Invasion of the Universe

I wonder how many of those of us who write exclusively on literature and read only novels, poetry, literary criticism and occasionally into related subjects, have an otherwise unaccountable curiosity with another beyond the literary horizon. Many, I imagine. I'm not talking about an interest like Colchester United or clay pigeon shooting but an area of fascination, something studied with no view to an output. 

In my case it's Easter Island. I read books on Easter Island, I watch documentaries on Easter Island and look at webpages on Easter Island. While this isn't quite the revelation – fourteen years ago I wrote about Nicolas Cauwe's Easter Island: The Great Taboo, the best book I've read on the subject – I have yet to read one that addresses let alone answers the question that fascinates me. Despite getting tired of seeing the same archeological facts repeated and the same popular legends raised, examined and debunked, I still look out for new books. The latest is Mike Pitts' Island at the Edge of the World featuring a history and archeology of the island, mostly familiar enough to me, but distinguished for the story it tells of Katherine Routledge's pioneering expedition to the island in 1914 and its hidden archives, a subject in which Pitts is strongly invested.

 But why Easter Island? John Dos Passos said his explanation was simple:

When I was a small boy forlornly attending an English preparatory school...some kind of person took me to the British Museum. There I saw a statue. This was a huge rough darkgray statue with a long sad darkgray face. As I remember it stood under some sort of arcade. I stopped in my tracks and stared at it through the sooty London drizzle. The statue stared back out of deepsunken eyes. What was it trying to say? To this day I can remember the feeling it gave me of savage brooding melancholy.

This appears in his complilation of accounts by visitors: from Jacob Roggeveen, the sea captain who named the island after the day in 1722 on which his fleet first sighted it, to Pierre Loti, the French travel-writing sensation, who visited 150 years later, and ending with Passos' own in 1969.

For me, the explanation is not simple. Asking what the statues are trying to say has never occurred to me. I have no interest how the islanders moved them into place or the purpose they served, and no interest if it was indeed the islanders who raised them and not some lost race as argued by Graham Hancock or alien visitors as proposed by Erich von Däniken. Unlike Thor Heyerdahl, I have no interest in where the islanders sailed from to populate the island, and I have no interest in the use to which the collapse of the island's ecosystem has been put by popular science writers as a microcosm of Earth's disastrous ecological trajectory. I have no interest in the rongorongo writing script or the birdman cult. I have no wish to visit the island. And while like Dos Passos I have stood before Hoa Hakananai'a on its platform in the British Museum, I felt no savagery or melancholy. I felt nothing. 

What is it then?

Awareness of Easter Island began over forty years ago when I saw a cartoon of an irritated man with the profile of an Easter Island statue posing for a bust as a sculptor chips away at a block. There are Easter Island statues (known as 'moai') in the background trailing off into the distance, and the caption says: "Get it right this time!". 

OK, not especially funny, but around the same time as I saw the cartoon, and in the same vein of bathetic cynicism, I stuck two Matisse-like cutouts to my bedroom wall and gave it the same title as this blogpost. For all I know the cartoon may have been the catalyst for recognising how a created object becomes something in excess of the world, which is also the repetition of the world in human consciousness ¹ and recognition that 'mind' is in the world but not of the world (not quite), to which writing forms an externalising and sublimating counterpart. Both are directed toward an object, whether that is a real object, an idea or a story. We overlook consciousness and writing in order to see. 

Alfred Metraux, a close friend of Georges Bataille, led an expedition to Easter Island in 1934.  This book club edition with embossed rongorongo symbols was published in 1965. Mike Pitts' history of the island demonstrates this empiricism and reminds us that the reason why the titles of books about Easter Island contain the words 'Enigma', 'Forgotten' or 'Mystery' is because the population of the island was more or less wiped out by disease caught from European visitors and then by kidnapping for slavery. Its folk memory was seriously degraded, if not erased. Our harmless wonder has its origins in violence, as Beverley Haun sets out in detail. Imperial exploration was replaced by imperial possession as the male islanders were captured for slavery, the land was taken over for sheep grazing, and the monumental cultural expressions carved in stone were extracted for European and American collections and museum display. Increasingly, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the island was constructed as a site of impenetrable mysteries. When the reasons for particular creations are obscure, their presence becomes a question. It is this presence that fascinates me, with Easter Island only exemplary, a microcosm of humanity's ritual and artistic compulsions. On a speck of land floating in a vast ocean, there are nearly 900 statues. What effect does the presence of such objects have on those living in their shadow? One moai in a museum thousands of miles away was enough to provoke strong feelings in Dos Passos, so how about nearly 900? I have sought out books about Easter Island hoping one would address the question. Jennifer Vanderbes may have chosen the ideal vehicle for such an investigation with her novel of 2004, but it uses the island merely as the backdrop to a feminist potboiler. Cauwe's book came closest with its focus on the archeology of the moai and why they were lain down (not toppled), reminding us that the moai were supulchral. On a visit in 1886, the William Thomson saw Easter Island as "one vast necropolis" while Pierre Loti noted it seemed "impossible to scratch the ground without stirring human remains". For the islanders, it was like being born into a cemetery. Perhaps this is part of what holds our fascination.   How can we live without the unknown before us?   René Char The most distinctive feature of the moai is the human likeness in coarse volcanic rock, primal material in opposition to the soft machine of human flesh. The other distinctions are the statues' repetition and colossal size. In his book on the colossal, Peter Mason points out that the adjective comes from the Greek kolossos for which size was not of primary importance while characteristics such as "immobility and sightlessness, singleness and verticality" were, each of which can be attributed to the moai, with singleness reoccuring nearly 900 times. He cites Jean-Pierre Vernant's chapter on Greek burial culture in which the kolossos functions as a double for the soul of the deceased person. When a kolossos is used in a tomb as a substitute for the corpse, it is not meant to reproduce the features of the dead man or to create the illusion of his physical presence. What it embodies in permanent form in stone is not the image of the dead man but his life in the beyond, the life that is opposed to that of living men as the world of night is opposed to the world of light. The kolossos is not an image; it is a "double," as the dead man is a double of his living self. 2  'Easter' thereby becomes more than a chance name for the island; the dead individual is resurrected in the moai, only what the viewer sees is not the living person as Christ was seen at Emmaus but that which stands apart from the familiar. The moais' correspondence to the Greek kolossos is confirmed in a report from The Economist about hauntings in The British Museum. Hoa Hakananai'a is a four-tonne statue of a human figure hewn from brownish lava rock, with deep-set eyes, pursed lips and a gentle pot belly. The Rapa Nui, the indigenous people of Easter Island...consider it to be an actual living entity. "This is no rock," the president of the Rapa Nui Council of Elders said last year. "It embodies the spirit of an ancestor, almost like a grandfather." The kolossos is not a likeness because, Vernant continues, it "plays simultaneously on two contrasting planes: at the moment when it shows its presence it reveals itself as not being from here, as belonging to an inaccessible elsewhere", which, Mason adds, "could be applied equally well to an Easter Island moai". So after reading so many books about Easter Island, I found an answer to my question in Vernant's even though it mentions Easter Island not once. That said, the book that drew my attention to it does discuss the various interpretations of the moai's existence. Peter Mason concludes that their failure to put an end to the debate about their existence "is a sign that the invention of narratives will not take us very far in trying to grasp the nature of the moai". This may be what fascinates me: resistance to narrative. Mason believes this is because "they fail to do justice to a presence that reveals itself as not being from here".  What is this presence? Vernant asks a question suggesting an answer:  What is it about the kolossos that makes it stand in such contrast to the world of the living that it seems to introduce into the earthly landscape where it has been erected not simply a stone, a familiar object, but the very power of death, in all its uncanny strangeness and terror? If the young Dos Passos wondered what Hoa Hakananai'a was trying to say, for me, standing in his place, it is the utter refusal of speech, the imposition of an unbreakable silence. For me there is no terror. Perhaps then Easter Island stands for the inverse of a fascination with books – that which does not resist approach because it allows one to deep dive into their pages, enabling speech of a kind in response – thereby acting as a negative counterbalance. Nevertheless, the two phenomena remain as one, as books share the features of kolossai: when closed and shelved, books are immobile, sightless, singular and vertical. We have only to look at social media to see photographs of bookshelves; standing there row upon row, evoking something in us that we feel, perhaps intensely, without being able to articulate, aware of an elsewhere we assume becomes accessible in reading but is never quite satisfied, hence the compensating move in literary culture to instrumentalise content: novels as entries into a contemporary debate, books as encyclopaedia, books as a humanism; fucking storytelling. Reading and writing is, however, "a profession of mute things" as Poussin said of his art. 2 The invention of narrative means we can drown out the silence books present to us, just as the narratives of archeology, anthropology and postcolonial studies drown out the presence of moai; a bookshelf, an island of statues: plenitude of the singular.   Just look at that 3D typeface. The question posed above by the poet René Char prompted me to wonder why the unknown is almost entirely absent in contemporary literature, specifically novels. It would explain the poverty in the paradoxically maximalist direction of the modern literary novel, something I discussed in a post about Enrique Vila-Matas' latest novel in translation. That is, if the unknown in the novel is thought of not as the McGuffin in crime and horror fiction, something demanded to become known by the end, compelling the reader to turn the page, but that which maintains itself before the unknown. Char's question is quoted by Maurice Blanchot in his essay on the poet and "the thought of the neutral", a key word in Blanchot's writings. He cites the language of Heraclitus as an example of Western thought speaking in the neuter and Char's poetry a modern-day equivalent. Heraclitus' words, he says, "are not concepts in the sense of either Aristotelian or Hegelian logic, nor are they ideas in the Platonic sense or, to be precise, in any sense at all". Modern modes of thinking are incapable of accommodating thought like this without sublimation. [O]ne can recognize in the entire history of philosophy an effort either to acclimatize or to domesticate the neuter by substituting for it the law of the impersonal and the reign of the universal, or an effort to challenge it by affirming the ethical primacy of the Self-Subject, the mystical aspiration to the singular Unique. The neutral is thus constantly expelled from our languages and our truths. 4  We mustn't confuse the neutral with a secret. It is not a revelation waiting to occur but a silence with nothing to say. "The unknown is always thought in the neuter", he says. If I detect something of the neutral in the presence of the kolossos, I can perhaps put an end to my fascination with Easter Island. Perhaps I have written this in that hope. To speak at all of an inaccessible elsewhere that has been "introduced into the earthly landscape" is an exceptional task (a task apart from all others). Silence and logorrhoea are exceptional. We might see the latter in Knausgaard's series of long novels premised on the sudden presence of a colossal object in the sky. We live now without the unknown as neuter and Knausgaard's books make this known. There are many more examples of novels that place the unknown before us but, like Knausgaard, remain unable to evade the checkpoints of instrumentalising criticism and reviewing. So while there is no need to herald the death of the novel, the demand must be for critics to turn away from ostensible content, from the about novel, and edge toward the unknown, to death in the novel, on the understanding that death is mute.      Notes 1  Unlesbarkeit dieser    Welt. Alles doppelt.     Illegibility    of this world. All things twice over.         – Paul Celan in Schneepart/Snow Part (and Michael Hamburger's translation) 2 Translated by Janet Lloyd and Jeff Fort.  3 Quoted in TJ Clark's The Sight of Death, a book apparently relevant to this post but, as it is about looking and discovery over time, it moves in the opposite direction.

⁴ In The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson.