E. M . CIORAN
283
a single breathless voice dominates space and substitutes itself for it. How
his eyes gleamed as he
saw
that mouth, insignificant and yet invading,
omnipresent! One would have thought he was witnessing the ultimate
metamorphosis, the supreme downfall of Pythia!
* * *
Having been fond of cemeteries all my life, and knowing that Beckett
liked them too
(First Love,
one may recall , begins with the description of a
cemetery, which is, incidentally, the one in Hamburg), I was telling him last
winter, on the Avenue de l'Observatoire, about a recent visit to the Pere–
Lachaise Cemetery, and about my indignation at not finding Proust on the
list of "celebrities" buried there.
(I
first discovered Beckett's name, by the
way, thirty years ago in the American Library, when I came across his little
book on Proust one day.) I don ' t know how we ended up discussing Swift,
although now that I think about it there was nothing unusual about the
transition, given the funereal nature of his mockery. Beckett told me that he
was rereading the
Travels,
and that he had a predilection for the " Country
of the Houyhnhnms" -especially for the scene in which Gulliver is mad
with terror and disgust at the approach of a Yahoo female. He informed me
-and this was a great surprise to me, above all a great disappointment–
thatJoyce hadn't cared for Swift. Moreover, he added, contrary to what peo–
ple think, Joyce had no inclination whatsoever towards satire. "He never re–
belled , he was detached, he accepted everything. For him,
there was ab–
solutely no difference between a bomb falling anda leaffalling .
... "
A remarkable judgment, reminding me in its sharpness and unsettling
suggestiveness of an observation made by Armand Robin in response to a
question I once asked him: "Why, after having translated so many poets,
where you never tempted by Chang-Tsu, whose writings, among those of all
the sages, are the most thoroughly pervaded by poetry?" "I have thought
about doing it often, " he replied, "but how can you translate a work that
can only be compared to the
stark landscape ofnorthern Scotland?"
* * *
How many times , since I have known Beckett, have I asked myself (an
obsessive and rather stupid question , I admit) what sort of relationship there
might be between him and his characters? What could they have in com–
mon? Can anyone imagine a more radical disparity? Must one assume that
not only their existence, but his also , is bathed in that "leaden light" noted
in
Malone D ies?
More than one passage of his seems to me like a monologue
