(This is a two-part series, friends, thanks to 1) Substack’s limitations on length and 2) the preliminary nature of what you’ll see before you, which is more like written evidence of thinking out loud or trying to bring lots of thoughts and proto-connections into some coherent form. Expect part II in your inbox tomorrow.)
Gerald Murnane’s narrator in Border Districts tells us from the get-go that “Two months ago… I resolved to guard my eyes.”1 The work of maybe- or not-quite-fiction takes us on a long loop of color-laden visions and thoughts that flow without warning one into the other, in order, it turns out, “to explain how I came by that odd expression.”2
Or rather, those thoughts are inseparable from the visions, whether the latter are remembered or constructed; our protagonist admits “I learned early in my life that I am unable to comprehend the languages of abstractions; for me a state of mind is incomprehensible without reference to images.”3 Colored panes of glass, the view through a primitive kaleidoscope, the identification of sources of illumination and the fall of light across pictures or rooms or verandas; religious figures taking shape in the mind as people seen in photographs; real-life landscapes imagined but never visited: these are the visual concoctions that pull the narrator into contemplation, and these are the fabrications or actual objects he alleges he'd not meant to look at, at least not head-on—at least not at first. He guards his eyes, he says, “so that I might be more alert to what appears at the edges of my range of vision; so that I might notice at once any sight so much in need of my inspection that one or more of its details seems to quiver or to be agitated until I have the illusion that I am being signalled to or winked at.”4
Is this guarding of the eyes just a more refined means of the narrator allowing himself to be distracted, pulled without plan into other thoughts or directions—a more formal method of going with the flow of images or objects that wind up in his path, traveling metaphorically or literally without aim and with all the apparent openness in the world? Getting called out or pulled away by a winking thing at the edge of our man’s vision could lead to intricate investigations, or to studies of only a certain depth that get short-circuited by something more sparkly a few steps further on.5 Signposts and surnames and place names, for example, tend to trip him up, knocking him out of his study of the passing scenery into visions of made-up colored maps and the uniforms of jockeys.6
Even with its initial purpose laid out, then—letting us know where “guard my eyes” came from—Border Districts seems to move in no particular direction, with no particular plan, its intent forgotten almost as soon as it’s been stated. We might begin to suspect that the real point here is to allow the narrator to revel in the fullest images he can recall, in all their palpable color and light.
This almost luscious savoring of every fine grain of every detail7 is in stark contrast to the situation poet Jacques Roubaud finds himself in after the death of his wife Alix, a photographer who left behind a number of self-portraits. At best, the world of his collection Some Thing Black is gray; usually, it exists somewhere between, or as witness to, the binaries of absolute darkness and various intensities of sunlight. When color does enter this world, it either has very little to do with Roubaud or verges on the awful. His days spent seemingly immobile as the sun tracks its path over the walls and floor and furniture, his dull attention might be drawn merely by habit by the sight of the cheap coffee he’s made: “On the surface of the liquid, archipelagoes of brown powder turn into black islands edged with creamy mud, sinking slowly, horrible.”8 The green leaves of the tree in the window have nothing to do with him; within the memory of a June day lurks “the yellow abalone of nothingness which may not be / mentioned or thought.”9
Although Alix’s self-portraits, included in this collection, are all black and white, it’s certainly due to more than that fact that the color seems to have drained out of Roubaud’s universe, “filled with homeless, colorless things,”10 a place where he cannot even picture or “name you any more except colorless.”11 Even the blood that had drained to the end of Alix's dead body’s limbs, the blood that had ultimately killed her, is described not by its color, but by being “so heavy.”12
“I rarely go out as if locking myself in this minimal space could make you real again because you lived here with me.”13 The poet knows perfectly well Alix isn’t there; he’s not tricked into thinking a ghost or some sort of lingering presence will soothe him if only he’s patient, if only he waits and watches, listens closely. It’s just that “you dissolved into this minimal space, burrowed into this minimal space, it has absorbed you.”14 Although the widower could give in to the temptation to lie there at night and “give form to you, could talk, remake you,” he’s not going to fall for that anodyne.15 He knows nothing can bring his wife back. All the same, Roubaud can’t remove himself from the space that has absorbed so much of her.
He seems to be living into Jacques Derrida’s understanding of mourning as “recognizing that the dead are now only ‘in us,’” an “interiorization” that constitutes “a different organization of [emotional, interior] space.”16 But this “interiorization is never completed and, because of this reorganization of space, remains in the end impossible.”17 Nothing is right; nothing is going to work; nothing will resolve the fact that someone was there, and is now gone, a disappearance that feels inconceivable. When Derrida wonders whether “the best sign of fidelity” to the one who has died is “to keep alive, within oneself” that vanished person, he could at first glance have pointed at Roubaud sitting there in the empty room, unwilling to absent himself from it.18
Or from the visible reminders that taunt the poet with his wife’s absence. Unable to leave this place that has absorbed the one who has disappeared, the mourner is also practicing a curious variety of guarding his own eyes, one almost exactly opposed to Murnane’s practice of selective sight. Because Roubaud sits there, traveling nowhere, focusing on anything but the pictures on the wall that would remind him of Alix—the elephants in the room that loom at all the edges of his attention but are never allowed to be acknowledged, to be let in and work on the poet’s thoughts or emotions. “I sit down on this same chair facing the picture. / I stay there till nightfall. / Not to look, I’ve already seen it, not to wait, nothing will happen, just a gesture, a continuity.”19 Roubaud is not open to things flickering from the periphery, demanding his attention; his form of guarding his eyes means clearly avoiding what’s calling to him, what’s demanding to be looked at as an insistence that he confront what’s happened: “I don’t look at it. this picture which contains you.”20 Looking at that picture might just result in his own end: “if this image should forever silence me my whole life would belong to it so totally it would, once and for all, be stopped with it.”21
The situation provides a ready-made example of Derrida’s assertion “that the force of the image has less to do with the fact that one sees something in it than with the fact that one is seen there in it. The image sees more than it is seen. The image looks at us.”22 Maybe part of what Derrida calls the fidelity evidenced in mourning is the courage to confront that complex image of, here, the person who has left—and along with her departure has also disappeared a fundamental piece of the one left behind. Without confronting that double loss, understanding what that now-absent part was and did and did for him, the mourner won’t be able to budge. In leaving, the dead person has messed up the sense of control that mourner thought he possessed: as Derrida says, in grieving the loss of the other, we are also engaging in “the mourning of our own autonomy, of everything that would make us the measure of ourselves.”23 How move on, how even leave the room, when the very thing that’s been able to tell you who you even are is missing?
Both Murnane’s narrator and Roubaud as mourner are called out by images that fall somehow in both men’s paths. Not unlike Derrida, W. J. T. Mitchell would have us view pictures, at least,24 by going back to what a drawn picture might have been doing; he would have us remember “the double meaning of drawing as an act of tracing or inscribing lines, on the one hand, and an act of pulling, dragging, or attracting, on the other.”25 Whether it’s Murnane’s narrator pulled to one side by a place name or an author’s photo on a book cover, or Roubaud’s anguish fighting the pull of the visible traces of his dead wife, there’s a desire within these inanimate objects that acts “as a kind of gravitational pull or magnetism.”26 To what end, though? What, to modify the question asked by Mitchell’s book title, do these images want from these men?
Are Alix’s self-portraits really temptations against which Roubaud must battle—or could they provide help, if not of the sentimental variety, in moving him on to whatever comes next? In not giving in to the photos’ call to linger a while, to remember the once-living body standing in them, confronting him, is Roubaud engaging in the work of mourning, with the aim to get over the loss, whatever that might mean, to “feel better” or figure out how to go forward by doing something more than technically surviving? Or in refusing to look at the portraits, contrary to that initial glance of the poor man sitting alone in his room, is he somehow avoiding what he owes to Alix, not taking upon himself the full duty of mourning? In denying the temptation to fantasize about her being there, about being there with her in her full presence, is he allowing her then to be forgotten?27 Or is all of this so-called duty even a legitimate concern; do we all, as they say, simply grieve in our own way, with none of those ways being wrong? Regardless of our means of coping, after all, one fundamental aspect of all those outcomes will basically be the same: the person we’ve lost will not come back.
How in the world will I finish this essay? Find out tomorrow, if the suspense doesn’t kill you!
Gerald Murnane, Border Districts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 3. Thanks to S and N for inviting me to read this book with them.
Murnane, 3.
Murnane, 109.
“Another rule,” he goes on, “requires me to record whatever sequences of images occur to me after I have turned my attention to the signalling or winking detail.” Murnane, 11–12.
Somehow, this method of proceeding does not feel like a random hopping from thing to thing. Also, this is not a spoiler, but the book does bring itself full circle in a brilliantly understated, almost stealthy, way.
Murnane, 63–65.
But note, by someone who also seems curiously detached; there’s no sense of emotion being experienced here, only reported on. Roubaud, too, seems at that stage of mourning where he’s deadened—in such despair that feeling has become impossible or unimaginable.
Jacques Roubaud, “The Moment I Get Up,” in Some Thing Black, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999), 26.
Roubaud, “A Day in June,” in Some Thing Black, 45.
Roubaud, “Singular Death,” in Some Thing Black, 76.
Roubaud, “Dead,” in Some Thing Black, 66.
Roubaud, “In This Light,” in Some Thing Black, 106. Alix died due to a pulmonary embolism. Although the color red is mentioned twice in the collection, it never describes blood. The poet asks whether one could “doubt red” (“Certainty and Color,” 55); in the final unnamed poem, “the sun / hesitates / leaves // some more / red” on the face of the church seen out the window (143).
Roubaud, “In This Minimal Space,” 34.
Roubaud, “In This Minimal Space,” 34.
Roubaud, “In This Minimal Space,” 35.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, “To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Mourning,” introduction to Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 10.
Brault and Naas, “To Reckon,” 11.
Jacques Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” translated by Brault and Naas, in The Work of Mourning, 36.
Roubaud, “Till Nightfall,” in Some Thing Black, 29.
Roubaud, “Till Nightfall,” 30.
Roubaud, “In This Light, II,” in Some Thing Black, 109.
Derrida, “By Force of Mourning,” translated by Brault and Naas, in The Work of Mourning, 160.
Derrida, “By Force of Mourning,” 161.
If not necessarily signs, fragments of glass, sunsets and landscapes and so forth.
W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 59. Italics in original.
Mitchell, 60.
“What do [pictures] demand? To be looked at, to be admired, to be loved, to be shown. What do they desire?... Average portraits… are the most forlorn figures of longing for recognition. No one cares about them except historians and specialists… A similar fate befalls family photos when all their relatives are gone and no one recognizes them anymore.” Mitchell, 73.