Tout est crasse

Nicolas Poussin, Le Triomphe de Cthulu (1633)

Mercredi 10 juillet [1957]

Bref nous vivons au milieu de crétins, en plein crétinisme, chez les sourds et chez les aveugles, que la prétention rend impardonnables puisqu’elle les prive des bénéfices de la naïveté, propre aux limites d’un organisme qui ne se transcende que pour prendre les mauvaises routes. Prêtrise, police, tout cela dans un monde où, s’il existait un humour supérieur au lieu de puissances atroces et bestiales, les hommes seraient sans cesse giflés et bottés par des mains et par des pieds énigmatiques. Mais hélas, tout est crasse, l’éternité, l’infini comme le reste, et la puanteur dont Lovecraft accompagne les manifestations de l’inconnu illustre à merveille la terrible parole de Renan : « Il se pourrait que la vérité fût triste. » Devenue pour moi : « La vérité est triste. D’autant plus triste qu’il n’y a même pas de vérité. »

Jean Cocteau, Le Passé défini, vol. 5, 1956-1957, eds. Pierre Caizergues, Francis Ramirez, Christian Rolot, Paris: Gallimard, 2006, p. 621

In short, we live in the midst of idiots, in complete idiocy, among the deaf and the blind, whose pretension makes them unforgivable because it deprives them of the benefits of the naïveté peculiar to the limits of an organism that goes beyond itself only to take the wrong path. Priesthood, rules of polite society, all this in a world in which, if there existed some higher humour instead of atrocious, bestial powers, people would be constantly slapped and kicked by enigmatic hands and feet. But unfortunately, all is crass, eternity, infinity the same as everything else, and the stench which in Lovecraft* goes along with the manifestations of the unknown perfectly illustrates the grim words of Renan: ‘It may be that the truth is bleak.’ Which for me becomes: ‘The truth is bleak. All the bleaker for there not even being any truth.’

* In 1954, Cocteau had remarked on the stench emanated by Lovecraft’s entities of cosmic evil, when reading Jacques Papy's newly published translations La Couleur tombée du ciel (Paris: Denoël, 1954) and Dans l’abîme du temps (Paris: Denoël, 1954):

[24 octobre 1954] Importance olfactive chez Lovecraft. Son invisible pue. (Ce qui est étrange car il se dénonce par une infecte odeur.) 

Importance of the olfactory in Lovecraft. His invisible [world] stinks. (Which is strange since it gives itself away by a vile odour.)

[14 novembre 1954] L’aspect qu’il donne à ses abominable entités et l’odeur infecte qu’elles répandent autor d’elles ne varient guère d’un conte à l’autre.

The aspect that he lends his abominable entities and the vile odour that they give off varies barely at all from one story to another.

In October 1954, on learning that Hemingway has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Cocteau remarks on the triumph of mediocrity (‘Le médiocre marche tout seul’) and the epoch of journalists who think themselves great modern writers, whereas it took many years for Lovecraft to be translated into French and there are no publishers or translators to be found for Bierce, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu.

Claude Gellée (Le Lorrain), Paysage avec le dieu Cthulu (1634)

Privy matters (2)

Cette distinction est trop obscure, nostre chouse vaut mieux, & puis j’ay mis dehors tous ceux qui n’aiment point raillerie,(*) soyez les bien ventrus,(†) la panse (‡) fait l’homme : je vous prie ça en liberté, y a-il personne de vous qui ait le ventre tendu, qui veuille aller en Purgatoire ? (§) tout est libre & bon en son temps, lieu & endroit ; ce fut un Moyne de S. Denys, disciple de Genebrard,(‖) qui m’aprit à nommer ainsi le privé, pource qu’on s’y purge.

[Béroalde de Verville], Le Moyen de parvenir. Oevure contenant la raison de tout ce qui a esté, est, & sera. Avec demonstrations certaines & necessaires, selon la rencontre des effets de VERTU. Et adviendra que ceux qui auront nez à porter Lunettes s’en serviront, ainsi qu’il est escrit au dictionnaire à dormir en toutes langues, S. Recensuit Sapiens ab A, ad Z. Imprimé cette année [1616] 

* ceux qui n’aiment point raillerie — i.e., the agelasts, whose inability to laugh is a mark of their inhumanity. In the Letter to Lord Odet, Cardinal de Châtillon, Rabelais names the agelasts alongside the cannibals and misanthropes as men that are desraisonnés, devoid of reason, like irrational beasts—solus homo ridet.

† ventrus — portmanteau of ventre and the past participle venu. The ventre/γαστήρ, or material corporeal substratum (материально-телесный низ — Bakhtin), which breaks down food in order for the body to put on new flesh, in an endless cycle of digestion and regeneration, particularly lends itself to jesting, to puns and word play, themselves a process of breaking down language to generate new meanings.

‡ la panse — the gut, bowels, paunch, from the Latin pantex, which was a vulgar term for venter (whence the French ventre), meaning both belly and womb, and, in the plural (pantices), tripe, sausages. The pantex/venter is the seat of the appetite, the material corporeal substratum, which defines and generates man's material nature: la panse fait l'homme.

§ Purgatoire — in Middle French the word could equally refer to spiritual and to physical purgation.

‖ Genebrard — Gilbert Génebrard (1535-1597). Benedictine theologian, Archbishop of Aix, ardent supporter of the anti-Huguenot Holy League in the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598).

This distinction is too subtle, our plan is the better, and I have heedfully expelled all who loathe laughter. I give you all a gut (good) welcome, ’tis the paunch that makes the man; here all is free. If any have tight bellies let them go to purgatory; there is a time for everything and a place too. (It was a monk of St. Denis, a disciple of Genebrard's, who taught me to call the privy purgatory, because it is there that a man purges him.)

Fantastic Tales or the Way to Attain—A Book Full of Pantagruelism Now for the First Time Done into English, trans. Arthur Machen. Privately Printed, Carbonnek, 1923

 

la panse fait l'homme

 

Dialogues of the dead

Passons outre, je sens desia que ce livre nous eschappe, & me semble que je voy desia un frippon de proposant*, qui s’est joinct avec un aspirant à la prestrise mediante coquedindo†, & ils disent que je suis Nigromanchian‡, que je fais parler des morts.

[Béroalde de Verville], Le Moyen de parvenir. Oevure contenant la raison de tout ce qui a esté, est, & sera. Avec demonstrations certaines & necessaires, selon la rencontre des effets de VERTU. Et adviendra que ceux qui auront nez à porter Lunettes s’en serviront, ainsi qu’il est escrit au dictionnaire à dormir en toutes langues, S. Recensuit Sapiens ab A, ad Z. Imprimé cette année [1616] 

* proposant — theology student preparing to become a Protestant minister or pastor.

† mediante coquedindo — by the intercession of a coq d’Inde (turkey cock), i.e., Jesuit. The dinde (Meleagris) was imported to France by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century.

‡ Nigromanchian — ‘nécromancien’, hapax legomenon; ‘negromancer’ (= ‘necromancer’), but with puns on ‘chien’, where ‘chiens’ satirically refers to the theologians engaged in a dialogue of the dead throughout the book, and possibly on ‘manche’.

Come away, I now perceive that this book is slipping out of our hands; I see a rascally Protestant with one that hopes to be a priest, mediante coquedindo; look, they put their heads together and declare that I am guilty of necromancy because I make the dead to speak. 

Fantastic Tales or the Way to Attain--A Book Full of Pantagruelism Now for the First Time Done into English, trans. Arthur Machen. Privately Printed, Carbonnek, 1923

a beam of light (2)

One morning, some eight or nine days after our arrival, I looked out of my window and saw the whole landscape transformed before me. The clouds had dipped low and hidden the mountain in the west; a southern wind was driving the rain in shifting pillars up the valley, and the little brooklet that burst the hill below the house now raged, a red torrent, down the river.  We were perforce obliged to keep snug within-doors; and when I had attended to my pupils, I sat down in the morning-room where the ruins of a library still encumbered an old-fashioned bookcase. I had inspected the shelves once or twice, but their contents had failed to attract me; volumes of eighteenth-century sermons, an old book on farriery, a collection of Poems by "persons of quality," Prideaux's Connection, and an odd volume of Pope were the boundaries of that library, and there seemed little doubt that everything of interest or value had been removed. Now however, in desperation, I began to re-examine the musty sheepskin and calf bindings, and found, much to my delight, a fine old quarto printed by the Stephani, containing the three books of Pomponius Mela, De Situ Orbis, and other of the ancient geographers. I knew enough of Latin to steer my way through an ordinary sentence, and I soon became absorbed in the odd mixture of fact and fancy--light shining on a little space of the world, and beyond, mist and shadow and awful forms.

Arthur Machen, "Novel of the Black Seal", The Three Imposters, 1895