i think; therefore, i am not: a book review of ‘thomas the obscure’
by Dylan Desmond
Many have made the argument that we cannot prove anything exists outside of ourselves. Rene Descartes is likely the most familiar source on the subject with his axiom “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”) aiming to prove things do in fact exist outside ourselves. Any modern scientist would undoubtedly build off this logic citing that with empirical evidence and data things can indeed be proved beyond reasonable doubt. If an item is dropped in open air, it will fall. The sun rises in the East and sets in the West. If a person stands in one place they cannot simultaneously be in another. These things can be observed time and time again to be infallible truths.
But what if these observations were subject to an unobservable scheme, the grandest imaginable, of deception by some kind of power greater than our rational minds could perceive? Perhaps our experiences could be a collective dream of a superior and much more complex consciousness than our own. What if the reality that has been endlessly described and analyzed by humanity in scientific, spiritual, rational, and triangulable fashions was a trick? What if the trick was being contrived by an uncanny aspect of our own self somehow connected and simultaneously disconnected?
In Maurice Blanchot’s philosophical novel Thomas the Obscure, observable reality is drawn into question. Undoubtedly, many of us have experienced instances when we too questioned our own through some uncanny incident or experience. Let us imagine the instances in life when we give way to the waves of an ocean or lake, metaphorical or not, and feel the weightlessness that seemed to carry and then fuse with our bodies. Moments later, if uninterrupted, did the mind not also fuse with the greater pulse of the water? And why shouldn’t they? We’ve observed that our bodies are made of the same substance as the waves in the ocean. Perhaps, the sensation could be compared to observing a drop of water connecting with that of spilled coffee on a saucer; the space between them suddenly vanishes and the two separate bodies of similar substance combine to one in the blink of an eye. Metaphorically, a body will die and years later it’s memory still speaks in a loved one’s ear.
The argument could also be made that the further one wades into that conceptual sea away from land, away from reason, safety, life itself, the less the empirical data of observation can be applied. To follow this analogy is to ponder the conceptual sea as an infinite void of consciousness, given way to its most grim and horrific darknesses as well as bright and beautiful illumination. Likewise, when pondering the uncanniness of living and experiencing sensations and events life, how are we to understand the instant between life and its inevitable end? To what ends is our observation of death dissimilar from the weightlessness of our body and mind fusing with the erratic pulse of the cool waves?
All people have floated in this sea. Nietzsche referenced this void when he claimed the longer one investigated it the sooner it began to look back. This might resemble something we describe as “madness.” At some point could the human concept of ego cease to exist in an observable manner? Could madness reign in that reality was altered so that falling objects did not hit the ground but instead became the ground itself and swallowed the rising and setting suns alike before vomiting them out as ice cubes?
The character Anne, growing fond of Thomas, suffers this journey into madness. Perhaps like Descartes himself, to understand her own self she wades far and deep into the unknown ultimately annihilating her understandings of the world to rebuild them as something firm and observable. To state “cogito ergo sum” is one thing but to observe it with one’s senses, to experience it, is another.
“And she fell among the major circles, analogous to those in Hell, passing, a ray of pure reason, by the critical moment when for a very short instant one must remain in the absurd and, having left behind that which can be represented, indefinitely add absence to absence and to the absence of absence and to the absence of absence add absence and, thus, with this vacuum machine, desperately create the void. At this instant the real fall begins, the one which abolishes itself, nothingness incessantly devoured by a pure nothingness. But at this limit Anne became conscious of the madness of her undertaking.” Pg 63
Returning from this abyss was a pyrrhic sort of transcendence. In this enlightenment Anne came to know the light and the dark, the good and the bad, and all opposites as singular units. Anne had become death and not death and in that hell of contradictions resurfaced in a shell of herself that was both being and not being. In some regard, she had merged with the waves, though instead of finding a firm foundation to stand on instead observed the inevitable intangibility of all foundations. Bodies, relations, language- all are temporary. Being too was observed as temporary like that of nonbeing.
Descartes axiom has often been interpreted by rationalists with a sort of patriotic fervor- “I think, therefore I am.” The statement is meant to be infallible in it’s rationality. It is not “I suspect” or “I feel,” both subject to irrationality and shifting perspectives, but instead presented concretely- “I think, therefore I am.” In the dysphoric introspection the reader observes in Anne’s abyssal plunge, Blanchot explores something less rooted in rationality. He offers an example, albeit fictional, of the irrationality of the human mind and human nature that the surrealists of the time, his name among them, sought to explore.
The world of dreams that is always being and nonbeing in our minds is wholly unpredictable and often unexplainable. It could be said that even recalling and explaining a dream is an inherently flawed effort. Afterall, our subconsciousness, the aspect of the human mind that lurks in the dark waves of our memories and experiences, is not rooted in rational thought nor could it be described with firm science. Of all the Freud’s and Jungs in the world, the deeper the analysis into the subconsciousness the less solid the ground from which the theories are formed. But this is not to say the effort is futile; quite the contrary.
Blanchot captures this irrationality in his illustration of Anne’s dysphoric introspection, ultimately bringing her to her deathbed. Descartes could not use reason and logic to explain this emotional reaction because it is not rational. This is because thinking is not based solely on logic and reason but is dependent on systems that while observable are indescribable. To think is to feel, but to feel is not necessarily to think. Feelings resemble something of an involuntary muscle that while attached to the same system at large will act according to irrationality. Rational thinking follows like an interpreter of the language used by one’s feelings to enact our emotions in rational ways we grow to rely on with age.
With Anne’s Death the reader is brought back to Thomas, who observed her passing from the bedside. While swimming in the beginning of the story, he observes another body further out at sea than himself. The body appears as a sort of doppelganger, but Thomas cannot see into the distance through a fog. He ponders Anne’s death and his own coming to the singular point in time and the moments in which he has viewed himself from other points in time. In contemplation-
“I think, it said, I am subject and object of an all-powerful radiation; A sun using all its energy to make itself night, as well as to make itself sun. I think there at the point where thought joins with me I am able to subtract myself from being, without diminishing, without changing, by means of a metamorphosis which saves me for myself, beyond any point of reference from which I might be seized. It is the property of my thought, not to assure me of existence (as all things do, as a stone does), but to assure me of being in nothingness itself, and to invite me not to be, in order to make me feel my marvelous absence. I think, said Thomas, and this invisible, inexpressible, nonexistent Thomas I became a mint that henceforth I was never there where I was, and there was not even anything mysterious about it. My existence became entirely that of an absent person who, in every act I performed, produced the same act and did not perform it.” Pg 99
Like a drop of water and coffee combining on a plate, Thomas understands he and Anne’s connection. “I was her tragic double.” Both aspects of being and non-being connecting as simultaneously living and dead instances the two shared a current of understanding in ignorance. Like the sun, using all its energy to make itself night.