#fantazius

This review follows the text through its own words, using its most striking passages to trace a voice that chooses clarity over belonging, and isolation over illusion.

This dark and wayward book is affectionately dedicated (…) to my enemies (…) to the curious ones (...) to the bathling ones(...) to the moral ones (…) to the anointed ones (...) to the religious ones (...) to the solemn and succesful ones ( ...) to the reformers - the psychopathic (…) to the righteous ones (…) to the prim ones (...) to the intellectual ones (…) to the freudian dervishes ( ...) and to many other abominations (…) in the hope that their righteous eyes may never kindle with secret lusts (…) nor their pious lips water erotically from its reading.

The dedication sets the rule.

The book refuses agreement.

It targets anyone who claims order, virtue, or control. The attack spreads across groups that shape behavior and belief. The text does not argue with them. It rejects them.

From there, it defines its core idea.

Perhaps the greatest miracle is that which enables man to tolerate life, which enables him to embrace its illusions and translate its monstrous incoherence into delightful, edifying patterns. It is the miracle of sanity.

Sanity does not reveal truth. It protects against it.

Life appears unstable. The mind turns that instability into patterns to survive it. Normal life becomes a filter.

That filter shapes how people see beauty.

People think of art in terms of symmetry. With a most amazing conceit they have decided upon the contours of their bodies as the standards of beauty. Therefore I am pleased to look at trees or at anything that grows, unhandicapped by the mediocritizing force of reason, and note how contorted such things are.

The book rejects human-centered standards. Nature grows without symmetry. Reason reduces that growth to fit expectations.

The same applies to human relations.

They tell me of health and sanity. And I say sanity is the determined blindness which keeps us from seeing one another. More than that, of course: which keeps us from seeing ourselves. And health is the lame artifice of our bodies which keeps us from loathing one another. I see and I loathe. Yet I must beware of falling to sleep in explanations.

Clarity leads to rejection.

People stay connected because they do not fully see. The narrator refuses that limit. He sees and reacts with disgust. At the same time, he resists turning that insight into doctrine.

This position creates tension in desire.

I watched her white body spread over him. Her eyes left me and my rhetoric dwindled into a sigh. I was alone with a spectacle. Goliath masturbating with a phantom — but not as Mallare had done. No, not as Mallare who had lain indifferent beside his Frankenstein. For Goliath's arms were around her, his legs entwined her. His body, an insanity in itself, made a mate beneath her more incredible than she. There was silence. Then she screamed!

The narrator stays outside the scene.

Desire appears distorted,excessive and distant.

I will whisper. I kneel with Goliath beside the couch. Ah, Mallare, Mallare — I am mad with love. I weep and beat my head. And this other one calls me away. His shape grows larger and his darkness lifts me toward it. He pulls me from the couch. Talk to me, Mallare. I am mad, but talk to me and I will understand. Dear, shining Mallare . . . Tell me ‘no’ and I will break my love. I will put my fist through the window out of which I watch for her. And it will be finished.

Love does not resolve conflict. It intensifies it. The narrator asks for refusal to stop himself.

His relation to life follows the same pattern.

Tonight, while there remained a little sanity, I had made up my mind to kill myself. But I have changed it. I will destroy instead my work. This is because I find the compromise easier and the destruction, perhaps, more interesting. I feel disinclined to abandon the things I loathe. The world with its nauseous swarm of life, its monstrous multiplications which are the eternal insult to the Omniscience I feel, still holds me. I am caught in a tangle and I remain suspended and inanimate, in the depth of a nightmare. But with your aid, Goliath, I will continue tenaciously mimicking an outward sanity so that people, when they see me, will go away happy in the assurance that I am as stupid as they.

He stays inside the world while rejecting it. He performs normality as a shield. He defines madness in his own terms.

I am too clever to go mad. To go mad is to succumb to the sanity of others. Since I avoid death, I must be wary of his misshapen brother. Yet, I can prove to my satisfaction tonight that I am mad. I have destroyed something. It was because the intricate presences of life awaken too many despairs in me.

Love confirms the same logic.

“It is pleasant to be in love with you,” he said. “Because love hitherto has been one of the abominations. In the world I have destroyed love existed. It was the foul paradox of egoism. Man, feeling suddenly the torment of his incompleteness, embraced woman. He was inspired by the mania to transform his desires into possessions.”

At the end, the world fades but remains present.

“I am aware of something that no longer lives in my mind. Dim outlines haunt me. Dead memories peer through the windows of my tower. Life grimaces vaguely on the edges of my madness. I can no longer see or understand. The world is a memory that expires under my thought. I am alone. Yet how much of me must still be the world! My dearest phantoms are, after all, no more than distorted reminiscences. I fear, alas, this is the truth. Yet it is pleasant to be alone with one's senses, to feel an independence.”

Isolation brings a form of independence, but not a clean break. The final movement pushes further.

“Laugh at me, Mallare. Let me hear your laugh far away. Or I go. Listen, Mallare. I turn my back on this darkness. I do not kneel at empty couches. No. I wait for you. You were my God. You, the One who contemplated. Yes, my arms are out to You. Come ... a whisper out of silences. Hey, Mallare. I dissolve. I become a little phantom. A useless little phantom. I drift like Rita. And they attack me. Hands, voices and trembling ones. They are brave because it is dark. Your worshippers, Mallare, they turn on me. They break windows. Pity me. This is the cross.”

Mallare becomes a figure he calls, not a presence he holds. He dissolves into something smaller, weaker, exposed. The crowd returns, not as structure but as threat. The refusal of the world does not erase it. It comes back in another form.

The book holds one line from the begining to the end. It rejects systems that organize life, morality, reason, love, society. It shows them as ways to manage fear and disorder. It ends with a voice that sees, rejects, and pays the cost of that stance without escape.