Adventures In Immediate Irreality
“I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Contents
Max Blecher’s Adventures by Andrei Codrescu
“Every Object Must Occupy the Place It Occupies and
I Must Be the Person I Am” by Herta Müller
ADVENTURES IN IMMEDIATE IRREALITY
Max Blecher’s Adventures
This is a book that soothes without sentimentality. Blecher
chronicled his dying from both the interior of his body and the outside of
nonexistence. He made that veil permeable: his words are vehicles traveling through
the opaque membrane that surrounds the seemingly solid world. These are the
“adventures” of the inside and the outside exchanging places, while being somehow
exactly the same in the light of Blecher’s extraordinary sensibility. Nobody knows
how to die. Max Blecher, because he was young and a genius, suggests a way that
investigates, rediscovers life, and radiates beauty from suffering.
“Ordinary words lose their validity at certain depths of the soul.”
Max Blecher’s soul was a fearless journalist who reported what his hypersensitive
senses and immense intelligence uncovered about the world we think we know. “The
world as definitively constituted had lain waiting inside me forever and all I did
from day to day was to verify its obsolete contents.” After the discovery that this
is not the real world, he finds it to be the projection of a text that tells a story
which erases the world as it appears to be: “All at once the surfaces of things
surrounding me took to shimmering strangely or turning vaguely opaque like curtains,
which when lit from behind go from opaque to transparent and give a room a sudden
depth. But there was nothing to light these objects from behind, and they remained
sealed by their density, which only rarely dissipated enough to let their true
meaning shine through.”
This is not Surrealism, as critics sometime saw it, but hyper-realism. Blecher
corresponded with André Breton, and was chronologically situated in a string of
Jewish-Romanian geniuses: Tristan Tzara (b. 1886), Benjamin Fondane (b. 1898),
Victor Brauner (b. 1903), and Gherasim Luca (b. 1913). Each of those writers
launched a precocious revolution related to Surrealism, with an urgency prompted by
an imminent and cataclysmic future. Yet, unlike his peers, for Blecher the urgency
of Time unfolds with a rigorous diagnostic probity that will not yield to any
unreflecting words. The games of language so beloved by Surrealists are there only
to be disposed of.
Glossing the nonsense conversation he enjoys with a friend:
“What I found in that banter was more than the slightly cloying pleasure of plunging
into mediocrity; it was a vague sense of freedom: I could, for instance, vilify the
doctor to my heart’s content even though I knew—he lived in the
neighborhood—that he went to bed every night at nine . . . We would go on and
on about anything and everything, mixing truth and fancy, until the conversation
took on a kind of airborne independence, fluttering about the room like a curious
bird, and had the bird actually put in an appearance we’d have accepted it as easily
as we accepted the fact that our words had nothing to do with ourselves . . . Back
in the street, I would feel I had emerged from a deep sleep, yet I still seemed to
be dreaming. I was amazed to find people talking seriously to one another. Didn’t
they realize one could talk seriously about anything? Anything and everything?”
This is the “nothing” that is acquiring mass and is already heading for the world
that Blecher feels becoming nothing but the mere traces of a once “serious” life. In
the unfolding researches of his childhood, he has time to uncover in dusty attics
the faded remains of gone worlds: letters, photographs, and paintings more
substantial than the present, which evanesces as he writes, “like a scene viewed
through the wrong side of a binocular, perfect in every detail but tiny and far
off.”
There is an inverted nostalgia here, a nostalgia for the present that has already
taken hold of the writer who is composing both his own and his decade’s epitaph.
Blecher, like Proust, endows places and objects from the past with the ability to
project an independent existence more real than the present. This world hides
another, open only to the genius of child-wonder and adolescent desire.
Adventures in Immediate Irreality is not a memoir, a novel, or a poem,
though it has been called all those names, and compared rightly with the works of
Proust and Kafka. Blecher belongs in that company for the density and lyrical force
of his writing, but he is also a recording diagnostician of a type the twentieth
century had not yet fully birthed, but the twenty-first is honoring in the highest
degree.
The place of these “adventures” is probably Roman, the provincial Romanian city where
he was born in 1909, a place small enough to explore, and conventional enough to
grasp. The time is childhood and adolescence in the still new twentieth century. The
probing instrument is his body rushing to work for as long as the liberty of his age
and his vitality allow.
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