T/le Scltool oj tlte Dead
learning to die. Writing is learning to die. 1t's learning not to be afraid, in other words to live at the extremity of life, which is what the dead, death, give uso 1'11 say this in parenthesis: perhaps the de ad man is the one who gives, while the dead woman gives less, 1 don't know. l'm showing my ignorance. Perhaps the dead man and not the dead woman enables us to receive; l'm talking about the father or mother, or whoever is in the pIace of the tĂ ther or mother. Perhaps we can't receive from the de ad mother what the dead father gives us? The de ad man's death gives us the essenti al primitive experience, access to the other world, which is not without warning or noi se but which is without the loss of our birthplace. So it gives us everything, it gives us the end of the world; to be human we need to experience the end of the world. We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn't what we think it is. Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and immortality we carry. We don't know we're ali ve as long as we haven't encountered death: these are banali ti es that have been erased. And it is an act of grace. Dostoyevsky received the world through having lost it (we always come back to the experience of Abraham and 1saac), received it because he was condemned to death, because he was in front of a firing squad and then was pardoned, in extremis. This is grace: death given, then taken back. Of course, l'm only talking about the death of the loved one, it's only a question of love here. And of everything loss brings as it takes away. We lose and in losing we win. This doesn't happen together, it can happen in a deferred, sustained, or continuous manner. As far as Bernhard is concerned, we might say that losing became winning in a fulgurating continuity. He te11s the story of how he began writing: he was hospitalized at the age of eighteen and declared beyond a11 hope. His grandfather, whom he adored, was in the sa me hospital, and doing we11, he te11s us, then suddenly passed away. Bernhard: "1 began to write hundreds and hundreds of poems." This is admirable, because it in-
lO
Tlte Scltool ojt/7e Dead
scribes an overabundance in its apparent realism, an extraordinarily vital stream. "1 existed only when 1 was writing." We comprehend that it is necessary to write, to no longer stop, since not dying and writing have been exchanged. "And since my grandfather the poet was dead, now I had the right to write and I used the entire world, transforming it into poems." Here the cause of this spring of writing, which occurs as an answer, or an erection, as resistance to castration, is said bruta11y. But I prefer to talk about it in terms of feminine sexuality, as a vital spring brought about and ordered by the disappearance of the one who was the source. The grandfather wasn't just anyone, he was the poet, the one who had always loved him, who was everything to him. In "Pertencer" Clarice Lispector has similarly told us how she had been conceived in the hope that her sick mother would survive, in the superstitious fantasy that if the mother produced life she would be cured. 5 Which didn't happen. The mother died. Clarice reveals in a dry voice how after her mother's death she always considered herself to be the soldier who deserted. And yet this happened without her being able to do anything about it. This is what we sometimes have difficulty hearing or accepting: we can do nothing about it. And yet desertion, Bight, impotency, are printed on the classroom wall. They are linked, associated: there is death. The misfortune or fortune-which wi11 make om lives an unending struggle to be fair-is that in 10sillg wc havc somethillg to gaill. Mixed loss and gain: that's our C1"ime. This is what we are always guilty of, guilt we can't do anything about with these unexpected and terrible gains. The first book 1 wrote rose from my father's tomb. I don't know why, perhaps it was the only thing I had to write then, in my poverty, my inexperience, the ol1ly asse!: the only thing that made me live, that 1 had lived, that put me to the test, and that I felt because it completely defeated me. It was my strange and monstrous treasure. I didn't think about a11 this, otherwise I wouldn't have written. For a long time I lived through my father's death with the feeling of immense loss and childlike regret, as in an inverted fairy tale: Ah if my father had lived! I naively
11