AT THE CAFE IRREAL
(an allegory concerning Irreality)Like the great Caneletto preparing to paint a picture of Venice for one of his Grand Tour patrons, Gustave Flaubert sat down in a cafe and started writing. With his practiced eye he noted the way the cigarette smoke seemed to hang in the air above the cafe's denizens, the elaborate choreography of the waiters scurrying to and fro while nodding acknowledgments of orders (and gratuities) received and, particularly important to his current work, the expansive gestures of a petit-bourgeois sitting off to his left, vainly trying to impress his female companion. Some number of minutes later he was joined by three friends. The first of them, who happened to be the philosopher Socrates, asked Gustave what he was doing. "I'm writing a cafe scene for a novel," Gustave answered.
Socrates smiled and shook his head. "So that you might, I suppose, more accurately describe the shadows on the wall."
Gustave laughed. They had spoken of this before.
"I would prefer to say: to more accurately describe life and the people who, as it were, cast the shadows. To my way of thinking, all we need to do is open our eyes and observe the people around us as their lives unfold and we will have a more complete, more striking, more probing vision of reality itself. I would even go so far as to say that we can, in this way, lift ourselves out of the cave."
"You sound like a scientist gathering data," scoffed André Breton, Gustave's second friend. André was a large man with an air of unpredictability about him.
"So long as it's understood that I attempt to express the characteristic details of the great and disparate body of data gathered, I suppose this might be true," Gustave replied. Remembering something he'd once read, he then added, "Besides, André, it seems to me that you too gather data. As I recall, there was once a publication called 'The Surrealist Research Bulletin.'"
"This is true," André admitted, pausing for a second to light up a cigarette. "Its purpose, however, was neither dialectical nor empirical--you see, we research the shadows that cast the shadows."
Gustav was about to say something when he was distracted by the approach of a waiter. The waiter, who had just delivered a cup of coffee to a gendarme sitting at the table next to theirs, was now asking Gustav's friends what they'd like.
"I guess I'll have a coffee," Socrates answered, after a moment's hesitation.
"For me as well," said André.
Jacques Derrida, the fourth friend, indicated that he too wanted a coffee while Gustav, gesturing at his nearly empty cup, requested another for himself.
The waiter, to their mutual surprise, made each of them repeat their order fully three times before repeating it to himself. Then he dashed off and, while the four friends watched in fascination, repeated the order to a second waiter who wrote it down in a little black book and then repeated it to a third waiter. Finally a fourth waiter came back and, with great solemnity, placed four inkwells on the table. "There you are," he said.
"But," Gustave said, "we ordered coffee."
"Exactly," the waiter replied, walking off.
They stared at the inkwells in silence for a few seconds until André started to laugh. Gustave also started laughing, catching on to what he thought was the joke. There was, however, a trace of scorn in his voice as he chided André for arranging a practical joke at his expense. André took some exception to this, denying that he'd arranged anything at anyone's expense, before adding: "Perhaps you are, and I say this with the utmost respect, a bit too mired in the notion of cause and effect to appreciate the situation."
"Mired enough," Gustave said, rising from the table, "that I feel a need to go to the bathroom and will, therefore, do exactly that. But when I return, I expect this order to be straightened out." He asked a passing waiter where the bathroom was and was directed to go down a short hallway that led off from the side of the cafe. He hadn't gone more than two steps in that direction before the waiter hurried after him and, with an apology, handed Gustav a key ring with several keys on it, explaining that they kept the bathroom door locked. Gustav then continued on his way and was soon standing in front of the door, fumbling through the multitude of keys in the dark hallway and finding that he had to match the appropriate key to no less than four different dead-bolt locks before he could open the door. But instead of a bathroom, he found only a brick wall behind the door.
Gustave returned to the table, fully expecting that André would be laughing at him. André, however, gave no hint of laughing. Instead he was carefully examining the inkwell, as if he still wasn't entirely sure that it was real. Gustave, still supposing himself to be the victim of an elaborate practical joke, decided to temporarily take leave of the situation. He was aided in that decision by the sight of a female acquaintance of his, with whom he had hopes for a liason d' amour, walking unaccompanied past the café along the sidewalk outside. Making his excuses and indicating that he'd be back in a few minutes, Gustav grabbed his coat and started to make his way out of the café.
When he stepped through the door, however, he found himself back in the cafe, standing once again in front of that same door, the one that had seemed to offer him, just a moment before, the possibility of an escape. He tried going through it again with the same result. And again, and then yet again. Meanwhile his acquaintance continued down the street until she finally disappeared into the shadows.
Gustav finally gave up and returned to the table. Knowing that even André was incapable of pulling off such a stunt, he said nothing. André, needless to say, wasted no time in driving his point home. "You know," he said to Gustave, "they often say that fact is stranger than fiction. And yet, I think what they're really saying is that fact is stranger than your fiction--they certainly wouldn't say it about mine."
"Uh-huh," Gustave mumbled, not really in the mood for a discussion.
André, however, was not about to let the matter drop. "So come now," he chided Gustav, "take out that notebook of yours and start writing some more about this cafe. You wanted to capture its essence and that's what we're now seeing, though it could certainly be said to be an essence en désarroi."
Gustave, knowing that André was very much aware of the fact that such occurrences were irreconcilable with his fiction, did not dignify André with an answer. Into the silence, however, stepped Socrates, looking as though the wisdom of the ages had suddenly been confirmed. "I believe," he proclaimed, "that this proves a point about the true nature of reality." Here he paused for a second to consider the possibility of having a meaningful dialogue with this group--with the suddenly sullen Gustave, the ever-obscufatory Jacques, and André, who would say anything to be au contraire, even when he knew that it flew fully in the face of reason--and decided that there wasn't any. Instead he arranged to have two of the waiters sit at the table. Once they were settled in, he asked them:
"Could it not be reasonably asserted, based on our good friend Gustave's experience here today, that we can neither see nor hear anything accurately? And if sight and sound aren't reliable, wouldn't the other, inferior senses be even more so?"
"Of course," the first waiter said.
"So when, I ask, does the soul attain to truth? For it seems anything considered in the company of the body is, quite clearly, deceived."
"True," the second answered.
"It is only in thought, then, that something of reality is manifested. Do you agree?"
"Yes," they both chimed in.
"And it thinks best when untroubled by such things as sight and hearing, pain or pleasure; when it is alone by itself, taking leave of this body and, doing its best to avoid all association or contact therewith, reaches out towards reality."
"That is so," said the first.
"Thus the soul of a philosopher utterly despises the body, shunning it and striving to be alone by itself."
"It is as you say," the second waiter said, reaching over to the first and trying to yank his bow tie off.
"Now for the next point. Do we believe there is such a thing as absolute justice, or not?"
"'We' certainly believe there is," answered the first, before pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket, wrapping it around the second's neck, and then trying to choke him with it.
"And absolute beauty and goodness?"
"If you do, then we do," they answered in unison, though the second had to croak out his answer due to the pressure on his larynx.
"Well, did you ever see anything of the kind with your eyes or any of the other bodily senses?"
"Assuredly not," the first answered, laughing demonically at the second waiter, who had turned quite blue in the face. Despite this, the second waiter managed to get out a verse of a song about the attributes of a woman who performed at the Moulin Rouge.
"Will not," Socrates continued, raising his voice to try and command more attention, "the apprehension of knowledge be done most perfectly by the man who approaches each thing, as far as possible, with the reason alone, and not dragging any of the senses to serve as an ally of thought. Won't such a man, to attain to the knowledge of reality, employ pure, absolute reason in his attempt to hunt down the pure, absolute essences of things?"
"No he won't!" cried out the first. "He'll live and love and experience life and in this way come to wisdom!"
Socrates, taken aback by this outburst, hesitated for a moment while the second waiter, who had appeared to be near death, took advantage of the first waiter's momentary distraction and broke free of his grip. Shouting, "Nonsense, he will shun the senses and employ pure reason!" the second started tickling the first under his arms. The first started giggling uncontrollably and retaliated by tickling the second, who also started giggling. Socrates, deciding that he'd lost this part of his audience, turned to his three friends. "Even you," he said, "are aware that when students of geometry, arithmetic, and the kindred sciences make use of visible forms and reason about them, they are thinking not of these, but of the ideals which they resemble; not of the figures which they draw, but of the absolute square and the absolute diameter, and so on."
"Yes, of course," Breton said with a wave of the hand. "And also, that this means that you, Socrates, utilize this discrepancy between the imperfection of the drawn object and the perfection of the imagined as a stepping stone to your much vaunted 'pure reason,' and negation of the importance of the sensate world. But tell me, Socrates, what do you see in the eye of your mind when I give you two legs of a right triangle, a and b, where a stands vertical and is equal in length to 8 inches and b lies horizontal and is equal to 6 inches?"
"That is, naturally, solved by the theorem of Pythagoras, who was so greatly beloved for his wisdom. Thus, I see a right triangle whose hypotenuse is ten inches."
"Look closer," André persisted. "Close your eyes and look closer. What do you see now?"
"I see the perfection of form," Socrates said confidently. But then, to the surprise of all, he started and opened his eyes wide.
"What is it?" André asked.
Socrates shook his head with disbelief. "I saw a woman's breast. Where I should have seen a right triangle, have always seen a right triangle, I saw a woman's breast. And, furthermore..."
"Furthermore?" André queried, as Socrates' voice had trailed off.
"And furthermore I saw the rest of the woman and, with her, I saw a naked man, also exquisitely perfect in form, and--for the sake of clarity--I must admit that I was disturbed."
Breton, upon hearing this admission from Socrates, the mightiest of all the rationalists, did not gloat. Instead he stood up and, a little bit as though he were Vladimir Ilyich Lenin proclaiming the triumph of the Revolution, said, "Long ago I made a statement to the effect that the day will come when man will recognize love, which is to say, carnal love, for his only master and will honor it even in those mysterious perversions with which it surrounds itself. I say to you that this day has come. That what we have seen in this cafe is not reality, but surreality. That the antinomies that have engulfed and repressed human existence into the deepest servitude--between waking and sleep (of reality and dream), of reason and folly, of the objective and the subjective, of perception and representation, of past and future, have at last been eliminated."
He then looked over at a woman who was sitting by herself a couple of tables over and said to himself, almost as though it were a prayer, "Love, I adore and have never ceased to adore your mortal shadow, your venomous shadow." To his friends he said "Excuse me, gentleman, but in a surreality there is no such thing as a repressed desire," before going over to the woman's table and introducing himself. No sooner had the woman shaken André's hand and told him her name than he proposed a "bout of libertinage" which would involve, specifically, her taking off her clothes, laying down on a bed, and being whipped by André repeatedly until he had found his satisfaction. Before the woman could respond to this extraordinary proposal, however, the gendarme who had been sitting at the table next to theirs stood-up and announced that he was taking André into custody.
"For what?" André asked.
"For offenses to be committed," the gendarme answered and now it was André's turn to look surprised. Before he could protest to the gendarme, Jacques finally spoke up, though (it must be said) not entirely in André's defense.
"André, my friend, I am afraid that for all of your supposed freeing of subconscious desire, you have in the end simply followed the age-old tradition of Western metaphysics and structured your thought in binary opposites. Only you think that you have overcome its constraints because you have reversed the traditional polarity of presence (deemed "positive") versus absence (deemed "negative") and thus good versus evil, rational versus irrational, et al. into a surreal polarity where irrational (in your case, deemed "positive") versus rational ("negative"), evil versus good and ultimately, of course, surreality versus reality. But, because you still hold to such binary opposites, you find yourself equally vulnerable to the supplement. Having observed the events here today, you proclaimed the cafe a 'surreality' and acted thusly. But, alas, the shadow presence of the supplement is always present--here in the form of the gendarme--undermining the distinction you had proclaimed between reality and surreality as it had undermined Gustave's and Socrates' distinctions before. As it always has and always will undermine all such binary oppositions such that they are no longer opposed any more then they are equivalent, or even equivalent to themselves. Where to mean is not to be."
"And what," asked André, as if he still had a point to prove, "is the binary opposite of life?"
"One would suppose it to be death," answered Jacques.
"Then try supplementing it with this, Jacques," André said, putting into practice what he himself had once declared (in the Second manifeste du surréalisme) to be the "simplest" of surrealist acts--that is, shooting somebody--by grabbing the gendarme's revolver and firing three shots into Jacques. The great philosopher-linguist slumped forward, presumably dead. Meanwhile, the gendarme immediately took back his revolver, grabbed André by the arm and forcibly led the surrealist away, leaving Gustave and Socrates sitting in silence at the table, watching with ambivalence the life and death struggle between the two waiters now proceeding apace on the tabletop.(gse)
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