Cruising Among Ghosts: Hart Crane's Friends

He slowed   (without those friends to keep going, tokeep up), stopped   dead and the head could notgo further   without those friends. . . And so it was I entered the broken worldHart Crane.   Hart

Robert Creeley, "Hart Crane"

The truth may lie in imagining a connectionWith him or with you; with anyone able to overlookDistance, shrug off time, on the right occasion. . . .

Alfred Corn, "The Bridge, Palm Sunday, 1973"

"No great discourse on friendship," writes Derrida, "will ever have eluded the major rhetoric of epitaphios, and hence of some form of transfixed celebration of spectrality, at once fervent and already caught in the deathly or petrified cold of its inscription" (Politics 94). The shift between the fervor and the cold of spectral "inscription" marks an ambivalence that is intrinsic to friendship's rhetoric, and also characterizes two different forms of represention: one celebratory and odic, the other ossifying in its evidentiary registering of the dead. Of course, Derrida means to suggest that these two kinds of representation are of a piece—that the elegiac strain in friendship (or the structure of friendship implicit in elegy) points to an ethical quandary central to the very form of address that brings into focus both friendship and mourning as two resembling (and mutually enabling) modes of relationality. If the elegy permits a unique mourning for and memorization of the unseen and unheard friend, it also goes much further—even excessively so—to provide the formal resources through which friendship becomes its necessary consequence. In the absence of the friend, might elegiac address be tempted to find friendship with those we have never met? What would such a "friendship" constitute? Would it be something like a hallucination? How would we recognize it, and what might its conditions be? To begin responding to these questions, I turn to Blanchot's suggestion that it is the very disappearance of the friend—a disappearance that brings us to the limits of truth and knowing—that felicitously allows for the rigor of something like "friendship" to occur:

We have to renounce knowing those to whom we are bound by something essential; I want to say, we should welcome them in the relation to the unknown in which they welcome us, us too, in our remoteness. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode, into which, however, the utter simplicity of life enters, implies the recognition of a common strangeness which does not allow us to speak of our friends, but only to speak to them. . . . Here, discretion is not in the simple refusal to report confidences . . . but it is the interval, the pure interval which, from me to this other who is a friend, measures everything there is between us, the interruption of being which never authorizes me to have him at my disposition, nor my knowledge of him (if only to praise him) and which, far from curtailing all communication, relates us one to the other in the difference and sometimes in the silence of speech.

(L'amitié 328–29; qtd. in Derrida, Politics 294–95)

The "strangeness" of the friendship Blanchot speaks of here lies precisely in the revelation of a "relation to the unknown," one in which the event of the utter loss of the friend withstands mournful fantasies of consolatory reciprocity. Put another way, the "pure interval" or friendly gap between the quick and the dead suspends the impertinence of ever speaking of someone acquisitively—speaking of rather than to them, recuperating difference through the false promises of a hospitality that welcomes the friend only insofar as he or she is knowable. For Blanchot and Derrida, then, to befriend would be to open oneself to death—to the non-reciprocal welcome of the unknown; but in following such a logic, how might we begin to sustain the very gap that opens between recognizing and averting the dead? How are we to attend to the dead while at the same time refusing to consent to mourning's conciliatory efforts? In what follows, I want to focus (by way of some brief detours through other elegies) on Robert...