Text 4. On the River

This is an intimate text, a present moment between I and himself, dense, hardly any air or space between them. As with most of the Texts, there are two separate beings, I and he; one has to read the Text as if I and he are separate beings. 

As an initial matter, I (alone) is both father and son: “Yes, I was my father and I was my son, I asked myself questions and answered as best I could, I had it told to me evening after evening, the same old story I knew by heart and couldn’t believe….” (Text 1, 103). At the beginning of Text 4 I asks himself: “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be….” (114) I gives a kind of unanswered-answer at the end of the text. 

He, the other, is writing about I, but I is writing this Text: he, the embodied other, the one who is “living and bewildered,” is thinking, trying to find I, “yes, living, say what he may.” I insists that he will never find I: “I’m not in his head, nowhere in his old body, and yet I’m there, for him I’m there, with him, hence all the confusion.” (114) My heart, in this river//Do you now recognize your image?//Under its crust does it//Swell to bursting in the same way?

He and not I, I says (but the voices are not I’s either), is the one who “tells his story every five minutes, saying it is not his.” (115) I complains: he wants to foist a story on me, he doesn’t even dignify me with the third person, like his other figments, Molloy or Malone. “That’s how he speaks, this evening, how he has me speak, how he speaks to himself, how I speak, there is only me, this evening, here, on earth…” (115)

But I relents. The other, the man above, is a mere figment of I’s (i.e., because, besides the rest, it may be he, the other, is mere figment or appearance), and words not I’s not his. “What am I doing, talking, having my figments talk, it can only be me.” (116) I half-admits to having a life: “There’s my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don’t say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.” (116) Life is a dream, but it is compulsory, and if he, on the one hand, is mere appearance, I is ever more phantom like.

And yet, I is also somehow this other, or has access to the body, is by necessity adhered to the other – the one who comes and goes on earth – even if I stays here, “to breathe is all that is required, there is no obligation to ramble, or receive company, you may even believe yourself dead… what more liberal regimen could be imagined….” (116) These words a failed resistance to or failed justification for words about the exhausting “obligations!” above, Text 3 (112).

I says, “Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible.” I is almost a whole man, above, below. And, as stated in Annotations, perhaps I is also almost restored to the feasible in art, close to being able to write about “a man” as a whole, as the man is able to do in Winter’s Journey. But then “it goes, all goes, and I’m far again….” (116) The text ends ambiguously as if in answer to the questions of the first sentence, “That’s where I’d go, if I could go, that’s who I’d be, if I could be.” I sense I does not care to be above, I would rather be here, far, if I has to be anywhere, and I does. (Why are they always trying to foist a life, a man, on me, on I?)