Collected Prose

cover to represent mourning, an absent image to stand as a mirror of the ineffable. Other ideas occurred to him. He tested them out, but one by one he rejected them, slowly pushing his mind toward darker and darker hues until, inevitably, he arrived at a deep, unmodulated black. But still that wasn’t enough. He found it too mute, too facile, too resigned, but for want of any other solution, he almost capitulated. Then, just as he was about to give up, he began thinking about some of the artists who had come before him, artists who had explored the implications of eliminating color from their paintings—in particular Ad Reinhardt and his black-on-black canvases from the sixties, those supremely abstract and minimal anti-images that had taken painting to the farthest edge of possibility. Spiegelman had found his direction. Not in silence—but in the sublime.
    You have to look very closely at the picture before you notice the towers. They are there and not there, effaced and yet still present, shadows pulsing in oblivion, in memory, in the ghostly emanation of some tormented afterlife. When I saw the picture for the first time, I felt as if Spiegelman had placed a stethoscope on my chest and methodically registered every heartbeat that had shaken my body since September 11. Then my eyes filled up with tears. Tears for the dead. Tears for the living. Tears for the abominations we inflict on one another, for the cruelty and savagery of the whole stinking human race.
    Then I thought: We must love one another or die . 

    June 2002

Invisible Joubert

    Some writers live and die in the shadows, and they don’t begin to live for us until after they are dead. Emily Dickinson published just three poems during her lifetime; Gerard Manley Hopkins published only one. Kafka kept his unfinished novels to himself, and if not for a promise broken by his friend Max Brod, they would have been burned. Christopher Smart’s Bedlamite rant, Jubilate Agno , was composed in the early 1760s but didn’t find its way into print until 1939.
    Think of how many writers disappeared when the Library of Alexandria burned in AD 391. Think of how many books were destroyed by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. For every miraculous resurrection, for every work saved from oblivion by free-thinkers like Petrarch and Boccaccio, one could enumerate hundreds of losses. Ralph Ellison worked for years on a follow-up novel to Invisible Man , then the manuscript burned in a fire. In a fit of madness, Gogol destroyed the second part of Dead Souls . What we know of the work of Heraclitus and Sappho exists only in fragments. In his later years Herman Melville was so thoroughly forgotten that most people thought he was dead when his obituary appeared in 1891. It wasn’t until Moby Dick was discovered in a second-hand bookshop in 1920 that Melville came to be recognized as one of our essential novelists.
    The afterlife of writers is precarious at best, and for those who fail to publish before they die—by choice, by happenstance, by sheer bad luck—the fate of their work is almost certain doom. The American poet Charles Reznikoff reported that his grandmother threw out every one of his grandfather’s poems after he died—an entire life’s work discarded with the trash. More recently, the young John Kennedy O’Toole committed suicide over his failure to find a publisher for his book. When the novel finally appeared, it was a critical success. Who knows how many unread masterpieces are hidden away in attics or moldering in cellars? Without someone to defend a dead writer’s work, that work could just as well never have been written. Think of Osip Mandelstam, murdered by Stalin in 1938. If his widow, Nadezhda, had not committed the entire body of his work to memory, he would have been lost to us as a poet.
    There are dozens of posthumous writers in the history of literature, but no case is stranger or more obscure than that of Joseph Joubert, a Frenchman who wrote in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth. Not only did he not publish a single word while he was alive, but the work he left behind escapes clear definition, which means that he has continued to exist as an almost invisible writer even after his discovery, acquiring a handful of ardent readers in every generation, but never fully emerging from the shadows that surrounded him when he was alive. Neither a poet nor a novelist, neither a philosopher