As such, there is little that resembles a traditional plot or narrative arc. Like the similarly unnamed narrators in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Blecher’s protagonist is interested in the people, places, and events around him only insofar as they reveal glimpses of larger metaphysical truths. As a result, reading Adventures in Immediate Irreality is a demanding experience. The objects that can set off a new crisis seem limitless, and Blecher pulls no punches when it comes to his narrator’s thoughtful intellectualism. “The fact that I could move, that I was alive,” he thinks, “was merely a matter of chance, a senseless adventure.” Though it seems paradoxical, his humanity itself is a prime example of that arbitrary-precision of the world that so infuriates him with nothing inherently meaningful about human life, he may as well be reduced to a single, static photograph. In another crisis, he sees a photograph of himself and is momentarily unable to determine which of the two is his real state: the man looking at the photo, or the image of that same man gazing back. Because if the doctor was well and truly dead, a band of mice would have to set upon his corpse and extract all the mouse matter he had borrowed during his lifetime to be able to carry on his illegal human existence. The first thing I asked myself when I heard the gruesome news was, “Were there any mice in the attic?” I needed to know. In one memorable crisis, he visits a doctor who he describes as being mouselike because he draws out the r’s in his speech “as if he were munching something in secret as he spoke.” Later, upon hearing news of the doctor’s death, he once more conflates simile with reality: Again and again, he tries to impose a level of transience onto his surroundings but is always brought back to reality by the world’s unwillingness to play along. Why shouldn’t he be a tree? Why wouldn’t a scarf also be a bouquet of flowers? It is this uncertainty, this inability to separate what is true from what is conceivable, that fuels the novel’s hallucinogenic “crises.” The narrator is disgusted by the precision of the universe, by the gloomily deterministic idea that any one thing can be only that one thing and nothing else. Such tragedies-and there are many-reveal, by degrees, the schizophrenic chasm between the world he perceives and the one that actually exists. “Buttons, thread, string-this is what the world contained at the most tragic of moments.”
#ADVENTURES OF HUMAN BEING FULL#
“What good did it do me to see a vase full of dahlias when the only thing there was a scarf?” he wonders. He looks again and sees the scarf, then plunges into despair over this disconnect between his own perceptions and actual reality. His illness shows him a world in which everything is interchangeable, but then dashes the illusion with reality’s unflinching precision.Īt Edda’s, he notices a bouquet of fresh flowers on a windowsill, only to be informed that there are no flowers, and what he saw is actually a scarf. His world is porous and mutable, yet rigidly fixed in place, and in such an environment, his experience of being a tree seems just as real as that of being a human. While characters like Edda are living fairly normal lives and going about their daily routines, the narrator is falling into fits and fevers of delirium in which the most basic elements of life-objects, locations, natural forces-appear to him as being in flux, and yet over time are revealed as eternally resigned to a single, unchanging state. Every object and interaction that the narrator casts his eye upon is muddy with doubt and uncertainty this extends even to his own humanity. This is because Adventures in Immediate Irreality is a novel that fundamentally takes nothing for granted. One of the great strengths of the novel is that by the time the tree revelation occurs, about three-quarters of the way through, I was more than willing to concede that he might as well be a tree, after all. The narrator’s certainty is gradually undermined by his interactions with the world around him, until he bitterly renounces his treeness and accepts that he is doomed to continue on as a middling, confused human being. This is but one scene from Blecher’s novel, and it proceeds from there in a similar fashion to the others. And so resolved, he marches off to see Edda. With that one thought, his humanity transforms. To win Edda’s favor, he deduces in a rare moment of clarity, he must be firm and resolute, just like a tree. He is, himself, struck by this realization quite suddenly.
It is sap that flows through his veins, and branches that extend from his torso. Understandably, he is desperate for his love interest, Edda, to understand. The narrator of Max Blecher’s semi-autobiographical novel, Adventures in Immediate Irreality, is a tree. Translated from the Romanian by Michael Henry Heim (New York, NY: New Directions, 2015)
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