In Pursuit of a Vanishing Star by Gustaf Sobin. Norton, $13.95.

“the enormity of so much scant evidence” – Gustaf Sobin
“tant d’évidence à travers tant d’énigme” – Yves Bonnefoy

Reviewed by Judith Bishop

Gustaf Sobin is a writer in the ascendant of his gifts, feeling the net he has cast grown heavy, and hauling the glitter in. An American who has lived for nearly forty years in René Char’s native region of Provence, Sobin has published seven books of his own poetry; one translated from Henri Michaux; a book of lyric essays, Luminous Debris; and four novels including the latest, In Pursuit of a Vanishing Star. What one senses through this various activity, as with few other writers, is the unity of an urgent quest, both personal and universal, demanding communication of so much clarity amid so much mystery, to use Bonnefoy’s words. As a reader, one is moved by the writer’s desire to make the echoes of his quest resonate in one’s own existence. Sobin is fascinated by an experience of Being as a luminous and generative power. Yet everywhere he looks, he finds evidence of our estrangement from the source of such experience. His self-given quest is to reconstruct, from what luminous debris there still remains, the lost origins of those artefacts and human lives which once radiated a certain existential meaning, “those long-lost figures, richly embedded in the subsoils of the heart” (Pursuit).

His fascination is never less than ambivalent, however. When in thrall to iconic images, the living substance of the present world atrophies for us; yet in the absence of such icons — or our bright reflection in them — we do not know ourselves. Voicing the difficulty of reconciling Being’s imperative with the social demands of daily life, René Char exclaimed: “why is it poet, that — being alive/ the most alive of all/ you do not/ flower among the living?”  Engaging that question at a slant, Maurice Blanchot responded: the poet is one who is fascinated with — obsessed by — what withdraws. In the movement of withdrawal the object of fascination leads the writer into the solitary and impersonal region of the Image or Idea. If to write is “to arrange language under fascination”, gripped by her Idea, the writer is “seized” and “monopolized” — made ecstatically alive — yet left “absolutely at a distance” from her desire. Sobin clearly apprehends the nature of this fascination.

Sobin’s ontological quest is evident in the plots of his two most recent novels, The Fly-Truffler and now Pursuit, each of which appears an inversion of the other, or the one, an asymptote, and the other, its reflection. In an interview published in NC1, Sobin describes The Fly-Truffler as “an allegory of sorts in which individuals… find themselves caught in a kind of existential twilight”. The allegory of The Fly-Truffler pursues, from a tragic angle, fascination’s consequence. A Provençal linguist, Philippe Cabassac, declines, through the intensity of his engagement with the radiant (and fragrant) image of his dead wife Julieta, into an oneiric daze: in effect, a living death. He had shared with the youthful Julieta a rare passion for the archaic language and landscape of Provence. Yet, in spite of the liveliness of her person, he admits in his journal to a suspicion that “[m]aybe it’s not a person we fall in love with so much as a distance, a depth which that particular person happens to embody.”  In Pursuit, Sobin creates a screenwriter, Philip Nilson, who, facing imminent death from bone cancer, sets himself the goal of capturing the precise trajectory and event of Greta Garbo’s transformation from a poor, plump Swedish teenager into a luminous cinematic icon — a woman whose face, Barthes wrote, “represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced”. Nilson gives voice to Sobin’s dearest theme when he observes, “Wasn’t it exactly… that plethora of sparkling particles that arose — all too rarely — from a lackluster existence, that gave life its veritable dimension? For me it wasn’t what life managed to retain that fascinated but what — under certain privileged circumstances — it so generously emitted.” Ignoring the paradox that no actress playing Garbo could, presumably, hope to replicate the phenomenal effects of the Divine One herself, Nilson seeks with his screenplay to renew the public’s interest in the kind of “film goddess” who — Barthes observed in 1957 — “had long since vanished not merely from the screen but from life itself.”

As Nilson’s involvement with the subject of his screenplay deepens, he acknowledges that this pursuit alone is what sustains his life now: that he needs — has always needed — such “irremediable distances to feed on”, even in his closest ties. Mirrors within mirrors: Nilson postulates that Garbo’s life — much, indeed, like his own — “had been devoted to nothing…but its own evasion”, for “[f]antasy…flooded each and every awakened moment of her existence, and — at the same time — served as stimulant, goad, driving her all the further in the one direction she’d unfailingly take: away.”  Fascinated by the Lolita-like figure of a blond half-sister, Leila, with whom he had an aborted sexual encounter as a teenager (and who herself was clearly a psychic stand-in for his own mother), Nilson is forced to acknowledge — though not exactly to regret — that he has expended his life in search of a luminous, but impersonal and surrogate image, one which, nonetheless, had once seemed to encapsulate the urgency and ardor of Being’s potential: “How could one explain that something that never happened had become — in one’s heart of hearts — the only thing that actually had?”

As often noted, Sobin’s language itself has a luxuriant extravagance about it, a breathless quality — most evident in the frequency of adverbs such as “very” and “indeed”, the insistent repetition of connectives such as “but” and “that”, and the occasional tumbling ride of question after question. Bordering on the excessive, the result is nonetheless entirely congruent with its end: to render palpable language’s ineffectual reaching after states of being whose nature — emanating light and energy, producing effects the traces of which alone linger — is to dissipate.

Published in Verse, 20.2-3, 2004.