I dreamed I was walking through a town steeped in dust but very sunny and full of white houses, an oriental town perhaps. There was a woman at my side, a woman in black, in mourning, her face veiled. Oddly enough, the woman had no head. The veils were tastefully arranged where the head should have been, but she had only a gaping hole there instead, an empty sphere running down to the nape of the neck. We were both in a hurry, following a cart with red crosses on the sides: it was carrying the corpse of the woman’s husband.
I realized there was a war going on, and in fact we soon came to a station. . Suddenly a man came out of a first class compartment; he was portly and well dressed, had a decoration in his buttonhole, and was wearing a monocle and white shoes. His bald spot was poorly hidden by several strands of silver hair. In his arms he held a white Pekinese, its eyes like two agate marbles in oil.
For a while he paraded up and down the platform looking for something. Finally he found it: a flower-girl. He chose several bouquets of red carnations from her basket and paid her for them, taking the money out of an elegant wallet of soft leather with a silver monogram. Then he went back to the train and I could see him putting the Pekinese on the table by the window and feeding it the red carnations one by one. The animal ingested them with obvious relish.
Blecher threads his observations into every page of this book just as densely and accurately. The details go clicking by. Tiny filaments of hair, little balls of agate, small tables, miniature dogs, petite bouquets — within the sweet substance of the diminutive, the details head into the monstrous.
M. Blecher — in letters he sometimes wrote Max or Marcel, but as an author he only appeared with the anonymizing initial M. — was a Romanian Jew, born in 1909 in Botoşani in the northeastern part of the country. His family owned a small ceramic factory on the edge of town and a ceramics and porcelain shop in the center. He traveled to Paris to study medicine. When he was nineteen he contracted osteal tuberculosis, and spent the rest of his short life in sanatoria. When his parents ran out of money for his treatment abroad, he had to return to Romania, where he died at the age of twenty-eight.
When you read his books it’s hard to believe your eyes. The author of this masterpiece was a twenty-five-year-old already weakened by disease.
Romanian literati lived in fear of Eugène Ionesco’s scathing reviews. But when Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Irreality appeared in a limited edition in 1936, he praised the book. Unfortunately it never achieved commercial success. And then came the years of fascism. And in 1945, after the annihilation of the Jews, came Stalinism. And after that came the home-grown variety of socialism, which entrenched itself behind a fraudulent ideology, never faced up to its own connivance in the barbarity, and even had anti-Semitism built into the system as a matter of course. Until the collapse of the dictatorship, national provincialism made it impossible for a Romanian Jew to be recognized as one of the best Romanian authors. And after 1989 the anti-Semites felt even more empowered, and anti-Semitism, having hatched out of socialism, is now allowed the same blatant free expression, and the same language, as in the fascist era. Once again the so-called intelligentsia is busy picking up the pieces and hammering them into a narrow-minded “national remembrance,” a little plywood box where someone like Blecher doesn’t fit. Most likely they’re afraid of this book, because it addresses a nightmarish truth and couldn’t care less for “national remembrance.”
“The certitudes I lived by were separated from the world of incertitudes by only the flimsiest of membranes,” says Blecher’s protagonist. What makes the author’s view so radical is the eroticism that lurks in every ordinary object, waiting to ensnare a person. The narrator interacts with objects in a way one can really only interact with people. His observations charge his surroundings with an eroticism otherwise only possible between skin and skin. His flesh seems to creep into the substance of the things, there’s a kind of promiscuity with inanimate ornaments. And the substance responds with a similar promiscuity, coupling with the flesh of its observer. Something forbidden pulsates between the person and the object, something that smacks of incest, of overindulgence, of pleasure, and of sinful intensity. Time and again, the search for the self ends in an exaggeration of identity. Time and again it is driven to a new extreme until it is suddenly called off as though too spooked to continue. The objects themselves, their features, become surrogates. They offer no answer, yet they usurp the place of everything the narrator wants to discover about himself.
Here is a description of a gypsy’s ring: “The extraordinary embellishments used by birds, animals, or flowers for purposes of sexual attraction. . the hysterical lace of petunia petals. . It was made of marvelous tin — fine, grotesque, and hideous. Yes, hideous more than anything. It got at love in its deepest, darkest regions.” In an office with leather chairs and subdued lighting, “the screen of an enormous pewter spittoon in the shape of a cat stood gleaming in a dark corner.” “The glass windowpanes wobbled a bit in their frames like loose teeth.” And inside the crystal coffin of a wax figure cabinet is “a woman with a pale, yet luminescent face, lying in a glass box and sheathed in black lace, a striking red rose between her breasts, her blond wig coming undone at the forehead, the rouge in her nostrils aquiver. . It remained lodged inside me, still vague, like a word I wished to recall.”
The adolescent vagabond falls for the objects, because he’s fallen for the eroticism of sensory perception. And as the things themselves become increasingly transparent through his close observation, he becomes less and less transparent to himself. Particular details inflame or cool his ardor: his body is now attracted, now repelled by the things. His flesh is a magnet. His organs alone are insufficient, they need something else, and they lie in wait for the objects, which are likewise in need. Their features entice the body, wresting away its feelings which they then consume. The internal and the external engage in mutual indecent assault, and in the end it’s impossible to say which side instigated the voracious encounter — whether the person assailed the object to the point of breakdown, or vice versa. The paths beneath the feet are constantly hoisted into the head. And roaming through the space that exists between feet and mind inevitably leads to lonely realizations. The differences between the beautiful and the ugly, the anguished and the elated, are no longer possible in this book. The intensity of perception climbs right through the skull, the “melancholy of existence” and the “normally organized torture” render all the usual registries unfit. Here only extremes combine to form completely new properties. To be sure, the objects retain their familiar names, but their looks and features get reinvented. The newly perceived sweeps away the familiar. And there’s no use opposing it, because in the act of reading, the shrewdness of every observation acquires greater validity than anything you might recall from your own observations of the familiar objects. In the words of Blecher’s protagonist: “I had the vague feeling that nothing in the world can come to fruition.” Nothing is ever completed. And this narrator is concerned with much more than completion.
Blecher’s eroticism of perception requires the constant comparison of one thing with a hitherto unimaginable other. In this eroticized world things venture into the outrageous: “When I got to the marketplace, I found men unloading meat for the butcher shops, their arms laden with sides of red and purple beasts glistening with blood, as tall and proud as dead princesses. . They were lined up along the porcelain-white walls like scarlet sculptures carved from the most diverse and delicate material. They had the watery, iridescent shimmer of silk and the murky limpidity of gelatin.” Or: “There were always nuts in a bowl, and Samuel Weber, who was especially fond of them, would swallow them slowly, peacefully, bit by bit, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down like a puppet on a rubber band.” And Samuel Weber’s son Ozy has “flute-like arms.” Or: “I felt the silence in me smiling calmly, as if someone were blowing soap bubbles there.” While taking a temperature “the slender glass lizard of a thermometer” glides under the arm. And of the doctor who is treating the malaria stricken protagonist, Blecher writes: “His small velvet eyes, fitful gestures, and thrust-forward mouth made him look like a mouse. The impression was so immediate and so strong that I thought it perfectly natural that he should give his r’s a long and sonorous roll as if he were munching something in secret as he spoke. The quinine he gave me only increased my conviction there was something mouse-like about him.” Behind the sewing machine shop was a small room referred to as “the green room”—when no customer is around the ailing protagonist hastily makes love with Clara. On one such occasion he spots a mouse out of the corner of his eye, perched on Clara’s powder compact: