and suspense and final silence." (9)

The opening pages of Javier Marías (1988) Dark Back of Time (translated in 2001 by Esther Allen) present, in rough outline, two philosophical views on the relationship between language and world and, thereby, truth. On the first perspective, language is incapable of representing the truth (especially events). While these days such thoughts are often associated with post-modernism, the idea was once a common, suspicious perspective on language (recall). It is important to recognize that a suspicion-of-language view is (a) neither self-refuting (as a lot of my lazy friends often insist) (b) nor does it entail skepticism about truth as such (b') because other things -- entities, humans, objects etc. -- are -- as Marías  narrator recognizes at once -- capable of simulating truth to some degree. (In fact, (b') is not the only alternative; some once-famous metaphysicians (b'') locate truth in non-linguistic perfect ideas or perfect forms, etc.) As we learn from Part 3 of Gulliver's Travels, this (b' or, even, b'') is not a very fertile or efficient conception of truth if we wish to do science, or engineer to wage war. But despite much table-pounding, only if we thoughtlessly defer to the authority of science or war, is the suspicion-of-language view refuted.

As an aside, in the novel the human duty not to thoughtlessly defer to the authority of war is presented in a touching retelling of the Christmas truce as an extended meditation on Wilfrid Ewart's The Way of Revelation.

the war lost its control and was disobeyed, and he [Ewart] was there and saw it. To say that it was vanquished would be false and pretentious, but it was sidestepped and even mocked for a moment, and the mockery was maintained even after the hard reminder--or revenge--of all-out warfare (whose primary aim is to exclude and negate whatever it does not enclose or taint)...(156)

Of course, all-out-war is not the only social institution that by enclosing aims to exclude and negate (that vague something that is not enclosed): the institution of property and the practice of (ac)counting function in analogous ways.

Anyway, in addition to appeal to lived experience in which the distorting effects of language are so routine that we better not pay attention to these (if we want to be taken seriously, and other practical consequences), we may also note (with a nod to Deleuze) that it is awkward to insist (often repetitively) that a repetition (as a representing in language inevitably is) somehow is identical to what is represented in the right sort of way, namely, both the representation and that what is represented are stable and undistorted, etc. Even so, it is always a bit tacky, if not an instance of bad faith, to encounter a text that announces the suspicion-of-language-view. For, most texts (including the truly fictional novels) tacitly rely on the norms and conventions that demand from us a foregoing or bracketing of any such superstition.

As it happens, at the start of his book, in the second quoted passage, Marías purports to renounce the suspicion-of-language view (at least temporarily). He intends or pretends [the book has all the trappings of a novel despite the fact that author and narrator share name and biographical facts]* to tell a story that relates events; let's call this the 'truth-apt-view.' If his "story" is still a novel, then a true novel. In fact, not only can language represent truth, it is even capable of doing so if the world is un-ordered. That is to say, Marías tells his knowing reader (who may be suspicious of remnants of onto-theology) at once that he is not positing a hidden order. Given that Marías has no privileged access to the nature of metaphysical reality (he does not flirt with revelation nor seems to adhere to a particular metaphysical school), he basically stipulates that (i) language can represent the truth and (ii) and that reality is -- despite the success of physics in some sense -- basically random "elements." The key to (ii), which is a kind of metaphysical nihilism, is, I think, to see in it not a claim about science, but rather the denial of meaning or purpose to reality (which is sometimes taken as a consequence of certain features of modern science). Having said that Marías does sometimes flirts with the possibility that (ii') experience is full of incompatible realities not because of the inherent falsity of one's imagination, but rather because of social projections on one's experience. ("Perhaps in that time, which has so often invaded my own time, I mean, the time assigned to me by other people's standards, fiction is compounded with reality, or with realities that are not only improbable and implausible but incompatible." (302))

For most of the story that he tells, Marías adheres to the truth-apt-picture. But at various points he limits it severely. I offer two examples: first he writes critically about Ewart's novel, Way of Revelation, "The characters are flat, none too credible and even less clever, as often happens when figures are taken too directly from reality, without sleeping in the imagination." (161) The problem noted here is that truth-apt-language is often self-defeating (because not credible, boring, etc). Of course, what is or isn't credible, boring (etc.) can be extremely context-sensitive. Anybody that reflects on the reality and complexity of, say, war-reporting starts to discern the pitfalls this limitation generates. Second, near the end of the (gripping) narrative, he reveals that his rejection of the suspicion-of-language view is not entire anyway:  

facts in themselves are nothing, language cannot reproduce them just as any number of repetitions, with their sharp edges, cannot reproduce the time that is past or gone, or revive the dead who have already gone past us and been lost in that time. (330)

So, even if one is not suspicious of language, there are inherent limitations to language's capacity to represent truthfully. It is just as necessary that we all die as (with apologies to McTaggart) that moments pass; our (once) lived experiences cannot be represented in such a way such that the dead get revived or those moments restored. From many vantage-points this entails a Pyrrhic victory to the truth-apt-view. 

Of course, one should not extract any "lesson," philosophical or moral, from a "real novel" according to the view officially adhered to by the novel (recall (9)). But, Marías's story is not a "real" novel in the traditional sense. (I can safely say that without offering an alternative categorization--I am not a librarian or bookseller!) In fact, 

Everything is so random and absurd, it's incomprehensible that we can grant any transcendence whatsoever to our birth or our existence or our death, determined by chance combinations as fickle as and unpredictable as the voice of time when it has not yet gone by or been lost, when it it is not yet ambiguous, when it is not yet even time, that voice we all know and hear murmuring as we move forward, or that is what we believe, because really it is the voice that moves forward; how can any importance be conceded to our fragile and insignificant passage which could so easily not have occurred because of a lie or some false testimony...So we spend our lives pretending to be unique and chosen when in fact we're interchangeable, each the random outcome of a spin of the wheel of fortune at a dank, decrepit carnival. The pretence is necessary, but what's bad about it is that our actions or misfortunes or good luck make most of us forget, in the end, that that was all we are doing, just pretending." (314-315; [that "voice of time"...is always fictitious" (301)]).

The key thought here is not metaphysical nihilism (recall ii above) that is fleshed out and diagnosed. Rather, it's the insistence that we live our lives pretending to be unique (this or that, with particular coordinates, a birth-date, a location, a baptized name, etc.) and special in some non-trivial ways. The thought is not just that if we take possibility at all seriously, then we have to accept that our non-existence is also genuinely possible, but really that we are displace-able, even disposable for other cogs-in-a-larger-wheel (of fortune). Rather than accepting the reality/fiction distinction as commonly portrayed (and then try to analyze how 'fiction' is supposed to have any  grip on us at all), this novelist shows and then tells us that in practice, most of us live telling ourselves stories (that fully license the suspicious-of-language-view), necessarily so; these stories are not bracketed or inserted in covers stamped 'fiction' or 'myth,' but endlessly recycled in a desperate attempt to keep the thought of "nothingness" (284) at bay.**

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Some random-google-fact checking suggests that this book includes a lot of verifiable material. I did note one oddity: on p. 329 the "Internet" is used in the modern sense. But given that the book was published first in 1988, this suggests to me a later addition (perhaps due to the translation.)

**Marías's story is not a defense of moral nihilism; if anything it is animated by (an ironic, but still real) moral concern. For example, he writes that "How dangerous credible voiced are, authoritative voices, voices that never lie, as if waiting for the day when time has come and it is really worth the trouble, and then effortlessly they persuade us of the most far-fetched or poisonous things. It may be that my own voice is becoming one of these, with age and some of what I've written, though most of it is fictional. But still I don't lie." (37)

Comments

[Steven Vanden Broecke]

Eric,

Wonderful post. One of the people who alerted me most to the meaningfulness of suspicion-of-language while clinging to language as one's lieu de rendez-vous with truth might be, perhaps unsurprisingly, Gershom Scholem on kabbalah.

Warm regards,
Steven

[M. Suárez]

Very good indeed. I recently reread A Heart so White and was again impressed by Marías' ability to enact past celebrated fiction (MacBeth) within what looks like contemporary fact but turns out to be elaborate fiction. He really makes you see the parable in every ordinary social interaction. It's masterly: only Borges, I think, had comparable ability to enact fiction within fiction and relate it to ordinary experience.