The Ruin of Kasch

Roberto Calasso

THE RUIN OF KASCH

Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon

Contents

THE RUIN OF KASCH

Note for Lucien

Living in the Torrent

Exempla Voluptatis

The Grand Ball

Treacherous Trifles

Dismal Glory

“The Mysterious Force of Legitimacy”

Arcana Imperii

The Origins of Sweetness

Eulogius

L’Autrichienne

The Woodcutter and the Fisherman

Goethe in Venice

On Taste

Metamorphoses of Style

A Belated Nostalgia for Sorrow

The Languor of a Park in Berry

Around Port-Royal

The Ruin of Kasch

Among the Ruins of Kasch

Elements of Sacrifice

Law and Order

The Forest Doctrine

Archives and Will-o’-the-Wisps

Postcards from the Quaternary

The Demon of Repetition

Goethe’s Birthday

Sacrificial Crumbs

The Antiromantic Child

Limits

Process

Glosses on Marx

Ricardo’s Ruthlessness

Geldkristall

History Makes Experiments

The Artificial Barbarian

Un frisson nouveau

Behind the Glass

Bien-aimé

A Visit to Picpus

“The Organization Wouldn’t Like That”

The Moscow Doorkeeper

Montaigne’s Wake

The Wolf-Man Recalls

Voices from the Palais-Royal

Mundus Patet

Letter from Saint Petersburg

Notes

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THE RUIN OF KASCH

Born in Florence, Roberto Calasso lives in Milan, where he is publisher of Adelphi Edizioni. He is the author of an ongoing series of books which began with The Ruin of Kasch and includes The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ka, K., Tiepolo Pink, La Folie Baudelaire and Ardor.

In the beginning the mountains had great wings. They flew through the sky and landed on the earth as they pleased. Then the earth trembled and shook. Indra chopped off the mountains’ wings. He fastened the mountains to the earth to make it stable. The wings became clouds. From then, the clouds gather around the peaks.

TALLEYRAND: I speak at the opening of this book because I was the last person familiar with ceremonies. I also speak, as always, to deceive. This book is not dedicated to me, nor to anyone else. This book is dedicated to dedication.

“Monsieur de Talleyrand is a difficult man to follow around the meanderings of his political life,” said the Duchesse d’Abrantès as she opened the doors of the Salon de M. de Talleyrand.¹ At the entrance, the delicious stuccoes of the ancien régime. By the exit, the bourgeois dining room. At the center, the hypnotic beasts of the Empire stare at us from armchairs. And in rooms to the side we greet the guillotine and the American forests. Toward the far end, a Congress stumbles in the trails of its dances. From every corner Prince Talleyrand’s mots echo among the guests. A delicate tom-tom, an instrument heard for the first time at Mirabeau’s funeral, sounds them out through the meanderings, billets-doux along the way. Mots retold many times over, almost never by the Prince himself, who was so lazy about writing. He entrusted certain terrible truths to the instant of a reply, threw them into the bustle of conversation, risking each time that they might not be picked up. But Talleyrand, who had seen it all, even before he had set off on his journey, always kept a magnanimous faith in at least one thing: in society as a resonant salon, where each time there would be at least one hidden ear to catch what he said. And so those mots, bound up in balsamic bandages, would be passed down over the years as if they were a set of folio volumes. Certain aristocrats, in old age, tend to resemble their servants. Here the Great Chamberlain will gradually become a simple master of ceremonies, keeper of a house of ghosts, tour guide. The meanderings of his life and of his salon will become the context for a cruel performance repeated over and again, though in changeable sequences, in place of the myth that society had forgotten to repeat.

In the salons that softly, tenderly surrounded the Congress of Vienna for one last time, the conversations heard in window recesses and immediately noted down by the secret police didn’t just concern amorous intrigues and what the history books would call the new balance of Europe. One question arose before every other and behind every other: that of transforming once and for all the ṛta, the articulation between heaven and earth that makes life possible and gives it order. It had all begun one day, when the gods, tired perhaps of the solid, opaque primordial turmoil, “wished: ‘What can we do to separate these worlds of ours a little further?² How can we have more space?’ And then they breathed into those worlds, uttering the three syllables ‘vī-ta-ye,’ and the worlds distanced themselves from each other and there was more space for the gods.” And, later, for human beings. It was certainly no longer appropriate to talk about it now. Indeed no one had any clear memory of it. And yet there was still a pressing need to resolve one family matter that harked back to ṛta: legitimizing Legitimacy as its heir. There was a certain embarrassment when talking about Law. But the true word of the moment was the other one: Legitimacy—and the person to grasp this could only be Talleyrand, the man who had always kept a discreet distance from the law. The step was enormous, and therefore needed to be sensed as little as possible, it had to be submerged beneath the surface of society balls and tiresome dynastic (sometimes domestic) quarrels. Legitimacy was the least reassuring word, a picnic among grassy ruins. But hidden behind legitimacy was another word, another realm: the realm of Convention, which was finally leading to absolute power. Until then, Convention had been the eternal cadet branch of the psyche, its power had constantly grown in an unnamable shadow, precisely because it had no legitimacy. In order to become legitimate, it would have to drain legitimacy and dress in its clothes. Now it needed to be recognized effectively, while command was given to facts. This had clearly been reached through political necessity. With the Russian campaign, Napoleon had stirred the ghost of unlimited war, attracted by the land that in itself evokes limitlessness, uncontrollability, hopeless turmoil, Europe’s exit from itself, far from civilization and its douceur. That same limitlessness was already about to show itself in Europe: a diplomatic euphemism would call it “the social question.” The moment had therefore come to give authority to the only power that promised to negotiate on equal terms with the limitless, perhaps even to grasp hold of it (though few at that time were sure about that): Convention as Legitimacy. Time would tell, it would bleach the bones of meaning. Pol Pot and his men roamed the jungle between Thailand and Cambodia. For most of the surrounding world, he was still his country’s sole legitimate authority. The temples turned upside down by his sovereign rule stretched into large numbers of mass graves, dug deep into the ground. The layers of those dead bodies epitomize our own Canonical Phases: the corpses at the lowest level reveal scraps of colored clothing and are the followers of Lon Nol (the ancien régime); they are followed, higher up, by the Buddhist monks (refractory priests); then various civilians (the Public Safety police turn against anyone); and finally the dark rags of the Khmer Rouge themselves (the true Jacobins, the true Bolsheviks, conspirators and renegades). Grave diggers heaped piles of skulls into the forms that Cambodian peasants had used from times immemorial to stack their annual pineapple harvest. In the face of mass graves, history returns to being natural history.

DUCHESSE D’ABRANTèS: When did we all start wearing masks? Let me think … yes, it was before I’d been let out into society, and my sharp-toothed cousins paid me a visit and told me everything … those were the reckless years of the Directory, when purple togas packaged in England were seized at customs … when Bonaparte was received at the Palais Luxembourg by five Directors with plumed hats, dressed in cloaks covered with arabesques and cut in medieval style—yes, they were not yet resolved on Roman Virtue … pale with anxiety before the General whom the sublime Ossian held suspended two inches above the ground … said our dear friend, ours, and everyone’s perennial traitor—Talleyrand, the only one to have succeeded in betraying everything, apart from style … and certainly not out of delicacy but because style is the golden scepter that is ultimately revered by a vast part of this world, and some other … Like a camp of dazed nomads, among pieces of cloth robbed from innocent travelers, this was Paris at that time … Everyone dreamed of the Court, but memories of the correct gestures were already starting to fade … the Directors represented the people, but that was not enough … though still representing someone, they were rather like salesmen setting off to invade the provinces by stagecoach … with their new price lists …

An irrepressible tropism turns the spirit toward Talleyrand: “Once, during my youth, and even later, when I used to love adventure stories and melodramas, I realized that what fascinated me was uncertainty about people’s identity.”³ How can we not experience it over that mask that many called deathly or impenetrable or impassive, while just as many have attributed to it all kinds of infamy and the most unexpected virtues? A mask that had watched over the whole murky course of the Canonical Phases, which themselves had doubtful identities: they did not know, they would never know, whether to consider themselves lucky or unlucky, all marked niveis atrisque lapillis. In the end the only thing that could be said was what Léon Bloy noted in his usual blunt manner: “Evidently God no longer knew what to do about that old world.⁴ He wanted new things, and someone like Napoleon was needed to set them going.” Apart from such harsh certainty, the whole was unstable, and then the outlines of a physiognomy offered themselves as a last mainstay. But there again, all knowledge is physiognomic.

Johann Kasper Lavater, the last savant of physiognomy, asked young Goethe to help him on his Physiognomische Fragmente. Wasn’t he perhaps already convinced about the “general homogeneity of every formation of nature”?⁵ Of course, replied Goethe—and his contribution to Lavater’s work would indeed be pressed further. For him, even objects, clothing, environments were part of physiognomic science: “Nature forms mankind, and mankind is transformed, and such transformation, in turn, is natural; he who finds himself standing in the midst of the vast world creates another world within him, a small world enclosed and protected by walls, and furbished in his image.”⁶

Over fifty years later, the old Goethe found himself leafing through the Collection des portraits historiques de M. le baron Gérard, published by Urbain Canel in Paris, 1826. They were etchings of somewhat doubtful quality that Monsieur Pierre Adam had made from those sumptuous portraits scattered around Europe. Goethe’s friend Boisserée complained, during one visit, about the crudeness of the execution. “My dear boy,” replied Goethe, “we, in our Weimar modesty, are content with such things.⁷ You are too refined and difficult to please.” Goethe spent much time studying those etchings alone. Art was not the point, he was following a physiognomic dream of his own. Leafing through the album, his eye fell on a man he had known on that now famous day at Erfurt, sitting to the right of Napoleon (who had made that embarrassing remark: “Voilà un homme!”). Studying the portrait of Talleyrand, he wrote: “The more we proceed to contemplate this collection, the more important it seems to us.” And yet, in commenting on the portraits of Alexander I, Charles X, and Louis Philippe d’Orléans, his words of appreciation were amiably generic. Only in front of Talleyrand do we feel him sinking into that obscure contemplative stillness from which his finest pages emerge: “Here before us we have the prime diplomat of the century. He sits in perfect stillness and calmly awaits all the circumstances of the moment. Sitting in a room that is most dignified, though not ostentatious, we find him wearing simple and appropriate court dress, his plumed hat on the couch just behind him, as if this homme d’affaires is awaiting the call that his carriage is ready to take him to a meeting; his left arm resting on the corner of the table, beside it papers and quills, his right arm in his lap, his right leg crossed over his left, and he appears to us perfectly impassive. We cannot but recall the gods of Epicurus, who live ‘where it does not rain and does not snow nor does the tempest ever blow’; such is the calmness of this man, untouched by the storms that hiss around him. One can understand how he manages to assume such an appearance, but not how he can maintain it. His gaze is quite impenetrable; he looks ahead, but it is doubtful whether he sees those who are looking at him. His gaze is not looking inward, like that of someone who is thinking, nor is it looking outward, like someone who is watching; his gaze rests in and on himself, like his whole figure, which suggests not exactly self-satisfaction, but certainly some lack of connection with the outside.

“But that’s enough, here we can play physiognomists and interpreters as much as we wish, in any case our understanding will prove too short, our experience too poor, our imagination too limited to give us an adequate idea of such a being.⁸ It is likely that the same will happen for future historians, who can see to what extent this picture of ours will be of assistance to them.”

Concealed in that review that was so superfluous, so marginal for the eighty-year-old Goethe, who still had to complete his Great Work, which remained suspended among the archetypes (and it was essential for him, the systematic and complete being, not to leave it in a fragmentary state), the lines on Talleyrand pointed to a cautious revelation by the Dichter about himself. Goethe, too, knew the art of concealing everything on the surface. An album of engravings of famous people—where the clamor of history is frozen, where looks already tend to dull, as in later illustrations in the Magasin pittoresque—provided an appropriate occasion for someone who purported to be an “occasional poet.” And it was precisely there, rather than in some conversation with Eckermann or other devoted ear, that Goethe had chosen to refer to that long parallel life that had accompanied him in the land of turmoil. After all, he and Talleyrand were the only two beings of absolute significance who had survived it all, from the earliest years of skating and boudoirs up to that dignified, ceremonious, and misunderstood old age. The old age of one who knows too much. Goethe had already taken on the guise of the Grosser Dichter while Talleyrand, at Valençay, received Honoré de Balzac, a writer consumed with curiosity who looked upon him as an ancient, impressive, and delicate kind of lizard; or, worse still, he received the rambunctious George Sand and her band (and Madame de Dino, at the Prince’s side as always, noted: “All in all, very little charm; and the rest of the company totally ordinary”).⁹

In that passage Goethe was sending out a stern warning: don’t fool yourselves—you scholars—into thinking you understand Talleyrand’s gaze, don’t fool yourselves into thinking you understand the polished serenity of the old councillor Goethe. And the game went as far as provocation. Goethe, the “Olympian,” as Germanic kitsch would repeatedly describe him, even resorted to the “gods of Epicurus” to get closer to Talleyrand’s gaze. And yet he must have known that, according to general rumor, that gaze had witnessed almost every possible villainy—and some even of his own making.

The suggested superimposition of the two impassive faces, implied by Goethe, would soon be recognized and declared. Sainte-Beuve—who understood almost everything and tried not to make it too conspicuous—wrote a few lines in this respect in the note introducing the works of Molière, in one of the most attractive illustrés romantiques with the vignettes of Tony Johannot, published by Paulin in Rue de Seine, Paris, in 1835 (Talleyrand still alive, Goethe recently dead): “And nonetheless his [Molière’s] lucidity, his customary coolness of character, at the center of such a lively work, did not lead in the slightest to cold and calculated impartiality, as has been seen in Goethe, the Talleyrand of art: such critical refinements had not yet been invented in poetry at that time.”¹⁰ These, once again, are lines tucked away along the margin so that they are barely apparent. But they were noticed by the sour and irrepressible Barbey d’Aurevilly, who didn’t miss the opportunity of voicing his lordly disdain for Sainte-Beuve’s babouches (“Sainte-Beuve disliked argument, it made his ears turn purple, and his sharp tongue would blabber in anger and spite …”)—and he made it seem like a gratuitous intuition: “Sainte-Beuve once had a flash of inspiration, and called Goethe a literary Talleyrand, today he regrets that correct idea.”^{11, 12} But at that point he, Barbey, weighed in with his sword: “The poseur that Goethe may not have been by nature, but which his admirers had made of him through their excessive admiration, carefully concealed the emptiness of his being beneath his Olympian air, just as Talleyrand, who was no less vacuous, concealed his own beneath the indolent, mocking pose of the supercilious lord who had seen a great deal more …