La freccia e il cerchio
anno 1, numero 1, 2010
pp. 105-108

5.
David Punter
Death, Story and the Preservation of the Soul

Demons possess souls during the vulnerable period immediately after a death, but stories keep them out. Like Chinese boxes or English hedges, the stories contain tales within tales, so that as you enter one you run into another, passing from plot to plot every time you turn a corner, until at last you reach the core of the narrative space, which corresponds to the place occupied by the corpse within the inner courtyard of the household. Demons cannot penetrate this space because they cannot turn corners. They beat there heads helplessly against the narrative maze that the readers have built, and so reading provides a kind of defence fortification… It creates a wall of words, which operates like the jamming of radio broadcasts. It does not amuse, instruct, improve or help to while away the time: by the imbrication of narrative and the cacophony of sound, it protects souls.

   This passage first occurred, for me, in a curious set of contexts. It is drawn from an essay called ‘Readers respond to Rousseau’, in a book called The Great Cat Massacre (1985) by Robert Darnton; it refers to Balinese customs to do with death, reading and the soul; but I first read it quoted by the late Angela Carter in an article in The Independent in 1992, which was itself a reproduction of the introduction to a volume of her criticism which was just being published – posthumously, for Carter had died the previous month. Even in its original setting, Darnton’s commentary on a specific purpose of reading is necessarily a kind of translation, as all anthropology must be, a translation from one set of practices into a foreign discourse; and translation itself is akin to the process of psychological transference as we seek to relocate our subject position amid a maze of different parents, different cultures, different versions of the dismembered self. Here, all is secrecy: we may find, or seek to construct, a version of Balinese belief, but, as is so evident here, we can only do so by trying to align it alongside assumed points of reference – which, of course, also have their own secrets, perhaps especially around scenarios of death.
   I want to read the text in detail; I want to ‘attend’ to it, but in the process of doing so I am bound to fall into the trap of interpretation. It is not possible, it can never be possible, to attend to a text in all its singularity; one is inevitably, as a reader, on a line of flight, moving away from the object as one seeks to be moving closer to it, finding deafening cacophonies interrupting the slow, patient work of the inner ear. As I read, I inevitably sever most of the connecting filaments which hold the text together; for what no commen- tary, no ritual, can do is resurrect the dead. Carter’s death, for example, curi- ously reinscribed (for me) on this text: it remains an event, as it were, inscribed in the Real, which is also to say that it is inscribed in the margins of this text – whichever text, by now, this text might be, Darnton’s, Carter’s, my own, that of the Balinese – as an ever-prevailing mark that even the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction is not reduced to a simulacrum but inevitably incarnates, makes manifest, something larger than itself.

   Of Singularity, Protection and the Machine

   That specific ‘something larger’ here could be related to Jungian notions of coincidence; we have the undecidability of what we are to do with a posthumous quotation which speaks of the force of words themselves in protecting the souls of, not only the dead, but those who have died recently, those who are in the most vulnerable stage of their evolution; as, by implication, Carter was, within the inner courtyard of this complicated house of language. A house of language also, of course, constantly changing in shape and even in building materials, such that even as I write ‘mechanical reproduction’ I am aware that all has changed since Walter Benjamin’s day, that the very notion of the ‘mechanical’ is now arranged against quite different terms – ‘machinic’, ‘electronic’, automatic and so forth – which turn the ‘mechanical’ on its head, from its associations with the futuristic fantasies of the Italians and Russians between the wars to a relegation to an old-fashioned regime of heavy engineering, repetitive manual work, all the features of social and economic life which are now seen as opposed to (inferior to, abjected by) ‘liquid modernity’.
   Language plays its part too, obviously, in any discourse which dares to use the term ‘soul’: and what I have meant by it over the years when I have been writing about it, trying to save it for critical purposes, trying to breathe into it a new lease of life and let the old ghost live, has also changed: beyond, one might say, all recognition. It now seems to take its place alongside discourses of ‘singularity’ and ‘natality’: to reference a point at which categories, histories and interpretations run out, a point at which we can no longer speak of the ‘mechanical reproduction’ of the generations without being aware of the aggressivity, the instrumental inflections, which attend on any discourse which does not attempt to recognise the singular irreducible. I shall (usually) continue to refer to this singular irreducible as soul.
   But we need a space in which more can be said about soul. Historically it has often been spoken of as that which has to do with the union, actual or virtual, even-handed or under the sign of domination, of mind and body; but clearly this is hardly appropriate in the context of, reading alongside, the secrets of this passage, because it brings us into the presence of that which survives mortality. Yet perhaps this is only an added perspective on the same thing: perhaps what we are looking at here is the principle of union – and thus implicitly disunion – between psychic and material, between the imagination and the body. The severance of that central intimacy (sometimes known by psychoanalysts as the Mother of Separation), the image of all other intimacies real and desired, would be no less decisive an event for soul, and for the mak- ing of soulstuff, than events which occur within the realm of union. The vul- nerability of soul would then derive from a mistiness around this very bound- ary; are there secrets here, hidden in the fog, or is there really no more to it than imbrication and cacophony, arrangement and noise?
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