Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Feder: A Scenario
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Stephens, Nathalie
BIRTHDATE: 7/15/1970
WEBSITE:
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Canadian
http://www.spdbooks.org/Author/Default.aspx?AuthorId=23400 * http://www.nightboat.org/author/nathanael * http://12or20questions.blogspot.com/2007/10/12-or-20-questions-with-nathalie.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 15, 1970, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
EDUCATION:Attended Lumière University Lyon 2, Lyon, France, and the York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
ADDRESS
CAREER
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, lecturer.
AWARDS:Fellowships from the PEN American Center and the Centre National du Livre de France.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Nathanaël is the pen name for School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, instructor Nathalie Stephens. Stephens was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, but she now makes her home in Chicago. Nathanaël has written numerous books, in both French and English, including The Sorrow And The Fast Of It, At Alberta, We Press Ourselves Plainly, Vigilous, Reel, Sisyphus, Outdone, The Middle Notebooks, Asclepias: The Milkweeds, and Feder: A Scenario. Nathanaël is also the translator of several books.
Asclepias is a small collection of lyric essays in which the author investigates subjects such as photography, death, translation, and intimacy. Nathanaël tries for multiple meanings within her work, making the reader pause before moving on to the next sentence or essay. A Publishers Weekly reviewer felt the book was rich in powerful images and wrote: “This collection does not accept the limits of academic disciplines, but instead gifts to the reader Nathanaël’s idiosyncratic mind.” The reviewer also called Asclepias “an important contribution to Nathanaël’s substantive body of work.”
In Feder Nathanaël writes of a man, Feder, who lives his mundane life in a bureaucratic job while living in a dystopian society, with much of the book a series of images of this world. Writing on the Lambda Literary Web site, Trevor Ketner wrote of Feder: “When Feder manifests himself as a temporal being, one with a past, present, and future (or put in a more classical context a beginning, middle, and end, therefore manifesting as a dramatic being, as well), he comes to his end. In much this way, the book itself defies understanding, glancing off direct appeals to meaning. Its genre is amorphous, its style at turns deeply engaging then coldly exclusive. Feder is a puzzle, a dramatized mental game, some rules of which readers might feel like they are missing. But, this reader is certainly ready to hear the riddle again; maybe next time I’ll catch on.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote: “Nathanaël’s idiosyncratic vision and patches of desert-dry absurdist humor add a pleasurable element to the reader’s book-length bafflement.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, July 25, 2016, review of Feder: A Scenario, p. 43.
ONLINE
Entropy, https://entropymag.org/ (March 20, 2014), Janice Lee, review of Sisyphus, Outdone.
Lambda Literary, http://www.lambdaliterary.org/ (January 21, 2017), Trevor Ketner, review of Feder.
Publishers Weekly Online, http://www.publishersweekly.com/ (May 8, 2017), review of Asclepias: The Milkweeds.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago Web site, http://www.saic.edu/ (May 8, 2017), author faculty profile.
12 or 20 Questions, http://12or20questions.blogspot.com/ (October 5, 2007), Rob Mclennan, author interview.*
Friday, October 5, 2007
12 or 20 questions: with Nathalie Stephens
Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël) writes l’entre-genre in English and French. She is the author of a dozen books including, The Sorrow And The Fast Of It (Nightboat (US), 2007), its French counterpart, …s’arrête? Je (L’Hexagone, 2007), Touch to Affliction (Coach House, 2006), Je Nathanaël (l’Hexagone, 2003) and L'Injure (l'Hexagone, 2004), a finalist for the 2005 Prix Alain-Grandbois and Prix Trillium. Je Nathanaël exists in English self-translation with BookThug (2006). Other work exists in Basque and Slovene with book-length translations in Bulgarian (Paradox, 2007). With Nota bene (Montréal, 2007), there is an essay of correspondence entitled L’absence au lieu (Claude Cahun et le livre inouvert), the self-translation of which is forthcoming with Nightboat (US): Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book). Stephens has guest lectured and performed her work internationally, notably in Sofia, Barcelona, Ljubljana, New York and Norwich. The recipient of a Chalmers Arts Fellowship and a British Centre for Literary Translation Residential Bursary, she was the keynote speaker at the 2006 edition of the University of Alberta's Annual Translation Conference. Stephens has translated Catherine Mavrikakis and François Turcot into English and Bhanu Kapil, Gail Scott and Andrew Zawacki into French, with a translation of work by Hélène Cixous forthcoming. Stephens presently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
1 - How did your first book change your life?
It didn't. That was perhaps what was most sobering about it. The boundary between book and no book didn't enable me to cross it or any other boundary. There was no here to there, just the body registering further silences, I might sometimes say humiliations. It is maybe disingenuous to say so, now that there have been this many books. It is not, I think, an exaggeration to say that they were already there. Not as Jabès would say, that the body unfolds the book that is waiting to be written. It is not remotely that prophetic or determined. But that I moved toward the thing that was waiting; itself a form of movement. The movement enabled that encounter, the waiting that I anticipated, presumed, made possible the convergence there of what is arguably an impossibility.
2 - How long have you lived in Chicago, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?
I have lived with Chicago since 2002, though I entered the city proper as a resident two and a half years ago. I could measure time in deaths, disease; or else in encounter, friendship; gardens, architecture. The number of falls -- historical and communal. Geography is one way of measuring distance, the many encroachments, and yes, a form of inscription, a way of approaching textuality, of moving through text. But it is not ever limited to the place where I am. Rather, it is cumulative, and the madnesses emerge with those accretions. The littoral imitates the body's permeability -- is this gender? Yes, of course it is, but it transcends the body proper (body parts), the physiological body, making light of our theoretical lamentations, pushing thought past tissue and holding it there; there, being not ascribable to a single (singular) form or articulation. The holding patterns (nation, text) reveal our own subscriptions to nationalistic (genealogical) litany; this is not a call for dissidence, but a manifestation perhaps of the insidious overlap of lives and the constructs that seek to contain them in distinction.
3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
There are no poems anymore. There have not been for some time now. Not that form of encapsulation. I distrust what calls itself poetry -- any genre delineation. Genre pre- or proscription is territorially suspect, the germ of othering, faction. These arbitrary separations reinscribe -- or at very least suggest -- the implicit violences of imperialist, nationalist discourses, and carry with them the usual scourges of complicity and collaboration. Defined in this way, a text -- circumscribed by genre, in a language that reinforces these exclusions -- becomes (is) an occupied territory. Such a position, the positioning of genre, is ontologically untenable, and in my view dangerous.
5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Am I comfortable locating the questions in time? Pulling at the relational strands that belie the carapaced text? The affective dimension (dementia) of the unexpected. The arbitrary delineations of place. Darwish, for example: "Now where is my where"? A short list of questions reveals nothing, nothingness: absence, place, possibility. These may all be questionable questions, but none are answerable. And it is this exhaustive unanswerability, this positioning of subjectivity at the edge of multiple abysses that make of text (desire) an elusive gesture, anchored only to itself, and pulling whatever remains into its wake.
7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?
The difficulties accrue. It is as though the self were pulled more and more thinly across the spine of each new book. The fragilities more visible, the implications multiplied. It is likely not so; the making of books hasn't changed, but my relationship to this process has, and with it my awareness of the compromises, the vulnerabilities, the surrender of a relationship to language in a context that withholds more than it offers. Art is not what it might have been; and whatever liberties or generosities I had first imagined I might find there are a veneer for the same filth that characterises most human endeavour. What was to have been a way of touching touches me now incontrovertibly, and not always reciprocally. This, perhaps is a kind of devastation; it is also the formulation of an ethics which is not ever separate from the painful questions from which it arises. Such that the binarism (harder-easier) does not apply. Simply the book is complicated by our relationships to it.
8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?
This afternoon.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The turn is inward. It is not so much a matter of going toward any one particular thing, but of inviting movement (back) into the body. Writing seems ironically to exist in direct contradiction with the movement (walking, for example) that enables it. In this respect, it is not a form of stillness, but a struggle with(in) the body's desire for reach. One winter, I walked up and down the shore of the Kantauri Itsasoa. This movement did not bring forward a book; it isn't causal in that way. It reminded the body of a thing it is always already forgetting. Language is in this way a form of treachery.
12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?
Of the Cahun essay or Nightboat and recent Hexagone books (The Sorrow And The Fast Of It / ...s'arrête? Je), I can say this: that the membrane is ever more thin.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I want to say friendship. Which of course includes all of the above. It is a threshold become possible. The possibility of a threshold.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This is an impossible question. The obvious answers to which are explicit in some of the work. Still, at the moment (and the moment is never still): De l'évasion (Lévinas), Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté (de Beauvoir), L'Intention poétique (Glissant).
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Sit still.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Forgive me for turning this question against itself, but as I read it, I am drawn away from it by the word occupation, in light especially of a new book about André Gide and WWII, the subtitle of which is A Writer's Occupation. This leads me again to the question of territoriality, and the ways in which we inhabit (occupy, claim, or possess) the spaces (such as language) that may very well be in control of us. The question thus reformulates itself in my mind as: What would you occupy, have you occupied (instead of this thing which you already occupy)?, the ethical tremor of which provokes a kind of terror. Because like it or not, we are all, to some degree, occupants. Occupying, and being occupied. And so driven by the circles we draw around ourselves.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
This is embarrassingly typical: L'étranger.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina. Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique.
12 or 20 questions archive
Posted by rob mclennan at 9:25 AM
Nathanaël
Nathanaël is the author of more than a score of books written in English or in French, including Feder (2016); Sotto l'immagine (2014) and Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal (2012). The French-language notebooks, Carnet de désaccords (2009), Carnet de délibérations (2011), and Carnet de somme (2012) were recast in English in a single volume as The Middle Notebookes (2015), which received the inaugural Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature.The essay of correspondence, Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book) (2009) was first published in French as L’absence au lieu (2007). Nathanaël's work has been translated into Basque, Greek, Slovene, and Spanish (Mexico), with book-length publications in Bulgarian and Portuguese (Brazil). The recipient of the Prix Alain-Grandbois for …s’arrête? Je (2008), Nathanaël’s translations include works by Édouard Glissant, Catherine Mavrikakis, and Hilda Hilst (the latter in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo). Nathanaël's translation of Murder by Danielle Collobert was a finalist for a Best Translated Book Award in 2014. Her translation of The Mausoleum of Lovers by Hervé Guibert has been recognized by fellowships from the PEN American Center and the Centre National du Livre de France. Nathanaël lives in Chicago.
Author: Nathanael
Nathanaël (formerly Nathalie Stephens) is the author of a score of books written in English or in French, including SISYPHUS, OUTDONE.; Theatres of the Catastrophal (2012); the notebooks, Carnet de désaccords (2009), Carnet de délibérations (2011), Carnet de somme (2012); and the essay of correspondence, Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book) (2009), first published in French as L'absence au lieu (2007). Her work has been translated into Basque, Greek, Slovene, and Spanish (Mexico), with book-length publications in Bulgarian and Portuguese (Brazil). The recipient of the Prix Alain-Grandbois for ...s'arrête? Je (2008), Nathanaël's translations include works by Édouard Glissant, Catherine Mavrikakis, and Hilda Hilst (the latter in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araujo). Nathanaël's translation of MURDER by Danielle Collobert was a finalist for a Best Translated Book Award in 2014. Her translation of The Mausoleum of Lovers by Hervé Guibert has been recognized by fellowships from the PEN American Center and the Centre National du Livre de France. Nathanaël lives in Chicago.
Nathanaël
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nathanaël
Born Nathalie Stephens
1970
Montreal, Quebec
Occupation writer, translator, educator
Nationality Canadian
Notable works ...s'arrête? Je (2007), Underground (1999)
Nathanaël (born 1970 in Montreal) is a canadian writer, literary translator and educator. Some of her works have been published under her legal name Nathalie Stephens. She lives in Chicago.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 Selected writings
2.1 Translations
3 Awards and recognition
4 References
5 External links
Biography[edit]
In 1970 Nathanaël was born as Nathalie Stephens in Montreal. She studied Literature at the Lumière University Lyon 2 and the York University, Toronto. Since 2002 she is member of the Québec Union of Writers.[2] She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[3] Furthermore, she is a contributing editor to the French online magazine Recours au poème and the American magazine Aufgabe.[4]
Nathanaël writes intergenre, poetry, prose, and essays — in English and French — which have been translated into Bulgarian, Basque, Greek, Portuguese, Slovenian and Spanish.[5] Her book Underground was finalist for a Grand Prix du Salon du livre de Toronto in 2000. L’injure was shortlisted for a Prix Trillium and the Prix Alain-Grandbois in 2005.[1] ...s’arrête? Je won the Prix Alain-Grandbois in 2008.[4]
Nathanaël has translated John Keene, Trish Salah, Reginald Gibbons, Bhanu Kapil, R. M. Vaughan et al. into French[1][4] and Hervé Guibert, Danielle Collobert, Hilda Hilst, Édouard Glissant and Catherine Mavrikakis into English. Her translation of Danielle Collobert’s novel Murder was shortlisted for a Best Translated Book Award 2014. She has been awarded with fellowships from the PEN American Center (2012) and the Centre national du livre de France (2013) for her translation of Hervé Guibert’s The Mausoleum of Lovers.[6]
Selected writings[edit]
The Middle Notebooks. New York: Nightboat, 2015 ISBN 978-1-937658-38-0.
Asclepias The Milkweeds. New York: Nightboat, 2015 ISBN 978-1-937658-39-7.
Laisse. Paris: Recours au poème éditeurs, 2015 ISBN 978-2-37226-025-1.
Sotto l’immagine. Montréal: Mémoire d'encrier, 2014 ISBN 978-2897122461.
Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal. New York: Nightboat, 2013 ISBN 978-1-937658-05-2.
Carnet de délibérations. Montréal: Le Quartanier, 2011 ISBN 978-2923400853.
We Press Ourselves Plainly. New York: Nightboat, 2010 ISBN 978-0-9844598-0-3.
Vigilous, Reel. Desire (a)s accusation. San Francisco: Albion, 2010.
Carnet de désaccords. Montréal: Le Quartanier, 2009 ISBN 978-2923400501.
At Alberta. Toronto: BookThug, 2008 ISBN 978-1897388242.
...s’arrête? Je. Montréal: Éditions de l'Hexagone, 2007 ISBN 978-2890067929.
The Sorrow And The Fast Of It. New York: Nightboat Books, 2007 ISBN 978-0-9767185-5-0.
L’absence au lieu (Claude Cahun et le livre inouvert). Québec: Nota Bene, 2007 ISBN 978-2895182641.
Touch To Affliction. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2006 ISBN 978-1552451755.
L’injure. Montréal: Éditions de l'Hexagone, 2004 ISBN 978-2890067189.
Paper City. A caprice on the subject of disillusionment. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2003 ISBN 978-1552451267.
Je Nathanaël. Montréal: L'Hexagone, 2003 ISBN 978-2890066960.
L’embrasure. Laval: Éditions TROIS, 2002 ISBN 978-2895160335.
All Boy. Calgary: housepress, 2001 ISBN 1894174348.
Somewhere Running. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000 ISBN 978-1551520896.
Underground. Laval: Éditions TROIS, 1999 ISBN 978-2895160021.
Colette m'entends-tu? Laval: Éditions TROIS, 1997 ISBN 978-2920887855.
This Imagined Permanence. Toronto: Gutter Press, 1996 ISBN 978-1896356051.
hivernale. Toronto: Éditions du GREF, 1995 ISBN 978-0921916680.
Translations[edit]
Hervé Guibert, The Mausoleum of Lovers Journals 1976–1991. New York: Nightboat 2014, ISBN 978-1-937658-22-9.
Danielle Collobert, Murder. New York: Litmus Press, 2013 ISBN 978-1933959177.
Hilda Hilst, The Obscene Madame D. New York: Nightboat, 2014 ISBN 978-1-937658-06-9 (with Rachel Gontijo Araújo).
Édouard Glissant, Poetic Intention. New York: Nightboat, 2010 ISBN 978-0-9822645-3-9.
Catherine Mavrikakis, Flowers of Spit. BookThug, 2011 ISBN 978-1897388884.
Catherine Mavrikakis, A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning. Coach House, 2004 ISBN 978-1552451403.
Awards and recognition[edit]
2013 Residential bursary from the Collège International de Traducteurs Littéraires (Arles)[4]
2013 Bursary from the Centre national du livre
2012 PEN Translation Fund Fellowship
2008 Prix Alain-Grandbois for ...s'arrête? Je
2003 British Centre for Literary Translation Residential Bursary of the University of East Anglia
2002 Chalmers Fellowship[4]
Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël)
Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël) writes l’entre-genre in English and French. She is the author of a dozen books including, The Sorrow And The Fast Of It (Nightboat (US), 2007), its French counterpart, …s’arrête? Je (L’Hexagone, 2007), Touch to Affliction (Coach House, 2006), Je Nathanaël (l’Hexagone, 2003) and L'Injure (l'Hexagone, 2004), a finalist for the 2005 Prix Alain-Grandbois and Prix Trillium. Je Nathanaël exists in English self-translation with BookThug (2006). Other work exists in Basque and Slovene with book-length translations in Bulgarian (Paradox, 2007). With Nota bene (Montréal, 2007), there is an essay of correspondence entitled L’absence au lieu (Claude Cahun et le livre inouvert), the self-translation of which is forthcoming with Nightboat (US), as Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book). Stephens has guest lectured and performed her work internationally, notably in Sofia, Barcelona, Ljubljana, New York and Norwich. The recipient of a Chalmers Arts Fellowship and a British Centre for Literary Translation Residential Bursary, she was the keynote speaker at the 2006 edition of the University of Alberta's Annual Translation Conference. Literaturen vestnik (Literary Gazette, Bulgaria) has written of Stephens’s work that “If we are to speak of modern prose today, it is, in all probability, of this kind: situated nowhere as a genre, but intentionally omnipresent.”
March 13th, 2013 / 12:00 pm
Author Spotlight
Kit Schluter
Murder: An Interview with Nathanaël, Translator of Danielle Collobert
Forthcoming from Litmus Press this April, Nathanaël’s definitive English translation of Danielle Collobert’s Murder marks the first ever of this French poet’s debut book. Originally begun in 1960 when Collobert was twenty years old, and published by Gallimard in 1964 under the auspices of Oulipo-founder, Raymond Queneau, this book laid the groundwork for what remains one of the most enigmatic and innovative bodies of work in contemporary French letters. As with the subsequent works of Collobert’s brief but impactful output, which lasted until her suicide in 1978, Murder speaks a language profoundly its own, unlike anything else she was to write, and quite possibly unlike anything else you may have read. Reading this prose gives one the rare impression of being in the presence of a voice speaking from the honest and cutting edge of present urgencies: that is, this is not a voice responding to conventions or trends in literary necessity, but one singularly engaging the emergent necessities of life itself, in all its complexity and danger. Here, in honor of Danielle Collobert and this fantastic new translation, Nathanaël and I discuss her life and legacy with an eye on her first work, Murder.
***
murderMurder
by Danielle Collobert / translated by Nathanaël
Litmus Press, April 2013
104 pages / $18 Buy from Litmus Press or SPD
Kit Schluter: To begin, what drew you to Danielle Collobert’s work? How did you discover it?
Nathanaël: I want to say that it was accidental, but I’m quite sure it wasn’t. Unless one understands friendship as accident. I entered, as did many, into Il donc, and Collobert’s Carnets, though with an eye turned away – perhaps out of a desire not to seek the life in the work, however much it is written there, and with such determinacy; the ‘twenty years of writing’ set against the impending suicide. Still, it is a hazard of hindsight to be able to set the life against the work, though this is so obviously a deformation of the reader, and so I resist as much as I can the tidy narrative of a life fallen from letters. The short answer to your first question is: Collobert’s language. But if the virtuosic remnants of Il donc are almost a perfect epitaph to the twenty years, I was much more viscerally and immediately impelled by Meurtre; I even borrowed an epigraph from this work into We Press Ourlseves Plainly much before the idea even of translating it had presented itself to me. Perhaps most immediately because of a shared concern, or conviction, that the distinction between murder and death is unconvincing and too readily upheld.
KS: What were the circumstances surrounding Danielle Collobert while she was composing Murder? Do you find that the book draws material or imagery from her experience?
N: My knowledge of Collobert’s biography is quite limited. Not unlike her parents and her aunt, who were all actively engaged in the Résistance during WWII, Collobert, a supporter of Algerian independence, was a member of the FLN (Algeria’s Front de libération national) at the time of Meurtre. She chose exile in Italy, where she completed work on the manuscript. It may be worth underscoring the importance of 1961, for the outcome of the war, which, in French contemporary society was never acknowledged under the name of anything other than the euphemistic “les évènements” (“the events” – to do otherwise would have been, not only to have acknowledged, if only semantically, Algeria’s nationhood, but the repressive force employed by France to resist – and as it happened, to defer – decolonization and independence). On October 17, 1961, a peaceful demonstration of many thousands of Algerians living in Paris, protesting the curfew imposed exclusively upon them, and the acts of police violence to which they were systematically subjected, was violently suppressed by Vichyist Maurice Papon’s police force, resulting in the arbitrary deportation of large numbers of Algerian demonstrators, and the summary execution of up to two hundred Algerians, many of whose bodies were pulled out of the Seine in the following days; several thousand Algerians were rounded up during the demonstration and distributed among prisons, the Palais des Sports and area hospitals. Several months later, on February 8th, 1962, what has come to be known as the Charonne Massacre took place at the eponymous Paris métro station; this demonstration, organized by the Left against the paramilitary OAS (the reactionary Organisation de l’armée secrète, which violently opposed Algerian independence), and often conflated in people’s memories (and in historical accounts) with the October massacre, resulted in the death of eight demonstrators at the Charonne métro station. It is not insignificant that French FLN supporter Jacques Panijel’s 1961 film, Octobre à Paris, which documents the moments before, during, and after the October demonstration, was censured by the French government and only shown for the first time in a French cinema in 2011 – half a century after it was made.
The photograph on the cover of Murder accounts, obliquely, and somewhat prochronistically, for these activities – it is a photograph of a bombed out building in Madrid, taken in 1937 by Robert Capa, during the Spanish Civil War.
Meurtre is tempered by the residues of such histories; but the work’s strength is in its ability to evoke them without resorting to explicit accounts, or naming. The generalization of historical violence is embedded in the intimate accounts presented to the reader – seemingly placeless, nameless, they nonetheless achieve historical exactitude through relentless repetition – a reiterative (mass) murder (one is tempted to say: execution), which afflicts and incriminates the gutted bodies that move painstakingly through these densely succinct pages.
KS: The language of Murder‘s passages is slippery, but in a productive kind of way. Although Collobert’s later work seems almost entirely irreverent of traditional genres and forms, the language of this early work, written around the age of twenty, seems to skirt the boundaries between the short story and the prose poem. Nobody is named, no locations are specified, no motives for actions are explained. And yet these prose pieces seem to function toward the development of short narratives that retain these traditional tools of the “short story,” however non-traditionally they might be getting used.
How would you address the issue of genre in this book? What are we dealing with here? Do you sense any influences informing the form of the pieces in Murder, or does this seem to be a mode of writing that Collobert can call entirely her own?
N: I would resist attempting to attribute a generic definition to Meurtre; I would not seek to inscribe it in a lineage, either. Which is not a rejection of eventual antecedents – often Collobert’s work is read against Beckett, for example. But a habitual reliance on lineage as a way of reading seems limiting to me, and a decidedly academic concern. Before even beginning to attempt to make this kind of attribution, one would need to recognize the distances the text has had to travel between French and English, and then acknowledge the divergences between generic constructs in those two (much more than two) literary cultures (though there is increasing adherence to English language delineations in French, which is indicative, perhaps, of a desire for change, but more cynically, of the global influence of specifically American industry, since this direction is distrustful of the generic fluidity for which French literature of the twentieth century came to be known), and take some note of the development of those movements over time, because, like anywhere else, they are not static, whatever limits are imposed to prevent alterations from loosening them from their categorical holds. Which is to say that the bolstering of the boundaries governing generic territories, such as they are defended, is in large part contextual. I would argue that it is no less accurate to categorise Meurtre as prose than it is to categorise Il donc as poetry; Meurtre has a strong poetics, as is Il donc continuing to grapple with the sentence. But one might suggest just as convincingly that all of her work has something of the film script (her language is at times much more succinct than passages in some of Antonioni’s film scripts, for example, which read like prose). I might offer these lines of Derrida’s as more eloquent provocation: “ ‘What / is…?’ laments the disappearance of the poem – / another catastrophe. By announcing that which is /just as it is, a question salutes the birth of prose.” (Tr. Peggy Kamuf)
KS: Collobert, in the final passage of the book, defines the book’s namesake, murder, as follows: “One does not die alone, one is killed, by routine, by impossibility, following their inspiration. If all this time, I have spoken of murder, sometimes half camouflaged, it’s because of that, that way of killing” (96). This, for me, is provocative and explosive language. And, I should say, that goes for the whole book: this isn’t a neutral work, but one that digs in its heels and takes a firm political stance. What political urges do you find central to Murder?
N: You have identified what is for me perhaps the most powerful passage from the work (these are the same lines I borrowed into the afore-mentioned epigraph). Out of this passage, I would signal the unlikely conjunction of routine and inspiration. There is here the suggestion of the sublimation of emotion into bureaucratisation. “That way of killing” is not distinct from the way of language, from a poetics or an aesthetic impulse; ‘inspiration’ is the incipit of murder – the very breath of it. This admission walls the text off from anything resembling hope. And yet it is also anything but nihilistic. It is snared by its own realisations – with emphasis on the real.
KS: Anxiety and contemplations of what may exist outside of life—I don’t know if it would be fair or accurate, exactly, to say “death” in this case, but let’s hold that word in the air—seem to form the backbone of Collobert’s writings. Take the opening passage from Dire II,
the only thing — to begin again — if possible — words again — the equivalent of a death — or even its opposite — or maybe nothing
to be here — the calm — deteriorating from tension — the world around that does not stop — but could stop — the breath that could stop now — one moment after another — same equality hangs — same cold hardness — same taste faint and mild — to put up with going toward the same moments again — to continue only the breath — breathing — lengthen the gaze — simply
Or the opening passage from the tragic Survival, the last book she was to publish before taking her own life in 1978,
I leaving voice without answer to articulate words sometimes
only silence answer to other ear never
if to mute the world not a sound
darken into the blue cosmos
more question than vertical travel
I leaving slippage to the horizon
everything the same everything mortal starting from the I
on all legs fleeing the horizon
at last only hearing music in the cries
enough enough
exit
enter born on debris hardly recognized the ground
emerged from salted vase the fetus from sewer
solar plexus gnawed anguish diffusing lungs breath panting
It’s clear how much formal difference there is between these two passages, though their arguments seem closely related. Murder, at times,seems to be grappling with these subjects, though in a very formally different language. What individuates Murder from the rest of Collobert’s work? What does it share with the rest of this work?
N: Your question raises, for me, one of the problems with complete works, in which an author’s discrete works are presented together, chronologically, and subjected to a regularized form; the distinctions between editions, formats, etc., is belied by the inclusion in a single – edited – volume of otherwise disparate books. In this instance, though formal singularities appear to be respected, the consistency of the typeface and page size, and margins, suggests a continuity between works that I would resist over adherence to. In my reading of her work, Collobert doesn’t appear to be casting herself across volumes and years, through a single project such as Edmond Jabès’s Le livre des questions, for example, in which le livre, though comprised of many volumes, is approached as a single work determinedly extended over most of the writer’s life – however much certain questions continue to return for Collobert. In each instance, the formulations are cast against renewed formal and narrative concerns, evidently resisting uniformity. These considerations aside, even resorting to emblematic concerns can cause problems; you’ve proposed, with some hesitation – and justly so, I would say – that Collobert’s work has as its primary inscription, ‘death’; but one could say without exaggeration, I think, that literature’s first – perhaps only – concern is morbidity. For Collobert, it is against language itself – the French language specifically, that the question must be posed; and it is not enough to have posed it, or, perhaps, to have been deposed by it. In the passages you quote from, death, as I read them, is not outside of life, nor is it outside of language; it is the very stuff out of which the text fails to speak. The anticipation of articulation, breath’s detachedness from ‘the world’, wields silences in the place of what might otherwise be. Language, here, is arguably an ontological impossibility. By the time Collobert arrives at Il Donc, something of language has been irrevocably destroyed – it seems annunciatory of the destruction of the body through which it might otherwise pass (Paul Celan’s work comes to mind as a corollary, a similarly culled language, to the point of near disappearance, if one takes, for example, the early Todesfuge and sets it against a poem like the posthumously published Ein Blatt – A Leaf). Meurtre’s grapple is at the level of the sentence; the accumulation of the many suspended, tortured lives, yields a murderous certainty; killing and being killed partake of the same movement. If one wanted, as you suggest, to read the rest of the work against Meurtre, one might, perhaps too hastily, propose the following works as demonstrations of Meurtre’s proposal.
KS: Let’s keep thinking about this, this constellation of themes, and take a look at some passages from Murder.
I have a chance of getting out. A single chance among thousands. I remain arrested before the number of ways offering themselves to me. I don’t know what to do, which path to take. This choice requires an intense reflection, and puts me in a state of very great perplexity. A single chance. Many might think that due to the infinitesimal possibility of success, I ought to make a decision whichever one. It is very much what I am tempted to do, sometimes, in moments of discouragement. But my will is strong and the choice too important so as not to have a last burst of lucidity at the decisive moment. I remain therefore in expectancy and in the fear of the irremediable. […] Sometimes I get up with the light sensation of decision. I go toward the entrance to the labyrinth which for a long time has seemed sweet and good for me. When there remains but one step to take to leave this world definitively, to start down that unpredictable path, and perhaps finally make it out or lose myself for good, suddenly I balk, I back up. Once again, it’s too soon. Nonetheless one day I will cross the threshold of the labyrinth, but toward what? (17-18).
From one house to another, the men brace themselves, against the walls, clutching the rope with both hands. Sometimes their boots slip on the seaweed, or else the shingles collide between their feet. […] It’s a difficult road during the storm. Only the strongest risk it, as well as the elderly, who would never agree to take another path. […] and yet what force is in this desire to walk alone, upright, from one end of the harbor to the other, directly into the storm. Trying to be upright, alone, against the sea, alive, powerful, mortal (50).
There’s more to hear, hear the voice, the questions, encourage oneself, protect oneself, struggle as well to go all the way to the end, with that immense cowardice of preferring words, their edifice, to the small, inconceivable gesture, that I am not yet able to make. Don’t slide just yet, keep holding back until the choice, or rather refuse that choice, that possibility (97).
These passages, combined with others in the book, add up for me to a certain general existential argument that Collobert’s work continued to make until the end of her life. To boil it down to a few phrases, it seems that she is arguing that to embrace life one must embrace mortality; that to embrace mortality one must embrace the absolute solitude of living; that to embrace this solitude one must confront the fear of what she calls “losing oneself,” even if that lostness be irremediable.
However, something about her understanding of the relationship of life and death reminds me of Rilke’s concept of Das Große, or “The Big Thing,” which he develops in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: the inexpressible fear of the death that is, to paraphrase, growing within us from our birth as a ripening fruit. And yet, there is perhaps a crucial difference between Collobert’s “getting lost” and Rilke’s “The Big Thing”. While Rilke’s term figures death as an existential inevitability of life, Collobert’s term is more politicized and argues that our deaths are imposed on us by social forces over which we have no control. Rilke’s death grows from within and thus one must die alone, while Collobert’s is imposed and thus one is forced in death into the company of an enemy. That is the sort of solitude she is discussing—the solitude we are forced to find when in company we cannot allow ourselves to tolerate, company that is expressly against the freedom of our wills.
N: Your question seems to be calling up an irrevocable rift in the apprehension of death; some would argue that the boundary lies at Auschwitz, others, that it is endemic to modernity. Certainly, Benjamin writes of the loss of an important function of the house once people cease to die within their own walls; Rilke distinguished between ‘serial’ and ‘proper’ death; in the same Notebooks you quote from, he writes: “Now there are 559 beds to die in. Like a factory [fabrikmässig] of course. With production so enormous, each individual death is not made very carefully; but that isn’t important. It’s the quantity that counts.” I am quoting Rilke as quoted by Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz, in which he writes: “In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced.” (tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen) In my own stubborn misremembrance, Vladimir Jankélévitch writes (my translation), “Death died in the death camps”. (His actual claim is that forgiveness [le pardon] died in the death camps). The mortality Collobert is grappling with in her work is post-mortal, I would say, in that it is stripped of its ontology, and offered to cold scrutiny (the so-called empiric scalpel); whatever intimations exist in Rilke, and may be fastened to an understanding of modernity, Collobert’s language comes after WWII. It is imprinted by it. But the political dimension of this morbid actuality is not, I would argue, unilateral: the enemy is also oneself. The figures moving through Meurtre are murdered and murderers, they are both executioner and victim; the force driving them to deaths sustained or committed is never made explicit or specific; one might go so far as to say that the vital impulse of this work is stifled by the permanent recognition that one stands ever before a firing squad (a perhaps more temporally torqued version of the vital corpse is Ortega y Gasset’s man who enters into battle with a wound in his temple). I am not convinced however that Collobert’s ‘we’ ever designates a collectivity; there is no indication of a shared plight of solitude; when she writes ‘we’, the we is inhuman in that the individual elements that comprise it have no individuation, they are hulls of selves, like the scraped crab on the beach; they have abandoned themselves to a cadaveric assembly line cum funeral procession.
KS: One of the distinctive traits of Collobert’s work is her play with the grammatical gender of French. There’s a nice story, told by Jean-Pierre Faye, in the foreword to first volume of her Oeuvres (P.O.L.), in which he, upon receiving a copy of Collobert’s Dire, begins editing the text by circling inconsistencies in the narrator’s gender. In one sentence the narrator is referred to with male adjectives; in the next, female; in some, the narrator is referred to with both, by turns male and female. It is only after reading further in the text that he realizes that, in fact, this is a very deliberate part of Collobert’s language, perhaps its singularizing trait. Do you see Collobert as part of a larger tradition of Francophone writers experimenting with gender in their texts? What distinguishes her play from the others’?
N: One might see continuities between Collobert’s refusal to settle on a single gender – a way, perhaps, within the confines nonetheless of French grammar, to unsettle the ‘I’, pluralize and fragment it, and resist the facile habit in the reader to conflate the narrative ‘self’ with that of the writer – and Nathalie Sarraute’s neutral ‘il’. Collobert’s ‘il’ becomes depersonalized (it), while the intent of Sarraute’s ‘il’ (he) is to generalize away from gender specificity, and away from the French grammatical intention which determines that ‘il’ stands in for (erases) ‘elle’ (even when bias indicates otherwise). In an interview with Simone Benmussa, in which Benmussa asks Sarraute to qualify her thinking about ‘le neutre’, Sarraute replies: “For me, the neuter [le neutre] is the human being. There is a word for that in Russian, it’s tcheloviek and in German Der Mensch, the human being, male or female, regardless of age, regardless of sex. In French ‘être humain’ is ridiculous. In fact, in Elle est là, I say: ‘It’s a human being, it’s ridiculous but it must be said.’” Sarraute is adamant her concern is not androgeneity, nor, do I think it is a concern of Collobert’s. Away from the syntactical injunctions of Romance languages – for monolinguistic English speakers, for example – it is nearly impossible to appreciate the grammatical dictatorship under which one lives in such linguistic regimes (Sarraute’s further discussion of Russian indicates the impossibility of avoiding gender altogether in language; and as Benmussa points out, Der Mensch too is gendered masculine). To misapprehend the specific violence done to the mind, and by extension, to thought, under such a regime is to misapprehend much of what has taken place in French thought over the course of the twentieth century, whether Sarraute’s neutre, Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style, Glissant’s Antillanité, Derrida’s Monolinguisme or Jeanne Hyvrard’s Pensée corps, to name but these. To return for a moment to the brief passage quoted from Sarraute, it is utterly telling that these problems become most evident in translation; it is through recourse to other languages (Russian was Sarraute’s first language) that she is able to articulate her concern. A grammar wishes itself to be hermetic; but is rendered porous (or revealed to be thus) precisely through the work of translation.
KS: In your own text, “(Self-)translation: an expropriation of intimacies,” you write, “Syntactically speaking, the sex of the sentence is not (necessarily) transferrable. A body thus destabilised loses sight of its referent when transversing into another language. English’s pronominal preoccupation, for example, singles out the subject’s gender as part of speech, which in French, again for example, is severally located in the sentence. Where one benefits from the ambiguity the other falls into normality. To dislocate gender’s stranglehold in French, one must strive for discord, grammatical disagreement in the place of English’s mis-fitted neutering.”
Did you find these grammatical differences between French and English coming into play in your translation work on Murder? Did you have to bend the rules or experiment with English grammar to make it speak the sense of Collobert’s prose?
N: In translating the Collobert, I resisted such acrobatics, which I tend to resort to far more sparingly in the translations of other authors’ works than I do of my own. To try to reproduce the movement between genders in Collobert’s text would have been to falsify it in English (largely in light of the fact that they are marked adjectivally with the first person pronoun as referent). Because the larger questions of the work remain otherwise transmittable. This may appear as something of a conservative decision, but to have done otherwise would have been to have submitted Meurtre to contortions it itself doesn’t resort to; it would also have been to treat English grammar as though it were interchangeable with French grammatical concerns. It is also worth underscoring the degree to which this tendency is much more prevalent in Collobert’s later works. If I may speak for a moment of Je Nathanaël, a work I published in both French and English versions, the very impetus of the French work, which was to hermaphrodise French (an impossible project, and one which necessitated enormous constraint, such as limiting myself to invariable adjectives, the imperative and the second person singular in the present tense), all but disappears in English in which gender is differently marked – and often suffers from (and is at times priviledged by) being unmarked (the so-called neutral). Rather than try to force the English into a discourse and grammar that weren’t its own, I allowed the text to become something else – at the risk of introducing a possibly (false) universalising strain in the work. In the case of a work like Collobert’s Il donc, Norma Cole’s decision to translate “il” as “it” is a perfect rejoinder to Collobert’s French impersonal pronoun. In Meurtre, there is only one instance in which, mid-passage, I let the sea’s pronoun slide from the more habitual “it” in English, to “she” as it becomes increasingly anthropomorphized in the text.
KS: Françoise Morvan, in her introduction to Oeuvres I (P.O.L.), speaks of a community of French poets who have, since Collobert’s passing, kept her memory alive: François Bon, Jean Daive, Ludovic Janvier, Bernard Pingaud, Jacques Roubaud, Claude Royet-Journoud, Alain Veinstein. Now, Collobert passed away in 1978, and it wasn’t until twenty-six year later, in 2004, that the first edition of her complete works was published in French. In this light, it seems that though her memory has not been dead, it has existed more in the underground. How do you understand Collobert’s influence, in France and abroad? Are there any key figures who have especially helped to keep this influence alive?
N: I’m not in a good position to answer this question, though I am suspicious of the homogeneity of the list of writers such as it is presented. Norma Cole, for example, might have been included among the keepers of Collobert’s memory – her translations have been tremendously influential on poetics and textualities specific to the United States, much as Paul Celan’s have been – producing departures from their initial languages, and localised styles. Collobert’s work was very marginal when she was alive; though Meurtre was originally published by Gallimard with the support of Raymond Queneau, after having been first rejected by Éditions de Minuit, her subsequent works did not meet with such favour; and in fact, Survie was first published in Italian translation before it was published in French. This is indicative of nothing, except that the vagaries a work can be subjected to are legion. One need only sample other near buried works that have met with subsequent irrefutability (Kafka, Benjamin, Robert Walser, etc.)
KS: It seems though that now this work is getting attention from the younger generation of French writers. For example, I first found out about Collobert from two young poets, who live in Marseille and run a wonderful journal of poetry, politics, and aesthetics, La Vie manifeste. One of these poets has actually dedicated much of her personal studies to Collobert’s work, recently writing both her undergraduate and masters theses on her works.
Given this sort of attention from certain contemporary poets and publishers, do you sense that Collobert’s work is experiencing an increase in readership or influence? If so, what about her work do you see as keeping her a vital figure for poets at work today? What alternatives does her work offer that can’t already be found in someone else’s poems? What can we learn from her that we can’t find elsewhere?
N: I would hope that Collobert’s reach would exceed that of so-called poetries, and circulate unencumbered through and outside of prescribed genres (even those which wish themselves to be encompassing – even these end up inventing asphyxiating constraints). I do think, however, that the demands of the text are not consistent with the consumptive speeds our worlds are submitted to today. This may account for some of the time it has taken for Collobert’s work to reach this far. It is quiet, and committed to a degree of precision that language seems nearly incapable of at this time of bulimic production. It may not even be useful to resort to comparatives in search of its specificity. Because this is something it claims without invention; and in my reading it is in time, in the time of (her) writing, and all that it has subsumed into it.
***
Nathanaël is the author of a score of books written in English or French, including Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal, We Press Ourselves Plainly, and Carnet de somme. Je Nathanaël exists in self-translation, as does the essay of correspondence, Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book), first published in French as L’absence au lieu. Other work exists in Basque, Slovene, and Spanish (Mexico), with book-length translations in Bulgarian and Portuguese (Brazil). A contributing editor to Aufgabe (NY) and Recours au poème (France), Nathanaël’s translations include works by Édouard Glissant, Catherine Mavrikakis and Hilda Hilst, the latter in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo. Recognized by a PEN Translation Fund fellowship, Nathanaël’s translation of The Mausoleum of Lovers by Hervé Guibert will be published in 2014 by Nightboat Books. She lives in Chicago.
Kit Schluter is a poet and translator based in Northampton, Massachusetts. His translation of Marcel Schwob’s 1894 novella, The Book of Monelle, was recently published by Wakefield Press (Cambridge MA).
SEPTEMBER 2015
NIC GROSSO
FEATURES
AN INTERVIEW WITH NATHANA�L
If you aren't careful, you are prone to slip and fall causing all sorts of bodily harm while reading Nathana�l. In the onslaught of words, of language, there is no shame in getting tripped up or falling on your butt a couple of times, but to quit reading could be the worst harm you could do to yourself. Nathana�l's texts are heavy, loaded, and overflowing with history, ideas, and intent. They are personal conversations and battlegrounds, attempts at understanding the current moods and trends while at the same time placing them within a greater historical perspective. True, at times, dense, the reader need only find the rhythm to unlock the text and soon will uncover a rich and ever-rewarding path ahead.
The collection of talks and essays that make up Asclepias: The Milkweeds comes from a variety of events and speaking engagements, but, as the reader moves through the texts, common issues begin to reveal themselves and one begins to link the themes swirling just beneath the surface. I hope the following conversation can further illuminate that journey.
One of the first things that jumped out at me early in Asclepias was how you framed translation. It is described in such a way that it almost appears as a transgressive act. Here I'm specifically talking about reading German translated into French instead of English (despite the fact that English shares closer roots and in some ways might be closer to the original text), because the friction it sparks when comparing the two and their distance from the original.
Your mentality in a way reminds me of Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theatre, constantly reminding the viewer that they are only watching a representation of reality and not reality itself.
The talk you refer to, which opens Asclepias, is grappling with a kind of complacency evident in some of the more recently enshrined assumptions coddling translation, specifically the self-gratifying idea that translation offers a closest possible reading of a text, when in my experience -- and the talk is explicitly (self-)referential -- it operates something much closer to what I would call a failure of reciprocity.
The juxtaposition of French and English translations of a line from Buber's Ich und Du exposes this discrepancy, and makes impossible the realization of a desire for proximity; in fact, the multiplication of versions produces an intractable rift, further exacerbating the legibility of a so-called original piece of writing.
In this sense, does translation offer a reader the most when read comparatively and/or with an in-depth analysis of word choice? Or can a translation stand alone -- even if recognized as simply the "imagined voice" of a voice that is not there (where the original is not available or beyond the reader's comprehension)?
I'm not sure translation is ever any one thing. It is entirely in relation and that relation is determined in large part by the text in question, and perhaps equally by its foreign administrator -- but it is an ever impossible relation.
As for whether a translation can stand alone, it often does, whatever one thinks about it. And out of this excision are produced some extravagant departures that can shape specific cultural discourses in astonishing ways. I am not sure I wish to sit in total judgment of the itineraries implied by translation; and if I do (which I certainly must do), then it can never be without full and equal condemnation of myself. The transgressions of which you speak can also have pernicious outcomes, particularly when driven by consensus.
This is a great understanding of translation and what should and shouldn't be expected of it. The benefits of the act of translation can quickly be twisted and manipulated if we value the act beyond reproach, without the possibility to check and balance the responsibilities of the translator. It reminds me of a story I'd read about Friedrich H�lderlin whom you also refer to in a later section.
This story comes from Anne Carson's Nay Rather where she relays a moment in his life where he was translating Antigone while at the same time being urged by his family to enter into psychiatric clinic. Something to which you too allude, Carson seems to infer that he might have been overcome by the great chasm between languages or otherwise, similarly, felt this vast responsibility to the original text while translating and understood the impossibility of proximity.
Let me quickly quote the section, Carson writes:
The verb καλχαίνειν (kalkhainein), "to make purple," came to signify profound and troubled emotion: to grow dark with disquiet, to seethe with worries, to harbour dark thoughts, to brood in the deep of one's mind. When German lyric poet Friedrich H�lderlin undertook to translate Sophokles' Antigone in 1796, he met this problem on the first page. The play opens with a distressed Antigone confronting her sister Ismene. "What is it?" asks Ismene, then she adds the purple verb. "You are obviously growing dark in mind, brooding deeply (καλχαίνουσ' /kalkhainous) over some piece of news." This is a standard rendering of the line. H�lderlin's version: "Du scheinst ein rotes Wort zu f�rben," would mean something like "You seem to colour reddish purple word, to dye your words red-purple."
The talks assembled in Asclepias are not limited to consideration of translation -- certainly not in isolation, nor as a regimentable mot d'ordre, nor even necessarily as a task -- but collaterally with photographic incident. "Exulant, or The Rain," the text you refer to in which H�lderlin appears seeks cinematic concordance (which is an effective discordance, though the distinction hardly matters) against a polylingual idea of exile that is thrown into question against the German, and specifically Germanic Exulanten, the untranslatability of which inscribes a refutation of the possibility of either origination or exile -- since in a linear logic, one is incumbent upon the other; but also because of the unlikelihood of place, as well as the falsity of nationalism. Ultimately, this entire work's concern, and this, I would say, is true of all of my work, is with the ubiquity of fascism (its degrees) and language's dictatorship -- how this is exposed is often through (murderous) absurdity, as in the occurrence of Campos de Carvalho's imbeciles, or Galina Ustvolskaya's "wooden cube," for example.
The ubiquity of fascism? After reading the text, it felt quite personal. Even through the density of language and layers of references, it felt close as if it were about self-realization or understanding how one existed beyond what could be grasped, translated, taxed, or confined. Although maybe we are talking about the same thing -- the individual in the face of institutions and the established (in all of its abstractions -- language, economic, social, racial, and gender politics)?
And this dictatorship of language is something that seeps into every corner of society and is apparent today in the language being used amongst the Greeks and the Germans. In very obvious ways right now, the debates taking place are attempting to frame the future of Europe with each side carefully developing their particular visions with languages steeped in history. One can even find within the speeches of the Greek Prime Minister a language that bears striking resemblances to that of Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War.
I understand your skepticism, and hesitated before resorting to the term fascism for precisely this reason. But I don't think fascism is separable from what is generally considered to be personal. And you are likely right that the text draws from a personal present in order to ask questions of itself; or rather, it doesn't uphold the distinctions expected of it. I'd like to quote from a passage from Ingeborg Bachmann's Der Fall Franza that articulates precisely the unexpectedness of such an assertion:
You say fascism, but that sounds strange, for I've never heard that word used to describe a personal relationship. [...] But that's an interesting idea, for it had to begin somewhere. Why does one only refer to fascism when it has to do with opinions or blatant acts? (tr. Peter Filkins).
Franza goes on to question the erasure by the generalization of psychoanalytic discourse of a notion of "evil" by an absolving idea of "sickness," arriving ultimately at the charge of rationalism's madness -- a charge that is upholdable by the tabulation of reasoned murders committed en masse by the Third Reich, and beyond. How is murder ever not personal, I wonder?
What is particularly confounding to me, and it is something I have been grappling with for a while, at least since Sisyphus, Outdone., but likely before even then, is precisely the human time signature; one's persistent belatedness in relation, not only to oneself, but to one's context, to history. It is present in the photographic capture, that is a present after the fact (which is the case, also of translation); in other words, it can never account for itself. It is a vigil carried out by the dead over the living who are only perceptible in their morbidity.
Returning for a moment to the Brazilian author Campos de Carvalho who is regrettably untranslated in English: "The word was given to man to blaspheme against his destiny, and the written word is the true word, just as the dead is the only true man in his total muteness." (My translation, from the French translation.) When Shostakovitch composes his string quartet #8, it is both in response to Dresden and his own envisioned end -- if he dedicates the quartet to his own memory, ostensibly in the absence of a dedication to come, it is out of a sense of belatedness, and in keeping with the poliomyelitis that is preventing him from performing. Borrowing then from Campos de Carvalho, the dedication itself signifies such muteness, both of the body, and the body politic, the bombed-out city of a country gangrened by fascism, with its complex valence of victims and victimizers. Shostakovitch is to be counted among the victims "of fascism and war" to whom the subsequent symphony is dedicated.
Along these lines, when Sokurov and Aranovich set Altovaya Sonata (Sonata for Viola) against Shostakovitch's last composition, the composition cannot help but be premonitory, such that the commemorative gesture of the film is as much a forensics as it is an elegy. Galina Ustvolskaya literalizes this contradiction by scoring a "wooden cube" -- literally, a coffin -- into her Composition No. 2, "Dies Irae." Whether or not the coffin is empty is, philosophically speaking, immaterial: it functions as a cenotaph, since the dead are always missing. But this indifference is precisely philosophy's fault.
Regarding fascism, I find this to be incredibly true. It seems as if we tend to dissociate from these incredibly large-scale institutions/movements, not realizing or actively refusing to acknowledge that at its root it is completely tied with a personal decision. The choice to engage or to disengage.
And this, too, is related to my frustration with most literature: works that seem to exist in a bubble onto themselves, instead of being written into a world that exists beyond them.
Considering this, do you approach your work in the hopes of making the reader or listener aware of an indifference that exists or is it more of a personal journey trying to understand the ways of indifference and how we dissociate from the bigger picture?
If I am honest with myself (and with you), at one point this was true; I began with a fervent belief in literature's capacity to effect change, even at a most microcosmic level -- and I found confirmation in this when I first read L'�tranger (Camus), and then perhaps even more convincingly La chute (The Fall). It was nothing resembling a (displaced) mentorship, even several times removed, as I have no real belief in this idea, and certainly not in its contemporary purchasable form; it is a crass kind of cynicism that conveys the notion that a mentor can be bought (though seemingly, almost everyone seems to have a price).
As for an audience*, and I say this not to be coy, but because I truly have no sense of a reader or audience when I am writing, such an awareness would be pernicious to a work in any case; and at the same time, I view -- or have viewed -- writing, again somewhat paradoxically, as dialogical, and want -- or have wanted -- to believe in its capacity to be reciprocal (even if in failure). At the moment, I am in a period of disappointment, a disappointment that far exceeds the sphere of what might be called personal; and to articulate this disappointment in a precise manner escapes me, though I can certainly conjure any number of complaints. Perhaps it has something to do with being faced with an idea of obsolescence, exactly the kind of obsolescence that makes a conviction of the kind you describe almost laughable (and daily, there is the impression of being mocked by the outcomes of mechanisms set under way long before I arrived, but to which I am nonetheless answerable).
The much under-discussed (and almost completely untranslated -- into English) Austrian philosopher G�nther Anders identifies the moment of such obsolescence as coinciding with the realization, through the development of the A- and H-bombs, that humanity is destructible, in its utter entirety (it is at this moment that Anders abandons art history in favor of anti-nuclear activism); this grotesquerie, though not dissociable from it, exceeds even the absurdity of the factory-death-camp installation that is now firmly embedded in the social substrata, if only because there is no possibility of retaliation against it, no possibility, either, of proximity. I think even this brief avowal makes explicit the degree to which my relationship to literature implicates me in it, with the caution nonetheless that the subject is not always the I from which one speaks.
*(There are at least two ways in which this can be refuted: first, the texts in Asclepias, having almost all been intended as talks, acknowledge, in their writing, the eventuality of a listener, however much this remained an abstraction; similarly, much of my work, in one way or another, has taken an epistolary form -- a good portion of The Middle Notebookes, for example, draws from my end of various bodies of correspondence; in this, it is comprised of letters after the fact; their (exhumed) re-contextualization in the book, though, already partakes of a void to which they are inevitably bound, precisely because of their belatedness -- they comprise an address without address, a tendering toward nothing. And this nothing is as much the self, as anything.)
From this fervent belief in literature to the current period of disappointment, how have you seen your artistic process and output develop or change? And considering G�nther Anders, where do you think you stand in your current relationship with literature? Asclepias doesn't seem like a collection resigned to its place but very much wrestling with current issues and its historical context. And where do you see Asclepias in your personal bibliography?
I'm not sure I'm able to make these kinds of assessments -- in part because each book ultimately occupies the place, for me, of a memory loss; it stands in the stead of something obliviated by the sheer fact of living, supplanting, and thus prolonging it. It would be misguided, I think, to place fervor and disappointment at two ends of a traceable spectrum; I certainly wouldn't attempt to attribute a global understanding of my life as a writer into anything resembling distinct categories -- in part, out of philosophical conviction, but also because I lack the necessary distance (and am resolutely disinterested in archiving myself: Derrida -- "the first catastrophe, is the ignoble archive that rots everything..."). Disappointment is certainly not a place from which writing can take place; in that sense, it isn't a resignation, but a frustration, which is, or can be, far more activating (what I find most disappointing is disappointment itself; I have always been opposed to it).
It is perhaps along the lines of recognizing, after having imagined oneself to have a fundamentally suicidal nature, to discover that one has outlived the age of suicide; in other words that one is far more alive than one ever wished to be: but there is nothing more vital, I think, than the desire to die. Perhaps in a sense this is literature's vocation. To attend to its own murderousness, which is indissolubly imbricated in the murderousness that determines the shape of the world.
Fervor may be the one thing that has remained consistent (despite and against myself), over time, from the first books until now; it must take the form of a kind of stubbornness because there are such ample, defensible, reasons for discontinuing.
As for what has changed, I hope my mind has improved!... and not at the expense of something unrecognizable... In material terms, the relationship between my languages is much altered, since Je Nathana�l (2003/2006); prior to that moment, there were two distinct bodies of work, one in French and the other in English; it was only with Je Nathana�l that I attempted to place the two languages in direct relationship with one another, and with that decision, I abandoned everything prior to it, which is of no interest to me now (save, perhaps, Underground). Even this narrative is wrong, there was nothing quite so deliberate about it! More recently, I have ventured outside of the enclave of bilingualism, with very rudimentary competence, but with due respect to the languages I encounter and place against one another, attentive to the outcomes of such composites. It seems to me that there is something to learn about history in this persistence, and maybe I mean about time. Now, the time of my work is altered (underneath which alt�r� in French, is adulterated, but also thirsting) -- its time is more vast, more stratified, more prehistoric, and disconsolate.
In answer to your question regarding Anders, I can only say that whatever I do, literature, for me, remains an imperative, a necessity, with its share of (compromised) urgency. (Compromised of necessity). I made an inverse decision to Anders, though not for dissimilar reasons: I ceased political activism and redirected my entire effort onto writing. But it was also out of disgust, ultimately, at the way activism was choreographed, and the kinds of manipulations exerted against the very people summoned to march. When it became impossible for me to distinguish between the paramilitary tactics of the left and their rightwing corollary, I stepped off. In any case, I have a fundamental distrust of the crowd, whatever guise it takes, whether under the rubric "community" or something more obviously sinister, it seems one is never far from the formation of a fascist rally. I am interested in something more reciprocal, which is admittedly more slow, but perhaps more integral. With all of this, I have deep respect for people who risk themselves in body to improve the lot of the planet and its inhabitants (someone like Pierre Rabhi, for example).
Finally, Asclepias, for me, is a pleasure, especially when set against the much more taxing Middle Notebookes. It comes the closest to existing in a present, and attests very palpably to friendship -- whether through invitation, collaboration, or contestation. There isn't a piece of writing in the book that doesn't arise out of a conversation. And that conversation is its context, the context in which a body risks itself, in speaking, against every evidence of its muteness. Asclepias is very vitally engaged in a kind of apprenticeship, of the cinema most especially, after photography, and in this it is an accompaniment to Sotto l'immagine, which, despite its Italian title, was published last year in French. Perhaps in this sense the truest (auto-)biography would be its bibliographies -- as well as its proximity to water.
Nic Grosso is the founder of Literaturha.us.
Feder: A Scenario
Publishers Weekly. 263.30 (July 25, 2016): p43.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Feder: A Scenario
Nathanael. Nightboat (SPD, dist.), $15:95 trade paper (144p) ISBN 978-1-937658-56-4
Writer and translator Nathanael's (The Middle Notebooks) latest is a slim, obscure "scenario" in which philosophical musings on architecture, the photographic image, and epistemology are layered atop a barebones narrative foundation. History, this elliptical book seems to imply, is too violent, chaotic, and vast to perceive in all its complexity; rather, the historical record is like a photograph left "to macerate too long in the developer ... [a] thick amassment of detail, so intricate as to be indiscernible." The enigmatic protagonist is Feder, "a man, who is no man, in a time, which is no time." He is a creature of habit, marching up the same stairs to the same desk in a soulless architectural complex, where he works as a functionary assigned various vague tasks. Feder investigates an unidentified corpse languishing at the bottom of a stairwell, only to be eventually deemed guilty for some unspecified offense. The cipher-like Feder is at once vital to the smooth operation of the state mechanism and utterly replaceable, a body as expendable as the ones constantly washing ashore and onto the city streets. Thick, theory-heavy prose abounds--"The coincidence of reflectivity and transparency provokes an unresolvable somatic contradiction which is most apparent at a building's flexion"--but Nathanael's idiosyncratic vision and patches of desert-dry absurdist humor add a pleasurable element to the reader's book-length bafflement. (Sept.)
Asclepias: The Milkweeds
Nathanael. Nightboat (UPNE, dist.), $14.95 trade paper (96p) ISBN 978-1-937658-39-7
MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Slim and strangely musical, this collection of lyric essays by prolific writer Nathanaël (Sisyphus, Outdone) serves as a sustained investigation of translation, photography, death, divergence, and intimacy, among other subjects. Nathanaël's work is the kind of embodied philosophy in which the multiple valences and intricate meanings within each sentence will give readers pause, yet her intriguing insights will pull ambitious readers forward. There are short lines of theory so sharp as to make the recurrent topics of photography and translation seem new—"With its vital concern for proximate agonies, translation owes something crucial to vigilation for its protean form." There are also long bits in which the promiscuity of Nathanaël's thinking will incite a thrill, as when French artist Claude Cahun's double-exposed photograph of herself leads to "an unusual architecture of bodies, a questionable landscape from which to think queerly about translation." Similarly, a comparison of French and German, the concept of hermaphroditism, the geographies of a body, and the value of the unintelligible all play roles within a few quick pages. This collection does not accept the limits of academic disciplines, but instead gifts to the reader Nathanaël's idiosyncratic mind. Its consideration of translation as "a poetics of equivocation rather than equivalency," is an important contribution to Nathanaël's substantive body of work. (June)
QUOTED: When Feder manifests himself as a temporal being, one with a past, present, and future ... he comes to his end. In much this way, the book itself defies understanding, glancing off direct appeals to meaning. Its genre is amorphous, its style at turns deeply engaging then coldly exclusive. Feder is a puzzle, a dramatized mental game, some rules of which readers might feel like they are missing. But, this reader is certainly ready to hear the riddle again; maybe next time I’ll catch on.
‘Feder: A Scenario’ by Nathanaël
Review by Trevor Ketner
January 21, 2017
Somewhere between philosophical treatise and pastiche of a high-modern novella, Nathanaël’s Feder: A Scenario marks the author’s tenth volume with Nightboat Books. Beautifully designed, Feder follows its eponymous main character through his mundane life of steady bureaucratic labor in a highly regulated dystopian society, “a world of silence” not altogether dissimilar from the contemporary United States. The narrative, stylistically broken and spliced, follows Feder to the moment that this mundanity is broken through linguistic and temporal revelation. “Tomorrow is not a word that had occurred to Feder before. The whole mechanism grinds to a halt.” Unfortunately for Feder, these revelations have lethal consequences.The book is invested in the traditions of authors like Albert Camus, Anne Carson, Julio Cortazar, and Maggie Nelson with its intellectual rigor and theoretical underpinnings (sharing, with Nelson for instance, a great respect for Wittgenstein). Decidedly cerebral, Feder doesn’t just involve the mind, it takes place there; the associative, disembodied voice of a narrator is quite nearly pure intellect. So much of what we are allowed to see of this world, just in snatches, is architectural, the manipulation of light and space acting as a kind of structural inspiration for the narrative. What’s more, the philosophical mode has poetic qualities and both of these are dressed up in the façade of prose. This was a mode of many the philosophers in Feder’s pages: the fictional scenario to illustrate a point. While the prose is occasionally opaque in intention, the book finds its denouement in a remarkably beautiful lyric section entitled “Topography of a Bird.”
“The bubonic hour is reserved for everyone,” the Delphic narrator says in this final section. Perhaps “Topography of a Bird” appeals to the reader as a kind of rich foil for the relatively stark syntax of the rest of Feder. The section itself is concerned with a certain kind of revolution after the death of Feder, even if only a personal revolution in the thought processes of the two characters, Anders and Sterne, who reside in these lush sentences
Carson has her deft humor and Nelson a lively messiness, even Camus and Cortazar have the weight of sheer weirdness to balance out some of the denser portions of their texts. Nathanaël uses the immaculate structural intricacies of pretense and simulation as a counterweight for Feder’s density. There are so many gestures toward recognizable narrative and familiar structures. The art in these gestures lies in that fact that they rarely resolve, instead often getting purposefully obscured in technical jargon or minutiae. These gestures are laid atop one another until, to borrow an image from the book, like so many images on a single piece of film they lose all sense of immediacy, “a thick amassment of detail, so intricate as to be indiscernible. . . . The surface fallen from itself, as it were; a strange luminescence.”
So often these narrative structures imitate riddles, or games. “For a moment Feder believes he is being watched. It is a game he likes to play with himself.” This comes, again, from the philosophers’ scenario method of explanation: If we have someone named Feder with y and z qualities and we understand that the world in which he lives has a and b conditions and he is put in whatever situation, what happens? In this way revelations can be thought of as parallel to punchlines. The thing about this book is it never reaches a punchline or revelation, instead exploring scenarios via non sequitur and collaged narrative structure.
“We have made ourselves manifest. Now, there is no one left to see.” When Feder manifests himself as a temporal being, one with a past, present, and future (or put in a more classical context a beginning, middle, and end, therefore manifesting as a dramatic being, as well), he comes to his end. In much this way, the book itself defies understanding, glancing off direct appeals to meaning. Its genre is amorphous, its style at turns deeply engaging then coldly exclusive. Feder is a puzzle, a dramatized mental game, some rules of which readers might feel like they are missing. But, this reader is certainly ready to hear the riddle again; maybe next time I’ll catch on.
Feder: A Scenario
By Nathanaël
Nightboat Books
Paperback, 9781937658564, 124 pgs
September 2016
- See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/01/21/feder-a-scenario-by-nathanael/#sthash.lReAcw7L.dpuf
SISPHYUS, OUTDONE BY NATHANAËL
written by Janice Lee March 20, 2014
Sisphyus, Outdone.
Theatres of the Catastrophal
By Nathanaël
Nightboat Books, 2012
168 pages / Nightboat Books / Amazon / Goodreads
& also,
The Sorrow and the Fast of It
by Nathanaël (formerly Nathalie Stephens)
Nightboat Books, 2007
I am afraid of silence.
I am afraid of the dark.
I am afraid to fall down.
I am afraid of insomnia.
I am afraid of emptiness.
Is something missing?
Yes something is missing and always will be missing.
The feeling of emptiness.
– Louise Bourgeois
Image Credit: http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/cultura/2013/louise-bourgeois-bellas-artes-muestra-968836.htmlImage Credit: http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/
This past January I wander through an exhibition of the work of Louise Bourgeious at Bellas Artes in Mexico City.
The vulnerability of a torment: you have to begin somewhere: the color blue, the damage is repairable.
– Louise Bourgeois
Let’s just start with a question here.
What is silence?
Silence as excess.
What I am afraid of: to be alone with my thoughts.
Lately I am living in a period of life where I am drawn to the devastating, the beautiful, the devastatingly beautiful. I am in a period of recovery, of getting-to-know-myself, of hiding, of darkness, of wiping the grime off the window with my elbow. Here we are together. Here we are.
Only part of the window is blurry. Yet it is the part that wants to be looked out of.
Let’s begin, too, that the acceptance of the tightening “this is all there is” is a comfort, a squeeze. I mean, am I afraid of dying? Am I aware of my mortality? Today? Aware?
On the other side of the cell, a grate. Openings large enough for fingers and eyes, but not the rest of the body. A phantasmal movement.
If the present is a measure of culpability, it is because of its immediate anteriority.
– Sisyphus, Outdone
Lately I am captivated by sunsets, the charcoal darkness of daylight’s mini-death each evening.
Screen shot 2014-03-19 at 1.05.27 PM
On the plane leaving AWP in Seattle, we are sitting on the runway, it begins to rain outside, I am listening to Elliot Smith, and I read:
Still.
>>
After an aftershock, there is stillness. There are reverberations and then there is stillness. The stillness itself is reverberant. Reverberant with the reverberations of the shock. I am shaken and then I am still. Instilled in me is the shakenness.
This is the mingling together of realities, the awakening of devastation. What does it mean to have a heavy heart?
Then:
Standing and suffering as in exists. As in the train exists.
How do I explain the feeling in my body when I read this? The undecided, unrecognizable feeling that washes over me. Suddenly, in this period of my life, there are no more words. I lose the ability to conjure the right words. Words. The immensity of the stare, the words, as they gaze back as me from the page. This is not a book. This is the conjuring of the words I have lost in my own incapabilities.
It is raining in.
Can I even describe to you the number of things I have been currently mourning? Can I capture to you the relief of a life that requires it? Mourning, I mean. As required, as necessary, as absolutely shakening, as absolutely devastating, calming, suspending.
Having brunch in Brooklyn with Brenda Ijima and Sueyeun Juliette Lee, we talk about loss and death, and the straddling of worlds.
The conjoined cries are the seismic matter of the dream, whose tremors reverberate into a state of waking and remembering.
This is no threshold: it is a reiterated collision that belies the possibility of situation.
This is not a book review. In no way is this a “review.” This is me reading and feeling and reacting in my body, a space for words, for resonances. This is all that I am capable of today. Today I refuse to “review” the language that asks my body to toil in a new way, a blurred sense of being that is absolutely certain and uncertain at the same time. The certain uncertainty of a strong and still shakenness, tectonic, stuttering. What does it mean to be tormented? To have a tormented mind? To be unable to sleep?
The tremors register within me a sincere affect.
These are its resonances.
There are only so many attempts at expression, infinite failures of language, finite spaces to feel whole again. Some attempts at approximations of this “feeling,” the feeling of this book, in its material form, in the reaction it produces in me, a reader, on a plane headed back to Los Angeles from Seattle, then again, on a plane headed back to Los Angeles, my home, from Philadelphia. Here, language inevitably fails as it always does. This is another relief.
***
Approximation #1: The Salton Sea. I’m walking around the Silver Lake Reservoir with a guy I’ve only met for the first time. We are having a conversation, among many things, about experience and the inarticulateable. I want to express my inability to express the experience of being at the Salton Sea.
– Really, I can only approximate to you my subjective experience. And anyways, you would see it differently, experience it differently.
– Describe it to me anyways.
I try. I say: Well, first imagine a sea, or a giant lake. The water is beautifully stagnant, blue. The sky, for whatever reason, is sort of pink, like there’s a slight blur or filter over it, a strange impressionist painting with water poured over it. Around the water there is a beach, sand, but it isn’t sand, it’s the crushed up bones of fish, fine like sand, and everywhere there are dead fish, scattered, in piles, in various states of decomposition, and in the water, dead fish floating on the water, and near the rocks there are the bodies of dead fish, still, but slowly moved by the water lapping back and forth slowly, the subtle movement of the corpses by the natural movement of the water, mesmerizing. And it’s hot. Fucking hot. It’s the middle of summer and it’s the desert and it’s like 110 degrees outside and the smell of the fish is also everywhere, consuming, and the heat emphasizes the smell, and all of it, the death in every corner, the intensity, sublime, devastating, and most of all, so fucking beautiful.
This is probably not what I said. This is an approximation of what I said because I don’t remember. I only remember walking and trying to describe an important experience.
***
The city presented a sky that demanded an ocean, but there were none of these.
I am, again, able to be affected by music. I am, too, capable of murder.
Still the mouth is catastrophal. It kisses catastrophe into the world.
Today this book is an excuse to bear to you some of my soul. This is perhaps a confession. I confess that I empathize with Sisyphus immensely. I confess that I believe there is not enough empathy in the world. I confess, too, that I believe there is way too much sympathy in the world.
My current lens is the only lens I can filter this through. Today I remember that yesterday there was an earthquake in Los Angeles. It was also 91 degrees. Yesterday I was walking around in Philadelphia where it was snowing and 25 degrees.
There is an assigned significance to the aftershock, too, the stillness, too, the movement, too, the acceptance, too, the pain. What of desire? What of unrecognizability? What of the cold?
Today I am okay with uncertainty.
Historically speaking, our nothing is in our forgottenness.
Historically speaking, our nothing is excessive.
The first difficulty is location. The second removal.
– The Sorrow and the Fast of It
***
IMG_3124
Approximation #2: Catedral Metropolitana. I enter the cathedral and sit down at one of the benches. As I sit there, I am suddenly and completely overwhelmed by an intensely uncomfortable feeling. Something incredibly heavy is weighing me down from all angles. It is more than uncomfortable. It is painful. It feels sort of like the heavy twist in your chest when you are utterly heartbroken, that wrenching of your internal organs, that incredible sadness and pain that I can not control no matter how hard I try to breathe, just breathe. It feels almost like the residue of the space has unfurled itself from the building that contains it, the inarticulatable suffering of all the people who have entered this space and cried, their tears, then mine, I can not control it, I cry. But through the pain, the fucking heaviness of it all, I do not want to leave, I do not want to get up. I will never feel this again, I think. I will never have this experience again. I want to hold on to it for as long as I am able. When I finally do leave the cathedral, the sunlight and crowds awaiting me outside, the feeling immediately dissipates. I can not even remember anymore how it felt. I remember the memory of the feeling, the words I used to try and articulate the experience to myself.
What does it mean to feel something? To feel and forget? To feel and remember?
Is death inevitable? What else is inevitable?
What does it mean to break?
We wash the dirt from our hands. We are that cowardly.
Every possible sentence is incomplete.
I am hallucinating. I care to know what the temperature is. I care to be capable of incredible kindness. I am capable of incredible cruelty.
Today I am capable of crying. I was not always. Today I don’t remember any of my education in literary theory. I am incapable of literary analysis. I am only capable of feeling, of comparing feelings.
What outdid Sisyphus.
– Sisyphus, Outdone
I am dying. I am living. I am simultaneously dying and living.
This is life. No. This is death.
Let’s talk about the geometry of life. It’s all wrong. The geometry, I mean.
I have killed before.
Of sincerity.
Of a lack of.
More time.
***
Approximation #3: Rain. Why suffer? In order to suffer. Lying in bed, being on Molly. Purgatory. This is not living, not dying, not relaxing, not. “I’m glad you decided to live a little,” he says to me. This is not. Heartbreak. Hot. Cold. Hot. Cold. Where and when? Register of being dispensed with. Living, not. The next time it rains, an impulse to lie down on the sidewalk. I lie down on the sidewalk. It is raining.
***
Let me try the afterall, the afterthis, the after. Let me try this body, already washed down river to arrive again at my front stoop. I was not home when this happened.
– I’m back.
– Why did you return?
– There are worse accusations.
It is not the body you died in. That one is still tucked away underneath your eyelids, still, the body, still, the composition, still, the hindrance. The sign above the door says “Emergency Exit Only.”
Would you believe that right now I am flying above a sea of white clouds? Ripples of blue sky that softly designate waves in the cloud-ocean. I am flying. “Hoist point.”
A theatre of the castrophal, with its figuring of untranslatability is also in this sense a theatre of the mind. A catastrophic theatre that exceeds thought. In other words it is unthinkable.
>>
In this does it resemble death.
Death as it is distinct from agony.
For example: The door opens into nothing but itself.
Before this book, the last piece of writing to make me cry: Kit Schluter’s translation of the poem “The Cold” by Jaime Saenz, 1967.
Before the book, the last thing to make me feel: it all.
Is death inevitable? What else is inevitable?
Today, I remember. It is already tomorrow.
Before, before. After all. Today.