The Incipient Frame-Up or the Verbal Eye

Author(s): Mary Ann Caws

Source: L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 20, No. 3, Autobiography in 20th-Century French
Literature (Fall 1980), pp. 55-65
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26283818
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 The Incipient Frame-Up or the Verbal Eye

Mary Ann Caws

I did begin but the resolve melted away and disappeared in a

week and I threw my beginning away. Since then, about
every three or four years I have made other beginnings and
thrown them away.1

TAKING MY CUE from that confession by Mark Twain concern

ing his unwritten autobiography, I would like to begin, not yet by
the real beginning, but by a throw-away opening, a disposable
line from a mock frame. A casual lumping together of all those
debatably separate entities: journals, memoirs, self-portraits, and auto
biographies proper, is pardonable, perhaps, with apologies made to the
real toilers and distinction makers in the field of autobiography2; spoofs
are probably not pardonable. (I do not believe, for instance, that I
would be forgiven an elaboration on the Confessions of Rousseau and
various others, as a writing act including a "fessée" shared by author
and reader, a drama of the "con-fessée[s]".) But let me set up anyway
my own categories like some frame of a house or, more modestly, some
house of cards, in order to whisk away breezily afterwards the construc
tion, keeping only the images of the frame and of the cards themselves.
Had I been eager to make room or rooms in that house, I would
have said that there are seven beauties, however ambiguous, of
autobiographical types. I would have sorted them out according to certain
categories of the single if not always the simple, and moved then to the
multiple. I would have begun with the straight type, thinking of Aragon,

Mark Twain, a letter of 1904, quoted in Louis Renza, "The Veto of the Imagination:
A Theory of Autobiography," New Literary History, IX (Autumn, 1977), 1., p. 1.
E.g., see Michel Beaujour, "Autobiographie et auto-portrait," Poétique, no. 36,
1978, pp. 443-458; Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975);
Jeffrey Mehlman, A Structural Study of Autobiography (Ithaca: Cornell, 1974); Jean
Starobinski, "The Style of Autobiography," in Seymour Chatman, ed., Literary Style
(N.Y.: Oxford, 1971).

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 L'Esprit Créateur

Leiris, etc., and then I would have added obliquely, as further models
for "straight": Gide, Violette Leduc, expecting an amused response.
Then I would have moved on to the self-distancing category, as for
example in Barthes on Barthes on Barthes, and from there to my third
type, the wholly or partially fictive or mythic—Colette's Claudine,
Gide's Theseus, Proust's Marcel, or then the Judith and Holophernes
characters of Leiris and shown how these types are extensions of the
possible self. Next I would have considered the self transposed, its
answer or identity sought and occasionally found, outside its actual
limits, as in Artaud s Uccello or Breton's Nadja. Since an author may
make an essay of various types, I would have also considered Breton as
a representative case of exploded or multiple autobiography, with the
many figures of himself and his various damsels seated in an unforget
table row at the exact beginning of his Amour fou; this category would
include also the many voices and figures of Jabès. Toward the end, I
would have gotten to the authorial won-over, where the identification
with an earlier writer or the future projection of one models the lines of
the life recounted by giving its shape to the recounting: illustrations
from Derrida's recent talks on Nietzsche and from Barthes' recent
meditations on Proust would have combined this won-over with the at
least semi-detestable one-up. And finally, I would have concluded with
a glorious traversal type, where other authors and texts enter by droves,
as in Roubaud's Autobiographie, chapitre 10, in which he brings Tzara,
Eluard, Reverdy and a host of others into his present language,
condensing memory and actuality. At last, neatly summarizing and
recapitulating my types to be counted and recounted: self-distancing,
fictive, or mythic, transposed, exploded, won-over, and traversive, I
would have managed to construct a proper frame, neatly fitted to the
occasion. Alas, that frame would be a misfit for the spectacles I want to
look at and through. So I will now discard all seven beauties tor one
quote on the subject of openings and wakings: "And winking Mary
buds begin to ope their golden eyes" (Shakespeare, Cymbeline). These
opes lead me to my real beginning, full of hopes, which takes as its
initial guide Malraux's assumption: "Il est admis que la vérité d'un
homme, c'est d'abord ce qu'il cache."3 What my commentary along a
single line, like the most modest possible project, chooses to illuminate
or occult may in turn illuminate another truth closer to home, like a
blind spot in my own eye—but there is no way out of that, and no

3. André Malraux, Antimémoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 15.

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 Caws

graceful exit for my study of the incipit. We all recognize the perils
of self-implication in the particular study of autobiography. I have
chosen to isolate here an incipient frame-up, at the risk of a definitive
let-down. This revelation of and for the verbal eye includes the eye
seeing, verily or unverily, and the I posing in the scene, at once
theatrical and visual. This specular viewpoint might be taken as a sort
of jazzy aubade to the self, a dawning self-consciousness or an eye
opener.
Already the expression I-opener has a garish tinge; in its celebration
of autobiographical beginnings, it seems to concentrate mainly on what is
I-catching: that, of course, is the point. The lines of possible transposi
tion from the French play on jeu and je to the equivalent English play
should be traced, circling about, even if the writer were then only said to
be playing a-round. The accusation of circularity is not wholly unjusti
fied, since by the incipient frame-up, I really mean the opening line as
both a life-line and a life sentence. The opening controls the rest; we are
strung along on the lead line of language, or we lose the thread, like a
Theseus gone wrong. Now the advantage of such a happy barbarism as a
verbal eye is its bi-focussing, on textual perspectives and on the I itself,
right at the beginning.
The opes give the orders and the order for the game of autobio
graphy, often compared to a game of cards—I am thinking of Aragon's
J'abats mon jeu and the expression jouer le jeu, including the playing both
of the game and the I, in the greatest game of them all: le grand jeu. The
question is simply what stacks the deck. Whether we listen to Gide's
lament at the absence of drama to be self-told: "Je n'ai plus besoin de
m'écrire,"4 or Barthes' quiet comment on the identity and the simul
taneous split between the self writing and the reading of the self:
"Je ne peux m'écrire,"s the letters of this art are clearly self-addressed.
Not simply the letter of some law or some reader-writer pact, but a
letterary social contract which could almost always bear the title
ascribed by John Lennon to his own self-righting: In His Own Write.
We might, in our own right, protest that the writes and re-writes are
too many and the autobiographical geniuses few—we might agree,
even, with John Sturrock, that autobiographers too often pattern
themselves on biographers and adopt the chronological order, as if the
game were always to be played the same way, historically, geographically,

4. André Gide, Journal 1889-1939 (Pléiade, 1951), year 1889, p. 14.

5. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: coll. Ecrivains de toujours, Seuil, 1975).
See p. 109, on the "grimace seconde" and the "Moi, je."

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 L'Esprit Créateur

and spiritually. He quotes Spender's account of an attempt at being

freer with his frame until realizing the full advantages of the objective
framework "through which I could knock the holes of my subjective
experience."6 Sturrock admires, as one can scarcely fail to, Leiris'
opening section in L'Age d'homme entitled "Old Age and Death," thus
putting the terminal in the liminal position: to be sure, for openers, that
is a lively one, and eye-catching in both strict and loose senses.
Aragon points out, in his Incipit: ou comment je n'ai jamais appris à
écrire (parenthetically, one of his best-written works) that the initiating
sentence is in fact a beginning of the self in all cases, "ce commencement
de moi" "Je crois encore qu'on pense à partir de ce qu'on écrit, et pas
le contraire" (I, 129). Thus does the sentence control the life said to
follow it: the incipit is seen as inclusive and suggestive, unlike the
explicit which is its opposite end. The elliptical, implicting, initial
incantation, immediately confuses language with seeing. A double
identity is given also to the model, both for a sentence, as in a
grammar, and for a tableau, as in a pose. Once well-posed, the model
focusses the rules of the game, imposes the attitude of viewer and writer
in sight, by hind-sight, or out of sight, whether it is a matter of self
portrait, or of a poseur, deliberate or accidental; the reflective threshold
of this kind of text, posed between the self and the other, the outer and
the inner, the language and the figure, validates the bi-focal metaphor
for the scene, and compels the acceptance of some spectacles of the eye
and of the super-positions.
Were I given to spectacular punning, various extensions could be
made along the lines of the autobiography as sea voyage . . . Let me
take though, a straighter way. Aragon compares the beginning of a text
to an échangeur, switching the traveler onto one path or the other; the
opening sentence is posed "entre se taire et dire, entre la vie et la mort,
entre la création et la stérilité," serving as initiation, for the passenger of
the text and for the authorial self.7 Here I suspect we might look back
with a kind of nostalgia at the perfection of Rousseau's classical frame in
the Confessions, with its lofty and sure beginning statement:

John Sturrock, "The New Model Autobiographer," New Literary History, op. cit., p.
56.
Louis Aragon, Je n'ai jamais appris à écrire, ou les Incipit (Geneva: Skira, 1979), p. 9
"Et je risque cette hypothèse que, au début de la création, phrase de réveil,
incantation initiale, incipit de telle ou telle nature, le bizarre ou le dérisoire des mots
surgis joue en moi le rôle de ce qu'on appelle aujourd'hui un échangeur, m'oriente sur
une route inattendue de l'esprit et, par un geste détourné, me détermine, homme ou
créateur, dans l'invention de vivre ou d'écrire" (p. 45).

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 Caws

Je forme une entreprise qui n'eut jamais d'exemple, et qui n'aura pas d'imitateur. Je veux
montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature; et cet homme, ce
sera moi.

Moi seul ... Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins, je suis autre.8

Moreover, the bottom edge of the frame makes a superbly knotted

closure, for the opening of this "moi seul," equally sure: "J'ai dit la
vérité . . . Tel fut le fruit que je tirai de cette lecture et de ma
déclaration" (ibid., p. 583). From singular enterprise to singular fruit.
We are now less certain of our singularity in our ventures of the eye;
consider, for instance, Sartre's all-inclusive end to his Words: " . . .que
reste-t-il? Tout un homme, fait de tous les hommes et qui les vaut tous
et que vaut n'importe qui."9
Modern beginnings are often quite factual and specific, even if
lyrical. They may be a simple statement of place as a distinguishing
feature; in Suarès' Voici l'homme, the man of great silence returns after
wandering in Europe, to a lonely country, localized: "C'est au pays de
Cornouailles, là où l'Occident finit, où le soleil chaque soir meurt dans la
mer, et où le solitaire Océan commence."10 Or the play of the I may
open on a temporal localization: Leiris' L'Age d'homme begins: "Je
viens d'avoir trente-quatre ans, la moitié de la vie." Putting aside
Derrida's reflections on Nietszsche's reflections on Dante's reflections
on the middle of life's road, such a setting is far too verbally limited to
be the life line I am aiming at. Take another typical start, a setting by
person or event: Gide's first published entries in his journal, from 1889,
read simply "avec Pierre," and then, "Enterrement de ma tante
Briançon: Je ne dirai point ces choses, car l'émotion perdrait sa fleur de
spontanéité, à être analysée pour l'écrire" (op. cit., p. 14). Here the
event is occulted, but the occult does not make in this case a challenging
frame. Or finally, the reflection may be set by its initial attitude, as in
Adamov's L'Homme et l'enfant: "Malade, j'ai éprouvé le besoin de
tenir un journal."11 In these cases, I submit, the porch does not hold the
reader, in part because the frame is too evident; from my own point of
view, the eye is not yet caught. For such openings, such endings, says
Gide's Theseus, "J'ai vécu,"12 and of course, given that hero, no thread
is lost, in such a line of life.

8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, beginning and ending, vol. I, OEuvres complètes

(Paris: Ed. de la Pléiade, 1959).
9. Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 214.
10. André Suarès, Voici l'homme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1948), p. 8.
11. Arthur Adamov, L'Homme et l'enfant (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 7.
12. André Gide, Thésée (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), p. 123.

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 L'Esprit Créateur

The eyes have it then for more open openings, even if the frame
selected should act as a freeze frame. Reverdy's non-departing meta
phor of beginning in Le Livre de mon bord is like a voyage halted, an
holds us in its own becalm: "Le navire est à quai. Mais il n'a pas d
voiles."13 And at the opposite pole, Barthes' opening image of an eye
for the I is quite evidently one on which the I, be it author's or reader'
is not expected to close (op. cit., p. 5). Looser beginnings are mor
involving; the famous interrogation at the outset of Breton's Nadja:
"Qui suis-je?"14 might have led us to hope for more of Nadja's Breton,
but he concludes, after all the surrealist wandering, by the finding of an
non-enigmatic lady X, as the temporary end of errance. (Perhaps this
the moment to admit openly, as a testimony to beginning involvement
that I always have at least a faint hope that the ending might change,
that someday, like an object newly "trouvé", the initial question migh
find a different answer, that the passage into which we were s
brilliantly led might have a less explicit exit.)
"Je fais une bien mauvaise sortie," said Breton on his way in the
ambulance to the hospital where his own day ended. But are there reall
any good endings? How shall we end? The most adventurous expe
imenters may take a classic way out; consider the closing lines from
Roubaud's autobiography, previously referred to:

oui mais voilà rien de tout cela n'était

ou plutôt rien n'était plus que ce qu'on disait . . .
. . .au revoir au revoir voyons si la
lumière creuse le ciel comme on dit

la vie que j'ai menée n'est pas celle que j'ai voulue
dis-tu qu'est-ce que c'est que ça qui s'est développé
depuis le berceau en ton nom

ainsi racontèrent-ils la vie je m'en souviens

pourquoi j'ai tout dit . . .

adieu mélange de voix vues profondeur

plus loin la rue la forme des étages adieu

prends congé15

13. Pierre Reverdy, Le Livre de mon bord (Paris: Mercure de France, 1948), p. 7.
14. André Breton, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 9.
15. Jacques Roubaud, Autobiographie, chapitre dix (Paris: Gallimard, 1978).

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 Caws

And that end, suspended in a self-address and yet addressed to us, leads
me back to beginnings, by a circular argument and a suspension of the
custom of moving temporally and spatially, first to last.
Moving from this last to a first, and from theoretical considerations
to two actual opening lines, I will briefly trace first a pattern of
suspension and extension, and then a pattern of elaboration, obsession,
and compensation which extends from the first line outward concentri
cally, this frame-up corresponding to a build-up. To frame my consider
ations on framing, I am deliberately choosing the firpt and last lines from
the first and last volumes of the four-volume set of a game, with its rules
included in its most outward presentation, Leiris' La Règle du jeu,
where the rules are quite evidently those of the game of the I.16 Leiris
refers here to the juggler, who aims not to miss the balls thrown: let me
continue that metaphoric line, still aiming at that juggler vein. For the
game I want finally to deal with, in both cases, is the suspension of one
sentence like a ball, in mid-air.
hirst, in the first sentence of the first volume, the action is caught
and held until its final verbal cadence and the physical fall which
approximates it: "Sur le sol impitoyable de la pièce . . .sur le sol
irreècusable et sans âme—de la piece . . . dans le salon ou la salle à
manger, dans la pénombre ou la lumière . . . dans cer enclos privilégié
guère accessible qu'aux adultes . . .le soldat était tombé." Set in a
threshold position, privileged and removed, the initial action is held,
and with it, all the keys to the pages to come; ending the first chapter,
the cadence, repeated, is allowed once more, falling as a perfect closure
identical with the opening: "Sur le sol de la salle à manger ou du salon,
le soldat, de plomb ou de carton-pâte, vient de tomber." The suspended
action is, to be sure, only that of a toy soldier, like a tiny narrative victim
of the life sentence. Here Leiris affirms the supremacy of language over
life, "en quoi le langage articulé tissu arachnéen de mes rapports avec
les autres, me dépasse, passant de tous côtés ses antennes mystérieuses."
That sentence might be seen to exemplify the hold, or the temps-délai of
which Leiris makes his autobiography, as it relates to language, the
object found and held: take for another example the last line of the third
chapter, with its extensive Proustian echo, aroused by one single word:

"Tantôt", mot qui me semblait si prometteur quand on le faisait tinter à mes oreilles

16. Michel Leiris, La Règle du jeu, vol. 1, Biffures (Paris: Gallimard, 1948); vol. IV,
Frêle bruit (1976).

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 L'Esprit Créateur

d'enfant pour désigner l'après-midi; "tantôt" mot qui a encore pour moi—bien que mêlée
d'une pointe d'inquiétude crépusculaire—une certaine saveur d'ortolan, de nouvel an ou
de gâteau . . . (278)

The echoes aroused are implicitly included in that exit:

Quand, par les soirs d'été le ciel harmonieux gronde comme une bête fauve et que
chacun boude l'orage, c'est au côté de Méséglise que je dois de rester seul en extase à
respirer, à travers le bruit de la pluie qui tombe, l'odeur des invisibles et persistants lilas."

From echo to echo, the memory passes as from hand to hand, those
cards of the jeu as they are shuffled and re-arranged. In the last volume
of Leiris' memoirs, the tenuous thread of sound as the title puts it—
Frêle bruit—is formed by the repeated questioning anxiously imposing
itself as the meta-autobiographical model: how shall the circle be circled
from the beginning to end to beginning, how shall the ring be ringed, or
the square be squared?
Already the first sentence introduces the interrogatory image,
recurring obsessively throughout; this is the life line of the text, genesis
and sufficient source, initiation for the hundreds of pages to follow:

Plutôt que suite logique ou chronologique, ces pages seront—quand finies ou du dehors
interrompues—archipel ou constellation, image de la giclée de sang, . . .dont mon
écroulement (concevable pour moi sous cette seule forme de soudaine catastrophe)
marquera le ciel fictivement.

The hand drawing the fate as from these cards forms—consciously—

manière of this hand—that fatal constellation, signed in blood against
the stars, like an echo of Malraux's artist's hand trembling its trace
against the night. The obsession here is the uncontrolled ending, "le sort
que ma main n'aura pas dessiné": the aim would be to block out the
game and to blot out the nameless spectre imposing its profile here as
the initiatory model and monster. The ensuing pages sketch a tragic and
not unnoble endeavor to wash the writer's hands of this fate as of an
unwanted ink stain, to wash them of the spot of destiny exploding like a
grenade that, "giclée de sang," is visible already in the opening line.
The initial scene, from August 20, 1944, is distanced in its framing
through a window, and the narrator, after gazing on what he calls its
"grandeur" and its "beauty," like that of a bullfight, then escapes to a

17. Marcel Proust, Combray, in A la recherche du temps perdu, v. 1 (Paris: Ed. de la

Pléiade, 1954), p. 186.

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 Caws

safer space, and a kitchen ritual, as if the enclosed and domestic washing
of the hands might blot out the violent mark made in the open, upon the
eye and mind: "machinalement, je me lave les mains au robinet de
l'évier."
But outside the window, as if in mockery of the initiatory constel
lation already compared to the crimson explosion, the grenades trace
their writing in splatters. Repeatedly, Pilate's gesture returns, washing
his hands of Christ's blood, in parallel to the writer's own acknow
ledged divorce between poetry and the sullying effect of action. But
another echo gives the lie to the gesture: "Tous les parfums de l'Arabie."
That spot swelling in the mind soils the white pages, against the
anthropologist's desperate distancing by intellectual analysis; to protect
ourselves from the flesh and blood of the human victim consumed, did
not the man-eating tribes invent forks? The obsession with purity
returns and shows itself empty; the hands grip nothing but their shame:
"Deux mains nues, ne tenant rien, tenues par rien et réduites à rien que
deux mains sans corps, se lavent au filet d'eau qui coule du robinet ..."
The distance, denied, itself obsesses: "Coupé de tout ce qui s'agite
sous mes fenêtres . . .suis-je plus vivant que deux mains à la dérive
qu'on découvre en train de se laver sous un robinet, dans la pénombre
d'une cuisine?" And then a metapoetic interruption: let a passage lead
from a private place to a theater, some "passage dérobé," some
corridor as a "fil conducteur" in Breton's sense, a conducting thread,
and the guilty distance from the kitchen and its obsessive ritual to the
explosive life and death outside the window may be dealt with, as a pack
of cards is shuffled, as a fate is meted out, by the writing and linking
hand. The constant desire is to join the two ends, to link action to
poetry, incipit to exit; but the linking and circling and recycling may
close on air, as the hands themselves were found to grip nothing:

Si, boucle bouclée, nous devons retourner au néant d'où nous étions partis, n'est-ce pas un
zéro—serpent se mordant la queue ou chemin de fer circulaire—qui résume toute la vie?
Seul problème: gribouiller à l'intérieur du cercle quelque chose qui noircisse son blanc,
change son vide en plein et fasse de son lac sans fond une île . . . Mais que gribouiller,
alors que ce zéro veut dire qu'il n'existe rien qu'on puisse prendre pour point d'appui?

What shall we write into the empty circle of ritual? A splendid tome,
spun out of, and around, its first sentence? To the anthropologist's
question, a cultural answer. Now the blood spots the dress of Lucia di
Lammermoor, and some obsessive corridor leads to Lautréamont's spot
of intellectual blood, marking forever the page like another white and

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 L'Esprit Créateur

virginal dress. The reader remembers that L'Age d'homme concludes

with a wall chosen around the self by a costume, a piece of clothing.
From which another passage leads to this writing: "Ecrivant, je cherche
abri dans la page blanche, comme une autruche cachant sa tête dans un
buisson, ou plutôt comme si cette feuille était le monde sans épaisseur
où la mort ne peut pas entrer . . .j'exécute ma danse sacrale avec un
sérieux qui devrait me faire rire." Like another bull-ring, this stage
serves for a primitive and priestly struggle with the self and language
("Cet essai pluriel où j'essaie et ressaie . . ."), a struggle heightened
rather than lessened by such self-irony. Implict in the violent incipit of
this volume is the celebrant's costume splattered like a vestment or a
sky; the unwashable spot grows larger and goes public: "La tache de
sang. Non celle dont on est souillé, mais celle qui gicle au visage des
autres ..."

All the aspects of the initial image and its terms, like so many
de jeu, will have been handled according to all the rites: "être en
de me dire que j'aurai manié ..." (261). And still now the rit
circular dance is itself divided by doubt, its frames framing the
empty center: "Diversion, alibi, rite purificatoire: cet ouvrag
j'attendais qu'une règle en émerge, mais qui ne m'aide ni à faire n
faire (puisqu'il n'en résulte à peu près rien sauf que, précisémen
persiste à le faire . . .) 'machine tournant à vide . . .'" (284).
visual and verbal model in the text repeats its game and itself,
identification of autobiography is underlined, in practicing self
same, equally trying: "Je ne fais que jouer mon propre jeu
(310)—Vouloir que mon jeu soit justifié . . .mon jeu consiste à prat
précisément, un jeu: le jeu littéraire ..." (310). At the conclusion,
image of blood makes a renewed procession through a private tr
and a public fair as the narration recalls, in a third-person distan
the hand-washing motif, that willed denial of guilt, returning its
retlection on the neatness ot sen and its tidy posture: toujours a
s'épousseter, s'astiquer, se bichonner . . (380).
Language was to have transfigured life as in certain epiphanic
moments forcing a conjunction between the exterior and the self. The
game, like life, was to have been arranged, with rigor and coherence,
under the sign of some master word such as poetry, acting as keystone
for the verbal edifice of the eye, but such an arrangement may imply
washing one's hands of what is done under the cover of that sign.
However noble the desire to make the two domains meet, outside
and in, to make the parts of the frame match, whether action and
64 Fall 1980

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 Caws

poetry, or beginning and outcome, it ends only with a contrary-to-fact

conditional: "J'aurais aimé trouver le point de confluence," and with
the suggestive image of a fallen bridge, at Avignon. Coincidence, like
vision, is never complete. The three final pages, from January 11, 1975,
some 30 years after the opening lines, tell of a scene occulted, the
memory of a brother whose blood was in fact splattered by a car but
whose image is then tidied up, unspotted, elided in the last grooming of
the text like a funeral toilet. The hands juggling the cards are efficacious
as those cosmetic handlers of the body at the last, those unspotters of
the double scene.

The final frame of the autobiography, then, being the bottom line, is
only partially illuminated, and the partiality is only partially confessed.
A florilège composed for the summing up of the eye is limited by its
absences, by which it is also defined: "ce que je n'ai pas décélé, pas su
formuler, ou répugne à mettre en lumière" (399). Parts of the scene are
darkened, as if to cover the spots remaining after the ritual washing of
the guilty hands at their play, for they are still writing, shuffling and
reordering those pages as flowers are arranged, this final image itself
covering over and ordering the initial spurt and splatter of blood.
Malraux's life sentence echoes here: the truth of a man is what he hides.
"I demand," reads one of the central poetic passages of this last
volume, "a country where the orange tree forever flowers." To place
these blooms in their proper setting requires perhaps, after all, the
arrangement on which the book closes. Not knowing what the deck
holds, we return from the final occluded trace of blood, that spot grown
unbearably large and present, back again to the constellation initially
compared to it, and which is still flowering, like an archipelago latent in
the opening sky. All the cards of the jeu may be shuffled, the pages and
stains and flowers of a life may be rearranged, and in the eye certain
blind spots may be privileged, for the needs of a text.
You are entitled, says the reader to the autobiography, in your own
write. And I too am entitled, autobiographically, to and by my project,
whose lines I choose to open, of which I cannot then wash my hands.
"Ce commencement de moi ..." leads now to its closure. The I-opener
was always directed toward the self and its waking; the lead line lends its
own specific shape to the verbal and visual frame most fitting to the eye
of that self in its spectacles.

City University of New York, Graduate School

Vol. XX, No. 3 65

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