Artists of refusal

 18) Joseph Joubert was born in Montignac in 1754 and died seventy years later. He never wrote a book. He only prepared himself to write one, single-mindedly searching for the right conditions. Then he forgot this purpose as well. 

 In his search for the right conditions to write a book, Joubert discovered a delightful place where he could digress and end up not writing a book at all. He almost put down roots during his search. And the point is, as Blanchot says, what he was searching for, the source of all writing, that space where he could write, that light which ought to be circumscribed in space, demanded of him and confirmed in him dispositions which made him unsuitable for any ordinary literary work or distracted him from the same. 

 In this respect Joubert was one of the first totally modern writers, preferring the centre to the sphere, sacrificing results in order to discover their conditions, and not writing in order to add one book to another, but to seize control of the point from which all books seemed to him to originate, which, once attained, would exempt him from writing them. 

 However, it is still curious that Joubert should not have written a book, since he was, from very early on, only attracted by and interested in what was being written. From a very young age he had been drawn to the world of books that were going to be written. In his youth he was very close to Diderot, afterwards to Restif de la Bretonne, both of whom produced abundant works. In his later years almost all his friends were famous writers with whom he lived immersed in the world of letters and who, knowing his immense literary talent, encouraged him to break his silence. 

 The story goes that Chateaubriand, who exerted great influence over Joubert, came up to him one day and remarked, “Ask that prolific writer lurking inside you to stop being so damn prejudiced, will you?” 

 By that time Joubert had already digressed in his search for the source of all books and was already clear that, were he to locate that source, he would be exempted from writing a book. 

 “I can’t yet,” he replied to Chateaubriand, “I still haven’t found the source that is the object of my search. But if I do find it, I shall have even more reason not to write that book you would have me write.” 

 While he searched and amused himself in his digressions, he kept a secret diary of a purely personal nature, which he had no intention of ever publishing. But his friends behaved badly towards him and, on his death, took the liberty in dubious taste of publishing this diary. 

 It has been said that Joubert did not write his long-awaited book because he thought the diary was enough. Such a claim seems to me preposterous. I do not believe that Joubert was taken in, seeing in his diary a substitute for literary abundance. The pages of his diary served simply to express the numerous ups and downs he went through in his heroic quest for the source of all writing. 

 There are priceless moments in his diary as when, at the age of forty-five, he writes, “But what is my art exactly? What goal does it aspire to? What do I hope to achieve by practising it? Is it to write and to know that others are reading me? Sole ambition of so many! Is that what I want? This is what I must investigate stealthily and at length until I uncover the answer.” 

 In his stealthy and prolonged search, he always acted with admirable lucidity and never lost sight of the fact that, even as an author without a book and a writer without texts, he still moved in the field of art: “Here I am, detached from civil things, in the pure region of art.” 

 More than once he saw himself as taken up with a task more fundamental to art, and of greater essential interest, than a work: “One must resemble art without resembling a single work.” 

 What was this essential task? Joubert would not have liked someone saying they knew what this essential task consisted of. In reality Joubert understood that he was looking for what he did not know, hence the difficulty of his search and the joy of his discoveries as a digressive thinker. Joubert wrote in his diary. “But how to look in the right place when one does not even know what one is looking for? This happens whenever one composes and creates. Fortunately, by digressing, one does not simply make a discovery, one has happy encounters.” 

 Joubert knew the happiness of the art of digression, of which he was possibly the founder. 

 When Joubert says he is uncertain about the essence of his strange task as a digressive, he reminds me of what happened to György Lukács once when, surrounded by his followers, the Hungarian philosopher was being showered with praise regarding his work. Overwhelmed, Lukács made the remark, “Yes, yes, but now I see that I have not understood the crux of the matter.” “And what is that?” they asked him in surprise. To which he responded, “The trouble is I don’t know.” 

 Joubert — who wondered how to look in the right place when one does not even know what one is looking for — reflects in his diary on the difficulties he had finding a refuge or adequate space for his ideas: “My ideas! I can’t seem to manage to build a house where they can live.” 

 Such an adequate space he may have imagined as a cathedral which would fill the entire firmament. An impossible book. Joubert foreshadows Mallarmé’s ideals: “It would be tempting,” writes Blanchot, “and at the same time glorious for Joubert to see in him an untranscribed first edition of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, of which Valéry said, ‘It finally raised a page to the potential of the starry sky. ’” 

 Joubert’s dreams and the work produced a century later share a common ambition: the desire (in both Joubert and Mallarmé) to replace ordinary reading, where it is necessary to go from one part to another, with the spectacle of a simultaneous word, in which everything would be said at once without confusion, in a glow that is — to quote Joubert — “total, peaceable, intimate and uniform at last”. 

 So it was that Joseph Joubert spent his life searching for a book he never wrote, though, when all is considered, he wrote it without realising, thinking of writing it.

**

27) I am going to make a third exception for suicides, and I’m going to make it for Chamfort. In a literary magazine, an article by Javier Cercas has set me on the track of a fierce supporter of the No: Monsieur Chamfort, who said that almost all men are slaves because they do not dare to articulate the word no. 

 As a man of letters, Chamfort was lucky from the start, he tasted success without making the slightest effort. The same was true of success in life. Women loved him, and his early works, mediocre though they were, ushered him into the salons, even arousing the royal fervour (Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette would cry uncontrollably at the end of performances of his works). It was not long before he entered the French Academy, and he enjoyed extraordinary social prestige at an early stage. However, Chamfort felt profound contempt for the world that surrounded him and he very quickly opposed his own personal advantages, with the natural consequences. He was a moralist, though not of the kind we have to put up with nowadays; Chamfort was not a hypocrite, he did not say that the world was horrendous only to save himself, he despised himself whenever he looked in the mirror: “Man is a stupid animal, judging by me.” 

 His moralism was not fake, he did not use his moralism to gain the prestige of an upright man. “Our hero,” Camus wrote about Chamfort, “will go even further, because the renunciation of his own advantages means nothing and the destruction of his body is unimportant (the way he committed suicide was savage), compared to the disintegration of his own spirit. This is, ultimately, what determines Chamfort’s greatness and the strange beauty of the novel he did not write, but the necessary elements of which he left us so that we could imagine it.” 

 He did not write that novel — he left Maxims and Thoughts, Characters and Anecdotes, but never novels — and his ideals, his radical No to the society of his time, drove him to a kind of desperate sainthood. “His extreme, cruel attitude,” says Camus, “led him to that final denial which is silence.” 

 In one of his Maxims we read the following: “M., whom they wanted to discuss various public and private matters, coldly replied, ‘Every day I add to the list of things I don’t talk about; the greatest philosopher would be the one with the longest list.’” 

 This will lead Chamfort to negate works of art and the pure force of language they contain, which he tried to communicate over such a long period. The denial of art led him to even more extreme denials, including that “final denial” referred to by Camus, who, commenting on why Chamfort did not write a novel and fell into an extended silence, has this to say: “Art is the opposite of silence, constituting one of the signs of that complicity which joins us to men in our common struggle. For someone who has lost that complicity and has sided completely with rejection, neither language nor art conserve their expression. This is, no doubt, the reason why that novel of a denial was never written: precisely because it was the novel of a denial. The point is that this art contains the very principles that ought to lead it to negate itself.” 

 As we can see, Camus — a yes-artist if there ever was one in his firm belief that art is the opposite of silence — would have been somewhat paralysed had he known the work, for example, of Beckett and other consummate, recent disciples of Bartleby. 

 Chamfort took his no so far that, the day he thought that the French Revolution, which initially he had been enthusiastic about, had condemned him, he shot himself, breaking his nose and disgorging his right eye in the process. Still not dead, he returned to the attack, slitting his throat with a knife and cutting into his flesh. Bathed in blood, he stuck the knife into his chest and, after slashing his wrists and the backs of his knees, he collapsed in a vast pool of blood. 

 But, as has already been said, this was nothing compared to the disintegration of his spirit. 

 “Why don’t you publish?” he had asked himself a few months earlier in a short text, “Products of the Perfected Civilisation”. 

From among his numerous answers, I have selected the following: 

 Because it seems to me that the public have the ultimate in bad taste and a desire for denigration. 

 Because we are encouraged to work for the same absurd reasons as when we look out of the window and hope to see monkeys and bear-tamers in the streets. 

 Because I am afraid to die without having lived. 

 Because the more my literary status declines, the happier I feel. 

 Because I do not want to imitate lettered people, who are like donkeys kicking and fighting in front of an empty manger. 

 Because the public are only interested in successes they do not appreciate.

**

48) Wakefield and Bartleby are two reclusive characters who are intimately linked. At the same time the first is linked, also intimately, with Walser, and the second with Kafka. 

 Wakefield — that man invented by Hawthorne, that husband who suddenly and without reason abandons his wife and home and for twenty years (in the next street, unbeknown to all, since they think he is dead) leads a solitary existence, stripped of meaning — is a clear forerunner of many of Walser’s characters, all those splendid walking nobodies who wish to disappear, simply disappear, to hide in an anonymous unreality. 

 As for Bartleby, he is a clear forerunner of Kafka’s characters — “Bartleby,” Borges has written, “defines a genre which in around 1919 Kafka would reinvent and develop: the genre of fantasies of conduct and feeling” — and also a predecessor of Kafka himself, that reclusive writer who saw that his workplace signified life, namely his own death; that recluse “in the middle of a deserted office”, that man who walked through all of Prague, resembling a bat, in his overcoat and black bowler hat. 

 To talk — both Wakefield and Bartleby seem to suggest — is to make a pact with the nonsense of existing. Both display a profound denial of the world. They are like that Kafkan Odradek of no fixed abode who lives on the staircase of a paterfamilias or in any other hole. 

 Not everyone knows, or wishes to accept, that Herman Melville, the creator of Bartleby, had dark moments more often than is desirable. Let us see what Julian Hawthorne, the son of Wakefield’s creator, says about him: “There was vivid genius in this man, and he was the strangest being that ever came into our circle. Through all his wild and reckless adventures, of which a small part only got into his fascinating books, he had been unable to rid himself of a Puritan conscience [...]. He was restless and disposed to dark hours, and there is reason to suspect that there was in him a vein of insanity.” 

 Hawthorne and Melville, unwitting founders of the dark hours of the art of the No, knew each other, they were friends, and expressed mutual admiration. Hawthorne was also a Puritan, even in his violent reaction to certain aspects of Puritanism. He was also restless. He was never one to go to church, but we know that during his years as a recluse he would approach his window and watch those making their way to church, and his look is said to have contained the brief history of the Dark Side in the art of the No. His vision was clouded by the terrible Calvinist doctrine of predestination. This is the side to Hawthorne that so fascinated Melville, who to praise him spoke of the great power of blackness, that nocturnal side that we find in Melville as well. 

 Melville was convinced that there was some secret in Hawthorne’s life that had never been revealed, and which accounted for the gloomy passages in his books, and it is strange that he should think this if we bear in mind that such imaginings were equally typical of him, whose conduct was more than gloomy, particularly once he understood that, after his first, celebrated great literary successes — he was mistaken for a journalist, for a maritime reporter — he could only hope for unbroken failure as a writer. 

 It is odd, but so much talk of Bartleby’s syndrome and I still hadn’t mentioned in these footnotes that Melville had the syndrome before his character existed, which might lead us to think he may have created Bartleby in order to describe his own syndrome. 

 It is also odd to observe how, so many pages into this diary — which, by the way, is cutting me off from the outside world and turning me into a ghost: the days I go for a walk locally, I find myself imitating Wakefield, as though I too had a wife and she thought I was dead and I carried on living in the next street, writing this book of footnotes and spying on her from time to time, spying on her, for example, when she goes shopping — I had hardly said anything till now about literary failure as a direct cause of the appearance of the Evil One, the illness, the syndrome, the refusal to continue writing. However, the case of failures, all things considered, is not especially interesting, it’s too obvious, there is no merit in being a writer of the No because you have failed. Failure throws too much light and not enough shade of mystery on the cases of those who give up writing for such a vulgar reason. 

 If suicide is a decision of such excessively radical complexity that in the end it becomes an incredibly simple one, to leave off writing because one has failed strikes me as even more overwhelmingly simple. However, one case of failure I’m prepared to make an exception for is that of Melville. He has the right to whatever he wants (given that he invented the simple, but at the same time extremely complex, subtle acceptance of Bartleby, a character who never opted for the thick, straight line of death by his own hand, and certainly not for tears and desertion in the face of failure; no, Bartleby, when confronted by failure, conceded magnificently, he did not commit suicide or become interminably bitter, he simply ate ginger-nuts, which was all that would allow him to carry on “preferring not to”), I forgive Melville everything. 

 The relative (relative because he came up with another failure, Bartleby’s, and so eased his conscience) disaster of Melville’s literary career can be summed up in the following way: after his first adventure stories, which met with great success because he was mistaken for a mere chronicler of maritime life, the publication of Mardi completely disconcerted his public, since it was, and still is, a fairly unreadable novel, although its plot prefigures future works by Kafka: it is about an endless pursuit over an endless sea. Moby Dick, in 1851, alarmed virtually everyone who bothered to read it. Pierre or the Ambiguities displeased the critics hugely and The Piazza Tales (where the story “Bartleby” finally ended up, having been published anonymously three years earlier in a magazine) went unnoticed. 

 It was in 1853 that Melville, who was only thirty-four, reached the conclusion that he had failed. While he had been considered a chronicler of maritime life, everything had been fine, but when he began to produce masterpieces, the public and critics condemned him to failure with the absolute unanimity of mistaken occasions. 

 In 1853, in view of his failure, he wrote “Bartleby the Scrivener”, a story containing the antidote to his depression and the seed of his future movements, which, three years later, would give rise to The Confidence-Man, the story of a very special trickster (who in time would come to be associated with Duchamp) and a stunning catalogue of rough, sombre images, which appeared in April 1857 and would be the last prose work he published. 

 Melville died in 1891, forgotten. During his final thirty-four years he wrote a long poem, travel memoirs and, shortly before his death, the novel Billy Budd, another masterpiece — the pre-Kafkan story of a trial: the story of a sailor unfairly sentenced to death, sentenced as if he had to expiate the sin of having been young, brilliant and innocent — a masterpiece that would not be published until thirty-three years after his death. 

 Everything he wrote in the last thirty-four years of his life was done á la Bartleby, at a slow pace, as if he preferred not to, and in a clear act of rejecting the world that had rejected him. When I think of this act of rejection of his, I remember something Maurice Blanchot said about all those who knew, at the right time, how to reject the pleasant appearance of a flat, almost always empty, communication, which, it may be said, is so in vogue among today’s literati: “The act of rejecting is difficult and rare, though identical in each of us from the moment we have grasped it. Why difficult? Because you have to reject not only the worst, but also a reasonable appearance, an outcome that some would call happy.” 

 When Melville stopped searching for a happy outcome and stopped thinking about publishing, when he decided to behave in the manner of those beings who “prefer not to”, he spent years searching for a job, any job, to keep his family afloat. When eventually he found one — which wasn’t until 1866 — his destiny coincided with none other than that of Bartleby, his strange creature. 

Parallel lives. During the final years of his life, Melville, like Bartleby, “the last column of some ruined temple”, worked as a clerk in an untidy office in New York City. 

 Impossible not to relate the office of Bartleby’s inventor to that of Kafka and what Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer, saying that literature was excluding him from life, namely from the office. If these dramatic words have always made me laugh — more so today, when I’m in a good mood and I remember Montaigne, who remarked that our peculiar condition is that we are made as much to be laughed at as to laugh — other words addressed by Kafka to Felice Bauer, but less famous than the first, make me laugh even more. I often used to bring them to mind when I was in my office to avoid the onset of anguish: “Darling, I absolutely have to think of you wherever I am, which is why I’m writing to you at the desk of my boss, whom I’m representing at this present time.” 

 49) In his biography of Joyce, Richard Ellmann describes the following scene, which took place when Joyce was fifty and Beckett twenty-six, and which could have come straight from the theatre of the No: 

 “Beckett was addicted to silences, and so was Joyce; they engaged in conversations which consisted often of silences directed towards each other, both suffused with sadness, Beckett mostly for the world, Joyce mostly for himself. Joyce sat in his habitual posture, legs crossed, toe of the upper leg under the instep of the lower; Beckett, also tall and slender, fell into the same gesture. Joyce suddenly asked some such question as, ‘How could the idealist Hume write a history?’ Beckett replied, ‘A history of representation.’”

**

Much more than Gracq and Salinger and Pynchon, the man who called himself B. Traven was the genuine expression of what we know as “a secretive writer”. 

 Much more than Gracq, Salinger and Pynchon put together. Because B. Traven’s case is replete with exceptional nuances. To start with, we do not know where he was born, nor did he ever want to shed light on the matter. To some, the man who said he was called B. Traven was a North American novelist born in Chicago. To others, he was Otto Feige, a German writer who apparently had problems with the law because of his anarchist views. Others claimed he was really Maurice Rathenau, son of the founder of AEG, and there were even those who stated he was Kaiser Wilhelm II’s son. 

 Although he gave his first interview in 1966, the author of novels such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Bridge inthe Jungle insisted on the right to the secret of his private life, and so his identity continues to be a mystery. 

 “Traven’s story is the story of his denial,” Alejandro Gándara has written in his foreword to The Bridge in the Jungle. In effect, it is a story for which we do not have facts and they can’t be had, which is the only fact. Denying all past, he denied all present, meaning all presence. Traven never existed, not even for his contemporaries. He is a very peculiar writer of the No, and there is something very tragic in the force with which he rejected the invention of his identity. 

 “This secretive writer,” Walter Rehmer has said, “reflects in his absent identity all the tragic conscience of modern literature, the conscience of a writing that, once its insufficiency and impossibility have been exposed, turns this exposure into its fundamental question.” 

These words of Walter Rehmer’s — I have just realised — could also reflect my efforts in this book of notes without a text. Of them it could also be said that they bring together all or at least part of the conscience of a writing that, once its impossibility has been exposed, turns this exposure into its fundamental question. 

 In short I think Rehmer’s sentences are to the point, but, if Traven had read them, first of all he would have been amazed, and then he would have burst out laughing. In fact I am on the verge of reacting in the same way. Besides, I hate Rehmer’s essays for their solemnity. 

 To go back to Traven: the first time I heard his name was in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in a bar on the outskirts of the city. This was some years ago, when I made use of my savings to travel abroad in August. I heard Traven’s name in that bar. I had just arrived from Puerto Escondido or Hidden Port, a town that, owing to its unusual name, would have been the perfect place to hear about the most hidden writer of them all. But it wasn’t there, it was in Puerto Vallarta where I heard Traven’s story for the first time. 

 The bar in Puerto Vallarta was a few miles from the house where John Huston — who made a film of The Treasure of theSierra Madre — spent the last years of his life locked away in Las Caletas, an estate facing the sea, with the jungle behind it, a kind of port for the jungle invariably battered by the hurricanes in the gulf. 

 In his book of memoirs, Huston describes how he wrote the script of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and sent a copy to Traven, who responded with twenty pages full of detailed suggestions concerning set construction, lighting and so forth. 

 Huston was anxious to meet the mysterious writer, who at that time was already famous for concealing his real name: “I secured,” writes Huston, “a tentative promise from him to meet with me at the Hotel Bamer in Mexico City, made the trip down and waited. He didn’t show up. One morning almost a week after my arrival I woke shortly after daybreak to discover a man standing at the foot of my bed. He took out a card which read: ‘Hal Croves. Translator, Acapulco and San Antonio’.” 

 Then this man produced a letter from Traven, which Huston read while still in bed. In the letter, Traven said he was ill and had not been able to make the rendezvous, but Hal Croves was his great friend and knew as much about Traven’s work as he himself did, and so was authorised to answer any questions Huston might have. 

 Sure enough, Croves, who said he was Traven’s agent, knew everything about Traven’s work. Croves spent two weeks on the film-set, collaborating actively. He was an odd and cordial man, whose conversation was agreeable (and sometimes became endless, resembling one of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s novels), though at the moment of truth his favourite topics were human pain and horror. When he left the set, Huston and his assistants began to put two and two together and realised that the agent was an impostor, the agent very probably was Traven himself. 

 When the film opened, the mystery of B. Traven’s identity fueled speculation. It was even said that a group of Honduran writers was behind the name. To Huston, Croves was undoubtedly of European origin, German or Austrian; the strange thing was that his novels recounted the experiences of an American in Western Europe, at sea and in Mexico, and were experiences that had clearly been lived. 

 The mystery of Traven’s identity fueled so much speculation that a Mexican magazine sent two reporters to shadow Croves in an attempt to ascertain who Traven’s agent really was. They found him keeping a small store on the edge of the jungle near Acapulco. They watched the store until they spotted Croves leaving to go into town. They then broke down the door and rifled his desk, where they found several manuscripts by Traven and evidence that Croves was using another name: Traven Torsvan. 

 Further investigative reporting revealed that he had a fourth name: Ret Marut, an anarchist writer who had disappeared from Germany in 1922. In 1923 Traven appeared in Mexico, so the dates fitted. Croves died in 1969, some years after marrying his assistant, Rosa Elena Lujan. A month after his death, his widow confirmed that B. Traven had been Ret Marut. 

 An elusive writer if ever there was one, Traven used an unbelievable variety of names, in fiction and in reality, to keep his own secret: Traven Torsvan, Arnolds, Traves Torsvan, Barker, Traven Torsvan Torsvan, Berick Traven, Traven Torsvan Croves, B. T. Torsvan, Ret Marut, Rex Marut, Robert Marut, Traven Robert Marut, Fred Maruth, Fred Mareth, Red Marut, Richard Maurhut, Albert Otto Max Wienecke, Adolf Rudolph Feige Kraus, Martinez, Fred Gaudet, Artum, Lainger, Goetz Ohly, Anton Räderscheidt, Robert Bek-Gran, Hugo Kronthal, Wilhelm Scheider, Heinrich Otto Becker and Otto Torsvan. 

 One of those who tried to write his biography, Jonah Raskin, almost went mad in the process. From the start he counted on the collaboration of Rosa Elena Lujan, but he soon began to understand that the widow was not entirely sure who the hell Traven was either. A stepdaughter of his managed to confuse him utterly when she claimed she remembered seeing her father talking to Mr Hal Croves. 

 Jonah Raskin finally abandoned the idea of a biography and ended up writing the story of his futile search for Traven’s real name, a wild-goose chase. Raskin chose to abandon his research when he realised his mental health was at stake: he had started dressing like Traven, wearing his glasses, calling himself Hal Croves... 

 B. Traven, the most secretive of the secret writers, reminds me of the central character in Chesterton’s The Man Who WasThursday. This novel talks of a huge and dangerous conspiracy consisting in fact of one man who, as Borges says, deceives everybody “with the aid of beards, masks and pseudonyms”. 

 85) Traven hid, I am going to hide, the sun will hide tomorrow, it’s the last total eclipse of the millennium. Already my voice is growing distant as it prepares to say it is going, going to try other places. I have only existed, the voice says, if talk of me can be talk of life. It says it is eclipsing itself, it is going, to end here would be perfect, but it wonders if this is desirable. And it answers itself that it is, that to finish here would be marvellous, perfect, whoever it is, wherever it is.

Bartleby & Co.

Enrique Vila-Matas

Jean Parvulesco Before the Eternal

 

Jean Parvulesco (1928–2010) is the author of an œuvre without peer — mystical, geopolitical, visionary — far removed from the psychological novel or realist tale. For him, writing is not an art but an alchemical operation, a tool for transmuting the real and summoning Being. He writes in black, yet to raise a sun after the darkness. His novels, poems, and articles narrate nothing — they operate. Their aim? To reweave the torn threads between the visible and the invisible, in the mad hope of re-sacralizing the world. An ontological combat literature addressed to the watchers.

Are there writings more estranged from the contemporary mentality and the spirit of its literatures than those of Jean Parvulesco? Was it necessary for the French paradigm — that world of terminal certitudes mortared with materialist truth and progressive sap — to collide with such a stumbling stone, to let the Carpathian irrational seep into it, borne by the Parvulescian word and its unfathomable mystagogy? Phantasmagoria, eschatology, mariology, mysticism, occultism, tantrism, orphism, oneirism — irrepressible Parvulesco unleashing the offensive of the ban and arrière-ban of invisible powers, officially relegated to archaic beliefs, as though books still held the power to call down fire from heaven.

A single metaphysical obsession feeds Jean Parvulesco’s abundant œuvre: to achieve the reunion with being as primordial creative potency, to allow the new dawn of the world’s reintegration into the superior sphere of the sacred. Poems, novels, and articles bear countless witness to this inextinguishable élan, wholly turned toward the primordial philosophical question of ontology and the process of transformation it enfolds.

Written after a foundational period of poetic creation — yielding titles such as La Mystérieuse couronne du tantra (1978) or Traité de la chasse au faucon (1984) — Parvulesco’s novels, from La Servante portugaise (1987) to Bal masqué à Genève (1999), passing through Le Mystère de la villa Atlantis (1990), L’Étoile de l’Empire invisible (1994), or La Conspiration des noces polaires (1998) — to name only the principal — are characterized by their autobiographical dimension fused with a tenuous fictional intrigue, from which emerge long observations and analyses on subjects proper to the author’s vision, sometimes dominating the entire book, as in Le Gué des louves (1995), Le Sentier perdu (2007), or Le Retour en Colchide (2010), which moreover echo the thematic article collections punctuating this bibliography (La Spirale prophétique, 1986; Le Retour des grands temps, 1997; La Confirmation boréale, 2007).

Thus the Parvulescian script — difficult of access, yet recommended for first readings: La Servante portugaise, La Spirale prophétique, and the short-story collection Mission secrète à Bagdad (2003) — pertains neither to a literary model nor to an intellectual discourse producing fiction or theoretical constructs, but to an interior path bound to the dimension of the last things, to a displacement within the plane of Revelation defined as eschatology. This approach uncovers the creative word in its secret trajectory, hoping to attain its ultimate reality — that instant when being becomes reunion.

Hidden Doors Within the World
The path of the metaphysics of being — ontology — that Parvulesco follows rests upon a fundamental mechanism for seizing the real, a movement of the gaze upon existence, “a supreme attention” to the substance of life. At the margin of the quadrilled domains of theology and metaphysics, this praxis of perception opposes abstraction with the images of a dialectic of the concrete, confronting perceived signs with the author’s capacities for appropriation and metamorphosis of reality. Observations and personal memories drawn from notes gathered over the years form the raw material of this penetration into the depths of the tangible, this process of opening consciousness to the domain of meaning.

Presented in terms of a doubling of the gaze, this orientation designates a deepening equivalent to crossing the frontier that separates letter from spirit, appearances from the nature of things. The interior gaze reverses objectification; it opens to presence and unveils the spiral of being. Parvulesco establishes this fundamental link between being and gaze, illustrating it throughout his œuvre, which is nothing other than an attention paid to the condensation of being in existence, history, politics, the arts, and literature — domains from which he extracts data proper to an interior reading and the unveiling of a particular ontological weave. This mechanism of apprehension, whereby he transcends or elevates every object considered through a visionary capture of its profound nature, constitutes the most determining and characteristic element of his thought.

Thus his geopolitical discourse, identifiable in numerous articles and often mingled with the romanesque and semi-fictional adventures of his personae. Whether his works on great history with geopolitical aim draw upon observation of civilizational and continental stakes — inspired in part by the German Haushofer or the American Mackinder, making him a figure of Eurasianism in the second half of the twentieth century — his analysis nonetheless seeks to raise these questions to the transhistorical plane. The political character of the Eurasian empire he constantly invokes is not absent from his views, but at the cutting edge of his discourse always impose themselves the prophetic and paracletic dimensions. The Imperium is for him, in the final resort, the incarnation of being, its spatio-temporal manifestation, its horizontality, at the hour of a new revelation of Life. What he terms, in this perspective, the Great Eurasian Empire of the End is nothing other than an eschatological projection of the Celestial City, whose mystical vocation the Parvulescian heroes — or the narrator himself — prefigure in their advent. His vision of Gaullism, emerging in the mid-1960s and designated by the expression Great Gaullism of the End — by analogy with that qualifying the Eurasian Empire — follows the same ascensional schema, this time evoking the hypostasis discernible in Gaullian geopolitics and its undertones concerning the metahistorical vocation of a France bearer of universal truth. The Gaullist adventure proceeds fundamentally from this vocation — that of the axial kingdom. Caught in the ontological movement of the Parvulescian spiral, until stripped of all link to any temporal episode, Gaullism becomes Great Gaullism, the receptacle of the sole primordial idea of this transhistorical universalism.

An Ontology Put to the Test of Art
Parvulesco thus weaves a mesh of being’s manifestations whereby he re-sacralizes the real. To the major axes of this hierophany — history and geopolitics — are added specific observations concerning artistic works whose integration into the Parvulescian sphere reveals the vital potency and, thereby, the ontological vocation that secretly defines them.

Interested in the works of filmmakers, painters, sculptors, even architects, Parvulesco devoted himself particularly to comprehending the interior lines of Éric Rohmer’s films, to piercing the metaphysical dimension born of the marriage between classicism and contemporary imagery that characterizes the production of this founder of the Nouvelle Vague, of whom he was a fellow traveler. From the sensitivity of the Rohmerian gaze, from its openness to the real, emerges the presence of being. Primordial ontology is brought back to life by the light projected on the screen. These reunions appear in their plenitude in Conte d’hiver (1992), a film whose heroine, Félicie, rejects, through the effect of a sudden revelation, the false amorous choices imposed by existence for the profound and irrational aspirations of her being — as Parvulesco explains in Retour en Colchide (2007), his final book. A consciousness of the same order forms the armature of L’Anglaise et le duc (2001), through which Rohmer shows the interior evolution of the English aristocrat Grace Eliott amid revolutionary events ever more degraded and menacing for herself and her friend the Duke of Orléans. This confrontation with the world’s acceleration opens a pathway between exteriority and interiority through which being emerges at the surface of the visible and intensifies therein. It exemplifies, within Parvulescian thought, the capacities of a remarkable metaphysical tool — a visionary art whose performative character transcends the boundaries of space and time, of the immanent and the transcendent, thereby bringing back to life what has vanished.

More than objects of analysis, the works in which Parvulesco discovers metaphysical potency resonate in him as so many revelations provoking an interior upheaval and each time extending further the field of his experience of being. Those of Constantin Brancusi particularly echo his thought. His commentaries on the sculptor’s quest — centered on the ultimate epuration of forms — translate this junction between their respective visions. By activating his own ontological keys, Parvulesco opens the interior doors of a trajectory corresponding to a process of personal stripping progressively accomplished through work upon matter. This stripping lived by Brancusi attached itself notably to the reunion with an archaic consciousness through the study of primitive or artisanal art objects. In search of the primordial source of creative being, this process establishes the relation between liberation and cosmic surreality, thus contributing to the overturning of the world into a new sacral time.

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Parvulesco’s frequentation of the painter Frédéric Pardo led to a similar degree his ascensional reading of the presence of being and the aspects of its manifestation. Seized by a quasi-ecstatic fascination for Pardo’s paintings, Parvulesco revealed himself before them more than ever as a visionary of being’s action and its special channels. Pardo’s portraits — of Daniel Pommereulle, Dominique Sanda, or Philippe Garrel, among others — constituted, beyond their oneiric and symbolic character, a metaphysical threshold translating, through several figures, the stages of being’s transformation confronted with non-being interfering in existence. Their nature thus revealed, these works transform the real and open the perspective of a new ontological cycle. “Narrative of a philosophical seizure of power,” they bear witness to the new power of being, Parvulesco tells us.

Writing and Transcendental Activism
The author of La Spirale prophétique thus upends the established order, turning facts and existences inside out and transposing them from the status of contingent data to that of projections emanating from a transcendent, Neoplatonically inspired universe. Carried to its furthest extreme, this perspective drives him to a metaphysical escalation that seeks to seize the plenitude of being in its generative dimension — the word that resonates within the interior spaces of the real functioning not merely as a revelatory presence but, beyond the speculative frameworks of categories (Aristotle), degrees (Saint Thomas Aquinas), or multiple states of being (René Guénon), as essentially an eruption: a vital, emergent, and radiant power born of an existential confrontation between the unstable and the permanent, the essential and the contingent. For Parvulesco, being is above all that which comes into presence, evolves, and transfigures itself within the substratum of an unbounded spatio-temporal process — indifferent to scales of magnitude, enacted in the reciprocal interplay of macrocosm and microcosm, in individual existence no less than in the collective and civilizational unfolding of destiny. Each of these stratifications within the density of the world mirrors the great cycle of being’s creative impulse: its ascent, its degradation, and its rebirth through a new advent.

Thus, the Parvulescian praxis — an exercise of consciousness directed toward a metaphysical decipherment of the real — is by no means confined to this precise framework. Through its revelatory function, the approach whose exemplars we have just examined bears witness to a directed operation, centered upon the axis of being’s advent and the mechanism of its reunion within the movement of an ascending spiral. It is precisely this activation of being’s procession that the Parvulescian vision has taken as its driving force: a “mysteriology in motion” of the consciousness of existence, whose scope it extends — through the mirror-effect between private revelations and historical Revelation — from the individual plane, where it is ordinarily situated, to the macrocosmic scale. The quest that leads to the reunion with being thereby reveals itself in the full amplitude of its action, converging upon a vision of active, cyclical ontology: an eschatological operation that renews the induction of the sacred into the terrestrial cosmos.

In the case of such a deposit, we may speak of a form of activism on the part of one who makes it his own — an ontological and transcendental activism set in opposition to any psychological intent, to any referential framework or idealism whatsoever. The dimension of being discloses itself solely in accordance with modalities of surrender to being itself and to its movement within the web of Revelation, through an effort of assimilation to being in keeping with the various degrees of its witness within the world.

For Parvulesco, the entire telos in this domain resides in writing — in a mode of writing that is above all poetic and novelistic, whose mysterious nature and mediatory function between immanence and transcendence he unveils more profoundly than any other. Parvulescian writing must therefore be understood as an activation of the metaphysical mechanism, capable of operating through the insertion of the real into the literary Word — an insertion whereby the distance between subject and phenomena is effaced. Thus translated into script, the real, liberated from matter, becomes nothing but interiority. The novelistic or poetic dimension it thereby acquires ushers it into the realm of ontological transmutation. In this “doubling” of reality, Parvulesco tells us, a circular movement takes shape: the real, elevated into a form of surreality, far from being confined to an abstraction born of the imaginary, instead imposes its newfound ontological weight upon the world of manifestation, to which it communicates its transformative potency.

Writing as Sacred Transmutation
Conscious of the nature of this ontogenetic mechanism, Parvulesco seizes its capacities within the sphere of Revelation. As an instrument of his own transformation, his interior perception can, through writing, become the instrument of macrocosmic mutations of an eschatological order — the weapon in the combat of being against non-being, at the crossroads where mundane realities intersect with divine action. This is why his œuvre in its entirety is so intensely consubstantial with his existence: it constitutes its double, the figuration of his sacrificial transmutation within the celestial horizon of an advent — a kind of nigredo akin to the mystical process of death and resurrection. “I write in black,” he sometimes says. Indeed, for the metaphysical operation latent in writing to be fulfilled, the latter must proceed from the vital experience of the author — from the gift of self in the aspiration to rejoin the primordial source of Life, from an amorous donation that bestows upon this itinerary a nuptial dimension. From this gift, Parvulesco absorbs the signs of being’s presence around him, and — across the multiple disciplines we have surveyed — elaborates his work around the central axis of the dialectic of amorous union: the union which, when truly lived, is able, through the transmutations of the Word, to enter into harmony with creative action and thus to bridge the abyss of the end-times.

Such is the dread secret of Parvulesco — one to which he ceaselessly draws the reader’s attention without ever naming it outright, as though an incandescent nugget lay buried within his books, when in truth it is the œuvre itself: this repetitive unfolding that proclaims the mad hope of renewing, through its very motion, the salvific miracle of Life’s advent and its terrestrial en-sunment. Parvulesco’s thought resides in a system constituted by the primordial articulation between the universe of a nuptial mysticism — “a certain activism of the depths” — and the manifestation of God’s Word in history, an operation whose archetypes are contained within Holy Scripture and activated in the Incarnation. It underscores the bond between the experience of presence and the function of writing in the relation between immanence and transcendence, as though scriptural Revelation were not confined to the canonical texts but dwelt, in varying degrees, within a multitude of writings throughout history — even unto our own day.

The Final Cycle of the Grail

“Such is the true novel,” Parvulesco tells us — a term to be understood in its broadest sense as the writing of being, as the instrument of the interior unfolding of the spirit of the sacred, a mode of writing of which the Arthurian romance is the very archetype: the primordial expression of the spiral of being and of the immemorial eschatological combat whereby the Word inseminates history. The Arthurian romance thus stands at the source of an ontological and civilizational cycle, while at its term there resounds the ultimate testimony of Parvulescian activism and of his polymorphous novels.

Beyond their manifold variety, these works all obey the same visionary axis, the same structural determinism embodied in the image of the passage to the beyond — “the ford of the she-wolves”. Around this nodal point there gathers a half-shadowed universe of ambivalent personae whose profound identity is unveiled through the return to the world of a common supernatural and archetypal alterity, destined for reincarnation as the sign of a new revelation. Semi-real worldly figures, erotic ritual ceremonies and high magic staged in the secrecy of Parisian villas or hôtels particuliers, nocturnal wanderings thronged with supernatural encounters, deaths and resurrections — all serve as the instruments of an ever-renewed orchestration of superior conspiracies on the threshold of a doubled reality. From one book to the next, this thematic unfolds: ferrymen of the otherworld, sometimes modeled on living persons or even on the author himself — Franz des Vallées, Jean Raimondi, or Raoul de Waldeck — or emissaries of shadow with dark designs — Robert Solutré or Walter Neroman — all in interplay with semi-divine feminine figures of multiple identities that merge into one another: Violette, “a super-activated energy nexus”; Laurence de Saint-Romain, risen from a dream; the initiatrix Wanda; or Jeanne Darlington, “the supreme mistress of a strange operative concept.”

Cartography of the Sacred
Whether it traverses fantastic literature, the cosmos of a renowned artist, oneiric memories, the global geostrategic theater, or the destinies of the Roman Church, this perspective is concerned solely with the enactment of interactions between the real and the surreal, between memory and sacred-bearing images whence the elements of fiction are quarried. Hence, no classical, psychological, linear narrative project inhabits the Parvulescian universe, but rather an articulation of data whose conjunction with fictional fragments serves only to elevate this existential substratum to the plane of transcendental experience. Freely conflating religious terminologies drawn from disparate wellsprings — Tantrism, Immaculate Conception, Great Times, or Old Country — Parvulesco transgresses ontological and semantic barriers at will, attending only to the expression of the sacred and the primordial concepts it enfolds.

These multiple crossings lend a disorienting, even opaque character to the whole — a corpus comprehensible only as veiled or ciphered literature, akin to an alchemical opus that describes the motions of the spiral of being not through correspondence with states of matter, but through their inscription within the spatio-temporal field. Iterative and imaginal, bearer of the Word, Parvulesco’s literature itself constitutes the line of passage.

This article is translated from Jean Parvulesco devant l’Éternel

By Hugues Moreau
https://medium.com/@-Novas-?source=post_page---byline--3282483b1f5c---------------------------------------

Applications of the Dream

 

This is a translation of Michel D’Urance’s preface to Jean Parvulesco’s posthumous work Return to Colchis (Un retour en Colchide 2010), which offers a pure and uncompromising distillation of Parvulesco’s vision. Here the novel is revealed not as fiction but as a clandestine operation, an alchemical weapon, and a vector of the dream into the real. Literature, revolution, tantric love, the hidden Imperium, the Heideggerian “ark of nothing,” and the final confrontation between Being and non-being are fused into a single, incandescent doctrine. What follows is less a critical introduction than a transmission from inside the invisible legion of the awakened — a manifesto whispered across the frontier where the novel ends and the apocalypse begins.

By Michel D’Urance

“There is in life the hysteria of a late spring,” wrote Emil Cioran in the 1930s. Life never stops oscillating. Whether we mean life in its vast sense — the sum of all lives, life as raw vitality, life against death — or in its personal sense — the unique existence of each one of us — it sparks a hysterical murmur. This murmur rises from the background of its own Being. The tension runs between two poles: the end of animal clarity (when we give way to human worries) and the beginning of a return to an original force. Destiny is a constant gamble, a relentless alarm ringing over the danger of feelings, goals, thoughts — all caught in the back-and-forth between “subjects” and “objects”. To live humanly — not in the “humanist” style of Hugo or Kant — means building, along the current, a construct that grows lighter and stronger day by day. Sometimes this construct collapses and dissolves beneath itself. Other times it rises above the fleeting man whose whole existence is to keep building it. When man and his construct finally fit together, they become one. At least that is true for those unreasonable, symbolic lives we call heroic. A superior personality, a “hero”, is rooted in a touch of madness, in a form of hysteria that grounds his historical life. Yet this madness is not a mistake, but what allows him to gather forms of hysteria and correct them. He draws in morbid essences to create anti-atomic shelters of the spirit. Think of lives like Camille Claudel, Yukio Mishima, Antonin Artaud, Émile Henry, Simone Weil, Évariste Galois — violent lives, stretched toward the absolute.

To explore how hysteria shapes the dream is to walk a path alongside someone very like us — almost too close to tell apart. Why, then, draw a line between hysteria and dream, between fabrication and transformation? In the eyes of psychiatry, the hysteric — like the dreamer — is unfit for reality. Both are accused of theatricality, of staging an imaginary world that lacks the solid coherence needed to live within reality. The dream, in this view, is a deficit — a damaged fragment of the tangible, a reef jutting from the sea of the real, easily mapped, measured, and dismissed as less than true. Reduced to a byproduct of expression, it is seen as a degradation of truth itself — a flawed production, judged and found wanting by the sovereign standard of objective reality.

But this book takes another path. Jean Parvulesco rejects the contradiction that says: the dream is inferior to reality yet somehow reveals the unconscious. His guiding idea is far bolder: the dream is a mode of creation by Being itself — a way for the deepest, most originary zones of the self to replicate themselves and bring forth the individual’s native mission into reality. This is not just the dream of sleep. It includes every experience — awake or aware — where lines of connection form between what reality allows and what the dream demands. In its essence, the dream extends from the original and functional figuration of the individual a thought that diverges from the common path — and in doing so, opens the way to one’s own path, to Being as such. As a key to the origin-matrix of every human being, the dream functions as a secret notebook — a private dialogue between self and self. The dream produced in the real is genuinely true. It is the “reality” extracted from the dream that is inaccurate in its power. The objectivity of the real depends on a dream of the real — the hidden prompter behind the stage of the physical world we call “authentic.”

The two following commentaries intend to indicate the stance of Jean Parvulesco’s œuvre. This requires a detour through those who animate it (and whom he animates): Parvulesco’s characters are living beings (I) within an aleatory yet foundational œuvre (II).

I
Jean Parvulesco’s characters are living beings. Born in 1928 in Romania, he fled the communist regime in July 1948 — swimming across the Danube to cross into Yugoslavia. He was sent as a political prisoner to the forced-labor camp of Litva-Banovici in Bosnia, a story he later recast in novelistic form in Secret Report to the Nunciature. A year later, he slipped into Austria under secrecy and was forced into ties with one of the American intelligence services from World War II and the early Cold War. He then entered the French occupation zone. This period appears — again in novelistic form — in The Ford of the She-wolves. He arrived in France in January 1950, after meeting Martin Heidegger in his mountain chalet south of the Black Forest. In Paris, he endured what he called the “atrocious tribulations of an inconceivable poverty” — briefly sketched in the short story “Incendium Amoris” (Secret Mission in Baghdad): “We were a fairly large tribe of students — or student-like specters — who more or less underground haunted the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, living in unbelievable conditions, in a state of collapse that didn’t even qualify as ordinary misery. We were social zombies, all of us living yet not living in a kind of transparent, fake, shameful underworld — and the worst part of it? It all happened in broad daylight. (‘We’ve got nothing to hide,’ people often said.)” Beneath the ashes of this suburban hell, some of them would find enough fire to become visible stars — shining far off in culture, in a certain culture, in cinema, in literature.

At this time, Jean Parvulesco joined an informal circle that included Éric Rohmer, Pierre Boutang, Roger Nimier, Paul Gegauff, and Jean Wahl. All the while, he kept close ties to a revolutionary faction of the Parisian right, led by Jean Dides, Charles Delarue, and a discreet industrialist, Jean Parcé. The scene of his youth was a field of embers — the initiatory ground, the raw energy, and solution to a path that would never stop diverging. The propeller’s wings began to stir. Parvulesco had tapped into the literary and cinematic world that gave him a chance to take root — to uncover his singular wandering, a pulsing path toward the future birth of his œuvre. This divergence was stretching a geometric figure across his life: the spiral — a subject for the “sciences of the occult”. The initiatory field of embers had gathered enough sparks to sustain itself through a whole destiny. Most of the fundamental connections — like the one with Éric Rohmer — led to other encounters. Let us mention Jean-Luc Godard, who cast Jean-Pierre Melville as the “Parvulesco” in Breathless (1960). The character’s main line would seep into the real man’s identity: “Become immortal… and then die.”

His first text in French appeared in 1967 in the second issue of “Cahiers de l’Herne” (dedicated to Georges Bernanos) and was titled “The Most Secret Paths.” The foundational book of his œuvre was published in 1978 by Éditions Ethos. Its title, The Merciful Crown of Tantra, could serve as a summary of all his published works. More than thirty works followed, including, among others, a poetic collection, Treatise on Falconry (its title inspired by the highly alchemical falconry treatise of Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, De arte venandi cum avibus or The Art of Hunting with Birds), two collections of articles (The Prophetic Spiral, The Return of Great Times), the astonishing poem Diana Before the Gates of Memphis, four essays, two of which are geopolitical (The Ice Mantle, The Red Sun of Raymond Abellio; The Geopolitical Foundations of Great Gaullism, Vladimir Putin and Eurasia), a play (The Indigo Palisades), a collection of short stories (Secret Mission in Baghdad), articles (in Éléments, Nouvelle École, Combat, Le Pariscope, La Place Royale…), pamphlets published by Éditions DVX and, of course, numerous novels and intimate novel-journals, including a series of twelve books forming a novelistic cycle (from The Portuguese Servant to In the Forest of Fontainebleau). One of the novels in this cycle remains to be published after the present Return to Colchis. In Éléments, the author explained that the “publication of this final opus will close the cycle, insofar as it actually precedes In the Forest of Fontainebleau, the truly last book of the cycle, my final novel, “released ahead of its time,” released before the two other novels that will lead to it and its decisive end, whose novelistic future will materialize in reality itself.”

The syncretism of politics and literature — where the two merge into one — plays a central role in Jean Parvulesco’s life. Consider the unexpected alliance between pro-Gaullists and anti-Gaullists during the Algerian events, followed by Spanish exile. Or, later, the striking compromise between Gaullism’s heirs (now rooted in parliamentarism) and “revolutionary-conservative” cadres. All this reveals his drive to embody a marginal approach — one that places a unique vision of world and Being at the heart of a confident activism, an approach subordinated to literature as a fundamental postulate. No matter the cost confronting the deviation of real positions from his literary positions — at least the real as it is most often “believed”. The fictional deviation from reality (take politics, for example) is the exact counterpart, in life’s affairs and societal balances, of the “dogmatic irrationality” the author develops in the spiritual realm. The challenge: to prove this deviation can succeed. Politics must submit to literature — which, though potentially political, only becomes so through assimilation. A Politics seized by literature gambits pieces to occupy the most essential and vital positions, for literature is a risky world.

“…First question, where do you come from?” asks Théa von Canalis to the hero of A Masked Ball in Geneva, a certain Jean, the presumably autobiographical first name found in many of Jean Parvulesco’s novels. To come, to originate, to arrive: those who influenced him came from vastly different planes of thought and commitment (Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, Gérard de Nerval, Knut Hamsun, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Joseph de Maistre, Karl Haushofer, René Guénon, André Dhôtel…). One must also consider the undoubtedly crucial encounters (Martin Heidegger, Mircea Eliade, Arno Breker, Jean Daniélou, Vintila Horia, Ezra Pound, Julius Evola, Raoul de Warren…), the singular friendships (Louis Pauwels, Raymond Abellio, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Vergès, Jean-Luc Godard, Dominique de Roux, Constantin Tacou…), and the influence of the great authors of American and English fantastic literature, especially Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Graham Masterton, Talbot Mundy, Algernon Blackwood, Gustav Meyrink, and John Buchan. This lends Jean Parvulesco a somewhat curious and highly eclectic, deeply paradoxical foundation, which underpins his originality both as a man and as a writer. His always discreet reputation will extend beyond the scope of the various dissident cultural circles. He inspires a renowned filmmaker (we have already seen the case of Godard), Éric Rohmer, who gives him a role in the cast of The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque (1993), where he plays “Jean Walter,” musicians (Dimitri from Paris dedicates a musical epilogue to him in “Sacrebleu” (1996), and the duo Symphony from the Tricatel label composes “M. Parvulesco” in 2000), and even the observant parts of the press (such as producer Olivier Germain-Thomas, journalist Michel Marmin, the review 1895, Spectacle du Monde, Valeurs Actuelles, etc.), which devote radio and television programs, special issues, interviews, and articles to him. It seems like this influence exists beyond France, particularly in Russia, with the support of the geopolitician Alexander Dugin, an advisor to the Russian authorities, who has written that Jean Parvulesco is his “favorite author.”

An author who rarely doubted, or who only experienced that good doubt whispered to oneself in the evening, once the windows are closed, a doubt not displayed, not assailing, whose positive act is called “resolution.” This is how literary beings function: they do not doubt like others. Robots of their own destinies, even in chaos they persist deep within themselves. The literary beings of Jean Parvulesco, his characters, enjoy what could rightly be called a prefiguring status, the kind we sometimes glimpse in real life. Elitist conceptions have prefigured their souls; they are no longer entirely men and women. They belong to an elite of the “awakened.”

These beings are beings who believe. Called to join an informal order without a true name, “the Organization,” whose doctrinal principles are revolutionary and whose profound existential goals are far removed from the “normal” world, men and women develop “nests”, strategic action points that unite a diffuse set of groups from dissimilar social backgrounds. These nests are mobile residences on the social plane, immovable on the plane of destiny, designed to serve revolutionary designs and action. The typical action in Jean Parvulesco’s novels involves a couple or a group of couples acting, in a dreamlike manner, as intermediaries with “unknown superiors” within the operational framework of the nests, whose various concentric and hierarchical circles — some more inner than others — bring together politicians and figures from the worlds of entertainment or literature, working toward concrete goals whose true intrigue lies elsewhere — in the formation of a revolutionary pole, a herald of “Being”, against fundamental adversaries, representatives of “non-being”. Ardent love, tantric love, then initiates the process of the slow and arduous transformation of these characters, of “their own lives”, their pasts, and their social trajectories, to create the conditions for the existential reversal that signifies the authorization of their “passage”.

For these beings are beings who change. They wage their battle with a reserve of power from the amorous “deflagration” — from which they never return to who they were but makes them what they are from the depth of their origin, the core of their being. What grants them this power of modification and reversal? The “camp of Being.” A chain of “night watchmen,” “harvesters without harvests,” “nocturnal workers” for the high designs of the “Reign” — Jean Parvulesco’s characters treat “life” only through absolute affirmation. This affirmation has destroyed all negativity, all the weaknesses characterizing doubters: the organized society, the regime police, institutions, morality, the anxious and indecisive — unrepentant mythomaniacs — educational agents, repressive agents, the press, and journalists. The characters advance fanatically as guardians of archaic forces locked against other archaic forces. The overall positions of their strife metamorphose the world.

A set of manuals for inspired action — the Parvulescian novel offers no comfortable stories, no romanticized simulations of reality. Each novel serves as a myth for Western literature “at its end” — linked to Raymond Abellio’s “ultimate novel”: a “novel of the eighth day”, where novel, events, and history fade — in truth, a novel of passage from the seventh to the eighth day, a novel of an unmoved mover and the ascent of the mobile world into him (from Abellio’s correspondence with Dominique de Roux). Jean Parvulesco calls this final novel of the Western era the “Venus Junction”. It is no longer a matter of being born or giving birth, but of being reborn and bringing about rebirth. Leaning on structuring persuasion techniques aimed at forming a new reality in the world of experience, Jean Parvulesco’s heroes inscribe their statutory signs in fire and marble.

The Imperium, as the multiple powers constituting the Eurasian empire is, for those who serve its spirit, the primary revolutionary concept: Europe, India, Japan, Tibet, together constituting a geopolitical organism emerging historically and spiritually, will turn away from the declining politico-cultural hegemonies and form the Eurasian empire. But the empire does not visibly exist in reality; it is not there, not yet there, no longer there, or held in waiting, perhaps in proximity.

And, facing the possibility of the empire, Jean Parvulesco’s characters are beings who live. Their stories unfold as combative, vivifying manifestations of the migration toward reality undertaken by literary entities. When adventure befalls literature itself, its meaning can no longer be ontologically identified with the simple advent of literature as “adventure.” These characters, inside the novel, inhabit “their reality” and invoke the power of the novel — the novel as dream — which must penetrate reality. Yet, being characters of the novel, they already “dream.” They do not dream of a “novelistic” existence that should somehow find its place in their “life.” They dream of a novelistic existence that yields its own figuration through the “novel” — through the novel alone. Because they before anything else are inside the novel, our reality now becomes the “novel” of their own reality; and our novel, their reality that emerges. The novelistic thus inverts the notion of adventure, which no longer means a “situation where peril looms” or a “turning point in the quest”. It now means only the real element of the novel: for literature now arrives as real adventure, it is the advent of existence into literature that serves as the activator of Jean Parvulesco’s novels.

At a certain stage of interpretation — once its central objective has been relatively attained by the reader — this œuvre reveals its core achievement: its original (in)novation of the very category of the novel.

In this new category, it is a matter of the application of the dream to reality in the mathematical sense, where an application can be the exact inverse of another application if an element A is recovered from its image A’, in other words, if a “return” application undoes what the “original” application has done. In novelistic terms, which are thus not terms of adventure, a character is applied as a person, or a person is applied as a character, according to the criteria of a normative order that takes account of Being. In this sense, the application of the dream is neither the realization of an “adventure” by the subjects of the dream, nor the creation of the dream, nor the reading of the novel by those to whom it is addressed. The application of the dream is determined by the preexistence and post-existence of the dream that is applied, before the novel and after the “novel,” in reality itself: the application is constituted by the annexation of the novel’s characters, which are dreamed, by persons in reality, which is an application of the dream. The theory of the application of the dream in the Parvulescian novelistic system consecrates models of a superior human activity, a latent and gradual form of overhumanity.

Will they succeed? The mystical fugue of Armande Béjart in The Strategy of Darkness, the foundational ambivalence of Karin, who founds a world for the narrator of A Masked Ball in Geneva, or the fallen-and-rising presence of the agents of the Manor of Roses in In the Forest of Fontainebleau, can no longer appear as literary descriptions according to the classical definitions of literature. They are, rather, furrows of archetypal identities “carved” into a book, as if by magical labor. Each character matrix-like possesses a series of roles that can be played either by his or her own personal realization or without that personal realization. For Jean Parvulesco this attribution of roles is a predestination — yet it may not stem from destiny as divine and “superior” subjection, but solely from Being, as outcome of this originary panoptic container of its own proper ends — from Being that regulates itself. Created within the order of the novel, Jean Parvulesco’s characters are vectors of the dream within reality. To dream of the novelistic reality, in real life, is to invoke support from the fundamental powers of production. It is to choose the field of a distinct becoming, that of life reclaimed in the territories of the dream, to affirm a world of subtle configurations that forms beings in order to form beings, to once again clear a path through the ontological chain of entities from remote oneiric and archaic fields to everyday reality.

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Will they succeed? In ordinary reality, persons give qualities to the characters of the novel; in the dream, characters apply persons from reality; and in the “novel” everything dialectically inverts. Through literature Jean Parvulesco has joined an invisible cohort of peers “in dream and in reality” who act for both empires. For although the empire is one, it is doubled in its functions depending on whether it is internal (the spiritual force within and by itself) or external (the spiritual force beyond itself, created by geopolitics). When the inaugural transformation occurs between lived reality and dream, between real dream and reality, nothing any longer separates the peers of reality from their peers in the dream. The realization of the dream, presupposing an essential distancing from the dream as such, allows reality to extend the dream into “life” and summon characters as persons, while the dream shapes persons as characters. All of them are players in a vast game of strategy. The alliance between the peers in the dream and the peers in reality is the philosophical locus of the conversion of the novel into reality — against everything in reality that must change. Immense tectonics of beings move the prefiguration of beings who prefigure themselves. Being regulates itself; beings prefigure themselves. The dispersion of peers in existence is ultimately that re-creation which is played out as the child described by Heraclitus plays, who plays because he plays: “Time is a child moving counters on a board.” Whatever internal instabilities there may be, Jean Parvulesco’s novelistic work shows us the path of this “child.” Time and being form a totality whose joint ordering suggests a general law of psychological gravitation that modulates the real as in a game — a law that always favors the strongest player: the one who wins because he believes the most.

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By Dragoš Kalajić
II
Jean Parvulesco’s œuvre is aleatory and foundational. When œuvres speak among themselves through the medium of criticism (the way one person converses with other persons), a rule of measure is needed to establish a hierarchy of œuvres.

This œuvre has often been (de)valued as “elitist” and over-elaborate, redundant, even incomprehensible. The loftiness of its influences cannot exempt it from the most frequent charge: “repetition”, tied to the accusation of hyper-prolixity, nor can influences serve as an automatic guarantee of quality. The author himself has justified some of the heavier characteristics of his writing: “My whole life is made only of repetitions; the present is called upon to repeat, always, what immediately preceded it. Thus, in my life there is never anything new, only ever a renewal … is this the ‘eternal return’?” (In the Forest of Fontainebleau) “What in the novel (in the romance) of my journey toward the final leap of the vision I received at the Belle Ferronnière may seem like (and indeed is) a kind of tiresome repetition of amorous questioning […] corresponds (it is necessary, I believe, that this be stated and doctrinally recorded here) to the terminal process of the ‘œuvre au rouge’ that the philosophers of living fire, of Incendium Amoris, call by the fierce and dolorist name reiteration. This repetition, then, so fatiguing, which never ceases to disorient and jeopardize any uninformed (I mean non-initiatic) reading of this novel, of this romance, is part of an obligatory passage and, as such, actively participates in the salvific process it is called to account for in the philosophically hermetic, inwardly visible progression: it is precisely this apparently endless repetition of an ever-identical amorous quest that bestows upon the writing conveying it a concealed yet haughty and permanent predisposition toward the invisible, thus making it an induced writing. I mean a writing induced in reiteration.” (The Mysteries of the Villa “Atlantis”).

Another almost constant reproach is the incoherence of certain texts, or at least their apparent incoherence, caused especially by inversions in the narrative sequence. Of that, everyone may judge for himself. One might say that a writer resembles a woman whose beauty lies beyond beauty itself: she can live on the heights without having to sculpt or discipline that beauty, which therefore appears more formless and open to criticism. There is something of this in the partial refusal to adjust Parvulesco’s work to a wider public, an œuvre whose accents are so intensely personal that it cannot always be grasped by everyone. Yet in a great many of these texts there remains, from the very first line, what unmistakably belongs to a higher plane of literature, as well as there remains an intuitive kind of reading. Those who read him intuitively discovers outstanding literary capacities, and above all an originality of vision that is genuinely new where literature is concerned: new in its understanding of the relations between literature and life, between literature and reality, between literature and the imaginary; new in its approach to the problem of Being and to the problem of engagement.

The Parvulescian œuvre is aleatory because its irregularities forbid any system to be cleanly deduced from it. Yet the power of its rare intuitions and lightning flashes, combined with an elliptical novelistic form, ends up bypassing the ordinary question of textual coherence by the sheer strength of the foundations on which it is erected. In the end, it should be possible to recognize here a marginal writer who inserts himself into the lineage of “anti-naturalism” and who is intuitively superior to a great many others. His writing is genuinely unique, crafting a universe of intrigues emerging for the very first time, within a frame of reference that is almost impenetrable. The transfer of new feelings to the reader, which is what ultimately gives an œuvre its reach, and here is grounded in a rich literary corpus, operates with striking regularity once the totality of the novels is taken into account, and once one measures their place both in what has already been done and, even more decisively, in what has never been done in the domain of letters. It is the whole that founds the work, the whole as a closed totality, not the single, impoverished part viewed in isolation.

The writer — the craft, the function, the very status of writer — is never univocal. Through writing, the writer runs the imminent risks of the one aggregating worlds and men. The sole fulfillment of his sincerity will be to found a new Saying. Henry Miller, through countless books pursuing his own quest to define a literary meaning, said nothing different: create worlds, create beings, overturn the world by adding to it one emotion that has been truly discerned. Jean Parvulesco, for his part, has attempted to propose something beyond Saying itself.

Jean Parvulesco’s œuvre is foundational, because his emotion transmits definitions, appeals, orientations meant for a rare readership — a readership whose every true peer, if they exist, knows exactly what his world is and why he must advance under the aegis of the invisible empire of the dream. Under the protection of an intimate and secret seal, at once personal and constitutional, that belongs to his own decisive trajectory, each peer knows what he has to do as an element of an invisible legion marching with the “ark of nothing” of which Heidegger spoke. In The Prophetic Spiral, Jean Parvulesco writes: “The more the external part of darkness expands and thus seems to prevail over everything, the more the judgement of spiritual beings amorously closes in on the few who find themselves concerned by this amorous judgement, and by this judgement alone, and the more this very closing-in becomes, in itself, a superpower, the spiral of its own intimate self-intensification leading with perfect precision to the occult hearth of the conflagration which, at the appointed hour, will be aroused to become the original rupture, the first, lightning-like annunciation of the terrible spiritual deflagration that is to mark — on both sides of the dividing line between Being and non-being — the apocalyptic reversal of the present powers and of the state of irreducible antagonism they represent. […] For it can hardly be otherwise for us, we who stand motionless, without past or future, who in the darkness of perfect powerlessness and the infinite shame of our current state nevertheless continue the desperate combat for the sole honor of God.”

Aleatory and foundational, Jean Parvulesco’s œuvre is steeped in Christianity yet maintains no real theological ties to it. It is a post-Christian work that denies Christian values while still invoking God, a “God” who possesses the same consistency as Heidegger’s Being. Its conception of vital energy, of characters, of dream, of the real, springs from the discourse of the Tao, from the values of Greek polytheism, from the return of Rome, from the mythologies of a Europe beheld in the light of a primordial Tradition (which we permit ourselves to consider unfindable), from the mental departure toward Thule, from Tantra, and from the notion of mana. In this, the apparent binarity of Being/non-being and good/evil becomes highly artificial. For Jean Parvulesco, only the struggle of strength against weakness, the oneiric against the rational, vitality against negativity matters, and thus, perceived differently this time, the struggle of “Being against non-being” in the service of the political and spiritual causes that matter to him. A dynamo, slowly gathering speed… toward the service of this selfsame dynamic energy…

Some have understood Jean Parvulesco’s œuvre as a means of appeal in cassation against Christianity, a contradictory means in light of the text’s appearances, but a certain one all the same. The expansive energy of the œuvre serves to establish control over ourselves (among other sources of control), in order to think and act against the invading Eastern spirit that is submerging Europe, against existential negativity, and against the (parliamentary and “rational”) political regimes of the era. What must be done will be done, no matter how, even by detours and back-roads, provided those paths can be used for the cause that moves the revolutionary. And particularly through traversals, when circumstances demand it, in obedience to the supreme revolutionary principle: the realization of the ends. Diverting the adversary’s routes requires knowing their phraseologies and methods, to position oneself in action not at the level of “gossip” (that of jovial comrades swallowing coffee while talking about revolution, as bureaucrats do when discussing their upcoming vacations), but at the level of “intelligence.” What matters is to act collectively and personally through the broadest, most encompassing means of combat possible. Biologically viral, the strategy of revolutionary agents is operationally “Trotskyist” and fundamentally activist. It must adapt activism to transient opportunities while treating as permanently obligatory the effort of thought, doctrinal labor, and the unyielding firmness of a real (even if hidden) work of resistance. The sole terminus is the final elimination of the adversary and the fulfilment of the revolutionary demand. Every tool is provisional.

Like a red, serpentine wave, the line of dusk just before sleep, a disquieting strangeness that strikes the spheres of rationality with sudden incapacity, piercing them open to other forms and revealing the paths of a dream, the reading of Return to Colchis launches, aimed straight at the real, a harsh proposition of dawn. Jean Parvulesco once said to me in Paris: “We are no longer men”. What strange conversations he must have had with Raymond Abellio near La Muette, in the Jardins du Ranelagh… “But overmen,” he added, while I was thinking only about what in his life was true, and about nothing except what could possibly be true. In another of our discussions he spoke of the “Heideggerian science.” And of literature, which “can be very violent”: “Do not forget, and this is not for the sake of a formula — formulas no longer have any meaning now — that we are among the few who can both wait and remember. Do not forget that high above us, in the skies of France, a blood-debt hangs, because everything began in France and it is in France that everything will be settled.” Another time, walking back toward La Muette, I was listening to his appeals to literature, to the appeals of the novel inside life itself, yet I felt absent from myself, because one sentence, then another, had struck me with perfect sense. I had been transferred. I was thinking that our responsibility consists in fixing literature into reality, and that this responsibility neighbors the summoning of Being in philosophy.

I do not know why Martin Heidegger agreed to meet Jean Parvulesco, nor the degree of significance this meeting had. Yet the very possibility of such an encounter between peers, between two highly differentiated individuals, may have possessed the circumstantial force of an imperative for the future of the novel and the future of philosophy alike. The combination of the insights yielded by one œuvre with those of another can lead thought extraordinarily far, even when only reduction or transgression is expected. Perhaps the conjugation of Jean Parvulesco’s novel with Martin Heidegger’s philosophy is, in the end, more faithful to the singular aims of both œuvres than certain other attempted communions, for example the version of the “Heideggerian novel” offered by Ingeborg Bachmann.

The author of Return to Colchis noted in The Conspiracy of the Polar Weddings that it is “the very near future that will show us the march of things, and it is the evolution of the situation on the ground through an existential ordeal that will reveal to us the final secret unfolding in the underground of the greatest history […] In a certain sense, everything is also accomplished through our waiting.” A waiting that is hearkening the moment it is accepted as the chronological axis of a philosophical tradition: “We thereby wish to mark, abruptly, the return of the new European consciousness of Being to the Heraclitean and pre-Socratic thought of the very first origins of our race; the negation, and the resolute abandonment of two millennia of Western rationalist blindness, an abandonment and negation pre-announced by the inner movement of Martin Heidegger’s final philosophical inquiries. We must therefore start everything anew from Martin Heidegger, in the most radical way.”


By Dragoš Kalajić
In Return to Colchis, it is specified that “it is not enough simply to reach Colchis: Once in Colchis itself, one must still know how to reach the Polar Tree and the Golden Fleece. One must succeed in seizing the latter. And then clandestinely depart from Colchis with the Golden Fleece, to bring it into the historical space and time of this world, where it must be able to act according to the preconceived plan and for the purposes envisioned and determined before the journey to Colchis. For the sole reason one goes there is to be able to act upon this world.” From the perspective of the applications of the dream, the novel is a timeless weapon. Return to Colchis, as Jean Parvulesco writes, has as its “inner time” its own unfolding outside of linear time — “everything becomes novel and novel of this novel, whose history would then be nothing other than the day-to-day history of its own becoming.” For the dream is the instrument of a will that is highly defined by Being itself, and the present book (sequel to The Ford of the She-Wolves) illustrates some of the criteria and powers of that will. The study of revolution and of revolutionary thought is, fundamentally, a study of clandestine life, a form of life that is nothing less than the practical enactment of the conditions under which Being calls.

The author of this novel (who is at the same time its dreamer, its diarist, and one of its readers) holds this edifying and heuristic conception of the dream: the dream can pass into reality through action or through writing. Yet it is still only a partial passage, a passage of wakefulness, for “capturing in writing the sharp, living, and overpowering inner impression of certain dreams, those which are truly decisive instances of our existence understood in its entirety, of our diurnal and nocturnal existence, is indeed almost never possible. Something always escapes, precisely that which should have constituted the undeniable participation in another order of reality, in a space of superior (and very likely even supernatural) consciousness and experience. No, the mysterious intimate reality of the dream allows itself to be grasped only in its immediate lived moment. It tolerates absolutely no repetition, no deferred approach, no later resumption, not even a memory.” A passage of wakefulness, therefore: a passage that is forever and a passage forgotten the instant it has been crossed. For, as Ernst Jünger writes in The Adventurous Heart, “the most powerful dreams are dreams in deep and lost places, from which the œuvre emerges only as an accident, and in which scarcely more than a feeble part of necessity is enclosed.”

“They failed because they did not start with the dream”: this all-too-famous quote from Shakespeare now transforms into a directive for combat. To fight, by applying the dream to create an œuvre charged with the future, thus has as its constant meaning: “begin”. There exist cold divinities in certain dreams, doubtless the prototypes of whatever, in waking life, is truly seized. Without them nothing moves, for they are the mobilisers of the seized object. In unreal Asgards, they close the lifelines of the men they impel, the men who tread the paths of Bifröst: the mythological rainbow of three colors, one of which burns, also called the “bridge of the Aesir”. “Paths of thinking for which what is past is indeed past, yet what is gathered remains on its way toward us: such paths wait for the day when men who think will venture onto them,” declared the master of the Black Forest.

There is an elite of the “awakened.” They are the clearing of a definition of Being and the solution of a secret mission. For Being feeds on Being.

This preface by Michel D’Urance is translated to English from Un retour en Colchide, Guy Trédanial Éditeur, 2010.

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The Guru

 

The first in this list is the figure of the Indian guru – a name that is rarely used without irony in the contemporary Western context, as if one wanted to denote a person who gives their followers opportunity to overestimate them, and presumably not without succumbing to self-overestimation first. Naturally this habitual irony tells us absolutely nothing about Indian conditions, but a great deal about the anti-authoritarian change of mentality among Westerners in general, and about the decline in the standing of their teaching professions in particular. It reveals the scepticism that has been epidemic in the Old World for some time towards the notion that any mortal could have more insight than another into the basic conditions of the world and life – not merely in the sense of a coincidentally greater knowledge based on longer experience, but thanks to a deeper penetration of the concealed structures of existence. Just as the concept of the master is ruined in Europe – the maestro in musical life being the one exception – so the idea of any higher teaching licence in existential matters has practically lost all credit. When Martin Heidegger occasionally used the expression ‘master of reading and living’ to describe Meister Eckhart, the archaic tone was already unmistakable at the time. In doing so, he was going very palpably against the newer consensus that the discipline of life is under no circumstances open to mastery.

The scandal of the guru function is easy to pinpoint: it implies a mode of teaching and learning based on an initiation, and thus a crossing-over to the sphere of sacred or non-public knowledge – it is precisely this aspect that makes the guru-centred study model of ancient India unacceptable for the modern learning culture of the Occident. We have introductions to this or that area of knowledge to offer, but do not allow any initiations – quite aside from the fact that enlightenment is not envisaged as the conclusion to a course of study. We also presuppose among our students the continuity of person from school enrolment to matriculation to graduation, while learning with a guru entails two discontinuous aspects: one at the initiation into the modus essendi of the pupil, which implies a form of symbolic death, and the other upon the prospective attainment of the highest goal, which Indian convention describes as the insight – gained psychosomatically and via certain states – into the identity of the individual soul and the world soul. This shows how the dramaturgical form of initiatic learning, beyond its trimming through the narrative form of a step-based life, is nested in a schema of rebirth – which is why its goal must be sought not so much in a qualification as in a transformation.

For Western sensibilities, the convivial or virtually promiscuous constitution of the Indian master–pupil relationship is even more scandalous than the initiatic alliance that accompanies it. As a rule, devotion to a master in a stationary Brahmanic context implied joining his household, usually for a period that could scarcely be shorter than twelve years – this was usually the time required merely to memorize the Vedic texts whose internalization was expected of adepts, regardless of which practical exercises (asanas) were used to carry out the psychophysical work of transformation. This household element of the master–pupil relationship implied an openly psychofeudal dependency. Here the pupil not only had to receive knowledge from the master, but also to fulfil various servant duties – hence the Sanskrit name antevasin: ‘the one who accompanies the guru and waits upon him’. More often, the pupil is referred to as a shisia or chela, which denotes one who ‘sits at the feet of the master’ – a word that calls to mind the memory of a lost world before the invention of the universal anthropotechnic device of the Modern Age, namely the school desk. From an attitude-historical perspective, incidentally, modernity is synonymous with a dependence on chairs or other seating furniture, and eo ipso the dying-out of the ability to sit on the floor without feeling burdened by one’s own body.93The true meaning of the guru-centred learning model, admittedly, does not consist in the cosy homely aspects, which from a distance recall the life forms of medieval craftsmen’s households in Europe. Hence also the threat of terrible consequences for any pupil who dared embark on an affair with the master’s wife – although this does not seem entirely outlandish given the informal situation of courtly love: a noble lady and a lowly aspirant in the closest proximity, separated by a strong taboo and with the attention of each drawn to the other. Its purpose only reveals itself when one takes into consideration the psychodynamic aspect of the master–pupil relationship: this is, after all, no less than a contract for the regulation of a hyperbolic transaction. As soon as the guru takes an antevasin or chela into his following, he has implicitly made a form of perfecting contract with him. This means a simultaneously metaphysical and pragmatic alliance with the goal of advancing at least a few steps along the path to actually existing impossibility, or even of realizing the magnum opus as such: deification in one’s lifetime and transformation into the jivanmukti, the one who is saved here and now. The guru and his student thus enter an alliance perhaps not of life and death, but certainly of life and hyper-life.

Viewed by the light of recent occidental psychological knowledge, this singular relationship is a magnetopathic or psychoanalytical rapport – that is to say a stabilized state of emergency in the soul field where the master makes himself available for the most intense idealizations on the part of the pupil. In contrast to the magnetistic or psychoanalytical situation, however, where, in accordance with the prevailing norms of sobriety, the long-term goal is the dissolution of an idealizing transference, the guru–antevasin relationship aims not for the end, but rather for the clarifying amplification of that idealization – and at once an identificatory intensification that, if carried out in an orthodox and proper fashion, should be driven forwards into the supra-pictorial, pre-objective and pre-personal register. From the guru’s point of view, the pupil’s idealizing anticipations are not wrong because they aim too high; rather, the pupil is only condemned to a form of indispensable error in the sense that he cannot yet know how much higher the real goal is located than his dreamy anticipations are capable of imagining. Nonetheless, identification is the most important affective resource that is available for use in transformative work – which is why one part of the craft of guru pedagogy is to keep the fire of the beginner’s illusion burning for as long as possible. That an institutionalized art of the impossible cannot be judged by the standards of Western trivial ontology, with the corresponding psychological constructs of normality, is understandable enough.

Such references to the hyperbolic dimension in the transformation contract between masters and pupils cannot, of course, refute scepticism towards the guru-centred form of studying. It is therefore anything but coincidental that a large part of Western writings, but also of the growing native literature on the guru phenomenon – not infrequently penned by disconcerted psychiatrists, committed social psychologists and nervous sect advisers94 – is devoted to the problem of false masters and the psychological abuse of those dependent on them. The authors consistently postulate the reinforcement of quality control for products on the religious markets. They usually view the situation as if the process of globalization had also cast the spiritual world market into a state of upheaval. Just as some dangerous pathogens today profit from the facilitation of worldwide travel, the memes of the ‘God delusion’ can also spread more easily beyond the borders of their source regions. Even more disturbing is the impression that psychosis has got carried away, and is now aiming to change its status from a classified illness to a misunderstood form of fitness. Most provocative of all, admittedly, is the epidemic of mystical amoralism which, thanks to the missionary successes of Hinduizing masters, began to spread through the overly receptive Western hemisphere. The virus, which has nestled in correspondingly arranged classes since then, consists in the dangerous realization that lack of conscience and illumination are, from a certain point of view, identical.

The truth is most probably that the world of enlightenment games too has been affected by mediatization, and the appearance of performance talents among the teachers of well-tempered impossibility was only a matter of time. No guru’s life from the last decades demonstrates this shift more clearly than that of the Indian enlightenment preacher and sect founder Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931–90), alias Osho, who, despite his controversial status, constitutes – along with Ramana Maharshi, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Sri Aurobindo Gosh – the fourth figure of Indian spirituality in the twentieth century whose aura emanated across the world. His exceptional standing is clearest in the adoption of Western performance techniques among the forms of spiritual instruction, which were otherwise steeped in pious routine. Like a Duchamp of the spiritual field, he transformed all the relevant traditions into religious playthings and mystical ready-mades. It was not least a testament to his lucidity that, at the pinnacle of his success, he turned himself into a ready-made and, showing a clear awareness of the change in the zeitgeist, distanced himself from his Hinduizing past. As he recognized just in time, this past was tied too strongly to the mentality wave of Euro-American post-1968 romanticism. In assuming the Japanese-tinged name Osho in 1989 – ‘the joke is over’ – he quick-wittedly connected to the recently developed neo-liberal, Buddhophile mood in the West and invented a label for himself with a promising future. This gesture announced that in the field of gurucentred anthropotechnics too, the age of re-branding had begun. 

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

On Anthropotechnics 

PETER SLOTERDIJK