The Stuff of Coincidence

The Stuff of Coincidence Jed Rasula IN A LETTER DATED SEPTEMBER 22, 1945, Antonin Artaud makes a curious assertion: "Car Jabberwocky n'est qu'un plagiat edulcoré et sans accent d'une œuvre par moi écrite et qu'on a fait disparaître de telle sorte que moi-même je sais à peine ce qu'il y a dedans."1 Artaud claims authorship of Lewis Carroll's famous poem, but he was not even born when the poem was written (and was only two when Carroll died). Artaud's problem with priority is more familiar in another context. During a lecture or a seminar someone else asks the question I was prepared to ask: have my thoughts thereby been pilfered? By what logic do I claim the spoken words of another as my own expression? We cohabit language, and as Bakhtin never tires of repeating , "[t]he word in language is half someone else's."2 What, then, is the legitimate scope of cohabited identity? What ψυχή, what ruah, k'i, atman, esprit, or spirit animates one who reads aloud a poem by Sappho, Li Po, Rumi, Breton? By the same token, whose hand guides the pen or forces the fingers on the keyboard copying out citations? Somewhere along this continuum of displacements a personal voice or expression is presumed to arise, amidst an overwhelming priority of other voices and, below them, the hyperpoiesis by which language, as such, speaks. An incredible presumption: that autonomy might spontaneously arise from the dense matting of alphabetic minima; that the unique might coincide with the commonplace—no less incredible of course than the story of a divine breath animating materia prima. When the infinite is conceived of as inhabiting a finitude, an agon of testimony ensues. For some observers, like Artaud or Judge Schreber, obscenity erupts not as a transgressive protest but as the ultimate impression the divine law performs in the mind of its hapless receptacle—the law, that is, of language , a law simultaneously given as the uncanny (the unheimlich or unhoused portion of being). The coincidence by which Schreber conceives himself the center of the universe is one which locates in coincidence the cohabitation of mortal and divinity, in which a confounding interplay of high and low is enacted as the living god contaminates the human receptacle with bird chatter. Schreber's apprehension that bird song consists of mutilated chunks of human language becomes, for him, proof of the universality of coincidence: that is, all events coincide, co-penetrate in an insidiously libidinal divine scheme. Schreber's mania reanimates the problem of coincidence Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4 71 L'Esprit Créateur as the very stuff of language, its material complication perpetuated fold upon fold, implicating every instance with its double and shadow dimension—and dementia.3 Artaud and Schreber are limit cases, and while they have become icons of linguistic distress, it will be useful to alleviate the eschatological resonance of linguistic alterity somewhat by stepping away from such flamboyant examples. Amidst the elite corpus of inimitably scholastic tales penned by Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" stands out for its audacity. The premise is simple: a twentieth-century man resolves to replicate a few chapters of Cervantes' famous novel, and he succeeds. The conceit is elegant: Menard's replication is to be an autonomous creation, not a mere transcription ; a production rather than a reproduction. Consisting mainly of bibliographic annotations and a retrospective critical assessment, the tale lacks a plot; but such a strategy suggests something about Menard's gambit—that it is meant to abolish time. This is only the superficial side of a more paradoxical and heroic endeavor, that of abolishing temporal distance so as to reconvene time in the image of plenitude rather than loss. Accordingly, Menard's Quixote, while "verbally identical" with that of Cervantes, is "almost infinitely richer."4 Even when stylistic anachronism is not paramount, the ideas expressed will resonate with historical discrepancy—as in the transformation of Cervantes' merely ornamental characterization of history as the mother of truth into a pledge of Jamesian pragmatism by Menard (43). Menard's aspiration signifies a certain verity of "progress" in the arts...