Row upon row of pyres were burned.
Only God knows their number.
Sometimes it happens you get lost inside a book. Sometimes it happens you’re stuck. When, a year after publishing A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance in 1897, Stéphane Mallarmé died of a spasm of the larynx, he left behind the unfinished handwritten manuscript of a project he’d been working on for over thirty years. What kind of project could take over thirty years? A project whose limit seems near, and then not. Any such project can swallow you up. Reviewing The Ways of Paradise could swallow me up. This I fear. On the topic of the pages remaining when silence’s poet went perfectly to his grave, this masterfully convoluted book says ‘the drafts and fragments that have been preserved—despite Mallarmé’s explicit urging that they be burnt after his death—have the characteristics of a concentrated, hieroglyphic sketch’. What was Mallarmé’s Livre to be? Some other time, let’s see. Suffice to say for now that, in its claim to the incomplete, the absolute and the contingent, The Ways of Paradise finds its likeness in Mallarmé’s great project. Translated from Swedish into English by Saskia Vogel, The Ways of Paradise is an assemblage of 199 passages written in and around the concept of the labyrinth. In the language-glass that covers all the lesser-known objects this book puts on display, there is doubleness. Whether about homosexual panic in 1950s Stockholm, the Surrealists’ interest in the history of alchemy, Jerusalem considered as the centre of the world, or the etymology of the word ‘symbol’; the philosophical significance of shells, especially those with a spiral; the presumption of pilgrims or Freud’s take on Da Vinci; André Breton, Paul Cezanne, or Cold War fantasists in Sweden; the Minotaur, or the colonial brutality of the crusaders: every plainly elegant passage here is charged by shadow narratives around the book, its project, its author and its ‘author’. No matter how outlandish the image or the detail, everything scans as a mise-en-abyme—an image of the book within the book. How’s this resignification achieved so absolutely? What is this thing that you’re reading?
*
Subtitled Notes from a Lost Manuscript, The Ways of Paradise starts with a one-page preface by Peter Cornell. Here, in strikingly matter-of-fact prose, the historian and critic lets it be known that the author of this ‘sheaf’ of ‘unnumbered’ pages found among the effects of a ‘familiar figure’ in Stockholm’s Kungliga Bibliotek, the man who for over thirty years had ‘in reverie’ been ‘absorbed’ by ‘an uncommonly comprehensive project’ that as he once disclosed in confidence would reveal ‘a chain of connections until then overlooked’, is not him. Cornell signs off as the editor of these notes. Thus the book opens with a breach of confidence: a tiny slit through which we rush into the body of the work. The juice of the preface is its reticence. With brazen sleight-of-hand, as if it hadn’t crossed his mind, Cornell omits to give this author’s name. Not even an initial is given to refer to this man who supposedly in death left only this: his so-called ‘critical apparatus’, his 199 footnotes. One of many lines explored inside is walking: understanding compared to walking in an ever-widening circle; walking sticks carried by pilgrims to the Holy Land as weapons; flaneurie as a form of automatism. ‘In Voyage en Orient,’ one note remarks on Gérard de Nerval’s travelogue of 1851, critiqued by Edward Said for finding in the East only a stage and company of players in opposition to which Europe could define itself, ‘the Holy Land does not allow focus to fall upon a single vanishing point; instead it dissolves into a vague absence’. In The Ways of Paradise, this vague absence is the ‘author’ himself. The abyme into which every detail is mise is the question of the full manuscript that has ‘yet to be located’, and the withholding of his name. Whatever their reality, the notes are thus transfigured, cast in Caravaggesque light, made allegory. Those questions which transfigure are in turn transfigured too. A short stroll from the library where these notes were ostensibly composed, we read: ‘In the small hours of the night, Berzelii Park became a meeting place for people from the underworld: prostitutes of both sexes, souteneurs and other trouble-makers.’ How does this image insinuate itself into the question of the author? How might it conspire with other linked but seemingly disparate images here? ‘After the crucifixion, Mary Magdalene is said to have been led by a star to Provence.’ In the abyss of the lost manuscript and name, the interpretational possibilities spiral out toward infinity. Often, you glimpse your own reflection in the chaos. Sometimes, the notes seem to know a few things about you—you, specifically. (Are you sure this book was published in 1987? Are you sure it wasn’t written for me? This is how psychosis works. Or was that schizophrenia?) Is this not literature itself?
*
The mythic Cretan labyrinth built to house the Minotaur was not like other mazes. With no crossroads, no blind alleys, no ways of going wrong but turning round, the labyrinth posed a simple question, really; but one framed in a manner so distracted and distracting that even its inventor had a hard time getting out. The Ways of Paradise brings us into the ‘hypnotic’ ‘meandering’, ‘labyrinthine’ folds of the green dress in Rogier Van der Weyden’s painting The Magdalen Reading (a ‘space for a paradoxical element of free, abstract painting in the middle of the century’s meticulous Flemish realism […] a whisper of European mysticism’); through the white and blue intarsia mosaical labyrinths in the nave floors of cathedrals across France (‘in place of the actual road to Jerusalem, the penitent, in prayer and singing hymns, would crawl on their knees along the labyrinth’s paths and passages to finally reach “the centre of the world”’); to Derrida’s conception of writing as ‘simultaneously designing and discovering an invisible labyrinth in the desert’, all the while careful to avoid the structure’s most covered passages and paths. No Joyce. No Borges. No Kafka. The original myth cannot but be told, but apart from a flash-forward of an overture some fifty-pages earlier (where Theseus, on leaving Crete, performs a chain dance, ‘whose rhythmic involutions and evolutions imitate the paths and whorls of the labyrinth’, compared with the Scandinavian jungfrudans, or ‘maiden’s dance’), the style here is closer to the preface: nothing showy, or ample, or pointed; nothing that could block or unduly disturb the myth’s historico-conceptual descendants. ‘Every nine years’, it says, though some accounts claim every year, ‘seven young men and seven young maidens’ were sent from the city of Athens and then cast into the labyrinth, horrifically devoured by the Minotaur, as reparations for—a death? I forget, and the notes don’t get into it really. Athens was ‘enjoined’ to ‘contribute’ them, that’s all. That’s enough. One day, Theseus convinces his father to let him join the youths and ‘destroy’ the Minotaur. On arriving in Crete he meets Ariadne. The two fall in love. As well as a sword—this gift omitted by the book—Ariadne presents him with a ball of thread. Instructed to tie it to the entrance as he goes towards the Minotaur—described as ‘half-human, half-monster’—he lets it unspool to record, to remember. With this thread, nicely, he finds ‘his way out’; but also—unmentioned, as well—his way there. ‘The work of art itself traces a journey through a labyrinth,’ an early note remarks of an ink drawing by André Masson, The Invention of the Labyrinth, a chaos of limbs, sexuality, genitals and explosions: ‘Automatism is his Ariadne’s thread.’
*
If you slit all the pages of The Ways of Paradise out, you could shuffle them up and derive a new book every day for the next ten thousand years. But it’s time I found a way out. My guess is that somewhere in the preface a thread has been tied up. Something about reverie—etymologically ‘wander’, ‘wild conduct’, ‘dream’, ‘frolic’ and ‘delirium’—calls out. In a labyrinth collapsing for lack of an author, what kind of an exit will reverie get you? The word crops up in four passages. Walking backwards through the book—for this isn’t the time to walk onwards—I’ll give you the quotes in reverse. The last is on Robert Smithson’s 1967 photographic report, ‘Monuments of Passaic’: ‘With the seeming objectivity of an ethnographer, and aided by a Kodak Instamatic, Smithson renders the city’s overlooked monuments: an old bridge, a pumping derrick with a large pipe, a parking lot. Finally, he stops in reverie in front of a sandbox, a “model desert”. The whole text is given a certain charge—though it is never explicitly stated—by the fact that Passaic was Smithson’s childhood home.’ The previous mention regards Gérard de Nerval, who ‘impregnates this modern landscape of disillusionment with mythologies and reveries drawn from his own reading’. Before that, a short fragment, given here in full: ‘To make a case against reverie, contrary to André Breton’s appeal in the First Manifesto of Surrealism to consider “the case against the realistic attitude”.’ And finally, first, from his book about the cosmos, childhood and language, is this otherworldly passage by Gaston Bachelard, a touchstone for the author of these pages: ‘There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes. These original solitudes, the childhood solitudes leave indelible marks on certain souls. Their entire life is sensitized for poetic reverie, for a reverie which knows the price of solitude.’ That reminds me. Captioned ‘National Library of Sweden (Kungliga Biblioteket) / Humlegården Stockholm’, a long-exposed old photograph on the page before the preface looks for all the world to be archival. But look a bit closer and you’ll see that it’s not. Off to the right, a hundred-odd feet from the entrance, obscured by bare spiralling branches behind him, a little boy on his own stands looking toward us, his face a bit distorted by a spectral figure, still less exposed, who is walking on between us; on, the other way, toward the library. From what I can see—but I could be seeing things—the image has been drawn on very slightly. What is this scene? What is an author? Michel Foucault was once spurned in Uppsala, in Sweden. Anyway, look. I’m out.