Equipoise 129
I spent an hour last Thursday discussing a passage of If This Is A Man with a very bright student, and since then I find myself thinking about this beautiful little paragraph whenever I’m driving. It’s the passage in the first chapter where Levi notes, with characteristic precision, that the impossibility of perfect unhappiness is parallel to the impossibility of perfect happiness: “The obstacles preventing the realization of both extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it, for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief.”
Flaubert and Beckett saw this too, this odd conundrum of not knowing enough and knowing all too well. Beckett’s characters are typically immobilized and unencumbered with all but a few possessions, the better to protect against the encroachment of dubiety. Nothing is assumed and everything is accounted for, as in Company where the merest descriptions of environment and condition have to be verified: “A voice comes to one in the dark…To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again.” Such scrupulousness, and to little avail - the man in the dark is still plagued by uncertainty as to where this voice is coming from, whose it is, whether he himself hasn’t simply invented it for the sake of “company,” and whether the memories the voice speaks of are his own or someone else’s.
Flaubert’s characters chart the opposite course: they begin unknowing and hopeful (about love, learning, society, etc.), and end with the cold certainty of disillusionment, of noticing stupidity and finding it intolerable. As Hugh Kenner says: “…the dimmest novel cannot compete, in obviousness, with middle-class life itself, middle-class life in which people exchange responses a Flaubert can calculate with Newtonian precision, and exchange these under the impression that they are making conversation, by which man is distinguished from the brutes.”
Bouvard and Pecuchet are sympathetic characters to me precisely because of their incompetence; in their pitiable constraints I see my own. Speaking is difficult for me because it entails overcoming the feeling of having nothing to say: do I know enough to say anything about anything? In this I’m grateful for the succor uncertainty provides - it makes me feel better to imagine that I might some day be less narrow and more capable; you never know.