The following text appears as the introduction to Pierre Klossowski’s The Suspended Vocation, translated by Jeremy M. Davies and Anna Fitzgerald, published this month by Small Press.
There are certain literary figures who establish themselves in the public eye, who become over time readily identifiable as the face of a movement. It’s almost impossible now to talk about existentialism without thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, or to think of literary modernism without James Joyce and Virginia Woolf springing quickly to mind. Once you begin to interest yourself in a movement or school and dig deeper, however—once you begin to consider how a literary or philosophical movement developed—other figures start to gain prominence. You begin to realize that there are other people who were crucial to the development of, say, modernism—indeed, were once seen as central—but faded from visibility with time: Wyndham Lewis or Henry Green or Dorothy Richardson, for instance.
The Suspended Vocation
by Pierre Klossowski
Translated from the French by Jeremy M. Davies and Anna Fitzgerald
(Small Press, June 2020)
And then there are those figures who seem to flit around the edges of movements without ever being fully involved in any of them, who pursue their own eccentric paths no matter what is going on around them. These are the writers who make up the secret history of literature, the hidden history that’s not easily reduced to movements or trends, and who always waver on the verge of invisibility until you stumble by accident onto one of their books and realize how good they actually are, and wonder, Why wasn’t I told to read this before? But of course you already know the answer: You were not told because it doesn’t fit smoothly into the story those in authority made up about what literature is—it disrupts, it can’t be reduced to the literary equivalent of a meme.
That’s the kind of writer Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001) is. He is not a joiner. He has his own particular and often peculiar concerns, and pursues them. He does not particularly welcome you in. The content of his writing, too, has the feel of a gnostic text, as if you are reading something that, if only you were properly initiated, you would understand in a different way. In that sense his work has an esoteric or occult quality to it—and likewise in the sense that it returns again and again to the intersection of religion and pornography, the sacred and the profane.
This is not to say that Klossowski was standoffish. One of the interesting things about him is that once you finally notice him you begin to see his shadowy presence everywhere in twentieth-century French culture. He was, for instance, an early French translator of Walter Benjamin—as well as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Kafka, among others. When very young, he was a secretary for André Gide and appears semidisguised as a character in Gide’s novel The Counterfeiters, a novel he appears to have helped edit and for which he also made illustrations (which were turned down for being too overtly erotic). The older brother of the painter Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, better known as Balthus, Klossowski was an artist himself, and his work is at once naïve and pornographically explicit in a way that sometimes references occult texts, mythology, and Klossowski’s own prose. He was a friend of Georges Bataille—and indeed Bataille’s own investigation of erotism might best be read in counterpoint to Klossowski. He was involved marginally with surrealists, spent time in a Dominican seminary, was later involved with the existentialists, and wrote philosophical texts on Friedrich Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade that were influential for post-structuralism. His book-length economico-philosophical essay La Monnaie vivante (Living Currency) Foucault called “the best book of our times.” Fiction writer, philosopher, translator, and visual artist, Klossowski worked in many modes and media and seemed to touch the lives of many of the literary and artistic figures we now admire. Indeed, once he’s noticed, it’s hard not to suspect he’s lurking even where you don’t see him.
American readers are not likely to know Klossowski’s work, though a number of his books have been published in English translation, mostly by small or academic presses. They may be slightly more likely to know Klossowski’s art, but usually as a kind of annex to the artwork of his more famous (and equally controversial) brother Balthus. His first novel La vocation suspendue, admirably and lucidly translated by Anna Fitzgerald and Jeremy M. Davies as The Suspended Vocation, is perhaps best known in the Anglophone world, if at all, through the remarkably faithful if loose adaptation scripted and filmed by the Chilean-French director Raúl Ruiz in 1978. The metafictional conceit of The Suspended Vocation (of which more below) would seem to make a movie version quite impossible, but Ruiz rises to the occasion by utilizing different actors and film stocks to represent the same characters and situations in differing interpretations.
Klossowski’s novel is the story of internecine conflict within the Catholic Church hierarchy. At the center of the story is Jérôme, a seminarian who finds himself in the center of a power struggle in which he’s not really sure of the sides or the players, in which any given individual might be sincere or might be hiding their true nature (if there is such a thing as true nature), and in which his own assumptions about where others stand, how they communicate with one another, and what he himself should do, end up putting him increasingly at odds not only with those around him but with himself. There seems to be a sect called “The Devotion,” as well as a sinister, authoritarian order called “The Black Party”—though we are sometimes told that this latter does not, in fact, exist, or might indeed be the official “Inquisitorial arm of the Church.” Klossowski’s narrator extrapolates that “[one] religious order (never explicitly named) able to exercise spiritual terror within the Church [is vying] with a rival order over the question of methods…” The latter group is “like a serpent with coils everywhere, whose segments always reunite,” which seems to have become perhaps unhealthily invested in a folk ritual known as “Our Lady of the White Marriage,” the obscure details of which will eventually seem to be hinted at in a religious fresco that causes Jérôme no end of trouble. Add to that Jérôme’s past life and indiscretions; his former friend and rival Malagrida, a painter; his taciturn spiritual advisor; the louche puppet-master La Montagne (which translates as “The Mountain”); a nun named Mother Angélique, who may or may not be on his side; the seeming heresies of an atheistic priest; and countless other men of the cloth whom Jérôme has difficulty understanding and who may be saying things they don’t actually believe in order to see what he might say back to them…
“L’esprit du grand maître à l’état de souffle explorant” by Pierre Klossowski
© 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Courtesy of the Klossowski estate
Confused yet? It’s a little like a John le Carré novel in which anyone might be a double or even triple agent, but instead of spies you have priests and nuns, and much of the plot and overt explanation has been drained away. The Suspended Vocation is a difficult text in that it keeps the reader in the same suspended uncertainty that Jérôme is in, and asks us to experience his struggle and confusion. In that sense, it strikes me as less of a descriptive text than an experiential one. It is as if, in reading it, you are ritually undergoing Jérôme’s struggle and moving toward the revelation that will most unsettle him.
And yet, you go through it at one remove: Klossowski’s The Suspended Vocation presents itself as a long critical review of a book (that does not exist) also called The Suspended Vocation. The author of the review has strong opinions about that book, makes guesses about what the author intended, and harbors suspicions as to the relationship of what’s going on in the text to the politics of the 1940s. In other words, The Suspended Vocation is an interpretation/analysis of this other The Suspended Vocation, which is about Jérôme’s struggles (and, I would argue, ultimately his failure) to interpret and analyze the hidden political structures of the communities in which he lives.
Central to the book is visual art, the previously mentioned fresco, forever in the process of revision, and which might reveal something of the truth if one knew how to interpret it—but even this is subject to transformation and internecine meddling, with the rival factions perhaps influencing what actually gets painted. The notion of the occult, an idea never too far from Klossowski’s mind, is tied to the idea that something can be revealed and hidden at the same time: an occult truth reveals itself to those who are prepared to see it, but remains illegible to those who are not. What I find remarkable about The Suspended Vocation is that it is a fiction that has the function of an occult text with an absent center. It is a book caught up in interpretation, in the struggle to understand, but also in the frustration of things that escape understanding, the frustration of the struggle to know what is real and what is feigned. Even if the fictive novel that is the subject of the “real” review that makes up Klossowski’s novel might try to provide a climax that wraps everything up, the reviewer is intent on picking that ending apart, on reminding us of all that is not said in it. Klossowski refuses a neat resolution and, in this challenging but ultimately rewarding novel, makes us think carefully and intensely about the way in which everything stable and substantive around us, the more and more we analyze it, threatens to reveal itself as made of cardboard.
Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen works of fiction, most recently Song for the Unraveling of the World. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts.
Banner image: “L’ombre luxurieuse” by Pierre Klossowski. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of the Klossowski estate.