I see in this novel I’m writing, in this daily book that’s beginning to give me more pleasure, a meaning different from the powerful novelty of its final format. I follow this book from hour to hour and from day to day, and I’m no more likely to give up on it than I am to commit suicide. This broken book resembles me. This mass of paper is a product of history, an unfinished fragment of my own essence and thus an impure testimony to the faltering revolution I continue to express in my own way through my institutionalized delirium. This book is cursory and uncertain, as I am, and its true meaning cannot be dissociated from the date of its composition or from events that have happened within a given period of time between my native country and my exile, between a certain July 26 and a June 24. Written by a prisoner held ransom at ten thousand guineas for a detox cure, this book is the bitter fruit of an anecdotal incident that sent me from a prison to a clinic, that obliges me to be methodically busy for days and days so I won’t grow discouraged. This book is the tirelessly repeated act of a patriot who’s waiting in the timeless void for the chance to take up arms again. Moreover, it embraces the very shape of the time to come: in it and through it I am exploring my indecision and my unlikely future. Overall, it points to a conclusion that it won’t contain because it will follow the full stop that I’ll set at the bottom of my last page. I no longer insist on pursuing the spectre of originality, something that would actually keep me inside the nitrogenous sphere of inflationary art. The anticipated masterpiece isn’t my business. My dream is of a totalitarian art in constant genesis. The one form I’ve been pursuing, confusedly, since I began this work is the formless one assumed by my imprisoned existence: an impulse constantly broken by the fragmented timetable of seclusion, a binary oscillation between hypostasis and aggression. Here my every move is an attempt to deny my isolation; I seek untidily any earlier existences where I was not a prisoner, but was flung in every direction like a corrupted missile. From that contradiction no doubt come the wild fluctuations in what I write, a frenzied alternation of drownings and resurfacings. Whenever I come back to this paper a new episode is born. Every writing session creates a pure event, attached to a novel only to the degree, unreadable but terrifying, to which I myself am connected to my broken-down existence. A naked event, my book is writing me, it is open to understanding only on condition that it’s not removed from its historical context. And here I am, suddenly dreaming that my epic, which is losing its sense of reality, is inscribed on the national calendar of a people without history! How ridiculous, how pitiful! It’s true that we have no history. And we’ll start having one only at that uncertain moment when the revolutionary war begins. Our history will be launched in the blood of a revolution that is breaking me, that I’ve served poorly: on that day, with slashed veins, we’ll make our debut in the world. On that day, a bloody intrigue will build on our quicksand an eternal pyramid that will let us measure the size of our dead trees. History will begin to write itself when we give to our pain the rhythm and the blinding power of war. Everything will take on the flamboyant colours of history when we march into battle, machine-guns at the ready. When our brothers die in ambushes, leaving the women alone to celebrate June 24, our writing will no longer be an event, it will become a document. The act alone will prevail. Only the guerrilla’s elusive and deadly action will be seen as historical; only despair that has led to action will be recognized as revolutionary. Any other writing, any other song, will be assigned to the pre-revolutionary period.
The revolution will come the way love came to us one June 24 when, naked and glorious, we annihilated each other on a bed of shadow while a conquered people was learning how to march in step. It will come in the manner of the absolute and repeated event that consumed us, whose plenitude is haunting me tonight. This nameless book is undecided, as I myself have been since the Seven Years War, anarchical too as one must be at the dawn of a revolution. We can’t wish soberly for revolution, we can’t explain it like a syllogism or call it in the way that we proceed in court. The inevitable disorder is already gaining on me, moulding my souclass="underline" I am invaded like the field of a battle I prepare for feverishly. It is on us and in us that the great disruption begins; it is in our vulnerable existences and our loving encounters that the first blows are dealt. The anarchy that heralds its approach manifests itself through our ministry; it throws us in prison, broken, unsatisfied, sick. The revolution I call for has wounded me. Before hostilities have begun, my own battle is already over. Prematurely disqualified, evacuated to the interior, out of the line of fire, I’m a wounded soldier; but what a cruel wound, for according to the letter there’s no war yet and that’s what is wounding me. My country is injuring me. Its prolonged failure has flung me to the ground. Wounded and ghostly, I experience behind bars the first tremors of a story that has never been told, that resembles this book only because it too is untold and because I don’t know the names of my brothers who will be killed in battle, any more than I know the titles of the different chapters of my novel. I don’t even know what will become of my characters who are waiting for me in the Coppet woods. I’ve reached the point of wondering if I’ll get to the Hôtel d’Angleterre in time, because that’s the only thing that concerns me now: the time that separates me from our meeting is slipping by.
Melancholy permeates me through all the valves of reading and boredom. Between the second-last sentence and this one, I’ve let four or five national revolutions pass, the same number of empires, of holy alliances and joyous entries. In the same rift I’ve seen a dozen revolutions turn to failure, starting with the revolution of Geneva in 1781, that of the United Provinces of the Netherlands in 1787, that of the Austrian Netherlands, and of Liège. In less than twenty-four hours I lived from 1776 to 1870, from the Boston Tea Party to the Camp de la Misère on the Meuse near Sedan, seeking nourishment in the harsh water of my memories. Since yesterday, somewhere between H. de Heutz and Toussaint l’Ouverture, I’ve been submerged in the secular water of revolution. I have shuddered at the thousand suicides of Tchernychevski and at the insurrectional romanticism of Mazzini. These elder brothers in despair and outrage are nearly as present in me as the Patriotes, my unknown brothers, who wait for me secretly, impatiently. Will they recognize me?