The Hunter Gracchus – Kafka

Two boys were sitting on the wall by the jetty playing dice. A man was reading a newspaper on the steps of a monument in the shadow of a hero wielding a sabre. A young girl was filling her tub with water at a fountain. A fruit seller was lying close to his produce and looking out to sea. Through the empty openings of the door and window of a bar two men could be seen drinking wine in the back. The landlord was sitting at a table in the front dozing. A small boat glided lightly into the small harbour, as if it were being carried over the water. A man in a blue jacket climbed out onto land and pulled the ropes through the rings. Behind the man from the boat, two other men in dark coats with silver buttons carried a bier, on which, under a large silk scarf with a floral pattern and fringe, a person was obviously lying. No one bothered with the newcomers on the jetty, even when they set the bier down to wait for their helmsman, who was still working with the ropes. No one came up to them, no one asked them any questions, no one took a closer look at them.

The helmsman was further held up a little by a woman with disheveled hair, who now appeared on deck with a child at her breast. Then he moved on, pointing to a yellowish, two-story house which rose close by, directly on the left near the water. The bearers took up their load and carried it through the low door furnished with slender columns. A small boy opened a window, noticed immediately how the group was disappearing into the house, and quickly shut the window again. The door now closed, as well. It had been fashioned with care out of black oak wood. A flock of doves, which up to this point had been flying around the bell tower, came down in front of the house. The doves gathered before the door, as if their food was stored inside the house. One flew right up to the first floor and pecked at the window pane. They were brightly coloured, well cared for, lively animals. With a large sweep of her hand the woman threw some seeds towards them from the boat. They ate them up and then flew over to the woman.

A man in a top hat with a mourning ribbon came down one of the small, narrow, steeply descending lanes which led to the harbour. He looked around him attentively. Everything upset him. He winced at the sight of some garbage in a corner. There were fruit peels on the steps of the monument. As he went by, he pushed them off with his cane. He knocked on the door of the parlour, while at the same time taking off his top hat with his black-gloved right hand. It was opened immediately, and about fifty small boys, lined up in two rows in a long corridor, bowed to him.

The helmsman came down the stairs, welcomed the gentleman, and led him upstairs. On the first floor he accompanied him around the slight, delicately built balcony surrounding the courtyard, and, as the boys crowded behind them at a respectful distance, both men stepped into a large cool room at the back of the house. From it one could not see a facing house, only a bare gray-black rock wall. Those who had carried the bier were busy setting up and lighting some long candles at its head. But these provided no light. They only made the previously still shadows positively jump and flicker across the walls. The shawl was pulled back off the bier. On it lay a man with wildly unkempt hair and beard and a brown skin—he looked rather like a hunter. He lay there motionless, apparently without breathing, his eyes closed, although his surroundings were the only the only thing indicating that it could be a corpse.

The gentleman stepped over to the bier, laid a hand on the forehead of the man lying there, then knelt down and prayed. The helmsman gave a sign to the bearers to leave the room. They went out, drove away the boys who had gathered outside, and shut the door. The gentleman, however, was apparently still not satisfied with this stillness. He looked at the helmsman. The latter understood and went through a side door into the next room. The man on the bier immediately opened his eyes, turned his face with a painful smile towards the gentleman, and said, “Who are you?” Without any surprise, the gentleman got up from his kneeling position and answered, “The burgomaster of Riva.” The man on the bier nodded, pointed to a chair by stretching his arm out feebly, and then, after the burgomaster had accepted his invitation, said, “Yes, I knew that, Burgomaster, but in the first moments I’ve always forgotten it all—everything is going in circles around me, and it’s better for me to ask, even when I know everything. You also presumably know that I am the hunter Gracchus.”

“Of course,” said the burgomaster. “I received the news today, during the night. We had been sleeping for some time. Then around midnight my wife called, ‘Salvatore’—that’s my name—‘look at the dove at the window!’ It was really a dove, but as large as a rooster. It flew up to my ear and said, ‘Tomorrow the dead hunter Gracchus is coming. Welcome him in the name of the city.”

The hunter nodded and pushed the tip of his tongue between his lips. “Yes, the doves fly here before me. But do you believe, Burgomaster, that I am to remain in Riva?”

“That I cannot yet say,” answered the burgomaster. “Are you dead?”

“Yes,” said the hunter, “as you see. Many years ago—it must have been a great many years ago—I fell from a rock in the Black Forest—that’s in Germany—as I was tracking a chamois. Since then I’ve been dead.”

“But you’re also alive,” said the burgomaster.

“To a certain extent,” said the hunter, “to a certain extent I am also alive. My death boat lost its way—a wrong turn of the helm, a moment when the helmsman was not paying attention, a deviation through my wonderful homeland—I don’t know what it was. I only know that I remain on the earth and that since that time my boat has journeyed over earthly waters. So I—who only wanted to live in my own mountains—travel on after my death through all the countries of the earth.”

“And have you no share in the world beyond?” asked the burgomaster wrinkling his brow.

The hunter answered, “I am always on the immense staircase leading up to it. I roam around on this infinitely wide flight of steps, sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, always in motion. From being a hunter I’ve become a butterfly. Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing,” protested the burgomaster.

“That’s very considerate of you,” said the hunter. “I am always moving. But when I go through the greatest upward motion and the door is already shining right above me, I wake up on my old boat, still drearily stranded in some earthly stretch of water. The basic mistake of my earlier death smirks at me in my cabin. Julia, the wife of the helmsman, knocks and brings to me on the bier the morning drink of the country whose coast we are sailing by at the time. I lie on a wooden plank bed, wearing—I’m no delight to look at—a filthy shroud, my hair and beard, black and gray, are inextricably intertangled, my legs covered by a large silk women’s scarf, with a floral pattern and long fringes. At my head stands a church candle which illuminates me. On the wall opposite me is a small picture, evidently of a bushman aiming his spear at me and concealing himself as much as possible behind a splendidly painted shield. On board ship one comes across many stupid pictures, but this is one of the stupidest. Beyond that my wooden cage is completely empty. Through a hole in the side wall the warm air of the southern nights comes in, and I hear the water lapping against the old boat.

“I have been lying here since the time when I—the still living hunter Gracchus—was pursuing a chamois to its home in the Black Forest and fell. Everything took place as it should. I followed, fell down, bled to death in a ravine, was dead, and this boat was supposed to carry me to the other side. I still remember how happily I stretched myself out here on the planking for the first time. The mountains have never heart me singing the way these four still shadowy walls did then.

“I had been happy to be alive and was happy to be dead. Before I came on board, I gladly threw away my rag-tag collection of guns and bags, and the hunting rifle which I had always carried proudly, and slipped into the shroud like a young girl into her wedding dress. Here I lay down and waited. Then the accident happened.”

“A nasty fate,” said the burgomaster, raising his hand in a gesture of depreciation, “and you are not to blame for it in any way?”

“No,” said the hunter. “I was a hunter. Is there any blame in that? I was raised to be a hunter in the Black Forest, where at that time there were still wolves. I lay in wait, shot, hit the target, removed the skin—is there any blame in that? My work was blessed. ‘The great hunter of the Black Forest’—that’s what they called me. Is that something bad?”

“It not up to me to decide that,” said the burgomaster, “but it seems to me as well that there’s no blame there. But then who is to blame?”

“The boatswain,” said the hunter. “No one will read what I write here, no one will come to help me. If people were assigned the task of helping me, all the doors of all the houses would remain closed, all the windows would be shut, they would all lie in bed, with sheets thrown over their heads, the entire earth would be a hostel for the night. And that makes good sense, for no one knows of me, and if he did, he would have no idea of where I was staying, and if he knew that, he would still not know how to keep me there, and so he would not know how to help me. The thought of wanting to help me is a sickness and has to be cured with bed rest.

“I know that, and so I do not cry out to summon help, even if at moments—as I have no self-control, for example, right now—I do think about that very seriously. But to get rid of such ideas I need only look around and recall where I am and where—and this I can assert with full confidence—I have lived for centuries.”

“That’s extraordinary,” said the burgomaster, “extraordinary. And now are you intending to remain with us in Riva?”

“I have no intentions,” said the hunter with a smile and, to make up for his mocking tone, laid a hand on the burgomaster’s knee. “I am here. I don’t know any more than that. There’s nothing more I can do. My boat is without a helm—it journeys with the wind which blows in the deepest regions of death.”

A Loucura do Dia

Estou traduzindo La Folie du Jour, de Blanchot, para servir de apêndice à minha tese de mestrado. O relato foi vertido ao português somente em Portugal, por um certo Silva Carvalho, tradução da qual encontrei somente um registro na biblioteca nacional portuguesa, referente à edição de 1987 (original aparentemente em 1981), e nada mais. Claro que segundo meus propósitos o mais óbvio seria traduzir parte da obra ensaística de Blanchot, visto que a tese lida mormente com a parte ensaística da obra.Porém tendo sidos traduzidos no Brasil os principais livros desse tipo de Blanchot (O Espaço Literário, O Livro por Vir – recentemente – , A Parte do Fogo, A Conversa Infinita – do qual o terceiro volume encontra-se em vias de tradução, creio) e nada tendo sido ainda feito em termos da obra ficcional, pensei em traduzir algo diferente, um récit, que para quem não sabe é algo entre o conto e o romance. ” A Loucura do Dia ” é uma espécie de relato – se mesmo o conceito de relato aqui não for insuficiente – sobre a experiência de um alguém, alguém que narra, atravessado e dissolvido pela obra que relata. Esse autor, ao longo da narrativa, passa por alguma experiência – da qual só obtemos vestígios – que faz com que perca a visão, e a partir desse acontecimento se opera um deslocamento entre a visão e o poder de relatar, entre a escrita do relato e o relato ele próprio. Desse momento em diante a única versão do que aconteceu é a versão louca de quem experimentou esse acontecimento, justamente a única testemunha cuja ficção pouco fidedigna é a única da qual dispomos. Durante o decurso da coisa, o narrador se depara com a Lei – Lei que na figura dos médicos exige dele que fale, que dê vazão ao relato, que cubra a extensão do visível e mantenha suspensa sua distância em relação a esse todo; ” conte-nos como tudo se passou “, ” nada omita “. Mas o evento foi justamente o que operou a cesura entre toda possibilidade de encontro à distância entre o relato e a ficção que ele relata, entre a verdade da linguagem e a verdade da experiência. Então, no final, o  narrador e protagonista responde com as primeiras linhas do relato que acabamos de ler, e qual não é a surpresa do leitor que, logrado, percebe que o relato que ele acaba de ler é o relato desviado, o único relato que o narrador é capaz de entregar, forçado pela Lei. E a frase final, que diz

” Un récit ? Non, pas de récit, plus jamais “

Vem para confirmar essa suspeita. Está dada, tarde demais, a possibilidade da disjunção que é a narrativa; não essa em especial, mas toda narrativa. 

trechos – 7

“

C’est la dépouille mortelle que Blanchot choisit comme forme exemplaire de l’image et de la fascination qu’elle génère6. L’image n’est pas seulement du côté de la vie, du monde partagé et rassurant du travail et de la connaissance, mais aussi du côté de la mort et de la résistance obstinée qu’elle oppose à toute maîtrise. Elle partage avec la mort ce double sens initial qui “fait que la mort est tantôt le travail de la vérité dans le monde, tantôt la perpétuité de ce qui ne supporte ni commencement ni fin”7. Comme l’image, ce qu’on appelle dépouille mortelle échappe aux catégories communes : le cadavre n’est ni le même que celui qui était en vie, ni un autre, ni une “chose”. L’étrangeté du cadavre met en cause en premier lieu la position, le lieu, la possibilité même d’un séjour : si dans l’opinion commune le cadavre devrait enfin avoir trouvé son lieu propre, en réalité la mort implique tout autre chose que le repos et l’immobilité. Le lieu de la dépouille est toujours en défaut, le cadavre manque à sa place ; il n’est plus “ici-bas” et pas encore dans un “là-haut”. Comme pour l’écriture, pour le rêve, comme pour tout ce qui relève du domaine dangereux de l’image, la manière d’être du cadavre (s’il est licite de parler d’être de l’image) n’est pas simplement de ne pas être. Le cadavre se situe dans l’entre-deux qui sépare et réunit la vie et la mort, l’ “ici-bas” et le “làhaut”, comme l’image occupe une place d’absence entre la réalité qu’elle est censée représenter et sa transposition dans l’imaginaire.Le cadavre double le vivant, il lui ressemble parfaitement sans pourtant lui ressembler, plus beau, plus colossal, plus imposant que lui. Face au cadavre on fait l’expérience limite de la ressemblance par excellence, ressemblance qui ne ressemble à rien. Dans la mort, le défunt n’accomplit pas son identité, ma sa complète ressemblance qui le prive de toute identité, le transforme en “quelqu’un, image insoutenable et figure de l’unique devant n’importe quoi”8.”Demeurer n’est pas accessible à celui qui meurt”9, l’image est sans repos, la ressemblance cadavérique est une hantise, un éternel recommencement qui attaque la possibilité même d’un séjour pour les survivants. “Finalement, un terme doit être mis à l’interminable : on ne cohabite pas avec les morts sous peine de voir ici s’effondrer dans l’insondable nulle part “10 : l’ “ici” rassurant du cimetière est un “nulle part”, une tentative de mettre un terme à l’interminable.

Déjà l’usage linguistique qui appelle “mortelle” la dépouille semble être une vaine tentative de vouloir arrêter cette dérive de la mort, de la confiner dans cette variante souvent oubliée du corps, soumise à une mortalité qui devrait rester étrangère aux vivants (qui préfèrent oublier leur mortalité fondamentale), comme au défunt (qu’on situe déjà implicitement dans une dimension d’immortalité). “

- Manola Antolioli, Images et mimésis dans l’oeuvre de

Maurice Blanchot

Mallarmé – Funeral Libation (At Gautier’s Tomb)

To you, gone emblem of our happiness!

Greetings, in pale libation and madness,

Don’t think to some hope of magic corridors I offer

My empty cup, where a monster of gold suffers!

Your apparition cannot satisfy me:

Since I myself entombed you in porphyry.

The rite decrees our hands must quench the torch

Against the iron mass of your tomb’s porch:

None at this simple ceremony should forget,

Those chosen to sing the absence of the poet,

That this monument encloses him entire.

Were it not that his art’s glory, full of fire

Till the dark communal moment all of ash,

Returns as proud evening’s glow lights the glass,

To the fires of the pure mortal sun!

 

Marvellous, total, solitary, so that one

Trembles to breathe with man’s false pride.

This haggard crowd! ‘We are’, it cries,

‘Our future ghosts, their sad opacity.’

But with walls blazoned, mourning, empty,

I’ve scorned the lucid horror of a tear,

When, deaf to the sacred verse he does not fear,

One of those passers-by, mute, blind, proud,

Transmutes himself, a guest in his vague shroud,

Into the virgin hero of posthumous waiting.

A vast void carried through the fog’s drifting,

By the angry wind of words he did not say,

Nothing, to this Man abolished yesterday:

‘What is Earth, O you, memories of horizons?’

Shrieks the dream: and, a voice whose clarity lessens,

Space, has for its toy this cry: ‘I do not know!’

The Master, with eye profound, as he goes,

Pacified the restless miracle of Eden,

Who alone woke, in his voice’s final frisson,

The mystery of a name for the Lily and the Rose.

Is there anything of this destiny left, or no?

O all of you, forget your darkened faith.

Glorious, eternal genius has no shade.

I, moved by your desire, wish to see

Him, who vanished yesterday in the Ideal

Work that for us the garden of this star creates,

As a solemn agitation in the air, that stays

Honouring this quiet disaster, a stir

Of words, drunken, red, a cup that’s clear,

That, rain and diamonds, the crystal gaze

Fixed on these flowers of which none fade,

Isolates in the hour and the light of day!

 

That’s all that’s left already of our true play,

When the pure poet’s gesture, humble, vast

Must deny the dream, the enemy of his trust:

So that, on the morning of his exalted stay,

When ancient death is for him as for Gautier,

The un-opening of sacred eyes, the being-still,

The solid tomb may rise, and ornament this hill,

The sepulchre where lies the power to blight,

And miserly silence and the massive night.

trechos – 6 – L´Espace Littéraire – appendix

“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,” says Hamlet, “when we have shuffled off this mortal coil . . .” The image, present behind each thing, and which is like the dissolution of this thing and its subsistence in its dissolution, also has behind it that heavy sleep of death in which dreams threaten. The image can, when it awakens or when we waken it, represent the object to us in a luminous formal aura; but it is nonetheless with substance that the image is allied — with the fundamental materiality, the still undetermined absence of form, the world oscillating between adjective and substantive before foundering in the formless prolixity of indetermination. Hence the passivity proper to the image — a passivity which makes us suffer the image even when we ourselves appeal to it, and makes its fugitive transparency stem from the obscurity of fate returned to its essence, which is to be a shade. But when we are face to face with things themselves — if we fix upon a face, the corner of a wall — does it not also sometimes happen that we abandon ourselves to what we see? Bereft of power before this presence suddenly strangely mute and passive, are we not at its mercy? Indeed, this can happen, but it happens because the thing we stare at has foundered, sunk into its image, and the image has returned into that deep fund of impotence to which everything reverts. The “real” is defined by our relation to it which is always alive. The real always leaves us the initiative, addressing in us that power to begin, that free communication with the beginning which we are.

And as long as we are in the day, day is still just dawning.

The image, according to the ordinary analysis, is secondary to the object. It is what follows. We

see, then we imagine. After the object comes the image. “After” means that the thing must first

take itself off a ways in order to be grasped. But this remove is not the simple displacement of a

moveable object which would nevertheless remain the same. Here the distance is in the heart of

the thing. The thing was there; we grasped it in the vital movement of a comprehensive action –

and lo, having become image, instantly it has become that which no one can grasp, the unreal,

the impossible. It is not the same thing at a distance

-255-

but the thing as distance, present in its absence, graspable because ungraspable, appearing as

disappeared. It is the return of what does not come back, the strange heart of remoteness as the

life and the sole heart of the thing.”

Short Husserl

There are thus without doubt irreal objectivities and irreal truths belonging thereto.

trechos – 4

” Therefore it is not the case that objects are at first present as bare realities, as objects in some sort of natural state, and that they then in the course of our experience receive the garb of a value-character, so they do not have to run around naked. This is the case neither in the direction of the experience of the surrounding world nor in the direction of the approach and the sequence of interpretation, as if the constitution of nature could, even to the smallest extent, supply the foundation for higher types of objects. On the contrary, the objectivity, “Nature”, first arises out of the basic sense of the Being of the objects of the lived, experienced, encountered world. “

” Life, as caring, lives in a world and, in the manifold ways of the corresponding relations, actualizations, and maturations, cares for the objects encountered in experience at any particular time and cares for the encounters themselves. The object of the care is not the meaningfulness as a categorial characteristic but, instead, is in each case something worldly which finds its corresponding objective expression and which life itself forms. Meaningfulness is not experienced as such, explicitly; yet it can be experienced. The ‘can’ possesses its own specifical categorial sense; the transition from explicitness to non-explicitness is, in an eminent way, ‘categorial’ (interpretation of the categories!). Meaningfulness becomes explicit in the proper interpretation of life with respect to itself, and thence we can first fully understand what it ‘is’ and ‘means’ to live factically ‘in’ meaningfulness.  ”

Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, pg. 68.

trechos – 3

wired

Um pouco do original…trecho esclarecedor do Heidegger ‘derridiano’ de Theodore Kisiel, no segundo dos grandes livros que dedicou a Heidegger: 

” The primary given is the world, not things, the primary presence is meaning and not objects. The inconspicuous non-objective presence of worldliness and its correlative concernedness takes primacy over the overt bodily presence correlative to perceivedness. World can never be reached by intuition but only by way of understanding and its interpretation, here, by way of the concerned preoccupation by which we get around that world. The basic mode of knowing here is no longer intuition but instead interpretive exposition out of its prior meaningful whole.’ The way of access is the concerned preoccupation of’ ‘getting around’ and not a free-floating and isolated perception of a thing. The view that reality can be found in bodily presence and this in turn in the isolated thing of nature will even more strikingly prove to be a phenomenal and thus phenomenological deception’ (GA Bd. 20, History of the Concept of Time). In the context of the environing world, ‘what is truly given immnediatly is not what is perceived but what is present in concerned preoccupation, the handy within the scope of our reach and grasp.’ Such a presence of the environmental, which we call handiness, is a founded presence. For more original than handiness is worldliness in its ‘pale and inconspicuous presence’, in which the presence of the handy is accordingly grounded, founded. ‘But if this handily nearest, the handy in concern, is already a founded presence, then this applies even more so to the character of reality that we learned about earlier and that Husserl claims to be the authentic presence of the world, what he calls bodiliness’ (GA Bd. 20). Bodily presence is ‘in no way a primary character but rather is grounded in handiness and what is immeadiatly is available within concern’. Bodily presence is the kind of encounter with world-beings that occurs in pure perception, but this can occur only when our getting around the world ‘is denied its full possibility of encounter’. It occurs only when the ‘primarily given and experienced world’, which is in fact our primary encounter, ‘is in some manner blocked’ (GA Bd. 20). It occurs when the looking around that accompanies our getting around the world is interrupted or, noematically, when the referential relations that reveal the environmental thing in its very handiness are breached, as in the experience of the broken hammer, such that it is now merely viewed. Looking around thus becomes looking at, circumspection is modified to inspection, the world-thing decays into a mere thing, its unemphatic worldly presence becomes and obtrusive,’naked’ bodily presence. (Blossen). All this occurs simply by covering up or ‘masking’ the network of relations that constitute the world-thing precisely as wordly. “

Heidegger´s Way of  Thought, pg. 181.

Claro, há toda a idéia do mundo e do primado da percepção em conjunto sobre o ato isolado, entre outras coisas que afastam Heidegger de Husserl. Mas a imagem do tecido ôntico do mundo rompido faz lembrar algumas referências óbvias às leituras que Jacques Derrida fez de Husserl, principalmente a respeito do intertwining temporal que acontece em qualquer experiência perceptiva, dado o excedente de significação da presença, que a mantém enlaçada na ausência, a corroendo de dentro. 

 

trechos – 2

Do review que Taylor Carman dedicou ao livro de Steven Galt Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning: 

In 1923, before moving to Marburg, for instance, Heidegger wrote to Karl Löwith with the following account of his presentation of Husserl’s work in class: “In the final hours of the seminar, I publicly burned and destroyed the Ideas… I am now convinced that Husserl was never a philosopher, not even for one second in his life. He becomes ever more ludicrous.” And of his lectures that summer he tells Löwith, “The old man will … realize that I am wringing his neck — and then the question of succeeding him is out. But I can’t help myself.”⁴ And in December of 1926, with Being and Time nearly finished, he writes to Jaspers: “If the treatise is written ‘against’ anyone, it’s against Husserl, and he saw it immediately but clung to the positive from the outset. What I write against, only indirectly of course, is pseudophilosophy (Scheinphilosophie).”⁵ The scales eventually fell from Husserl’s eyes, and he would later describe his realization of Heidegger’s duplicity as “one of the most difficult ordeals of my life.”⁶

Como diz o link de um download sobre a relação entre Husserl e Heidegger, not every family is happy 

 

 

trechos

Daqui em diante vou postar trechos breves, indicações formais – formale Anzeichen – de passagens que favoreçam a trajetória que estou tentando desenvolver em minha tese. O trecho seguinte, embora não mencione nominalmente Blanchot, obviamente lhe diz respeito.

De Phenomenology World-Wide, de Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, pg. 462:

” From the start Derrida was critical of Heidegger´s thought on being, strongly recalling that the (metaphysical) opposition between the original and the derivative is only displaced in Heidegger. Once again, it is the thought of presence that occurs in Heidegger´s antagonism between the proper (eigen) and the improper, ‘propriation’ (Ereignis) and ‘dis-propriation’ (Enteignis), ‘authenticity’ (Eigentlichkeit) and inauthenticity, ‘appropriation’ (Zueignung, Aneignung) and forgetting, etc.  ‘ Heidegger´s problematic’, Derrida says, ‘is the most profound’ and ‘powerful’ defense of what I am trying to query, under the title of thought of presence (Positions). Even in its heideggerian form, this antagonism indicates at first, one might say, the necessity of returning to a purity of origin, of a Schritt zurück or an Aufhebung towards the ‘thing itself’ in its pure immediate presence. In this sense it must be replaced by the irreducibility of the difference between the ideal and the real, by the necessary interlacing of presence and non-presence. The absolute and original presence to self in the transcendental experience is never pure. Necessarily, it always reveals itself as already contaminated by non-presence, non-life, by an inalienable non-originalness. “