Charles Du Bos: rumor of footsteps

Silvio Mattoni
UNC/Conicet

What is there in a 'diary', what strange fascination does that genre exert where events unfold

the entries with dates or with indications of entering the days of a life? Itself
An intimate character from the beginning is the subject of all suspicions. Why write, if
Isn't it for an image of the other that one wants to reach? And this in the double sense of
affect someone else, interest them, but also with the impossible longing to become
Another, that is to say: to write in such a way that one could read there what one is, to read oneself.

same.
Let's think about two famously renowned diaries where the subjects exposed themselves,
they describe and recount without hiding their lucidity regarding the gender problem that
they are using. I mean Gombrowicz and Pavese. There couldn't be two figures of
"I" more antagonistic. One writes their diary to reveal a genius that
exile would have left on hold; the other, to analyze the cycles of discomfort
intimate who fights against the tenacious projects of making literature. In summary, without
the need to reread those peaks of the construction of one's own image that
they will necessarily accompany works of fiction – although, in certain cases, how
differentiate what is recorded in the diary from what is supposedly imagined or transposed in
literature as such? - From Gombrowicz we are left with a series of sparks, the ingenium, the
ruthless analysis of others, the gaze that transforms any landscape; by Pavese,
in contrast, the melancholy, the suffering, and finally the transformation of that arduous
effort to move forward in a suicide letter. In the two journals, so different, with
such dissimilar destinations, one to be published and promoted, another to be kept and
exhumed, it seems that the ending gives it that enormously epistolary sense
amplified. In front of the letter from the genius who waits to be recognized and finally achieves it, without

that doubts about the necessary adherence to their originality overwhelm him, there is the letter
of the melancholic that will awaken all shades of compassion and understanding,
but only when I can receive them no longer except the mere book.
 In some way, the final point of the diary, which would be the starting point of his own
publication, produces an unexpected metamorphosis of all the accumulated notes.
As if upon reaching the last line a meaning were fixed that neither the author, nor the events or
registered gestures could prefigure and now throw that supposed intimacy into space
of the public. The newspaper is treasured, but what is published, as is known, goes to the
garbage, it becomes a vestige, a remnant, an incomplete and unending piece that will occupy a niche of

the library.
Kafka's diary, on the other hand, could deny almost everything I have just said.
That is why, perhaps to look for more general and perhaps more futile symptoms of the species
"diary", I approach a character that has no other fiction than his own signature and his
judgments, that writes its speech, as Barthes would say. That is why I stop at the diary of a
French critic, quite famous at the beginning of the 20th century and whose remains are now available.

mortals in old out-of-print editions, his name was Charles Du Bos.

More or less contemporary of Gide and Claudel, although also of the emergence
from Proust, it could be said that these three names outline a triangle that Du Bos
seek to fill, to shade with the light stroke of their critical opinions. But the matter with
the one who thinks, examining details and even making her life an innumerable
the succession of small events is attributed to her dedication to literature
English. From the beginning, then, Du Bos writes the diary of an aesthete, where the
readings, concerts, and contemplative walks do not cease to impose their rhythm on the
everyday gestures. The salvation of a consciousness through art, through the enjoyment of beauty,
Through readings and what can be written, that would be the motto that drives Du Bos every day.
Hence the fascination that the work of Proust produces in him, culminating in redemption of
wasted time, of social life, friendship, and love, thanks to the effort of
composition that transforms the involuntary and fleeting into artistic will. On the other hand,
the literary vocation of his friend Gide reaffirms this devotion of Du Bos that seems
to propose literature as a religion. Claudel, on the other hand, whose work he admires, in a
at first it seems hard, too dismissive regarding the purely artistic,
because precisely in him religious truth matters more than the literary effect. Then
we will see how the triangle is inverted and the Gide-Proust base gives way to the base
Proust-Claudel.
 Let's pause on the book Extracts from a Diary, which covers the period 1908-1928 and
whose Argentine edition of 1947 has a foreword by Eduardo Mallea. He does not hesitate to
to ascribe to the spiritualism that Du Bos seems to lead to, and abundantly cites
Claudel to highlight the inner development of a "soul." But just as, as
In the diary, the decisive date of 1927 approaches and Du Bos has a kind of revelation.
which makes him a practicing Catholic, that inner life begins to lose depth, as if
all the aesthetic furniture that covered it, all the details of appreciation and treasure
of experiences, it should be sacrificed to religious devotion and to an absolute that imposes
its truth above the nuances. Although along the way the notes - which in its
most Du Bos seems to dictate and that's why they can ultimately acquire the whole aspect of a
sermon or religious meditation - always record a concert, an article, the reading of
day and above all the intensity of its effects: the "piercing emotion", the sensation of
exaltation or mediocrity, the ideas that stimulate. Critical impressionism unfolds.
then all their range of resources, which have nothing rushed about them and where the truth
it seeks in the particularity of the subjects and not in the adequacy of the judgments to the
objects. For example, Du Bos acknowledges the literary importance of Flaubert, which elevates the
style to the range of non-negotiable value, but in that same gesture sees the reduction of a
singularity to mere style exercise, where excessive planning would nullify everything
expressive possibility of the "intimate". Thus, in him, "man is the style" and not to
the inverse; 'only admiration remains, prestige is purely verbal. It happens to me
it's always the same with a writer who is not intimate. How many things there would be to say about
the intimate writers and those who are not!" In some way, that perfection of certain
works would not affect me because it would only require an aesthetic appreciation from me, of the
beautiful form, of the compositional achievement, while the fragility of the writer would be hidden from me

and would keep my own fragility at bay. That's why Du Bos is a great reader of
confessions, memories, correspondences, notes on works that could not be carried out.
Thus, the definitive judgment on a book would distance any possibility of affecting others,
prisoners of the same hesitations and who could only recognize their experience in a
image, in its irreducible ambiguity. That image that translates the impression caused by
the book would be the vestige of that singular subject who, in his style or perhaps in the neglect
of his style, he has left his marks. The trial must be suspended or overflow, to propose
always more than one possibility, as if one were observing someone and not something.
Once the word is spoken, writes Du Bos, (even if it is someone else who has spoken it), one is
feels poorer and annoyed, poor at the same time for the possibility that she takes away from us and for

the smallness that has placed it in its place, that is there, before our eyes, in our ears,
"that survives, opaque and childish." To then pronounce a deliberately negative judgment.
(for evil can only be deliberate) is to belittle the other, the work that the other wanted
to become, to the range of substitutable, minimal objects, which we can no longer see or admire. By
the opposite, the celebration, the enthusiastic outburst that leads to speaking well of someone or
Something that someone did can only affirm its uniqueness, its unrepeatable nature.
Instead of the biblical leaf where the foliage of humanity is not changed by its fall,
inexorable moreover, it is replaced and generations follow each other, admiration
marks a particular trait despite the ephemeral body, the fleeting culture in which that must be
to enroll. Refusing to curse, something that is not always possible, the community of the
the just preserve their space. Thus Du Bos: "As long as we refuse to commit those acts or
to pronounce those words, we are like protected by a thick foliage; but barely
one of us gives in, we feel our inner helplessness with a shudder.
Any contempt expressed - because it could instead be felt without reaching
becoming an act – makes visible the possibility that everything can be denounced, shows that
Nothing is admirable beyond impressions, environments, identifications.
Interestingly, Du Bos does not accept this "vanity of vanities" that could be uncovered.
behind the desolation caused by a word of rejection, but would prefer a
luck of eternity for beings and the appreciable works, where no disgust could be
to annihilate its splendor, or perhaps where every singularity could be rewritten,
infinitely. "I deplore such words, such judgments, so much that I wish I could erase them.
with a sponge like chalk on the blackboard.
A few months after this reflection, Du Bos conjectures that the modification of the
Eras, or rather styles, should not be attributed to a rejection of the previous ones, but to an admiration.

sharpened, that only sees the outstanding points of a figure whose imperfections
they recede and become background. Those who are fully aware of 'the qualities
of the age that has preceded them" will have to be modified because they have that
consciousness, superimposed on those qualities whose naivety or emergence
spontaneous cannot be repeated; all of which, concludes Du Bos, "makes them something very
different, sometimes totally opposite.” So probably what seems
the culmination, the definitive moment of a style, that full awareness of the
procedures and contents, whether in truth the opening of 'a new art, a new style'
On the other hand, "without them wanting it," those same subjects whose lucidity distanced them
inevitably from those whom they admired. In modernity, according to Du Bos, that
lucidity is called 'autonomy of style'. Then 'the expression reaches a
intrinsic life, an intensity superior to thought that is in charge of
comunicar”. Podría decirse que una época percibe como estilo lo que en su momento
they were techniques of production or exposure of a thought. And is it not read now?
a style in Du Bos, in his impressions, beyond the truthfulness with which there will be
imagined covering them?
In any case, at least until the appearance of the sacred mantle that covers the
entries from the last years of his diary, fervently Catholic, Du Bos does not assume
a truth to be reached that is not individual. Of course, it is one only, since
the impressions always refer him to that dark, sometimes impenetrable center, in
the wheel to which affections, senses, and the time spent are unraveled
events. If truth is individual, there cannot be several for each one, since
that its manifestation would be the only proof that this element is indivisible. At the same time
unique and unitary, the self of the diary returns to itself as if recovering the thread that
scattered details, the randomness of days, the whims of readings seemed to have
hidden. Nevertheless, that same confusion of records is the constitutive matter of
thread that the diary needs to continue, which it does not hesitate to cling to in order to keep being

written. A sort of apathy can then affect the diarist as they doubt their
own centrality and thus mortally wound the vital proliferation of his diary. Unless that
same state becomes its matter. Du Bos says: “I try to direct the little will.
what I feel towards the act of writing; and the moment I pick up the pen, everything relaxes: a
real physical weakness – but which, barely perceived, becomes a reason for excuse –
it lulls and nullifies my thought; I am then a docile prey to a kind of vertigo
metaphysical by which I assist the unfolding of a reality with which nothing
I can do it; that reality is, despite everything, within me, it's mine, and it's as if it flows alongside

me, parallel to me." It is a perfect description of the state that theologians

medieval people called "acedia", a demonic impotence that particularly attacked
the intellectuals, the scholars, the overly eager readers, and that it turned into vanity
every book, every experience. But Du Bos also points in the direction of the way out of that
marasmus, since it becomes its theme. The annotation in the diary functions as
a kind of remedy against acedia, an exorcism of the meridian demon by means of
of a writing that does not require clear thought, planning, or argumentation
convincing. Negligence, the neglect, which translates the Greek akedía, can be cured or...
they mitigate in the daily that implies a concern for oneself, a self-care. "In
lacquered, Barthes says, I am both the object and subject of abandonment: hence the feeling of blockage,

of trickery, of dead end.” But precisely its record, the testimony of that
state for personal and external uses, it is already an exit, a new springboard towards your face
opposite, the exaltation, the mania of reading and writing. And what stops the hand, that
the real physical weakness of Du Bos, before the pen, the style that must be made, is not a
tiredness from monotony, from the repetition of the same gesture, but rather the anxiety of having
to say always something new. Rather, the atony, that having nothing to say, refers
to the impossibility of repeating those gestures that were successful and defined one's own
uniqueness, as if the style, instead of belonging to its author, got lost in the haze of
a ritual whose rules are now forgotten. The diary is the thesaurus of repetition
yes, it causes the same monotony to reintroduce its own tone, like the silence in which
the tuning note is lost so that the ear can find its replica and the body
start playing.
There then appears, in the confession of the impotence to write, the image that the
registers and from which all writing is triggered; “fascinated
momentarily, writes Du Bos, I convince myself that that single word, that single
images can illuminate thought, manifesting it in its fullest integrity
strict." At each step, in his diary, he will try to find or transcribe the finding of that
word, that image that would define a work, a being, even if deep down it is nothing more than the
translation of a perceived intensity. Du Bos assumes, behind that experience,
beyond reading, a presence: intensity as a sign of someone. Write: "the
What sovereignly matters is the step, the pulse, the heartbeat," that which determines ethics.
the writer's aesthetics and has nothing to do with his ideas or feelings - to
less, clarifies Du Bos, not with those he voluntarily tries to express. This ethics of
a fidelity to one's own time strives to turn a personal fact into a general value, but
it is an unsuspected generality for the self, which emerges from the capture and
elaboration of the fact "precisely because I did not suspect it," just like the pearl, yes
we use the type of image that Du Bos appreciates, ignoring the grain of sand that has given it
origin.
In a way, the organization of a work can fall into the failure of breaking one's own.
step, preventing the intense perception by the other. And there is a certain cruelty in that.
indifference, in perfection. Although precisely about those planned structures,
between its wheels and predetermined rhythms, the moment of carelessness can appear and
someone makes their presence felt, plays their intimate diary, so secret that it has not even been
written, in the space of the most thought-out project. "To counterbalance cruelty, notes Du
Boz, inherent to every organization, it is necessary to spend intervention treasures.
individual." And where will those treasures be found? No map could indicate their location.

localization, because they are forces, energies that thought cannot activate
because they are even at the origin of thinking. How to continue thinking then if what
Does import exist beyond what is voluntarily thinkable? Perhaps not thinking, it will say.
Du Bos, but writing. 'Writing has always constituted for me, above all, and I fear that
It will always consist of a detachment, a calorie expenditure. Hence the notion of
the necessity of the act of writing; physical necessity, implied in the rhythm that is imposed on the
written and that the body rejects when some external opinion, a feared judgment or
longed for, it comes to syncopate it. Nietzsche's aphorism, widely commented on and
defended by Du Bos even against other sayings of the same philosopher - "that they do not exist"
more truths than individual truths" – finds in the need for one's own path
and the fidelity to the rhythm of writing its restriction: to imagine truths when one does not know
nothing but what is done, a single act. "I never know what I am going to say before I write it,"
repeat Du Bos. And what is done, what is going to be said in a diary, if not the sovereignty of that

detachment, that expense of being writing, recording everything that is not known? For
Supposedly, defining one's own in that way would be impossible, unless someone else did it, which is
the ghost of being read that haunts every diary. The only thing that will remain will be
fragments, traits, points, it's just that each one will not be seen in isolation from the rest by a

extensive treatment that yearns to become complete. Even that intensity that
the impressions of Du Bos provoked are nothing more than a shine, a fragmentary glow.
The impression of presence cannot be a thing before the senses. The fragmentist,
As Du Bos says, he knows that "the whole is by definition untreatable," which is why he must adhere.
At the moment of noting, to that particularity and not sacrificing the spark of a theme to the
"the pleasure of artificially uniting them with each other." The fragmentist, and every writer of
diaries it is, does not want to be an intellectual, does not want to organize, but makes art, seeks
"the specific solutions that are always tailor-made."
Such solutions, like diary entries, measured by dates, of some
way they close the circle that goes from the point of unease to the explanation, but in their
course, in the curve, let’s say, that they take towards their provisional, untimely end point,
reveals at the same time what is most one's own and what remains inaccessible. "Ideas are
they rise like partridges, notes Du Bos, and the worst suffering consists in being unable to

stop to catch them in flight"; although the price of this contemplation of prey
Volatile things that cannot be captured end up being another death. The distraction falls under the
shots of abstraction that always aim upward and 'kills even the possibility of
a feeling”. This is Du Bos's ailment: the fragments, the flashes, even his own
impressions about the works they appreciate the most, overwhelm them, drain their strength. And in a

At this moment, that energy no longer seems recoverable.

If Proust salvaged the fatuity of ordinary moments by linking them to a meaning

of individual time whose eternalization would correspond to writing, Du Bos cannot,
at a certain level of saturation, more than sacrificing them to the transindividual time.
He will then look at literature and art from a moral perspective and not from a body that records.
his impressions. And he will admire Claudel to distance himself further from Gide, despite the fact that the

Claudel always describes bodies in transit, earthly powers in

functioning, and does not allow his poetry to sink into a generalizing pietism - that it
leaves for his letters and opinions, for the policy of the Catholic. In fact, Claudel does not believe

of the intimate ecstasies that are recorded in daily logs. In an interview, he/she states:
Keeping a diary, looking at oneself in it, is the surest way to completely distort
"concept of oneself." To which the journalist insists, believing that it is about
differences with the profane, egotistical daily: "And would you issue the same judgment, for
example, about Charles Du Bos, who also kept a diary and who was a maniac of
"intimate diary?" Claudel, demonstrating that for him writing does not occupy the place of
examination of conscience, responds: 'Without a doubt. The Greeks said: 'Know thyself.'
Complete error. One does not know oneself.
the knowledge of the other, for the other who reads and about the other that we believe we are. Claudel

he must have thought that only a transcendent, omniscient Other, prying into our deepest
recondite corner, may know us. The shadow of that supreme reader who deciphers what
never written, the unspeakable, so to speak, outlines a silhouette on the curtain of consciousness
that on certain occasions, in the intensity that distracts from any thought, it can
dancing to the rhythm of words that no longer speak alone, but instead point to a
unrepeatable time, the one that ends with death, always individual.
In a harsh essay on the relationship between Gide and Du Bos, which is like the
confrontation of two newspapers, Pierre Klossowski argues that religious ecstasies
described by Du Bos around 1928 are too similar to pleasant memories
of mundane afternoons from the beginnings of her diary, around 1908, and that 'the religious life,
instead of freeing him from his enjoyment as an aesthete, it would have been nothing but the supreme

object of that enjoyment." Curiously, at that point of maximum internal intensity, if

we believe in the letter of the diary, it is when we least feel the presence of a subject
particular. We were accompanied, happy with the aesthetic and philosophical quirks of the
original critic and the eager professor; we enjoyed his digressions and his narratives,
the way everything affected him, even the collapses, the impotence to write
that the persistent diary only contradicts to record the current state of the ruins. But
in the end, the doubts of the convert are reiterated, the detailed descriptions of masses -
as if the charm or irritation they may produce did not depend on their execution
with few variants - and the intense readings on the presence of other bodies, others
rhythms, names finally, become comments of the gospel or of the saints that
they only reveal an invisible presence, which veils the proper names with its nonexistence
that Charles Du Bos once treasured so much. The same monotony, which is like silence or the
The gap between two diary entries runs the risk of being replaced by an untransmissible one.
fullness. And in the face of that satisfaction of believing, closing a book that we had seen

crossed by the most extreme fragility and the most lucid observations, I can only
find the appropriate image inside and replace it, through a similar hand game
by the author, one name for another: 'The poetry of Du Bos is that of the best intimacy'
French, quite similar (to repeat Proust's penetrating formula) to the poetry of
the rooms that one crosses without living in them." In those rooms arranged by the
regular communion seems that something is missing, out of place, moved, lost. Without
embargo, despite Klossowski's considerations that Du Bos would become
so - from Gide's point of view - a 'managed man', despite the
Du Bos can see Gide as someone "manipulated" by the demon of art that he
idols and distracts him from the last remnants of an inherited morality, still the
Diary observations find the detail, the impression, even in that exacerbation of
an aesthete who appreciates his own liturgical ecstasy.

As we already said, ideas and beliefs matter less than the rhythm of writing to
which Du Bos does not betray at all. The step, the heartbeat of the body has stopped and continues to leave

certain traces, reverberations in the rooms rearranged by the end of the diary – to
less in those 'extracts' that the author chose and published. And as a French philosopher says,
who had nothing clerical but preferred to study Catholic writers for reasons
theoretical, "a body is something that enjoys." The supreme enjoyment of its world of impressions, that

type of interior upholstery of the curious secret chamber where the mystics placed the
soul, can continue to unearth its moments and rediscover what thought
he always set aside anything that could have distracted him, I speak of sensations. Thus, in
a midnight mass that is counted as an evening at the opera, forgotten by all
the surrounding things, 'of all things in the radical sense of the word,' clarifies Du
Boss, you can record the epiphany in which your senses annul space and the body no longer exists.
one can distinguish themselves from their only thought. It writes: 'I felt as if wrapped in'
an invisible cloak; barely, now and then, my gaze distinguished the golds of the
masonry of the choir; I experienced everything that can be intimately palpable in the
state of recollection, and it was of a beauty so full and so simple at the same time
that, upon returning to the second floor room, in front of our snack, we stayed long
silent rats, as if it were difficult to return from so far away.” If something happens here, in the
daily and not at mass, it is that the I of the maniac has turned into an effusive we. The
the described effect remains that of a spectacle, which is not told to us because it
it unfolds in an intimate theater. Could it be that only an appearance, a reflection could show him
Who is he that eagerly seeks his secret truth? A truth that may not
to exist, like in a nightmare of Saint Teresa in which the most hidden dwelling and that
communicating directly with God would be forever empty. However, the rhythm
it is still necessary, even in the void.
In 1939, in the last entries of his diary, shortly before he died, Du Bos endures
again the onslaughts of a feeling of collapse, but now no longer living in a house,
in a building metaphor, but on a ship. He has conceived his Christian journey as
navigation and not as the construction of an inner castle. Shipwreck is the threat to
the one that she will have to face. "The shipwreck, the feeling of shipwreck has obsessed me
"small things in the capital hours of my life," declares Du Bos; and just at that hour
similar had clung to the board of a regained faith. Although given the persistence of
its cycles, the insistence of its traits, the presence of rhythm in the daily, it fits
to wonder if someone can become another. The convert Du Bos offers us
now the same concern, the same intelligence in their sleeplessness for holiness, that
admire and cannot reach, as in their celebratory judgments of paintings, books or
concerts. The ratings of the critic may even turn out to be less fascinating.
that the incessant struggle with the inaccessible holiness – as attested by the prologue of
"beautiful soul" by Mallea, if I may allow the cacophony.
After all, another hour of shipwreck had inspired Du Bos the last sentence of
a book about Thomas Hardy that said: 'Not loving life has no other result than
make one love human beings even more, to love them, precisely, because
they are, like me, subject to the fortune of living...” The love of fleeting life, for the bodies of
others, it imposes itself on the ideal of art, on the belief in the permanence of the works. The shipwreck

threat but it doesn't happen, because the intimate sinking involves attention to others,
perhaps communication, although the luck of living is a fact and not a word. Up to that
last moment, the tireless diary writer is unaware of what awaits him, the past
nothing teaches him except that every moment cast into oblivion can come to demand accountability in
any phrase, but it can also provide assistance so that the subject insists on what
It will be written, because – as Du Bos says – nothing is known before writing.

Cited bibliography

Du Bos, Charles, Extracts from a diary, Emecé, Buenos Aires, 1947 (with prologue by
Eduardo Mallea.
, What is literature? The last diary of Charles Du Bos, Troquel,
Buenos Aires, 1955.
Claudel, Paul
Klossowski, Pierre, “Gide, Du Bos and the Demon”, in Such Fatal Desire, Taurus,
Madrid, 1980.
How to Live Together