Life is more hellish than hell itself
February 19, 2007Two authors: Akutagawa and Donne, to finally reopen old wounds and begin a new, new year. In Jay Rubin’s new translation of his best short stories, Spinning Gears is the very last, a dark descent into Akutagawa’s own abyss:
Sleep was the only thing that could save me. But all my narcotics were gone. I could hardly stand the thought of being kept awake in torment, but I generated enough desperate courage to have coffee brought to the room and started writing with frantic intensity. Two pages, five pages, seven pages, ten pages: the world of this story with supernatural beasts, one of which was becoming my own self-portrait. Fatigue, however, begin to cloud my brain. I finally left the desk and lay down on the bed. I slept for what must have been forty or fifty minutes. But when I became aware of someone whispering these words in my ear, I came suddenly awake and stood up:
“Le diable est mort.”
Beyond the window and its volcanic stone frame, the night was beginning to give way to a chilly-looking morning. I stood against the door and surveyed the empty room. Clouded in patches by the outside air, the glass of the window on the other side of the room seemed to display a tiny landscape: a yellow-tinged pinewood, and beyond it, the sea. I approached the window with some trepidation, only to discover that the elements that made up the landscape were simply the garden’s withered grass and pond. The illusion had had its effect on me, though, for it called forth an emotion close to homesickness.
Stuffing my books and the manuscript into the bag on the desk, I made a decision: as soon as it turned nine o’clock, I would call a certain magazine publisher and, one way or another, arrange for some money. Then I would go home.
- Spinning Gears, Akutagawa
Akutugawa took his own life at the age of 35, of course, a thoroughly modernized Japanese in a post-Meiji era full of turmoil and upheaval. Murakami calls him a writer of national stature, finding in his work not just superlative writing but also shades of the national psyche, a writer who became iconic of his time and age, etc. In Spinning Gears, we find in his increasingly frantic and incoherent choices and actions the revealing of a man incapable of holding himself back from the darkness (without light, as he thinks as he speaks with the man who lives, ironically, in the attic of the Bible publishing house). We leap from reference to reference, folding ourselves back into the story as Akutagawa dances in and out of reality and his own inner self, finding that, as he falls, we are pulled in, exclaiming and exhorting, foreboding and filled with dread, until the very end. In the same vein, Donne’s Bianthanatos, which I have returned to again and again, he defends (half-heartedly, almost, to defy censure) self-homicide through the laws of nature, reason and that of God. In his appeal to reason, Donne lists men who have taken their own life, great men and lesser ones who, in their martyrdom, were made more than nothing. Death comes to all, by our own hand or otherwise. Words snarl my tongue; it pours outside, I sink further and, then, inexorably, I reach out, vulnerable and shivering, again.
Not suicide, not darkness, not death, this new year, but staring into the abyss, as I am, waiting for myself to come home. I am still lost, after these 2 years.
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