"For a long time, after her escape and the notice about the search for her that was printed in Paris-Soir, I knew nothing about Dora Bruder."
A book in
"For a long time, after her escape and the notice about the search for her that was printed in Paris-Soir, I knew nothing about Dora Bruder."
A book in which what's NOT known is maybe more important than what's known, which is not much. The author repeatedly reminds us what he doesn't know. The whole book is more a meditation of what's unknown, and even of what cannot be known, having been lost to time.
“I remember experiencing for the first time that sense of emptiness that comes with the knowledge of what has been destroyed, razed to the ground.”
Time creates an aura, much like the one silence creates. The silence of history mirrors the silence of anonymity. The years are the many layers of padding muffling the voices of the past. The past becomes inaccessible--lost in noise.
“I feel as though I am alone in making the link between Paris then and Paris now, alone in remembering all these details. There are moments when the link is strained and in danger of snapping, and other evenings when the city of yesterday appears to me in fleeting gleams behind that of today.”
For a long time, I wondered about this idea that the universe is a computer, one whose hard drive contains all the data of what happened, even when noone was looking. And nothing is ever lost to time, and all mysteries can be solved. You just have to know how to access it.
“It is said that premises retain some stamp, however faint, of their previous inhabitants. Stamp: an imprint, hollow or in relief.”
The best he can do, like fans visiting a rock star's childhood home, is to walk in her footsteps, to cross paths with her through time, and imagine. To experience what she might have experienced--to try to relate to anything that doesn't change. But everything changes. Even the map of the world changes, the continents shift.
“One way not to lose all touch with Dora Bruder over this period would be to report on the changes in the weather. The first snow fell on 4 November 1941. Winter got off to a cold start on 22 December. On 29 December, the temperature dropped still further, and windowpanes were covered with a thin coating of ice.”
A cruel reminder: there will always be days of fog and days of rain. Seasons come back, there will always be cold days. But never exactly the same cold day. One cannot reach through these illusive commonalities.
“Nevertheless, you can read: DEPARTMENT OF E . . . INSPECTORS Underneath, an arrow: “Passage on Right. Door number . . .” We shall never know the number of this door.”
I should mention that this book is really about the holocaust. That tragedy hangs like a fog over the prose. If you enjoy the melancholy of Sebald, you might enjoy this one. I felt the beginning and premise were excellent, and it really put me in a mood. But I don't believe it delivers on that promise, never arriving at any new or surprising insights. Still, a pretty good read overall....more
Anais Nin goes through men in a way that parallels how her absent father went through women. But instead of sleeping with them (or maybe, in addition Anais Nin goes through men in a way that parallels how her absent father went through women. But instead of sleeping with them (or maybe, in addition to), she analyzes them, mothers them, worships them, excuses their bad behavior, entertains their theories, dismisses them. In the end, she seems much smarter than her men, yet she listens and gains profound insights from them.
This is the first time I've read anything by her, and from her reputation, I thought this was going to be 90% sex and incest. But it's almost none of that. I mean, I'm sure she has a lot of sex, but it's mostly off screen (or expurgated)
She's an extremely intellectual and abstract thinker, and this makes her diary unlike any other. There is very little of the day to day happenings, and it's almost entirely filled with her psychoanalyzing herself and her friends. (I've read some reviews that say she's self absorbed, but I mean, this is her DIARY, she's allowed to be a little self absorbed here of all places, right?)
Like any complicated person, she's full of contradictions. She's extremely radical yet at the same time, kind of conventional. On the one hand, she's completely free of social and sexual boundaries. Many of her relations overflow into uncomfortable (for most) situations, like how she has sexual relations with most of her therapists. And obviously her father is hugely problematic as well. She seems to be a feminist in how strong and independent and free she is. Yet at the same time, she listens and submits to men and their sometimes sexist views without any pushback. She even accepts certain assumptions they have about the differences between men and women that seem quite a stretch to my ears:
Women, said Rank, when cured of neurosis, enter life. Man enters art. Woman is too close to life, too human. The feminine quality is necessary to the male artist, but Rank questioned whether masculinity is equally necessary to the woman artist.
Overall, this was way more interesting than a diary should ever be. There's something seductive about the serpentine intuitive pathways of her mind. Also, she's just a damn good writer. I would read more of her, but maybe one of her novels next. I think I need a little break from this, as good as it was.
Some choice quotes:
“What is this powerful magic we create together and indulge in? How can Henry be excluded from it when he has genius? What do June and I seek together that Henry does not believe in? Wonder wonder wonder.”
“Perhaps we have built a false concept of wholeness and, under the pressure of an artificial unity, people like June explode and fly in all directions.” (reminiscent of Golden Notebook)
“This love of cruelty must bind them indissolubly. Would they take pleasure in destroying me? For jaded people, the only pleasure left is to demolish others.”
“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”
“I have no brakes on," I said. "Analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.”
“I feel like a well-appointed laboratory of the soul—myself, my home, my life—in which none of the vitally fecund or destructive, explosive experiments has yet begun. I like the shape of the bottles, the colors of the chemicals. I collect bottles, and the more they look like alchemist bottles the more I like them for their eloquent forms.”
“Enter this laboratory of the soul where every feeling will be X-rayed by Dr. Allendy to expose the blocks, the twists, the deformations, the scars which interfere with the flow of life. Enter this laboratory of the soul where incidents are refracted into a diary, dissected to prove that everyone of us carries a deforming mirror where he sees himself too small or too large, too fat or too thin, even Henry, who believes himself so free, blithe, and unscarred. Enter here where one discovers that destiny can be directed, that one does not need to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. One need not be branded by the first pattern. Once the deforming mirror is smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness; there is a possibility of joy.”
“If we could only write simultaneously all the levels on which we live, all at once. The whole truth! Henry is closer to it. I have a vice for embellishing.”
“If unity is impossible to the writer, who is a sea of spiritual protoplasm, capable of flowing in all directions, of engulfing every object in its path, of trickling in every crevice, of filling every hole, at least truth is possible in the confession of our insincerities.”
“How the aim of analysis resembles the old Chinese definition of wisdom: wisdom being the destruction of idealism. The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others—an admirable image. When this is broken down by the analyst's discoveries, it is a relief because this image is always a great strain to live up to. Some consider the loss of it a cause for suicide.”
“Henry has asked the impossible of me. I have to nourish his conception of June and feed his book. As each page of it reaches me, in which he does more and more justice to her, I feel it is my vision he has borrowed. Certainly no woman was ever asked so much. I am a human being, not a goddess. Because I am a woman who understands, I am asked to understand everything, to accept everything.”
“I laugh at my old fear of analysis. The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
I have no fear of clarity.”
“I have a feeling that the masochism of woman is different from that of man. Hers comes from her maternal instinct. A mother ... suffers, gives, feeds. A woman is taught not to think of herself, to be selfless, to serve, help. This masochism is almost natural to woman.”
“I told [Henry Miller] my theory of skipping meaningless details, as the dream skips them, which produces not only intensity but power. He begins, "Wednesday morning I stood at the corner..." I say, drop "Wednesday"; drop the extra weight to achieve speed, the essential ... a literature of "cuts.”
“To the poets, insanity seems closer to divinity than sanity. The madman arrives at death not by human progression, the disintegration of cells, but by a series of holocausts.”
“He said, "I always thought that one had to deserve love, I worked so hard to merit it."
This phrase was so much like what I often wrote in my diary. The idea of deserving love. And then watching love being given to people who did nothing to deserve it.”
“There is a great continuity in my relations and devotions to people. For example, I remember what Allendy and I talked about the last time, and if a thread remained loose I pick it up and set about untangling it and placing it where it belongs. It is a work of minute cellular construction which all life constantly strives to destroy. The entire mechanism of practical life obstructs such a construction. The telephone rings; the patients are waiting; the conference has to be written, prescriptions, and my own mass of cares, duties, the house, the friends, the garden, the needs of others. All this brutally submerges the pattern, the web of profound correlations. I fight hasty, casual, careless contacts. Just a patient, subterranean, delicate effort to destroy the solitude of human beings, to build bridges. To achieve this in relationship and in writing takes much time. Proust had to retire from life to do it in writing.
I give to this creation a care I give to none other. When we are interrupted, it is characteristic of me that my thread remains unbroken. I stand in the room possessed by the theme, and I do not let go.”
“When I came home I sat by the fire and, staring at it so long, I became hallucinated. I thought I was standing inside a glass bell such as I have as a paperweight, a ball of glass which I shake and then the flurries of snow dance inside of it and cover a diminutive castle.” (reminiscent of The Bell Jar)
“I can only tell you that my surroundings are me. Everything is me, because I have rejected all conventions, the opinion of the world, all its laws. I am not obliged, as you and Jeanne are, to play a social role.”
On Artaud giving a lecture: “Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theatre came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony.”
Artaud: “They always want to hear about; they want to hear an objective conference on 'The Theatre and the Plague,' and I want to give them the experience itself, the plague itself, so they will be terrified, and awaken. I want to awaken them. They do not realize they are dead. Their death is total, like deafness, blindness. This is agony I portrayed. Mine, yes, and everyone who is alive.”
Rank: “'The precondition, then, of the creative personality is not only acceptance, but its actual glorification of itself.'
Cannot or will not accept himself. How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities?”
“We are punctual, a stressed, marked characteristic. We need order around us, in the house, in the life, although we live by irresistible impulses, as if the order in the closets, in our papers, in our books, in our photographs, in our souvenirs, in our clothes could preserve us from chaos in our feelings, loves, in our work.”
“There are two of us. The fragments of our life which do not fit into a desired image, we discard. But I cull them in the diary, and I cannot forget them. My father forgets them.”
“The immense pride in my father. True, he did not love us humanly, for ourselves, just this reflection of himself in three human beings reproducing him, continuing his attitudes. He loved us as his creations.”
“[My father] tells me the story of the humble and rather homely little governess no one paid attention to. "Without me she would never have known love. I used to cover her homely little face to be able to make love to her. It transformed her. She became almost beautiful.”
“In front of me there is a deep abyss, and if I continue to fall into it, deeper and deeper, how long will it take me to reach the bottom? I imagine that life is such an abyss, and that the day I strike bottom will be the day I cease to suffer. One of these days I will say to my journal: "Dear Diary, I have touched bottom.”
“We talk about the dream—return to my original statement that most dreamwriting is false and intellectually composed, that the real dream has an authenticity and can be recognized. The intellectually composed or fabricated dream does not arouse the dream sensation in others (like Cocteau's film, for instance).”
“Immediately I catch the elements I do not like, which leave me cold. Logic, order, construction, classicism, equilibrium, control. I wanted to shout: I admire imperfections, Dostoevsky, Lawrence, and Henry. There is a power there.”
“Wasn't it D. H. Lawrence who wrote of how women took their pattern from man, and proceeded to be what man invented? Few writers have had a direct vision into woman. Few women had vision into themselves! And when they did, they were revolted at what they saw, just as people were revolted by what Freud exposed.”
“Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream (in other centuries by tuberculosis and all the other romantic illnesses).”
“The happiness described by Rank, then, is the one of positive, creative assertion of the will through the consciousness of creation; and that, by this highest of efforts, I can arrive at a self-abnegation or forgetting of myself to a greater whole. An artistic enthusiasm for a variety of manifestations is the basis of creative exuberance.”
“When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with. I was convinced of people's need of illusion.”
“George Sand, Georgette Leblanc, Eleonora Duse, women of yesterday and today. The mute ones of the past, the inarticulate, who took refuge behind wordless intuitions; and the women of today, all action, and copies of men. And I, in between. Here lies the personal overflow, the personal and feminine overfulness. Feelings that are not for books, not for fiction, not for art. All that I want to enjoy, not transform. My life has been one long series of efforts, self-discipline, will. Here I can sketch, improvise, be free, and myself.”
“[Dr. Rank] knew, perhaps, that the woman would soon fade because there was no role for her; that the woman's role to live for a man, for one man, was denied to me by my neurosis; and that to live fragmented was a negation of the wholeness of woman. And he knew that I would be driven back to art.”
“One might say that it is natural that a mechanical feeling should arise in the analyst who is confronted, say, a hundred times a year with a drama of incest; but if he had not hastened to the conclusion that all dramas of incest resemble each other, he would not have lost the vital interest in how or why the incest drama developed. It is very much like demanding a sincere participation on the part of the analyst; and no such participation would be possible if we did not refer back to the feelings of an artist when he is about to paint, for the thousandth time, the portrait of the Virgin and Child. The real artist is never concerned with the fact that the story has been told, but in the experience of reliving it; and he cannot do this if he is not convinced of the opportunity for individual expression which it permits.” (reminiscent of TMwoQ / Musil)
“The scientific attitude skeletonizes the personality and produces a contraction, a reduction to phenomena. Otto Rank emphasizes the difference between individualities and produces the expansion of it. The stressing of differences enlarges his universe. Rank seeks and delineates the individual mold into which each one is helped to enter, his own mold, as against the general mold imposed by scientific analysis.” (systems vs. the individual, again reminiscent of Musil for me)
“The act of self-creation which the neurotic must make with the analyst is only possible if he is convinced that the invention of his illness is a symptom of the power to create, and not a symptom of impotence.”
“The cause of discord in the personality is usually the tragic disparity between the ideal goal of the individual, the image he creates of himself, and his actual self. It is this which he projects on the world, on his relationships with others. Most analysts immediately seek to reconcile the individual to the world without realizing the deeper, inner discord, or considering what world it is the individual should be adapted to.”
“Americans are never interested in abstract thought, never attracted by the idea of exercising the intelligence and the imagination for the pleasure of discovery, of the process itself, as they exercise their bodies for a physical pleasure. No. It must be a practical knowledge, applied immediately, immediately useful. Pure ideas, pure speculation, pure exploration without conclusions do not interest them.” (ha!)
I didn't know much about Duchamp going in. This was just a long interview with him about various topics. I found him interesting when he talked about I didn't know much about Duchamp going in. This was just a long interview with him about various topics. I found him interesting when he talked about art in general, his own art, chess, movement, words, and ideas. I found him dull when he talked about what artists he knew in NYC and Paris and how a certain art show got put together or what this or that artwork sold for (although not his fault, he actually despised the art scene; the interviewer wouldn't stop asking questions about this stuff!)...more
Amazing book, very different from Ladivine. A sort of allegory where what's being allegorized could be many different things. It's powerful enough thaAmazing book, very different from Ladivine. A sort of allegory where what's being allegorized could be many different things. It's powerful enough that it's not just an allegory though, there's something universal in here, primal. What impressed me most was how realistic the emotional world of each character was, even while the manifestations of that in the book's physical world were often surreal and strange. And because we are reading from Nadia's perspective, we don't figure out many of these character's motivations until later. Much is hidden from us that slowly gets revealed. And as it's revealed, the world that is portrayed becomes much more relatable, even understandable along some strange logic....more
It is hardest to write a thing simply and exactly, and Annie Ernaux does just that. It is simply a book about her mother's life, their sometimes fraugIt is hardest to write a thing simply and exactly, and Annie Ernaux does just that. It is simply a book about her mother's life, their sometimes fraught relationship, and her death. Stylistically it is clipped, at times detached, but always brutally unflinchingly honest. Even at only 92 pages, she's able to bring out the subtleties of situations, she notices the details that matter, the ones that suggest more than what's plainly there. I really liked this one and plan to check out more of her work....more
The first 30% or so (being thrown in prison, meeting the Abbe Faria, his miraculous escape, and his finding tBeware of Spoilers, you have been warned:
The first 30% or so (being thrown in prison, meeting the Abbe Faria, his miraculous escape, and his finding the treasure) was gripping and fun and the pages flew by FAST! I loved it!
The last 70% was slow going though. He really did embody the whole "wait and hope" message in that you as a reader really had to wait and hope for that payoff! Sometimes you have no idea where his little subplots are going.
I think the slowest part was when the Count first moves to Paris to begin his elaborate plans. There are so many characters that you are suddenly introduced to and so many polite society scenes where it's just really hard to remember who is who, and what relationship everyone has with each other, and what part of the plan is this again?
In addition, you have to really suspend your belief. Not only does Edmond Dantes pretend to be the Count of Monte Cristo, he also pretends to be at least 2 other major characters, and nobody ever notices that it's the same guy!
Some parts of the plot rely completely on the Count being some kind of god-like figure, which is hard to believe, but of course if you're along for the ride, maybe you don't mind. He plans things out in his revenge scheme that you really can't plan out, it's almost like he knows everyone's tiniest motivations, so that he can predict exactly how they would react to each little thing.
Towards the end, his god-like ability fades a little and you see him falter. His plan goes a little TOO far with the crown prosecutor Villefort, as he did not mean for his son to die as well. To make up for this, he goes a little TOO easy on Danglars... Danglars was the one who started this whole thing, and he didn't seem that remorseful at the end, but the Count just lets him off the hook after making him lose most (but not all) of his money. I think he should have at least taken all his money and kicked him out into the streets to become a beggar. I mean, the other two guys met much worse fates!
Oh and the whole thing with Haydee was weird. She was his slave! But then she fell in love with him, and he didn't realize that he was also in love with her. She says: "I love you as one loves a father, a brother, a husband!" But 2 of those things are SO not like the other thing... so which is it lady?
He tries to give her freedom but she won't leave him, she'd rather be by his side. I have a hard time accepting her attitude to everything after what she's been through... if I were her, I'd be like give me freedom, goodbye slave owner, no matter how good you were to me! So this part almost read to me like Dumas's own fantasy. Maybe he owned slaves and was hoping to alleviate his own conscience?
(I just looked it up... not sure if he owned any slaves, but his own grandmother was a slave... interesting)...more
What at first seemed like an essay about Cixous's first loves in literature turned out to be a complex network of remembrances/allusions about her conWhat at first seemed like an essay about Cixous's first loves in literature turned out to be a complex network of remembrances/allusions about her concept of the Philippine (i.e., twin almonds -- which reminded me of her thoughts on William Wilson in Ourang-Outang), reincarnation, gates, gardens, telepathy, etc. Even though I really liked it, I don't feel like I gave this the reading it deserved. But the reading it deserved would have required:
a. reading Peter Ibbetson by George du Maurier b. reading Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen c. reading all of Freud d. reading all of Proust e. everything else by Cixous f. learning French and reading this book in its original language (the translator tried to convey the dizzying level of punning and wordplay going on here using footnotes and original french words in parenthesis, but it only served to remind me how little of the real experience I was getting)
Well, I am saying it to you today, if you want to go further on the narrow path which leads to discovery, you must lose your head, yes, there's a head which must be lost, the head that knows, that is to say, that thinks it knows, too fast, the one Proust denounces and runs away from, this intelligence head which prevents the sensation from finding its name and the trees with arms stretched out entreatingly from resurrecting. For it is the ones who believe they know who are truly credulous, the believers, the arrived, the immobile. Whereas those who are on a walk and do not know, and are tempted by the sirens of oblivion and of memory, and scrutinize the piece of green curtain hung in front of the broken glass screen, wondering what is happening to them, those come near the point of apocalypse. An intoxication whispers to them it is going to take place, it is going to take place... The times are near. As follows: the prisons crumble. The gates throw their bars wide open.
Hélène Cixous is the greatest writer/thinker of the last 50-ish years. There have been great writers who don't think as well, and I love some of theirHélène Cixous is the greatest writer/thinker of the last 50-ish years. There have been great writers who don't think as well, and I love some of their books just as much. And great thinkers who do not write as well, and I appreciate their efforts, at times. But Cixous is a great modern thinker because like the Rodin sculpture, she thinks with her whole body, thrust forward. Not only in the mind, headcase, skull-numbed knocker, but also the visceral venereal contagion of the body, and the emotional rut and rot of the gut, she is a full-body thinker. Which is fine and good, but how often do you find someone like that who can also match such thinking-skills with writing-skills?
For that is exactly how you must read her, with your own full intellect, emotion, and bodily-thrust. That is the only way to fully comprehend her thought, which is so well-proportioned along all three axis. There have been others with comparable thinking/writing skills, for example Musil is great at both, but then he is a very male thinker. He thinks mostly with his head, and thus he is top-heavy, prone to toppling over if it weren't for his sense-of-humor which keeps him slightly more light-headed than he would otherwise be (this is totally not a dig, Musil being one of my favorite writers).
It's this human porosity that bothers me and that I can't escape since it is the faith of my skin, the extra sense which is everywhere in my being, this lack of eyelids on the face of the soul, or perhaps this imaginary lack of imaginary lids, this excessive facility I have for catching others, I am caught by persons or things animated or unanimated that I don't even frequent, and even the verb catch I catch or rather I am caught by it, for, note this please, it's not I who wish to change, it's the other who gets his hooks in me for lack of armor. All it takes is for me to be plunged for an hour or less into surroundings where the inevitable occurs--cafe, bus, hair salon, train carriage, recording studio--there must be confinement and envelopment, and there I am stained intoxicated, practically any speaker can appropriate my mental cells and poison my sinuses, shit, idiocies, cruelties, vulgar spite, trash, innumerable particles of human hostility inflame the windows of my brain and I get off the transport sick for days. It isn't the fault of one Eichmann or another. I admit to being guilty of excessive receptivity to mental miasma. The rumor of a word poisons me for a long time. Should I read or hear such and such a turn of phrase or figure of speech, right away I can't breathe my mucous membranes swell up, my lips go dry, I am asthmaticked, sometimes I lose my balance and crash to the ground, or on a chair if perchance one is there, in the incapacity of breathing the unbreathable.
But yes, Cixous. . . her writing is very raw, it's like this lidlessness she talks about, it allows you straight into her thinking and emotion with very little membrane in between. And she's quick to dispose of all writing conventions, grammar, and rules in order to convey whatever she wants most directly. Look, she's already abandoned her writing ship. 'Whatever it takes!' she says above the thunderous roar.
But I remember the string beans. The title of the scene would be: "betrayed in the nick of time by a handful of beans snapped too fast." p.99
But it is also this ability of hers that makes her books difficult: to read her on multiple levels you must read her both carefully and carelessly. Because you must catch all her senses, you need to slow down to get the intellectual sense, but then you have to go back and read it again fast to get the rush of the words, the intonations and catch of her breath, the whats-said beneath the immediate sense of the words. Just as she herself does constantly when she thinks: as when she thinks about the conversation with her mother, she interprets her words one way but also observes the way she handles the string beans as saying something completely different with her body.
This book is a personal investigation, a thinking-back to her firstborn son's early death, a coming to terms with something she had not fully thought through before. (view spoiler)[What gets me in the end is how simple the 'solution' was. Being such an intelligent person, how did she not think to ask her brother for the cause of death? Was it that part of her really didn't want to know, that she was holding out on the answer which she must have suspected right in front of her the whole time? (this would line up with the whole "give me the poison pill but don't tell me that you're going to do it" theme of the book) Or was it that she was thinking in such subtleties that the obvious answer was always out of reach? (hide spoiler)]
This book further solidifies my high opinion of Cixous upon reading her for the first time in Double Oblivion of the Ourang-Outang. But it also opens up the deep sorrow (or one of the many deep sorrows) that drives her forward. Although there were playful parts, the book as a whole was less 'balanced' than Ourang-Outang, it was a serious personal and emotional journey. Ourang-Outang, on the other hand, though also serious, was the best mix of serious and playful, intellectual and personal, a perfect light-but-not-too-light introduction to her I could have hoped for. Now I can't wait to read all the others.
But later, I take the metro under the earth to go to the Cinema. I was going to see a film that I do not want to see but it's a duty I know. Un Specialiste. Repellent name. But impelled by my son the wind and drawn by the word that repels me, pulled this way and that off I go taking the way through the dark. As soon as there is species, special, I grow tense. Going to see the specialist was like delivering my myopia to the Cyclops to size up. More precisely handing my two quivering eyes like two fuzzy-eyed lambs over to be judged. In order to see the film called A Specialist it is necessary to have in your soul a region which is carefully insulated from the rest of your being so that the evil cannot ooze out indefinitely. To say I wanted to see it calls for an explanation: It is precisely the film one especially-does-not-want to see one wants nonetheless to see, just for that reason, because there is refusal repugnance and danger, that's how one day I ended up reading a book I especially-did-not-want to read because the minute I opened it I saw that everything took place in one sanatorium or another, places I force myself not to write satanorium by mistake, because for one reason or another if there is one place in the world I dread more than a prison or camp, because of the evil sorts of metamorphosis that happen to us there, it's the place called by the Latin word sanatorium: And likewise I have a repugnance for the Latin word in French specialiste, and likewise for the same Latin word in German. And in the same way after a losing battle with myself I end up writing a book that I especially-did-not-want to write.
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. --Elizabeth Bishop, 'At the Fishhouses'
I've never been a good swimmer, but I could take this short pa
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. --Elizabeth Bishop, 'At the Fishhouses'
I've never been a good swimmer, but I could take this short pamphlet of a book, I thought. Submerge within its allusions, recollections, and metaphors as Gracq quietly whispers, never above the register of the water itself, serpentine river-like sentences in my ear.
"It tickles" I complain.
"Shhhhh..." Gracq says, grazing at my neck with his soft lips, covering my mouth with his whole hand. His hand smells like rosemary and fir. Up above, the glassy surface of the river remains unbroken. I can see the world as if contained in a ziplock bag, clear as preserved fruits and syrupy sweet.
"None of this is true, is it?" I say.
"There, there..." Gracq says, and starts quoting Poe, Bachelard, and Nerval. I succumb to the forces of literary history, of Gracq's own meticulously reconstructed childhood. I even forget to breathe. Somewhere, a little Gracq is still suspended on those still waters, like a photograph being developed....more
Hélène Cixous Region: Western Philosophy. School: French feminism. Main interests: Literary criticism. [...] "She has published over 70 works; her ficti
Hélène Cixous Region: Western Philosophy. School: French feminism. Main interests: Literary criticism. [...] "She has published over 70 works; her fiction, dramatic writing and poetry, however, are not often read in English" -- Wikipedia
Oh but people! But but but but... people! Wake up! Don't let your lethargic willingness to give in to the maddening inertia of air conditioned rooms filled with post-structuralist slack-jawed graduate students blind you to the fucking truth, man! For we have here one of the greatest (still living!) writers of fiction/fact/creative nonfiction/poetry/poetic essay (whatever this book happens to be, I don't even know). Maybe her academic theoretical work is great also. I have no idea. I've only read this one book. But whatever your thoughts on that are, don't pigeonhole her as an academic or theoretician, because this book is so much more, it's a writer's book, and everything I look for in the best of my reading experience: warmth, humor, sensuality, language, poetry, philosophy, inventiveness, playfulness, emotion, messiness, unruliness, surprise, craziness.
"The word mum still fascinates us, it's a gem, as if we had kept a milk tooth. This can only be said in all modesty. I myself say mum to my son or daughter and we murmur Rimbaud in amongst the broom flowers between fables and seas."
What is this book about? Well, I don't really know. It's about so many things. But on some very concrete level it's about Hélène Cixous opening up a box that she finds in her cupboard. Which I guess goes to show that a great writer can write about anything and make it great. This was not an easy read, but it was so pleasurable that I didn't mind re-reading many passages over again to understand them. Also, I'm sure my understanding is only partial: she alludes to so many other works, as well as personal things that I feel like I'm not even supposed to know.
There is none more cast out by happiness than he who discovers its doorway. On the one hand the subject surpasses the teller. On the other the teller snuffs out the subject upon which he breathes. And yet how can one not want to be surpassed?
I am not saying this book is poetic. Because even though it is, it is also not. Not in that typical lyrical way. It is very down to earth and personal, I just mean that she has a very particular way of saying things that makes me have to constantly catch my breath.
"For me, theory does not come before, to inspire, it does not precede, does not dictate, but rather it is a consequence of my text, which is at its origin philosophico-poetical, and it is a consequence in the form of compromise or urgent necessity. [...] Never has a theory inspired my poetic texts. It is my poetic text that sits down from time to time on a bench or else at a café table - that's what I am in the process of doing at this moment by the way - to make itself heard in univocal, more immediately audible terms. In other words, it is always a last resort for me." -- an interview
I was not surprised when I read that quote. I get the sense even from this non-theory book that she writes in order to think instead of the other way around. For this reason, even though there are many ideas in this book, I would not lump it in with other idea books. Even novels of ideas (like that excellent Mosley book I just finished) seem more like an explication of an already fully formed vision. Whereas for Cixous, the vision is always formed in the writing. The struggle to say what she means is also the meaning of what she says.
This creates a deeply maddening, sometimes repetitive, highly entertaining and insightful struggle as you're reading it. It doesn't hurt that her style, on the sentence to sentence level, is also messy, full of clauses, sometimes ungrammatical, with made up words or words jammed together in playful ways. It's like one big brainstorm of words. It's wonderful, and it's confusing, but it actually makes sense, it's actually crystal clear and enlightening when you follow her thought.
The Serpent Oblivion devours my lions one after the other. Sated. What's left is the Serpent full of lions. When will the Serpent's Serpent come? At the end of death when the dead are dead, says Poe to Baudelaire, the teeth are left. As soon as you are foolhardy enough to think of them, they rise up and bite.
One last note. Please read/re-read these Poe stories before you read this book, as they are referenced at times in minute detail:
It's one of those great books with the rare ability to put into words everything I've always known. *
* Wittgenstein says "About what one can not speakIt's one of those great books with the rare ability to put into words everything I've always known. *
* Wittgenstein says "About what one can not speak, one must remain silent." Of course, as a philosopher, he was right. But what is unspeakable is also exactly where poets must venture forth a primitive utterance. Not to fill it up brashly with idle talk, but to consecrate it with voices which will increase the silence. This is why phenomenology as practiced by Bachelard, though a branch of philosophy, is more akin to poetry. He whispers to you everything you've always known, intimate knowledge that we all share wordlessly, yet he increases its mystery by speaking about it in a hush of clarity that does not defile the subject matter as psychologists, philosophers, or psychoanalysts do. It makes sense then
that he uses poets and writers as the basis for his study of intimate spaces. More specifically, the poet's image, which arises purely, in a realm before thought or language, springing forth without history or context or reason. The image is Bachelard's tool for studying the essence of safe places in which (and for which) daydreaming takes place, like the house, the drawer, and the shell. The phenomenologist, like the poet, is interested entirely in the essence of a thing, which often has only weak ties to the actual physical reality of a thing. Since I also live almost entirely in the imagination,
this book had the odd effect of feeling at once familiar and new. For once, someone does not miss the whole point! Bachelard does not analyze. What he does instead is set the tongues of these various images to ringing at harmonic frequencies, then invite you in to hear the resonances. It's like going to church. There is awe here, and play, and love that comes only after intense immersion. Many of my own poems are rooted in this same seeing/hearing, especially my In the Sea, There Are a Million Things in There poems and my chapbook A Reduction (yes, shameless self promotion!), both of which start with the inextricably linked worlds of large and small as a realm for daydreaming....more
I wanted to like this more than I actually did. It's French, it's experimental, and it was recommended to me by smart folks. But I just didn't feel itI wanted to like this more than I actually did. It's French, it's experimental, and it was recommended to me by smart folks. But I just didn't feel it. I thought her prose was enjoyable enough, but a bit tedious. The format of her similes are always the same, i.e. something simple compared to something long drawn out. And I wanted some variation in her technique. The whole "mystery" aspect was interesting for a little bit until I thought I figured it out, which was about 10 pages in. I am still not sure if I am right or not, since no answers are ever revealed (which I don't mind, I actually prefer it this way), but the nagging sense that I was right, and that the book was really about (view spoiler)[the writing of a book, i.e. about a man (the narrator) who has actually imagined the lives of these other people, who couldn't help himself but imagine them, and who depended on these people of his creation (whether or not they really existed, or whether they existed as separate forms) screamed 'metafiction' to me in a way that didn't increase my pleasure. (hide spoiler)]. I know I spent the whole review complaining about this book, but I actually found it generally enjoyable to read. I just didn't like it as much as I wanted to like it, or thought I would like it....more
"Not for a second do I see the need to be brave. Perhaps being brave is my form of cowardice."
I just realized that I have not reviewed this book yet.
P
"Not for a second do I see the need to be brave. Perhaps being brave is my form of cowardice."
I just realized that I have not reviewed this book yet.
Part of the reason for my lapse is that there is never anything to say about war. About the Holocaust. About torture. About death.
Or rather, there is too much to say that I never know where to begin.
Besides Marguerite said it all already in this book.
Which is in itself impressive. She says it all in here without falling into the typical trappings of saying it all about such a subject.
Without sentimentality. In fact with the opposite of sentimentality.
"There's no point in killing him. And there's no longer any point in letting him live. ... And just because there's no point in killing him, we can go ahead and do it."
She goes to the very edge of emotional experience and is somehow able to write about it almost as it was going on, and it doesn't turn out like an overly emotional teenager's drivel (I just realized after I wrote this that it may be read as a subtle criticism of Anne Frank, but it's not intended that way, I haven't read her since high school, so can't speak on that front).
Part of the reason this is impressive is that to go to the very edge of emotional experience is an entirely different beast than to write out that experience on paper. To affect a reader in that way requires going to a different place inside of oneself after much silence, quite separate from the edge of experience that is experienced while in the midst of experiencing the edge of experience.
Duras was able to do that seemingly in the moment. At the edge and not at the edge at the same time. How?
Maybe the war divides us, divides our experience, so that we can talk about the missing cheese in the same sentence as we talk about the death of a traitor (as they do in one of the later chapters here).
Death and cheese, Duras understood, normally existed on different planes of human experience. But in wartime there is only one plane of human experience. Human experience becomes one dimensional. There are no hierarchies of objects. Everything is simultaneous.
"I feel a slight regret at having failed to die while still living."
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