III—
Novelists

Liliane Giraudon

Liliane Giraudon was born in 1946 in Marseille. Among her books of poetry are Têtes ravagées: Une Fresque (Paris: La Répétition, 1979), Je marche ou je m'endors (Paris: Hachette-P.O.L., 1982), La Réserve (P.O.L., 1984), Quel jour sommes-nous (Bethune: Ecbolade, 1985), and Divagation des chiens (P.O.L., 1988); her prose work includes "La Nuit " (P.O.L., 1986), Pallaksch, Pallaksch (P.O.L., 1990; awarded the Prix Maupassant), and Fur (P.O.L., 1992). A member of the Quatuor Manicle, she cofounded the magazine Banana Split with Jean-Jacques Viton, which became La Revue vocale: La Nouvelle BS in 1990 and which she and Viton still codirect. She teaches in the Marseille public schools.

Selected Publications in English:

Pallaksch, Pallaksch . Translated by Julia Hine. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1994.

What Day Is It . Translated by Tom Raworth. Rosendale, N.Y.: Women's Studio Workshop, 1986. Reprinted in part in Violence of the White Page: Contemporary French Poetry , edited by Stacy Doris, Phillip Foss, and Emmanuel Hocquard. Special issue of Tyuonyi , no. 9/10 (1991): 89–96.

Serge Gavronsky: As a reader, as codirector of Banana Split , as a writer, you would agree, I'm sure, that within the past fifteen years it's been almost impossible to avoid the term écriture in speaking about contemporary French letters and philosophy. Could you give me some examples of the way you think that concept may have functioned in your own work?

Liliane Giraudon: In my own case, writing is something that doesn't depend on the possession of a form of knowledge. I would rather conceive of it as a sort of forward movement and, first of all, something of a solitary endeavor, though inscribed in a history that posits the question of reading, which for me is inseparable from writing. I think that if I hadn't read a number of texts, I would not have begun to write. In my case, more and more, writing is something that rests—if you'll allow the abstraction—on an idiolect, that is, something unique that doesn't even have a beginning, nor does it have an end: a practice that's quite instantaneous, though unraveled along a continuum that has pitfalls and, without one's knowing it, a forward movement. In the final analysis, it's as though the fact that the letters of the alphabet are black renders things equally black for me in this forward movement, even when they open up in an impression of speed. Sometimes I feel that I've made it there, perhaps after having written tales of sexuality. But no sooner are you there than it disappears, and you no longer know if it hasn't all been invented! When I reread my work, it's as if someone else had written it, and I think that is what pleases me in writing.

As you know, I am less and less inclined to separate prose from poetry; I find it increasingly difficult to say—or dare to say!—that I'm writing a poem, because today there's an ideological investment, a mystical one in our French tradition that appears too heavy for me in relation to my own insignificant story, which can't find its place there. I have a feeling that in reaction to the mass of culture, I'm like a biographical accident on the road—that is, I find myself there, though I shouldn't ever have been there! However, as I go on reading and acquiring new techniques, I realize that what is happening is an

act of dispossession; rather than accumulating things, in fact I'm getting rid of them! I also believe that I shall continue to write without knowing if I've made it there. Well, that's my position, when I think of writing and poetry. There's a statement I'd like to borrow from Jacques Roubaud, which in effect says that "poetry is most contemporary today because it most exactly formulates the question of survival." I truly feel that way. There's something in poetry that reveals the end of something, and it may just be the end that explains the ardor within.

At the same time there's a posture in poetry that I don't like, which is undoubtedly connected to a religious problem, the sacred, something that seems treacherous to me in that it entails a certain mastery, and it is easier, I think, to be a major traitor with objects cheaply made. I think that one can, by oneself, produce or read even though there comes a moment—the drama of contemporaneity—when one realizes that what one has written is finally so limited, as is one's evaluation of one's contemporaries, that one is also hostage to the system. Given this situation, I'm not sure if one can actually proceed. When I read a piece of prose, I believe I can identify a certain breath, a certain speed, a certain weight that writing possesses. But this is increasingly difficult to do when I read poetry, and I am increasingly skeptical about my ability to know whether what I have in hand is an écriture or a parody, the work of someone who's bluffing or who is just a fine technician.

I believe, contrary to what is commonly held, that in poetry there is at the same time less danger and yet more urgency. I don't mean danger for the one who is writing but rather in relation to the act of writing itself, and less so in forms that appear less musical, such as prose. Sometimes something happens all of a sudden, and then one truly has the sense that écriture is something that can change opinions, that it might radically transform both the world and those who read. Thus, it's difficult for me to move forward today within these categories, because furthermore, there appears to be a protective closure as soon as poetry is mentioned, one that doesn't function in favor of

poets but rather to their detriment. I have written a book called La Réserve , because for me the word brings to mind at once the reserve section in a library and the idea of an Indian reservation. It might be urgent for me to experience the reservation, in the sense that as a child, I played at Indians and was very much taken by the fact that the Indians hadn't been beaten but had survived with negative connotations—they had been made to look like savages, like failures.

It seems to me it's the opposite for poets. Poets emerge if only because the poem is already there and because the poetic object in itself becomes an object that protects. For me, that's the opposite of what it is to write. It's not a form of knowledge, not a way of proceeding within protective reserves, not a question of fighting, in the way Denis Roche talks about fighting when he approaches with his camera in a slightly phallic stance, taking shot after shot, coming back home, well fed, in order to assume the posture of a cultural object. I don't mean this as an attack on Roche but rather on the object we produce. That's why today there are écritures. I'm also thinking about someone like [the novelist and playwright] Marie Redonnet, because I think she's someone who should be talked about; she has produced small objects that make me think much more than do certain poems which, among my contemporaries, raise a sort of sacred sigh—muted and sometimes a bit painful and sterile, because it comes out of an obligatory, necessary, incontrovertible allegiance.

SG: You've just raised a number of issues that I'd like to follow up on. The first—which I think is absolutely correct—is that poetry, which is the crossing through of an unknown territory, representing the uncertainty of the very act of écriture, has become in France (and has been for some time, especially in a certain milieu, in all those milieus you have so succinctly defined) an ideology of the end; that is, the actual danger has disappeared, and now only the formula remains. This sort of poetry can be written without committing oneself, as one might understand that notion, not in Sartrean terms but in those of his master, in that mystery Heidegger configured in the very act of enunciation, so that essentially, insofar as I can read it, écriture

in France has often become practically predictable or at best formalistic, with metaphysics coming to conceal a diminution of talent or, worse—since you yourself mentioned it—weakening those talents that might otherwise have flourished, talents subjugated to a metaphysics of negation, of the blank space, of finitude, or of ideas, to recall what Mallarmé once said to Degas, which characterizes bad poetry. And yet here the idea has become more important than the drama of écriture, and as a result it has opened the way, paradoxically, for the novel—an opening onto something that isn't as sacralized, that is no longer within the apparent scope of religion, something that no longer needs all those supports. Because it is far less a prisoner of those preoccupations, in fiction we can find a more modest expression and therefore a more interesting one, one that's perhaps more "authentic" in its relationship to reading and writing. That was my first thought in hearing you describe an ideology of finitude, of the end, which facilitates one's work.

The second thought that came to mind was the connection between reading and writing; that is, when you write prose or poetry, you are conscious of your readings. In fact, you are their unwitting subject; those readings run through you, form you, deform you as well, perhaps make you act at the scriptural level in a way other than "yours," if that can be defined in an essentialist manner. In light of this, would you identify those readings, which obviously include not only your own but also those you select for publication in Banana Split (or are the two the same?), among which are so many texts in translation that one might say your choices have nourished not only your readers but, in an unexpected and mysterious manner, the French language itself. I'm supposing that your foreign-language texts are like so many life buoys allowing poets and writers who read your magazine to survive the theory of finality, Heidegger as well as Derrida, survive this concept of the closure on absence.

My other question rests on privileged information, since I know what you do professionally! I'll stick to one aspect of that: namely, you are in daily contact with a deeply moving reality, which up to this

point you have marginalized in your own writings. Correct me if I'm mistaken, but to this day you haven't translated your work as a teacher in a predominantly North African neighborhood in Marseille into prose. I don't think an American writer would have overlooked that experience! If it is present in your work, it's been remarkably attenuated. What, then, is the relationship between your professional life and your literary production?

LG: Let me begin with the first question. It's hard to talk about an ideology of the end, because curiously, when I write I never think of the book to follow. That's why I find it difficult to take myself seriously with respect to literature, because when I write it's an everyday pursuit, blow by blow, and I certainly don't have a plan, in the way some people set out to write a diptych or a triptych, for instance. It's only afterward that I become aware that everything is interconnected. But I don't have a project in mind, because initially, I'm not sure I'll even continue! Sometimes it seems that I go on because I have no other choice, and yet I'm not so sure that in fact I will go on. That may be the juncture at which I integrate the idea of the end, where it becomes possible to think about it . . . I track down people who stop writing. I track them down and I want to know about it, and I find it odd that there aren't more who "jump ship," because it seems to me there are a great number of reasons for doing just that, and it's probably owing to a far more profound and far more secret and far more serious impotence that so few abandon ship.

As for my reading and my life, the two overlap, but the reader does not take precedence over my life. My professional life is a choice. I have chosen the status of a teacher—that is, one who normally believes in a certain type of knowledge—so as to break this cash nexus and find oneself with people who have been marginalized, who have no more language of their own, who are completely beaten down by a language they do not understand, that they don't grasp, and that further serves as a tool to grind them down. They react by using ideolects taken from different cultures, physical postures and sociological ones, often due to deviant behavior, to violence, and I became

aware that those readings I have with them, readings of the world—because I look at them and talk and listen to them—have a force equal to the corpus of world literature, past and present. This literature I absorb in small doses out of curiosity, because I don't spend more than three hours a day reading, which is rather little when you consider your average intellectual. I spend another two hours in a bar near the harbor, where I just listen and do nothing else, with nothing but a cigarette in my hand; that is sometimes more surprising an activity than reading Rabelais, for instance, and it shakes up form and sound in ways that may be more important. If something does occur in my writing, it's probably from that sort of reading; those readings may help move it along. That's not the lesson I learned from Mallarmé or Reverdy, but the jolts I received long ago came from their direction and went further back to Racine and Claudel. But I believe this lesson has an equal charge, and I use that word because I'm always surprised by the call for modernity in a language that's already modern in those poets.

Was it because a camera stood nearby that I got the idea that I'm a fighter, a machine gunner vis-à-vis reality and the place where I'm going . . . that I thought I might leave something behind, something I might transmit? It's true that for me private reality—a completely contrary reality, an anticulture and antinature—is undoubtedly more important, for the simple reason that it is not digestible. My work consists in integrating it, and it will not allow itself to be digested. It will not allow itself to be cannibalized. I think I pay a heavy price in my attempt to cannibalize in that domain, because the endurance wears me down physically, the way exercise does, whereas my attempts to cannibalize in literature are far more comfortable! I feel as if I've had my fill of literature, especially when I produce it, but reality lingers, remains for me—how can I put it—a pale reflection, and I try through a variety of means, often completely artificial, almost archaic ones that touch on magic, to connect to that other text, the one I was talking about in which there's another language, another music that teaches me an enormous number of things, things that in

all truth I have yet to understand, but they are signals; they signal the end of something and perhaps my own end, that is, the end of the poem, of an attempt at a poem.

SG: Let me pick up on two aspects you've just described. You spoke about another language, another music, and you've just typified two categories of experience, neither of which corresponds to at least one of the foundations of literature, that is, the subject. When you speak of language and music, it's as if you had in mind a certain choreography and then an écriture, but you have not actually talked about the existence of these bodies to whom speech has been denied, those students, that milieu. You spoke of sociology, and if I'm not mistaken, you have kept that aspect in the background. Or do you make a conscious decision, as you begin to write, to exclude a certain subject matter, all the while alluding to it indirectly, translating some of its codes so that one who might recognize them, who might have that language in his ear, might immediately exclaim: "Yes! I recognize that sentence, the way it's been put together. It reminds me of a particular situation." But in your texts you have excluded the situation from which the music and the language come. I suppose for you, had you kept the context, it might have appeared too direct, or perhaps unethical.

LG: It's all very curious. At first it was a decision, a self-imposed ban for reasons that are not always clear. There's a reason I've read about that photographers give. Some photographers never photograph without asking for permission first. That shows a respect for the model, for the subject. There's something magic in that. It may be because I don't feel I have the right to appropriate stories or reproduce things I share with people who will not have access to them. That means that I don't want to take forms and make of them another object that would be a reflection of the ones I've taken, in a slightly magical way, from those who are not able to see what I've done. That's called respect, but in my case it's also a form of superstition. It's very odd, similar to what happens among certain tribes—there are things that are allowed, others that are not. I'm sure there's a danger in taking

from others that way—a danger for them, a danger for me; not for those who read the work. And from another point of view I also know it produces the worst kind of literature, that is, either a form of reportage or the realistic novel, which may in itself be excellent but has nothing to do with literature. For me literature must free itself from both. Therefore, I escape through a form of knowledge I take from elsewhere, though in fact I have neither the tools to do that nor the power or the strength.

In my book "La Nuit " I was dealing with a fable wholly transposed, in which I took a lot from another "book," the book of those who have no language. I also took from what I saw, what I heard, what I grasped. Let's say from what I received, because there's a connection. What I find curious, bizarre, is the idea of the destructive warrior. I don't at all have the impression that I work that way. I rather think I operate through a system of connections; that is, I try to connect like bodies that try to gather a little light, with which I recharge myself and, in return, give something back—not a mirror image or a representation, but something that would transmit this violence. That is what I believe, and it's what I've found in certain writers. That's what literature is all about! A certain degree of intensity, a certain phosphorescence, sometimes following a number of lines of print, which results in the passage of something and is transmitted to the reader, for whom it will also change something. This has nothing to do with anything intellectual for me; it's almost chemical, a transmission via a chemical process that can destroy as well as build. What interests me in literature is its destructive side, and I'm convinced that literature destroys. It has allowed me to destroy, among other things, an anguish and a fear of society and of its laws, which were totally deadly, a killer in my youth, and that would no doubt have destroyed me physically had I not encountered literature. At that moment, writing intervened.

This business about teaching was also a chance occurrence. At one point, instead of doing that, I might have trained horses. But I'm convinced that in the animal realm there are equivalences with the

human realm. In any case, in our contacts with the animal kingdom there are equivalences, as well as in our contacts with nature; here I should clarify, because I've read too much bullshit on what people say about nature and poetry. I recently reread an interview of David Antin. He said something that touched me a lot. He spoke about the state he finds himself in when he sees buds blooming. At that moment there's a sudden electric charge that results in the rediscovery of oneself. It is at once incomprehensible and overwhelming, and it's there. Literature is also that for me; it's the connection with things like that. I spoke about the animal world because the short stories I'm now fabricating are at once based on animals and on people, the people I've taken in that particular reserve and hadn't dared touch before. I've tried to touch them, but in a completely transposed manner, which means I've introduced a degree of strangeness in them. I'm not saying that to place myself in the company of someone like Kafka, but I think he succeeded extraordinarily at that, that is, in situating a world that is in fact more human than our own but at times is completely unreal, symbolic, removed from and yet connected to what is most human, too human, in fact!

It is within these limits, in this swampy world, that écriture interests me. And it's true that I regret being a French author, and what's more, I'm a French author who's incapable of learning a foreign language, even though I went to a school where I was taught one, and though I am now myself a teacher and taught Latin when I began. But still I'm incapable of learning a foreign language, and besides, the French language drives me crazy. I resist the role of apprentice, even though I'm beginning to learn a lot of tricks, but I can't seem to possess them. To tell the truth, I'm incapable of knowing. In analysis I was told that this inability was unquestionably a very deep decision on my part that I had made into something effective. Because I do think I have the capacity for learning a foreign language like anybody else, but in fact I haven't done so. I'm incapable of it!

SG: That may be so, but the texts you've produced are obviously part of the French language, though not necessarily of that French lan-

guage we're using around this kitchen table in Marseille! You have your own style, and I might say that, contrary to what you've just implied, you do have a remarkable mastery over the French language; you've been able to make it into a language of your own within the larger confines of the French language itself. In fact that is your signature.

LG: That reminds me of something Emmanuel Hocquard once said about writing: "It's a little language within language." And that may be what testifies to the impossibility of language.

SG: One last question: How important is your identity as a woman? Are you polemically conscious of it, scripturally so? Is that I found in your texts a corporeal one? Is it feminine? feminist? I say this within the context of recent theoretical positions that have, in reading women's works—mostly, but not entirely, of the past—insisted on their marginalization. If that were your understanding of it, then Hocquard's comment would have a double meaning: as a writer you would associate yourself with that minimalization within the broader scope of language, and as a woman, that same observation would then become overdetermining. Would your own experience as a writer conform to some of those interpretations?

LG: It's a very complicated matter. I don't believe I play games when I write. That may be the difference; that may be the juncture at which I separate myself from a feminist concept of literature. I do think it's important, however, and it's not a chance thing that I'm disappointed by feminist literature. In general, though I'm a radical feminist, with deep convictions that I act on in my day-to-day struggle, I'm nonetheless disappointed, because to my way of thinking, barbarism is an essential aspect of literature. I once believed—it was my dream—that women, less and less absent, and thereby more and more numerous in their absence from the arts, from literature, music, painting, and sculpture, were really going to create a salutary form of barbarism, one that would be visible. Ten years ago I really thought something like that was going to happen. I think I must have been living in a utopia.

Nevertheless, I don't think I was wrong when I thought about something different, because it's true, I think, that something different was going on. I'm thinking, for example, of a woman sculptor whom I like a great deal and about whom little is said today, and that's Germaine Richier. One of the first times I was deeply moved by sculpture was when I was very young and totally ignorant, and by chance I stood in front of a reproduction of one of her pieces. At that time, of course, I hadn't any idea who Germaine Richier was. I hadn't even seen her name. That sculpture really became a totemic object for me; I dreamed about it, and to compound chance, it also happened to be an animal! And yet it wasn't an animal one could identify. It may have been a turtle. It's all quite vague in my mind since it was only a reproduction, though my dreams were founded on that basis. Afterward I said, "Who is that sculptor?" Then I looked around and saw things, and when I saw that there was power in the actual piece, which was even larger, I felt an even greater vibration than I had felt looking at the reproduction. I would have liked . . . at that time I was totally uneducated in the ways of the eye in relation to sculpture; in fact that went for all the visual arts. What occurred then has happened in many of the productions shaped by women, but I have often been disappointed when I heard that same little musical phrasing and, furthermore, found it co-opted by men.

There you have it. I don't believe there is a feminine écriture. I had hoped for a more violent operation, but I don't think it happened. It must happen from time to time; what hampers me is to be a woman and write. For me it's a hindrance. It's the nature of co-optation by men that is always ambiguous, that's always either seductive or protective and, at moments of fragility, is undoubtedly dangerous for women who produce art or literature. Furthermore, when you talk about publishers . . . well, Marguerite Duras had a few harsh words to say about them! I recently heard her speak on television, and I found quite curious the hatred, the disdain that she provokes among

certain intellectuals today. I found that very interesting. There must be an element of what I call barbarism in her work. She really must have reached that, because over the past three to four years she's been involved in things people say she shouldn't have meddled with. There's a violent reaction to her, a true desire to dismiss her through irony—calling her "that old bag"—which is really symptomatic of something!

The Birthday Dinner

In one piece. Curled up as if asleep, naked under cellophane.

She looked at the price, checked the weight, and placed it in the basket. She remembered one of them. A long time ago. With its soft fur. And which became invisible in the snow, being white.

In the kitchen, when she removed its grayish-pink body, she found the head tucked under the liver (intact). More naked than the naked body. She was struck by its prominent eyeballs without irises. And the teeth. Pushed forward, narrow in the pink.

She calmly split off the head and, without wrapping it, immediately threw it in the garbage. In fact, it wasn't in one piece but split halfway down the middle. The thighs and the hind legs were spread-eagled, stretched out in the hot oil. Then followed by the forward parts, forelegs which were slenderer and shorter. As she turned over the parts to make sure they were singed, she created a sort of weird coitus between the two parts of the animal, which then behaved like two separate and oddly complimentary bodies.

She stopped. The thing had begun to burn. She stirred more energetically and was struck with terror as she noticed that one section rode on top of the other. The image seemed to confirm it. She chased it away by removing one of the two pieces. She placed it on the cutting board and, taking hold of a chopper, cut the rabbit's hindquarters into two sections which she then immediately threw back into the frying pan. The image disappeared. She sat down and lit a cigarette. Something told her not to let it go at that. That, in fact, it had really been a question of her own life, of herself in that vision as rapid as it had been obscene.

The first object she had ever loved was a rabbit. Alive. She would spend whole days with it. It was he, one winter night, who escaped in the snow. And who was never found again. While still a child, she had learned that death could be reduced to the death of those cells not necessarily essential to the life of the entire body. That this caused a muti-

lation which could or could not be cured through the simple healing of the wound. That depended on the tissues' ability to regenerate.

Very early on she had secretly absorbed the process of partial death. As a result, in the autumn, falling leaves on the other side of the valley and all the tender blazing lights of the slopes regularly participated in this underground endeavor. Nothing like that impression of violence which, in the fall, had spread over the whole of the horizon. Over the sorghum and the corn, now blanched, the entire sky bathed in vaporous flames. Each day rose larger than the preceding one and in a solar flare which seemed immediate.

The leader had an iron box which he buried at night at the far end of the stables. That's where the legs were kept. All of them which, together, they had torn off the lizards on the walls. Not the tail, easily sectioned off and which the little saurian easily gives up in order to escape its aggressor. No, not the tail but one leg. And not just any one: the right rear leg. Once in a while a knife was needed. Sometimes, completely disgusted, they'd crush the heads between their fingers. Then a colorless liquid would ooze out which would almost instantaneously fuse with the vapors in the air. For a long time thereafter, the tiny grayish members would jerk about inside the folded handkerchiefs.

She spoke very little even at that time. Aware that life indeed was a combination of functions which resist death. The smell which came out of the iron box wordlessly revealed that each one came to be reduced to a pile of remains or of waste.

The gang had its secrets. No one knew where the box had been hidden away.

At thirteen, she had suddenly stopped growing. Thus, very early on she had reached her adult height, that is to say, the length of her own cadaver. She had quite simply drawn the relation between this break in her growth and the distant cause of her death, one day, perhaps natural.

Ever since that time, closed up in her memory like the reptilian legs in their iron box, people and things, in their repeated epiphanies, had further illustrated that initial understanding of the world.

She got up and turned off the flame. No doubt the meat was done. Soon her husband would be coming through the door, arms laden with wine and flowers. It was her birthday. He would passionately explain to her that man holds a privileged place in nature; that in a lifetime he can expend, in units of weight, four times as much energy as any other mammal. As she listened to him, she would slowly and carefully chew on the white flesh of the little rodent.

Adulterous Mélanges of Everything

"To browse" [bouquiner ] in 1549 meant "to cover the female." She decided to abstain from any kind of reading for several days, the way that some people used to abstain from sexual relations. Void as a necessity. The presence of the void is the prime of breath. Aimlessly looking, for example, at a thigh. Or the belly. False silence on the sound track. River. Planes freely projected onto space; the work goes on without you. One must think again about what once was called meditation and which here cannot be separated from the hazardous contemplation of, for example, the moon at night and which comes from behind , lights up, glides, a violent halo very white, this slow progression through the sky over the dark lines of the trees (no doubt it's a question of affirming, using all available means, the spatial independence of plane surfaces projected into space) or else the lake, its curves, an objective affirmation or pneumatic conception,
always behind
the stones
the water
a belladonna (blue flowers producing sinister little black tomatoes)

"Thanks for your Polaroid which makes me hungry. Hungry to look at each object, look slowly at each fruit (it took me some time, for instance, to discover the skin of an orange). Yes, inaction is undoubtedly the condition for an inner activity. And it isn't easily reached. In Paris, I leap from a little anxiety to a little pleasure and 'inaction' appears to be inaccessible (I ask myself, to whom does this knee belong, on the right side of the stool. To you?) Sun. An event in this northern region. And noise! They're redoing the roof of a farm and the air carries the noise over here. In Symi, I could at times hear a pretty Danish girl laughing (at night) on the other side of the harbor. I was troubled by that laughter. Much love. "

On my table I found a little book by Max Jacob, "Art poétique" (1922), and opened to this sentence: "Modern poetry or the hidden face of the cards ."

Or else alone. With this bird. Always the same. Through the window. She writes in the kitchen. A slight angustia (an odor. It's an odor). Now she makes herself a cup of coffee. She's just eaten a little white flesh, a rabbit's, and then a spoonful of garden peas, these grown (the other fed and then skinned) by the father, cooked yesterday with mint (also planted over there). Slowly and with a curious feeling she chewed these rural products. All the while recalling the shack where lukewarm balls are piled up. Fur and feathers. The odor. She rarely goes there. Each time that fascination joined to a powerful malaise.

Eaters of white meat. Plane-Surface-Razor, a thigh, a shoulder. The world of objects vanquished. Which manifests itself in an underground manner. ("but if I hear a moan, I can make out neither sense nor any definite form ") behind

                  behind

                  (ScarTanelli

Black woman

    the body

On her back THIRD WORD Holder

His influence (on the poetic mind). Warning against the vain infinity of isolated moments—atomic series—but especially and furthermore against the belief in a dead and murderous unity .

                ScarDanelli )

The one who, in the end, gave up using either pronouns or verbs referring to the second person.

When I began reading his Hyperion , he said: "Don't look too closely. It's cannibalistic ."

Le Repas D'anniversaire

Entier. Replié comme en sommeil, nu sous cellophane.

Elle regarda le prix, évalua son poids et le déposa dans le panier. Elle se souvenait de l'un d'eux. Il y avait très longtemps. A fourrure douce. Et qui dans la neige devenait invisible, parce que blanc.

Dans la cuisine, lorsqu'elle dégagea son corps d'un rose légèrement gris, elle découvrit sous le foie (qui était entier), la tête. Plus nue que le corps nu. La boule proéminente des yeux sans iris la frappa. Et les dents. Avancées, étroites dans le rose.

Avec calme, elle trancha la tête et la jeta ainsi, sans l'envelopper, directement dans le vide-ordure. En fait, il n'était pas entier, mais tranché à mi-corps. Les cuisses et les pattes arrière se trouvèrent étendues, écartées à plat dans l'huile brûlante. Immédiatement suivies par la partie avant, pattes plus graciles et courtes. En les retournant afin de roussir correctement chaque morceau, elle provoqua une sorte de coït étrange entre les deux parties de l'animal qui se comportèrent alors comme deux corps séparés et mystérieusement complémentaires.

Elle s'arrêta. La chose brûlait un peu. Elle remua avec plus d'énergie et remarqua avec effroi qu'une partie chevauchait l'autre. La confirmation de l'image s'imposa. Elle la chassa en retirant l'un des deux morceaux. Elle le déposa sur la planche et s'emparant du hachoir, elle fendit l'arrière-train du lapin en deux parties qu'elle remit aussitôt à frire. L'image s'effaça. Elle s'assit et alluma une cigarette. Quelque chose lui disait qu'il ne fallait pas en rester là. Que c'était bien d'elle, de sa vie, dont il avait été question dans cette vision aussi rapide qu'obscène.

Le premier objet qu'elle avait aimé était un lapin. Vivant. Elle passait des journées entières avec lui. C'est lui qui avait fui dans la neige, un soir d'hiver. Et qu'on n'avait jamais retrouvé. Encore enfant, elle avait appris que la mort se réduit à celle de cellules non obligatoirement nécessaires à la vie de l'ensemble du corps. Qu'il en résultait une mutilation pouvant ou non se réparer par simple cicatrisation. Cela dépendait de l'aptitude des tissus à la régénération.

Le processus de mort partielle, très tôt, elle l'avait secrètement intégré. Ainsi, à l'automne la chute des feuilles, de l'autre côté de la vallée, tous les feux tendres des coteaux participaient régulièrement à ce souterrain fonctionnement. Rien de cette impression de violence qui quelques mois plus tôt gouvernait toute l'étendue d'azur. Sur le sorgho et les maïs devenus blancs, le ciel entier baignait dans une vapeur de flammes. Chaque jour se levait plus grand que le précédent et dans un embrasement solaire qui paraissait immédiat.

Le chef avait une boîte de fer qu'il enterrait le soir, au fond d'une écurie. C'est là que se trouvaient les pattes. Toutes celles qu'ensemble, durant le jour, ils avaient arrachées aux lézards des murs. Pas la queue, facile à sectionner et que le petit saurien livre aisément pour échapper à son agresseur. Non, pas la queue, mais une patte. Et pas n'importe laquelle: la patte antérieure droite. Un couteau était parfois nécessaire. Il arrivait que pris d'un brutal dégoût, ils écrasent la tête entre leurs doigts. Alors, un liquide incolore se répandait pour se fondre presque instantanément dans les vapeurs de l'air. Longtemps après, les minuscules membres grisâtres s'agitaient à l'intérieur des mouchoirs repliés.

A cette époque déjà, elle parlait très peu. Sachant que la vie est bien l'ensemble des fonctions qui résistent à la mort. L'odeur qui se dégageait de la boîte de fer révélait sans discours que chacun se réduisait à une enclave de réserves ou de déchets.

La bande avait ses secrets. Personne ne connaissait le lieu où la boîte était enfouie.

A treize ans, elle avait brutalement cessé de grandir. Atteignant ainsi très tôt la taille adulte c'est-à-dire celle de son propre cadavre. Très simplement, elle avait établi la relation entre cet arrêt de croissance et la cause lointaine de sa mort, un jour peut-être naturelle.

Depuis ce temps, aujourd'hui enfermés dans sa mémoire comme les pattes des reptiles l'avaient été dans leur boîte de fer, êtres et choses, dans leurs épiphanies répétées, n'avaient fait qu'illustrer cette première lecture du monde.

Elle se leva et éteignit le feu. La chair devait être cuite. Bientôt son mari ouvrirait la porte, les bras chargés d'alcools et de fleurs. C'était

son anniversaire. Il lui expliquerait avec passion que dans la nature, l'homme est privilégié: il peut dépenser dans sa vie, par unité de poids, quatre fois plus d'énergie qu'aucun autre mammifère. Tout en l'écoutant, elle mâcherait lentement et avec soin la chair blanche du petit rongeur.

Mélanges Adultères De Tout

Bouquiner en 1549 signifiait couvrir la femelle. Elle décide de s'interdire durant plusieurs jours le moindre livre, comme certains s'interdisaient tout rapport sexuel. Nécessité du vide. C'est la présence du vide qui réamorce le souffle. L'attention sans objet et qui tombe sur la cuisse par exemple. Ou le ventre. Faux silence dans la bande son. Rivière. Plans librement projetés dans l'espace, le travail se poursuit sans vous, il faut repenser à ce qu'on appelait la méditation et qui ici ne saurait se séparer de la contemplation hasardeuse de, par exemple la lune le soir et qui sort de derrière , éclaire, roule, halo violent très blanc, ce parcours dans le ciel sur le sombre dessin des arbres (il s'agit sans doute d'affirmer par tous les moyens l'indépendance spatiale des surfaces-plans projetées dans l'espace) ou bien le lac, sa courbe, une affirmation objectale ou conception pneumatique,

toujours derrière

les pierres

l'eau

une belladone (fleurs bleues produisant de sinistres petites tomates noires)

«Merci pour ton polaroïd qui donne faim. Faim de percevoir chaque objet, chaque fruit avec lenteur (j'ai pris un certain temps à découvrir, par exemple, la peau d'orange). Oui, l'inaction est bien la condition de l'activité intérieure. Et on n'y arrive pas facilement. A Paris, je saute d'une petite angoisse à un petit plaisir et «l'inaction » paraît inaccessible (je me demande à qui appartient ce genou à droite du tabouret. A toi?) Du soleil. Un événement dans cette partie nord. Et du bruit! On refait la toiture d'une ferme et l'air porte les bruits jusqu'ici. A Symi, je pouvais parfois entendre une jolie Danoise rire (la nuit) de l'autre côté du port. J'étais troublé par ce rire. Je t'embrasse .»

Sur ma table, un petit livre trouvé ici, de Max Jacob. «Art poétique » 1922—et ouvert sur cette phrase «La poésie moderne ou le dessous des cartes ».

Ou bien seule. Avec cet oiseau. Toujours le même. Par la fenêtre. Elle écrit dans la cuisine. Légère angustia (une odeur. C'est une odeur). Maintenant elle se fait un café. Elle vient de manger un peu de chair blanche, celle du lapin, puis une cuillère de petits pois cultivés eux (nourri puis écorché l'autre) par le père, cuits hier avec de la menthe (semée là-bas encore). Elle a mâché lentement et avec un sentiment d'étrangeté ces aliments ruraux. Tout en évoquant la cabane où s'entassent boules tièdes. Plumes et poils. L'odeur. Elle y va rarement. Chaque fois, cette fascination mêlée à un puissant malaise.

Les mangeurs de viande blanche. Surface-Plan-Rasoir, une cuisse, l'é paule. Le monde des objets vaincu. Ce qui se manifeste de manière souterraine. («mais si j'entends un gémissement, je ne vois aucun sens ni aucune forme définie ») derrière

                   derrière

                   (ScarTanelli

Négresse

    le corps

Renversée TROISIÈME PAROLEHolder

Sa démarche (sur l'esprit poétique). Mise en garde contre le vain infini de moments isolés—série atomique—mais surtout et encore contre la croyance en une unité morte et meurtrière .

                  ScarDanelli )

Celui qui à la fin, n'utilisa plus jamais ni pronom ni verbe se référant à la deuxième personne.

Lorsque je me mis à lire son Hypérion , il dit: «N'y regarde pas trop, c'est cannibale .»

Leslie Kaplan

Leslie Kaplan was born in New York in 1943. She has published L'Excès-l'usine (Paris: P.O.L., 1982; 2d ed., with an interview by Marguerite Duras, 1987), Le Livre des ciels (P.O.L., 1983), Le Criminel (P.O.L., 1985), Le Pont de Brooklyn (P.O.L., 1987), L'Epreuve du passeur (P.O.L., 1988), Le Silence du diable (P.O.L., 1989), and Les Mines de sel (P.O.L., 1993).

Selected Publications in English:

The Brooklyn Bridge . Translated by Thomas Spear. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1992.

Extract from The Brooklyn Bridge . Translated by Serge Gavronsky. In Serge Gavronsky, "Ecriture: The French Mind." New Observations , no. 54 (Jan.-Feb. 1988): 18–19.

Extracts from L'Excès-l'usine and Le Livre des ciels . Translated by Cole Swenson. In Violence of the White Page: Contemporary French Poetry , edited by Stacy Doris, Phillip Foss, and Emmanuel Hocquard. Special issue of Tyuonyi , no. 9/10 (1991): 123–29.

Serge Gavronsky: Among younger French writers, you're the only one born in the United States, that is, the only one to have learned English first, as your mother tongue, and now writing solely in French. How did you pass from one language to the other? From one culture into another? How did you become Leslie Kaplan (pronounced in French, of course!)?

Leslie Kaplan: In fact I was raised in France, but there has always been an American Leslie Kaplan as well as a French one. So the answer is that simple!

SG: Given this conjunction of identities, of nationalities, and the facility to decipher both an American and a French mode of writing, at least on the level of reading, can you spot an American trace in your French novels?

LK: I'm sure there's an American undercurrent in my French, but to tell the truth, in my own case, I don't want to take it any further. I'm persuaded it's there—no doubt it has something to do with rhythm, ways of articulating things, cutting them up—but I wouldn't want to look for elements beyond that, and I'd like to keep it a certain distance from my consciousness. I can also say that when I write I very much enjoy reading poetry and novels in English. English counts when I work.

SG: It is true that one rarely likes to characterize one's own poetics, but clearly in your work, and I'm thinking of your novel The Brooklyn Bridge , there are numerous links—bridges, in fact—that cross over language to a particular place, taking off from the quote, "Mary, Mary quite contrary . . ." and your literal translation into French, which doesn't pretend to be anything else but a reader's pony. What also interests me is the relation you maintain with reality, which I had already admired in L'Excès-l'usine , a reality that encompasses language as well. Would you care to talk about the "reality" question that has become significant in recent literary criticism, especially from a psychological/aesthetic point of view?

LK: I find it difficult to talk about, but all I can say is that indeed, it's true. I'm trying to write what I might call "the real," which has noth-

ing to do with "reality," that is, with a linearity that already contains the writer's ideas. I'd like to arrive at a moment that would be infinitely more direct, massive, with things coming simultaneously from every direction. That's why the image weighs heavily in my case;films, for example, stimulate me a lot, that's obvious, but only a certain type of film, in which the real is present. Perhaps the definition of that term can only be given by the work itself. I can't speak in clearer terms about that, but take, for instance, a scene in a café where people are holding serious discussions, and at the same time people are walking by, and at the same time the sky is visible, and at the same time there are feelings on the part of the people that may or may not come to the surface of the conversation, which nevertheless keeps going at the same serious level. All that at the same time. For me, that's important. And here I'm reminded of the definition André Bazin gave in reference to Rossellini's films. I think the Italian neorealists showed reality as a block, not as something dissociable, but a unity. And that's what I'd like to reach.

SG: In your work there is a strong scenographic sense, to the point where at times, one might even think of your writing as a series of subtitles for the images: "The blue sky. She sees him. Embraces. Playing." A staccato succession, for instance—flashes, spontaneous elements that render explicit the absent image. In so doing, language renders materially visible the invisible, and thus there is a relation between the nature of language and the image. Images wander in photography and in film, but in your work a sort of evocation is powerfully suggested in a style in which language refuses to become expansive, in which it remains contracted, refusing to fall into a lyrical trap.

LK: In any case, as you said, I do want to establish a tension through this contracted form of writing. I would also want emotions to figure in—whether this is evident or not, and that's for each reader to gauge—but they shouldn't stop one from thinking. That's very important to me. I want simultaneously to hold my readers and to allow them to think, and as you can see with one of my characters, Julian,

a certain number of questions are put forth, which must entice readers while also making them want to elaborate the questions themselves.

SG: What you've just said plays into the very concept of reader response, in which the text, far from being closed and wholly determined by the author, allows the reader to participate, in fact act as a kind of co-creator, a translator of sorts! But in passing you also used a word that's almost taboo these days, that is, emotion. Do you feel that this interest is making a comeback? Whether it's muted or, on the contrary, flaunted, there are signs, if not of a massive return to an affective prose, at least of an admission of a need, especially after a long period of formalist writing, to recover that area of expressivity.

LK: I too believe that's true, but of course it doesn't indicate in the slightest a return to a psychological form, to psychologism. This development points to a return to realism not in its outdated forms but finally in its present dimension, and personally I don't think that should be excluded. Not at all.

SG: Let me turn to the way you phrase your thoughts: I don't mean to imply that all your sentences are similarly constructed, but there is a stylistic harmony in your writing that's founded, at least partially, on an abruptness, on what seems to me to recall a breath line, dependent on the body itself, a sort of corporeal expression.

LK: I guess both are present. What I can say is that I rework a lot when I write. Sometimes a piece remains in its original state—that can happen—but in any case, it takes me rather long to convince myself that that's what I wanted, even if it's the same thing I had written down originally! I don't know precisely how to say it, but no doubt this work is important.

SG: When I spoke to poets, one of the questions I asked myself, in reading contemporary writing in France, was what the relation might be between the aural, or oral, and written forms. Obviously everyone works over their writing, and yet in some way there seems to be a formal ban on communicating emotions of immediacy, as if feelings could only be described within metaphorical quotation marks! Thus,

while this work is necessary, shouldn't it allow an opening to sound itself, to the sound of voice?

LK: I think I understand what you're saying, and I'd say that on that score I'm rather in agreement with you. Perhaps you might amplify. Your point seems to me correct, but since I've not thought enough about the question, and especially not in those terms, it does take me a bit by surprise!

SG: Let me put it another way, then: To be a woman and a mother, to be American and Jewish, that is, to be many beings at the same time, doesn't that imply that "they" come to enrich that block you've called "the real"?

LK: Absolutely. Let's say that the block is always seen as lived and felt by someone . The block includes the subject. I don't want to formulate that in a theoretical manner, but once again if I take films, it's evident that that's what happens. Rossellini and Cassavetes, who are two of the greats for me, do not at all have the same way of seeing the world, and yet for me both produce a cinema of the real. Each does it in his own way, as someone has already mentioned to me! Maurice Blanchot wrote about that in his article on L'Excès-l'usine in Libération [February 24, 1987]. For him, the "one" [on ] in my work is in the feminine voice. Of course I hadn't thought about that in the beginning, but the factory [l'usine ] is real, as a thing, and it is quite clearly seen and felt by a woman. That's certain.

SG: That explains the dedication to Blanchot in your novel. He's there.

LK: He is in it . . .

SG: He's in the book as an exegetical figure, but his presence traverses the book itself, casting its light, rightly or wrongly; there every reader must reach his or her own conclusion. But it's impossible to read Blanchot's name and forget him! In reading the fiction that follows it, one thing remains unquestionable: your French defies easy translation into English! Perhaps in your French there's an echo of a certain type of virility, a certain verbal potency. The infinitives appear in a magisterial way, but there is also an elliptical procedure at work, a form of writing that draws back into itself, that interrupts

itself. Have you thought about this particularity in your work? Isn't there, in the long run, a risk of appearing baroque in emphasizing throughout a highly stylized voice, let's say, a very conscious presence of écriture? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that in the four novels I've read there is a corresponding stylistic register.

LK: What do you mean by baroque?

SG: A certain type of mannerism; a formulaic mode.

LK: I suppose a writer always faces that risk, the risk of repeating what was at one time a discovery and contained something true. However, there's no other way I can write. Later on it may even become a tic. I think everyone faces that threat. It's also a function of what goes on within oneself, the relation to oneself. Is one inside or outside of the real when writing? I don't think there are any guarantees. That may be why writing cannot be considered, in the strictest sense of the term, a profession: because there are no guarantees!

SG: Let me go back to the problem of translation, to this particular limpidity and abruptness to which at least the French reader is accustomed, in contemporary French prose, and which often depends on Duras-esque short sentences, even sentences where the verb has been omitted. Have you ever read yourself as an American reader of a French text, thereby introducing a critical or ironic distance?

LK: No, I can't say I have. What I can say that ties in with translation, however, has to do with one of my texts in a German magazine from Berlin: as they translated a considerable part of L'Excès-l'usine as well as Le Livre des ciels , something indeed of a different nature entered the language relation. But I don't know about English; since I feel close to English I don't think I can spot the difficulty. That may also be because I'm not used to writing in English.

SG: Have you ever been tempted to?

LK: It's not a question of being tempted. I've got a very powerful inhibition against it.

SG: I won't pursue that line! Tell me, isn't it rare for a young author like yourself to see a second edition of her work come out just a few years after the initial printing?

LK: It is, and I was surprised!

SG: From 1982 to 1987—that's quite astounding. How do you explain it?

LK: Well, it's a fact that the edition sold out. The first print run was six thousand copies. It didn't come out in paperback or anything like that. For that type of a book, it really did very well! When it sold out, Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens [Editions P.O.L.] thought it would be worth-while to put out a second edition, adding an interview by Marguerite Duras that had already been published in Banana Split , edited by Liliane Giraudon and Jean-Jacques Viton.^[*] I was very happy.

SG: When you read what others have written about your work, like Blanchot or Duras, do you recognize yourself? Do their perceptions coincide with yours? In other words, are you pleased with the "translation" of your work in French?

LK: If I understand your question, yes, I do find myself in others' responses! It has occurred to me that at times I'm in total disagreement with what's being said about the novel; at other times I fully agree. Things may come back to me and surprise me, and that's good. Obviously, Blanchot's writing about L'Excès-l'usine was very important for me. And in my interview with Duras in Libération I sometimes discovered things; at other times I didn't see it her way on a number of points, but that too interested me. We don't necessarily have the same vision of what I said in my novel.

SG: Isn't that in the very nature of the way you perceive things, in that block of the real to which you alluded?

LK: That's it, exactly.

SG: As you know, having lived and written in Paris for many years, there has been of late a pronounced concern for theory in the preparation of the literary product, both in its authorial aspects as well as in the presence of the reader. This same concern strongly marked the degree to which formalism influenced the writing of poetry for

a number of years—let's say, from the late fifties through the early eighties. Since you yourself have made use of a Lacanian distinction between the real and reality, could you evaluate the presence of psychoanalysis in your work?

LK: That's a complicated question; I do read a lot of theoretical texts, as distinct from fiction and poetry, but I can't say precisely what part that reading plays in my own writing. Psychoanalysis is very important for me on the level of thought, but as for spotting it in my work, if indeed it can be spotted there, I don't know what to say. Furthermore, I wouldn't want something of an explicitly theoretical nature to figure in my texts. That doesn't make any sense for me. Let's say—I'm not quite sure how to express this exactly—these sources may come up in terms of the question of ethics, but as far as style is concerned, I don't see them at all; perhaps they're there, but I can't follow that track.

SG: The characters whom you define in your work are apparently removed from this type of discourse. One would not expect them to speak in that way . . .

LK: That's certain but . . . No. What's important for me is the real, and at least one of the distinguishing aspects of an écriture of the real—as opposed to realism—is that in realism, despite everything, one can still clearly appreciate the author's theories, though it's never acknowledged. At least that's how it seems to me. A certain naturalist vision of the world, of things. I won't go into detail, but that doesn't interest me. I absolutely want an element of surprise in reading and thus . . . no theory!

The Brooklyn Bridge

The young woman and the little girl arrived early on in the park. The man saw them from a distance and watched them for a long time. Then he came closer.

The crowds haven't come yet. It's Sunday.

Start of the hot weather. Chance of mosquitoes.

A shuffle of clouds, moving fast. Blue mixed with green. Low hanging smoke in the way, coming from elsewhere, and one smells the ocean nearby hugging the city. Loading platforms and docks.

Anna walks through the park.

The park takes over the center of the city, an immense area, open. Inside, cars move, buses. Bicycles and roller skates circulate. Trucks, horses.

But vast, tree-lined alleys, too, corners of shrubbery. Bodies of water, hills. One can sit on the grass. Animals, leaves.

Benches everywhere, iron and wood. Sit down, read the paper. Listen to a neighbor. Once an emaciated, wrinkled black man spoke in whispers about the men who were walking by. Hollow like straws, he mumbled. Look. There's nobody under that hat.

Everybody can get into the park. Swings, families. Food stands.

At the other end, there's a zoo, an animal farm for the very young. Fowl. A bear.

Lots of swings. A simple wooden plank between two ropes. One gets on, feels the air, a happy connection between things. One swings, then gets off. During the week one can often see well-dressed men and women getting on the swings. It's free.

The city. It's overwhelming. Meetings and networks. Clouds. The presence of goods and bodies.

"Hello," says the man.

The little girl looks up.

"Hello," says the young woman.

"Can I sit down?" says the man.

"Of course," says the young woman.

The young woman has a book in her hands. She's not reading. The little girl has a doll. She's playing.

"She looks like you," says the man to the young woman.

The young woman smiles.

People arrive. Picnic baskets, portable radios. Music fills the park very early on.

You hear it, it gets louder. Groups and guitars.

Soon the sun, and the sky will be harsh and brilliant like a sheet of iron. Women will lie down beneath it. Legs and breasts, waists.

Children's games. Kites, balls. There are lawns set aside for sports.

Vendors selling ice cream, franks. Imported products, fresh juices. Vegetables in fashion.

Rowboats move around on the little lake. Water lilies, reeds. Urbanity.

Anna walks through the park.

A walk through the park, a walk through the city. One easily moves in and out of the park. No fences, no gates. At night, there are certain areas said to be dangerous. That's possible.

"Have you ever seen the Brooklyn Bridge?" asks the man. "It's the most beautiful one."

"Why?" asks the little girl.

The man smiles.

The sky, clear and blue. The smell of grass. The heat rises.

Trees in the light, and all the leaves touched. Here and there, little traffic circles, unkempt and handsome, wood sweating, rotten. Around there the air is hazy and mild. The folds of shadows.

In a hollow, a large carousel, wooden horses, stiff and colored, turning around, calmly, like an encrusted music, a floating souvenir.

The children. How they can surprise you.

The man and the young woman sit without saying a word. The little girl plays.

In the distance, a group of buildings made of glass, transparent and cold, seem to be coming out of the trees. Evidence of the image. The vegetal origin.

Anna passes by a young woman walking gracefully, blond and slender. Like a line drawing, a small victory in the making.

The music gets louder.

A group of sailors on a bench. Deeply tanned, really heavy and fragile. Take up a space, and for a while. Anna looks at them. Workers of the sea.

The man and the young woman begin to talk. The man wears jeans and sneakers. He wears an open jacket over his white T-shirt.

He's very handsome. Vigorous, the shoulders.

The young woman pays attention to him, she answers him. At the same time she remains undecided, preoccupied. Dispersion.

She's got long hair, a wide skirt, earrings. Her earrings move constantly.

The little girl plays.

"So you've never crossed the Brooklyn Bridge." The man asks.

The little girl looks up without answering.

The young woman interrupts. She's already crossed that bridge, perhaps she doesn't remember it.

The little girl listens, then continues to play.

The young woman and the man speak. Easy words. A few laughs.

The green rises from the trees.

Motion of the sky, of a single piece.

Anna walks. The joy of walking. To know the earth and the sky at the same time. A pure mental activity, too. To think without words, believing one is doing it.

Anna passes by a group of black boys and girls. Soda bottles, radios. Adolescence, a tangle.

Brilliant black skin.

Large eyes, identifiable voices, a way of speaking.

It's a park within a city. The present time, easy. No roads here, but streets. The present moment which includes where one comes from, my God. Where one might have come from.

Rumors. Old-fashioned talk.

"You love me?"

"Yes."

Conversations.

Anna gets off the path to walk on the grass. The grass is cut short, elastic and firm. Various varieties of verdure. Sod.

A squirrel chews, refined. Small limbs.

Women's light skirts, T-shirts and shorts. A few bathing suits. Pants, sandals.

Anna walks on as the heat rises. The blue rises. Sky everywhere. A discrete unity.

The women. Anna watches them move. Each one creates a form, a call. It's aggressive and pleasant like laughter, a cutout.

Children arrive, accompanied by silent nannies, blue and white. A child has dropped his lollipop and cries all alone, ignored.

But the mothers, how to speak about them. Anna wonders if they make up a category, if one can ever speak about them.

"What's your name?" The little girl's voice stopped her.

"Anna," answered Anna.

She sat down. The young woman smiled at her. Anna immediately found the man very handsome, very somber. The young woman, ah! interesting. But the little girl. Her wide eyes, light skin, lively movements. Power. Absolute and also impersonal, as always with perfection.

Idea, one feels at the same time she's mean, too useful, of a miniature, an object. The word "small."

Moment of silence.

Anna doesn't know where she is.

All around, leaves, splashes of color. Forms lose themselves. Only the little girl, her neat outline.

Then things fall back into place. Trees, the green carpet. Familiar noises.

The man. He's very white, a deep white, severe. Violence, fatigue. A rigidity.

He looks at women with a steady eye and indifferently. It's not agreeable, and yet in that look, a woman can see herself, see her own beauty, her audacity.

Because of the man, one thinks about the city. Present tensions, skin-deep, and that modern demeanor, disconnected.

Farther away, a bus passes by, a large tube, closed and yellow. People sit in their places, lost in thought, packed in. Interior life.

There are mostly blacks, the bus is going to their neighborhood.

Isolated neighborhood with brick houses, old stores. Odd-looking bricks, old and red, they're elsewhere too, raising their quaint, childish walls right into the center of town. They're there, participating.

But where the streets end, the ocean, the ocean rough and green, its currents and waves. Boats move under the sky.

Now a man stands up on a box and talks in a lively manner. People stop and listen. Difficult to catch everything, but one can pick up specific elements, facts, an accumulation. Pedagogy.

A boy comes closer, he's poorly dressed, very dirty, a young drifter. When she sees him, Anna catches herself thinking, "Well!" in a definitive manner, punctuated. Afterward she's all the sadder.

"Are you rich?" asks the little girl. She looks at the man.

"Why ask?" says the young woman, smiling. "Money isn't everything."

"Yes it is," says the little girl. "I'll only marry a rich man."

Le Pont De Brooklyn

La jeune femme et la petite fille sont arrivées tôt dans le parc. L'homme les a vues de loin et les a longtemps regardées. Ensuite il s'est rapproché.

Les gens sont encore peu nombreux. C'est dimanche.

Début de chaleur. Possibilité d'insectes.

Le ciel est mélangé, rapide. Bleu avec parfois du vert. Des fumées basses, encombrantes, qui viennent d'ailleurs, et on sent la proximité de l'océan accroché à la ville. Embarcadères et docks.

Anna traverse le parc.

Le parc prend tout le centre de la ville, un immense morceau, sans démarcation. Dedans, les voitures roulent, les autobus. Circulation de bicyclettes et de patins. Camions, chevaux.

Mais grandes allées d'arbres, aussi, coins de buissons. Plans d'eau, hauteurs. On peut s'asseoir sur l'herbe. Les animaux, les feuilles.

Partout des bancs, fer et bois. Se poser, lire le journal. Ecouter le voisin. Une fois, un vieux monsieur noir trop maigre et ridé avait parlé tout bas des hommes qui passaient. Creux comme la paille, avait-il chu-choté. Regardez. Il n'y a personne sous le chapeau.

Le parc reçoit tout le monde. Balançoires, familles. Stands de nourriture.

Au fond, il y a un zoo, une ferme d'animaux pour les très petits. Volaille. Un ours.

Les balançoires sont nombreuses. Une planche, simple, entre deux cordes. On monte, on sent l'air, la liaison heureuse des choses. On se balance, on se retire. En semaine on voit souvent des hommes et des femmes dans leurs habits de ville bien élaborés venir faire un tour. C'est gratuit.

La ville. Elle est si forte. Rencontres et réseaux. Nuages. Présence des marchandises et des corps.

—Bonjour, dit l'homme.

La petite fille lève les yeux.

—Bonjour, dit la jeune femme.

—Je peux m'asseoir, dit l'homme.

—Bien sûr, dit la jeune femme.

La jeune femme a un livre à la main. Elle ne lit pas. La petite fille a une poupée. Elle joue.

—Elle vous ressemble, dit l'homme à la jeune femme.

La jeune femme sourit.

Des gens arrivent. Paniers à pique-nique, transistors. La musique commence très tôt dans le parc.

Elle commence, elle grandit. Groupes et guitares.

Tout à l'heure le soleil, et le ciel sera dur et brillant comme une tôle. Les femmes s'allongeront dessous. Les jambes et les seins, les tailles.

Activité des enfants. Cerfs-volants, ballons. Il y a des pelouses réservées au sport.

Vendeurs de glaces, de saucisses. Produits importés, jus naturels. Légumes à la mode.

Des barques circulent sur le petit lac. Nénuphars, roseaux. Urbanité.

Anna traverse le parc.

Traverser le parc, traverser la ville. On entre et on sort du parc facilement. Il n'y a pas de grilles ni de portes. La nuit, certains coins sont réputés dangereux. C'est possible.

—Vous connaissez le pont de Brooklyn? dit l'homme. C'est le plus beau.

—Pourquoi, demande la petite fille.

L'homme sourit.

Le ciel dégagé et bleu. Odeur de l'herbe. La chaleur monte.

Les arbres dans la lumière, et toutes les feuilles traversées. Par-ci par-là des petits ronds-points délabrés et beaux, bois suintant, pourri. Autour l'air est flou, relâché. Les plis de l'ombre.

Dans un creux un grand manège, des chevaux de bois raides et colorés qui tournent, tranquilles, comme une musique incrustée, un souvenir flottant.

Les enfants. Comment ils peuvent vous prendre.

L'homme et la jeune femme sont assis sans rien dire. La petite fille joue.

Au loin un ensemble d'immeubles en verre transparent et froid qui semble sortir des arbres. Evidence de l'image. L'origine végétal.

Anna croise une jeune femme blonde et légère qui marche souplement. C'est un trait de dessin, une petite victoire qui se déroule.

Les musiques augmentent.

Un groupe de marins sur un banc. Ils sont très bronzés, bien lourds et fragiles. Occuper une place, et pour un temps. Anna les regarde. Ouvriers de la mer.

L'homme et la jeune femme commencent à se parler. L'homme a un jean, des baskets. Il porte une veste ouverte sur un T-shirt blanc.

Il est très beau. Vigueur, les épaules.

La jeune femme fait attention à lui, elle lui répond. En même temps elle reste vague, préoccupée. Dispersion.

Elle a de grands cheveux, une jupe qui s'étale, des boucles d'oreille. Les boucles d'oreille bougent sans arrêt.

La petite fille joue.

—Alors tu n'as jamais traversé le pont de Brooklyn. L'homme demande.

La petite fille lève les yeux sans répondre.

La jeune femme intervient. Elle a déjà traversé ce pont, peut-être elle ne se souvient pas.

La petite fille écoute, ensuite elle continue son jeu.

La jeune femme et l'homme se parlent. Paroles faciles, un peu de rire.

Le vert sourd des arbres.

Mouvement du ciel, d'une seule pièce.

Anna marche. Joie de marcher. Connaître le sol et l'air en même temps. Pure activité de la tête, aussi. Penser sans mots, croire qu'on le fait.

Anna passe à côté d'un groupe de garçons et de filles noirs. Bouteilles de soda, un transistor. Jeunesse, fouillis.

L'éclatante peau noire.

Les grands yeux, les voix si particulières, l'accent.

C'est un parc dans une ville. Temps présent et large. Pas de routes, ici, des rues. Le moment actuel qui inclut d'où l'on vient, mon Dieu. D'où l'on a pu venir.

Rumeurs. Le vieux langage.

—Tu m'aimes ?

—Oui.

Conversations.

Anna quitte l'allée pour marcher sur l'herbe. L'herbe est bien courte, élastique et ferme. Valeurs variées des verts. Plaques.

Un écureuil mâchonnant, raffiné. Les petits membres.

Jupes légères des femmes, T-shirts et shorts. Quelques maillots de bain. Pantalons, sandales.

Anna avance dans la chaleur commençante, le bleu qui se lève. Le ciel partout. Unité discrète.

Les femmes. Anna les regarde bouger. Elles créent chacune une forme, un appel. C'est agressif et plaisant comme un rire, un découpage.

Des enfants arrivent, accompagnés par des nourrices silencieuses, bleu et blanc. Un enfant a laissé tomber une sucette et pleure tout seul, ignoré.

Mais les mères, comment en parler. Anna se demande si elles font une catégorie, si on peut jamais parler d'elles.

—Comment tu t'appelles? La voix de la petite fille l'a arrêtée.

—Anna, a répondu Anna.

Elle s'est assise. La jeune femme lui a souri. Tout de suite Anna a trouvé l'homme très beau, très sombre. La jeune femme, ah, intéressante. Mais la petite fille. Les grands yeux écartés, la peau claire, les formes si vivantes. Une force. C'est absolu, et impersonnel, aussi, comme toujours la perfection.

Idée, on sent en même temps qu'elle est mauvaise, trop utile, d'une miniature, d'un objet. Le mot «petit».

Moment de silence.

Anna ne sait pas où elle est.

Autour, des feuilles, des taches de couleur. Les formes se perdent. Seule la petite fille, ses lignes nettes.

Ensuite les choses se rétablissent. Les arbres, le tapis vert. Les bruits familiers.

L'homme. Il est très blanc, d'une blancheur profonde, sévère. Violence, fatigue. Une rigidité.

Il regarde les femmes d'une façon appuyée et indifférente. Ce n'est pas agréable, et pourtant, dans ce regard, une femme peut se rencontrer, rencontrer sa propre beauté, son audace.

A cause de l'homme, on pense à la ville. Tension présente, à fleur de peau, et cette allure moderne, cassée.

Plus loin, un autobus passe, un gros tube fermé et jaune. Les gens sont à leur place, recueillis, serrés. Vie intérieure.

Il y a surtout des noirs, l'autobus va dans leur quartier.

Quartier isolé avec des maisons en brique, des vieux magasins. Etrangeté de ces briques anciennes et rouges, on les voit ailleurs, aussi, élevant leurs murs désuets, enfantins, jusque dans le centre de la ville. Elles sont là, elles participent.

Mais au bout des rues c'est l'océan, l'océan houleux et vert, ses courants et ses vagues. Les bateaux qui avancent sous le ciel.

Maintenant un homme est monté sur une caisse et parle énergiquement. Quelques personnes se sont arrêtées, l'écoutent. On n'entend pas très bien mais on peut reconnaître des données exactes, des faits, une accumulation. Pédagogie.

Un garçon s'approche, il est mal habillé, très sale, un jeune clochard. Quand elle le voit, Anna se surprend à penser «Eh bien» d'une façon définitive, ponctuée. Après elle est d'autant plus triste.

—Est-ce que tu es riche, demande la petite fille. Elle s'est tournée vers l'homme.

—Quelle importance, dit la jeune femme en souriant. Ce n'est pas l'argent qui compte.

—Si, dit la petite fille. Je me marierai seulement avec un homme qui a de l'argent.

Maurice Roche

Maurice Roche was born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1925. Among his numerous publications are Compact (Paris: Seuil, 1966), Circus (Seuil, 1972), CodeX (Seuil, 1974), Opéra bouffe (Seuil, 1975), Mémoire (Paris: Belfond, 1976), Macabré , poème (Seuil, 1979), Testament: poème , livre/cassette (Paris: SonTexte, 1979), Maladie mélodie (Seuil, 1980), Camar(a)de , fiction/essai (Paris: Arthaud, 1981), Je ne vais pas bien, mais il faut que j'y aille (Seuil, 1987; awarded the Grand Prix de l'Humour noir and the Prix Paul-Vaillant-Couturier), Qui n'a pas vu Dieu n'a rien vu (Seuil, 1990), and Sous la chair des mots (Montpellier: Editions CMS, 1993).

Selected Publications in English:

CodeX . Extracts translated by Mark Polizzotti. In The AvantGarde Today: An International Anthology , edited by Charles Russell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

CodeX . Extracts translated by Carl Lovitt. In In the Wake of the Wake , edited by David Hayman and Elliott Anderson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.

CodeX and Circus . Extracts translated by Inez Hedges. In Inez Hedges, Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and Film . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983.

Compact . Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Elmwood Park, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1988.

Macabré . Extracts translated by Claudia Reeder. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Assembling Press, 1979.

Maladie mélodie . Extracts translated by David Hayman. In Re-forming the Narrative: Toward a Mechanics of Modernist Fiction . Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Mem. Mori . Extracts from Compact . Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Toronto: Rampike, 1986.

Serge Gavronsky: When I read a traditional American novel, I'm struck by its insistence on plot and, as a result, by the critic's periphrastic strategies. A review thus becomes a second-rate effort at doubling the nature of the characters and the story line, rather than being attentive to the writing itself.

Maurice Roche: Not always. Take Burroughs, for example . . .

SG: That's true, but he's not quite the traditional novelist! I'm thinking of the insistence on narrative in the U.S., on the telling of the tale—that seems to me far removed from your CodeX, Circus , and Compact , novels in which, however much one might hope to capture them in a verbal translation, in the final analysis, as Derrida said of Joyce's Finnegans Wake , the eye has to play its part. Your texts pun, and that punning can only be appreciated when the reader doubles as a viewer. If you read Roche out loud, something gets lost in the translation!

MR: True. In my work the stories do not exist as stories alone. They are composed as a musical score. They insist on typography, drawings, sketches, notes.

SG: The "what's it about" aspect is negligible. Don't you think that the American bias in favor of transposing the spoken into the written, encoding everyday experiences into the text, really doesn't correspond to your own ambitions?

MR: It's not only a question of using language but of tasting it in one's mouth—Ie goût de la langue —the way Rabelais did, or Céline.

SG: When I look at one of your pages, I see a flurry of words, enabling the reader to read what he or she wishes or to be carried by the text along its own currents.

MR: The problem with literature is perhaps its untranslatability. By that I mean that I cannot read a German text as I would a French one; a translation will never be exactly what the original text was. I'm fascinated by that—well, perhaps not by the question of untranslatability, but by something that provokes a certain anxiety. Even though I learned to speak English as a bartender—and I too can function within the realm of national clichés, saying "yes," "no," and "thank you," in a number of languages!—still, it may be that were I to come

across a chauffeur, my bartender's English would no longer suffice. That was the idea in Compact when I introduced a page of braille. It was to show the reader that he was blind, that he couldn't understand a thing, that he couldn't read a single word. That's what fascinates me in this sort of literary work—the incommunicability of it all, and not its profound nature, either; something quite superficial. It comes about when you sculpt a text, when you call into question all its tricks, certain anomalies of language, when you put on paper all the incongruencies contained in language, all its paradoxes. If I write in French, "Il arrive qu'il parte," try to translate that!

SG: How about a fast try, let's say, "When he's coming he's going," though I'm aware that what it really says is, "It so happens he's leaving."

MR: I'm sure that in German someone would find an equivalence for this apparently strange and, on the face of it, contradictory statement. That's what interests me in literature, whether French or German: when the writer focuses on things in his own language that constitute a barrier to communicability. Television, radio, the media—all accentuate the breach between this type of endeavor and the mask that conceals it. Talk for the sake of talking, in order to make sounds, against background noise . . .

SG: As if the background noise were made up of words . . .

MR: A background noise that really keeps you from listening in, the way a TV screen acts as a screening device for the material shown. You see an image on the screen, but the screen also blocks it. My problem is not to change the world. It's changing anyway, but obviously not through literature and not because we begin to question all sorts of things. I make a book the way Calder makes a mobile. That's about it for me. I might have done the same with music, but you see I like to tell stories! You were talking a while back about narration and description—well, yes! There's got to be a story in a book. It's indispensable. That's what I miss in music, especially since I'm neither a romantic nor Berlioz. I couldn't tell my story in music. Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps in contemporary music you can tell a story. I'm sure we're getting there, but I was much more at ease with

literature, since it was through literature that I was able to tell a story.

I build my church . . . and description plays an important part. There's a whole literary school that defined itself around description! And because of it, all of a sudden, all those pages we used to skip over in a Balzac novel are now read in a different manner. When I tell a story, I'm not involved in what has been called a literature of commitment or something like a roman à thèse . That's not my thing. I'm not interested in that. I seek out difficulty. One day, as I was writing Compact , I said to myself, "That's untranslatable," and yet there were certain things I had written in French that I found, curiously enough, better in another language. So this barrier exists only in a certain idea that we have of it.

SG: You talk about the French language, but in fact there are numerous French languages in your texts.

MR: Some friends of mine had translated one of my texts into Russian, and I saw there was a pun in that language that I hadn't intended in the French. I told them that was not by chance; it wasn't a gratuitous or arbitrary thing. And I worked it over with a friend of mine who knows Russian.

SG: This curious mixture that appears to cross linguistic lines and at the same time doesn't, isn't it the same with music? Don't we have a tendency to speak about French music, or German or English music?

MR: Up to now that has been the case, but in contemporary music . . . Yet even without knowing the name of the composer, I can tell if he's French or not. Serial music doesn't interfere with the identity of the composer, either. In language and structures, one proceeds with subtlety and modesty. And when I use a passage in English in one of my texts, it's not for the sake of elegance but to make a point, to render a color of the mind. It's not just language but a way of articulating thought. When I wrote Circus , for instance, I wasn't thinking of the fact that the Japanese write from top to bottom, but I was taken by the idea of producing a textual experience that hadn't yet been tried.

And yes, my training as a musician may have come in handy in this sort of practice.

SG: Isn't the conceptualization of the page in that work of a graphic nature, too?

MR: Yes, but not in the unfolding of thought; not in the act of writing, either, since I do know what it is to write music, and I know that the two are not at all similar. Music poses the problem of note values, rhythm, etc., which is absolutely particular to it, whereas in prose it's a matter of narration. Someone once said that when he wanted to express a thought he would write a novel and when he had nothing to say he would compose a musical score. That's idiotic! I'm persuaded that in writing music you are also telling something, but it's something rather fluid. There are no characters, or if there are, one is the reader and the other is the composer.

SG: Doesn't that go back to the vocalization of the Homeric text?

MR: Listen, even when you sing you're telling a story!

SG: What about your own story?

MR: I've always been fascinated by language. When I was six years old, for example, my father, who unfortunately died early, used to read me works by Alfred Jarry and Victor Hugo's Fin de Satan . He was a very good reader. He loved literature, and every time he found me with nothing to do, he would either read to me or ask me to read out loud. And music, too. Don't forget that he and Roger Desmorière, an orchestra conductor who is now dead, had been childhood friends. I began to study music later on, but I must admit that literature fascinated me from the start. As you know, my parents weren't upper-class people by any means. My father worked for Michelin, and my mother was a social worker at one time.

SG: Were you always interested in prose?

MR: Not just prose! Poetry always fascinated me. I read more poetry than anything else, and as a child I even wrote poetry, but I also liked to tell stories. I read lots of novels, too. Balzac, Jules Romains. My father brought books home all the time. I have a great admiration

for Jules Romains. Sartre, who wrote such garbage, was influenced by American literature, but when he began his Chemins de la liberté , wasn't he in fact technically continuing Jules Romains's Hommes de bonne volonté ? But Sartre is more of a pain in the ass. Even if his Chemins de la liberté may be the worst stuff, it's still the best thing he ever wrote.

Now I remember what my father said to me when I was thirteen or fourteen years old, "I don't get why you're so set on becoming a musician when it's perfectly clear that one day you'll be inside the skin of a writer." When he said that I thought it was perfectly ridiculous. I liked to read novels, I had learned about them in school, of course, but don't you see, between Mozart and Proust, I would always chose Mozart. Someone once said that a successful writer is a failed musician!

SG: Did you ever notice that the first three books you wrote all began with the letter C ? And that after Opéra bouffe , the next three begin with the letter M ?

MR: That was unavoidable. I didn't intend it that way, but the titles correspond to the content. Did you know that when Compact came out, over twenty years ago, my editors at Seuil asked me to change the title? If it had a meaning in English, it certainly didn't in French.

SG: What do you think about the Oulipo school?

MR: It's very different I was great friends with Georges Perec; he was the most involved in playing games, and yet that didn't stop him from being an extraordinary person. But what really, really interested him were language games, crossword puzzles and the like. In my case, these were only a means to an end, and if I no longer needed them, then . . . But there is one thing I hold dear despite everything, maybe because I'm a romantic after all, and that's feeling the whoosh of the wind after the bullet's passed by.

Appendix on the Works of Maurice Roche

by Maurice Roche, translated by Serge Gavronsky^[*]

A Little Memento

Compact (or, The Seeing Blind) is a novel about blindness, mercantilism, impossible love (symbolized by a striptease scene in front of a blind man). Numerous narratives—brought together into a single one—crisscross each other; there's at once a single possibility for the narration and numerous narrative practices.

Circus (or, The Alienated Annexed): hologram of our daily life—its massacres, its genocides, its death camps, hunger . . . The text is pulverized, multiplied, but the elements in place are condensed into a single unitary discourse.

CodeX (or, The Amnesiac Memorialist) appears as an archaeology of fiction, the book of illness, of the pains of the body, the sum of therapeutics: medica-lying [médicamenteuses ] recipes, advice on how to die "cured" of life—and rest in peace; knowledge summarized in an appeal for peace in the shape of an atom bomb.

Opera buffa (or, My Toys Had Been Given Away, I Had So Few) belongs to the comedic and satiric genre, that is, it's aggressive. It appears as an intermezzo (composed of intermezzi), a hyphen that links all my preceding works to the following ones.

Memento Mori (Life Is Here Only to Be Remembered): native city, childhood, the father's death, work—which is neither joy nor health—un-

[*] Maurice Roche was kind enough to give me this unpublished text as an addition to the interview.

employment, experiencing a hospital, futile projects for an autobiography.

Mem. Mori , besides using techniques borrowed from the epistolary novel, dispersed in time, also uses montage in its filmic sense (this has nothing to do with collage—as some have wrongfully assumed).

This return to memory, before losing it forever, is interspersed with events occurring during the composition of the novel.

Macabré (Danse Macabre; or, The Precarious Scythe), a biped's choice of inventions, tasks, and obsessions: torments, tortures, loves, famines, illnesses, murders of all sorts. A sequence of illustrations in the tradition of the dance of death of the Middle Ages. Fusion of text and drawings.

Testament (Sound/Text): A work in the renewed tradition of a literary genre in vogue in the Middle Ages: the author's voice from beyond the tomb—accompanied by a tape.

Malady Melody (Pain is connected to music; one cannot conceive of the former without the presence of the latter; love and death find their way in both.) A story of a short life and a long agony. These are the elements that constitute the games and pleasures that help humans to disbelieve that they're already on their way to dying. It's an internal opera with its recitatives, its arias, its "numbers."

Camar(a)de^[*] (Pain Painting) is about rediscovering the origin of the major themes that constitute the thread of life and of a given work. This doesn't come to pass without hesitation, without difficulty; the itinerary resembles a labyrinth—a "way whose paths bifurcate." As if the narrator wanted to put off the ineluctable encounter, all the while seeking it out desperately, when in fact it's by his side, that old, faithful camar(a)de

[*] If the parenthetical a is removed, camarade (comrade or crony) becomes the figure of Death (la camarde ).

that accompanies us, an invisible shadow with its grave and laughing mask, the one we try to conceal even as we represent it as a ritual, magical conjuration, sometimes as a trompe l'oeil.

This fiction forms a sort of diptych with the preceding novel. In Malady Melody , music underlies the narrative; in Camar(a)de , painting plays with writing not in order to illustrate it, as is customary, but to cast light on it. A confrontation of the image and the word. Doubling of the image and the word. Not a book of the dead but a book of blithe desire.

I'm a Near Goner but I've Got to Go . This "novel of novellas" is composed of a succession of narratives extending one into the other, like a rhizome, in which one finds sketches written down for stories, fables, fragments, tatters of souvenirs, and more or less truncated parables, not to mention those endless stories whose beginnings are all absent. All that unified by a few underlying leitmotifs and by a subliminal image whose presence one unknowingly acknowledges in the course of reading and which should, in the end, reveal itself in the form of a mental hologram.

On Compact

After Compact appeared, they said one had to have a pair of scissors to be Maurice Roche. I'm not a pair of scissors . . . Scissors are our way of life. Contrary to what readers of "romanticized biographies" may think, life is not a straight line. As for Compact , not only did I not work with scissors, but I composed the work line by line in exactly the way it's presented to the reader, from beginning to end. For example, I didn't work on page eleven before completing page ten. That said, a book is a composition , whether one wants it to be or not. Despite all previous plans or grids—however necessary, even indispensable—the initial project is dismembered. This holds true for Compact as much as for Circus and CodeX , though these three books—which for me constitute a whole—

appear very different in their aspects, each having its autonomy, its global project. As a consequence, it cannot be said that separate pages were written in and of themselves and then redistributed.

If one really reads Compact , one can see that it's indeed prose in the etymological sense of the word, even if the book appears as a diachronic/synchronic reading, and thus as writing that had to be controlled in light of the evolving text. In this manner linearity is constantly called into question by various events that have come to disturb the book itself during its composition. This is precisely the opposite of what happens in a collage. From the start, there's Compact : a book deduced from itself as the reading proceeds. Yes, it's formal—to the extent that this text, which sees itself as polysemic, suggests, through the use of a series of personal pronouns, numerous narratives that crisscross among themselves gathered into a single one, and various narrative practices. In fact the movement of Compact can be represented as a lottery of personal pronouns which, turning around the central neutrality of the impersonal pronoun, "one" [on ], tend toward anonymity, that is, toward the

unanimity of an absence, at the same time refusing neutrality, because they deploy themselves around it (see figure).

Each pronoun indicates a narrative, a narrative mode, and each narrative has its own typeface, its temporal mode, its syntax. Typography furthermore may be considered in a wider sense as punctuation, as the coloration of the timbre of the reading as well as an indication, a provocation leading to different temporal modes of reading. There can be within the same sentence numerous fragments of each one of these narratives, which can appear either as an emendation or as a contradiction—in any case, as a counterpoint: this gives rise to a type of movement between the narrative that seeks its completion, the one that's in the process of being composed, the one that one doesn't want to complete but nevertheless does complete, etc.

Notes
&&&
The Body's Design

Every writer, whatever his writing, would like to know the proper way of inhabiting his own body, his own problems—health, love, lost love. All are part of an absolutely scandalous life that is imposed on us. The fact that I have pain in my hands and cannot hold a pencil—that too is part of culture. All forms of writing belong to the body. They are the body's design. We write with our bodies, be it literature, music, painting; I would even say film and, of course, song. Vocal cords are part of the body. Can one really imagine Kathleen Ferrier without her body? She died of cancer of the vocal cords. Her last recital was recorded. I heard it. She was sublime. She fainted at the end of it and died a few days later. We write our bodies and those of others. We participate in the bodies of others. We participate in the lives of others—their pain, their thinking, their writing, their singing, and everything that can be heard and seen. That's obvious. What surprises me is that most people don't see it that way.

Onomatopoeia in Comic Strips

Language, it has been said, began with a cry and an onomatopoeia; writing, through drawing. All that must have accompanied religious rites. Protection and subsistence. Anything to feed one's face in the hunt's trajectory. They could as well have imitated the cries of animals as engrave them on the walls of caves: the hunter's Michelin Guide. In the beginning people drew visible objects and subjects in the same way that they named, or rather imitated, various noises and sounds of nature. The evolution of writing (from the tip of the flint to the pen!) occurred at the same time as that of language (from a cry to a speech!). Hadn't the time come to represent, to identify ideas without contours? This explains why, after hieroglyphics, ideograms developed, rebuses, etc., and finally the alphabet. I'm schematizing.

It is interesting to observe that onomatopoeia has come back full force, especially in comic strips . . . and specifically using the alphabet! See, for example, those assemblages of letters (on the page) with appropriate graphic renditions, which, via the reader's eyes, address themselves to his ear.

The Sound Thickness of the Text

Cratylus said, "It is in Nature that names are affixed to things." If the sonorities of language enveloped the reality of things named, one might perhaps rediscover a hidden truth. There's a fabulous truth in onomatopoeia. "Honk! Honk! Honk!" is more evocative that "warning" or "horn." Isn't it pretty when Ponge says that all the vowels in the French language are to be found in the word oiseau ?

One must also look at a word. Claudel wrote a marvelous piece in which he explained how words resemble what they designate. Locomotive , for example. The L represents the smokestack, the o the wheels, the m the body of the machine, the t the platform with its roof, the i the

railway worker, etc.^[1] I too like to wander through language in this fashion. It brings us to a truth, a child's truth.

We are destined to die and thence condemned to render to the real its lively character. One must reunite the world in a single body, that of the text. Everything must join in that: the letter, the word, the sentence, discourse, the graphic procedure that may be an integral component of the work's structure; there must be a phonic and phonetic architecture to the text. Besides the "subtext" (anagrams, logogriphs, etc.), the "exegetical text" (hieroglyphic citations), there exists a text outside the page, above the page, if I may say that—a discourse in relief in the sound thickness of writing, which obviously calls to a certain inner ear as the reading proceeds. "To make the double breath visible: writing and breathing." As Claudel said (once more!):

The ductus traced by the quill follows that of the voice.

When asked why I make use of different typographic options and consider the space on the page, I like to underscore that it's a question of an expanded punctuation, and also an intonational punctuation. You don't read an italicized text in the same way as you do one in capitals. That's an indication of the sound of color.

The thickness of the text is not only in the ear or the eye. The blind read with their hands! In Compact I quoted a text in braille (though I didn't use raised dots), simply to show that those who can see are blind. If you were to read a text in braille, you wouldn't understand a thing. Therefore you too are blind. For the blind, the sound thickness of the text rests on raised dots; they have it at their fingertips. And you who think you can see—you see nothing. You're blind. You're the blind man's blind man.

[1] That's my interpretation. Here's Claudel's: "A drawing for children: First of all, the length of the word is made in an animal's image. L is the smoke; o , the wheels and the boiler; m the pistons; t indicates speed, as in auto , like a telegraph pole or perhaps a crankpin; v is the lever; i , the whistle; e , the connecting buckle." I prefer my interpretation!

Musician or Writer?

Ever since the beginning, most writers have been fascinated by music: Shakespeare ("The man that hath no music in himself . . . is fit for treasons"); Rabelais, whose famous "frozen words" (=onomatopoeia) are taken from Clément Janequin's polyphonic song "La Guerre"; later on, Diderot . . . but I'll not mention them all. In the nineteenth century Stendhal, Balzac (see his Gambara , whose protagonist invents the panharmonicon, ancestor of our synthesizer). Closer to our own time, Proust and Thomas Mann, etc., to say nothing of our own contemporaries. Apart from Mallarmé, James Joyce is the one who dealt most extensively with music. It has been observed, in particular by André Hodier, that if others wrote about music, and often in a superb manner, Joyce wrote music itself. It's obvious that the eighteen styles of Ulysses originate in musical models of the past. In Finnegans Wake , where Joyce no longer seems to depend on music, a few nevertheless see the precursor of contemporary musical forms, themselves generating new works of fiction. As for myself, if I find this idea seductive, and if some may have been happily inspired by it, I am not, for all that, convinced. (Can't help thinking of Pierre Dac's comment, "Beethoven was so profoundly deaf that throughout his entire life he thought he was painting!")

In music there's an inexpressible factor that is rarely found in literature. Moreover, this factor transcends language barriers—even and especially and paradoxically—when it is a question of a work as unique, as maximal as Finnegans Wake . Music doesn't need translation, even if it carries more precise resonances within the culture that created it. But today all types of music are fused into one. Olivier Messiaen and all of Western music have been touched by musical compositions coming from the Far East. Obviously it's more difficult for a literary text to achieve universal recognition than it is for a musical one. It does happen, thank God, but infrequently.

It's clear that a successful writer is no more than a failed musician.

We Exist for the New

But then I sometimes ask myself who nowadays can actually be interested in literature? There's no doubt that here in France there's a pronounced hostility toward anything that disturbs daily routines. I've just found a text I read on the TV show "Apostrophes." (I once was gently reprimanded for having declared in a newspaper interview, "I'd like to know why, in a world of supersonic planes and atomic submarines, we should still be satisfied with a horse-and-buggy literature, a sedan borne by moth-eaten servants?") Here's the text:

Are there rules that allow us to write a novel, so that a written story that falls outside them should be considered otherwise? If Don Quixote is a novel, does The Red and the Black represent another? If Monte Cristo is a novel, is The Dram Shop another? Is there a comparison to be drawn between Goethe's Elective Affinities , Dumas's Three Musketeers , Flaubert's Madame Bovary , Mr. Zola's Germinal ? Which of the above is a novel? And where are those so-called rules? Where do they come from? Who defined them? By virtue of what principles, what authority, and what logic? An intelligent critic should discover everything that least resembles the novel already written and encourage aspiring writers as much as possible to follow new paths.

I'm not responsible for the above; Guy de Maupassant wrote it. Well, that ought to keep you from asking me if my books are novels! Don't ever bug me about this business again!

Stockhausen reminds us that an objection currently leveled at certain artists is that they're nothing but innovators, that they're only interested in seeking out the new because it's new. If we look closely, the opposite seems to be the case, to wit: innovation remains on the outside, it isn't sufficiently universal, and the new is pursued for its effects and not because it is new. Apart from these misunderstandings, it's precisely in the name of the new that artists invent (discover) the new . Perception of the new produces knowledge, and it would be trifling for an artist to ask why men and women do not constantly aspire to knowledge.

Me

An atavistic rotten piece of luck was responsible for my coming into the
world. I wasn't made for living. Well, then, for what ?

On the one hand, I felt I couldn't have cared less for her ( . . . !); on the other hand, I had to suffer her sickening affection.

On the model of Joubert, who tore out from books those pages he didn't like, he on the other hand had deleted from his own work all that he considered superfluous, that is, practically everything. What remained were aphorisms, reflections, portraits, "cameo novels," selections . . .

I'll be dead as long as anybody else, and yet at this hour I'm alive. I prayed
until midnight and now I'm dead tired. I'm hungry .

Who said, "One of the charms of style is in the precision of equivocation?"

If I spit in my soup it's to give it flavor.
I'm a sick man, my father knows it .

Up to the age of eight, I neither laughed nor smiled—since then, I've adopted
a sort of rictus .

As a child, my mother would scold me because I didn't eat; thereafter, I
was so hungry that I lost my appetite forever .

How to translate the effort that goes into translating, from one language
into another, an untranslatable expression—and in such a way as not to betray
the effort ?

I try to follow a line of thought which goes all alone into the night and I

remain with a memory of this little adventure. It's as if one had lost something
of oneself and were chagrined by that .

     You've only got what you invent .

     Headaches are very close to the skull .

     One feels more and more hemmed in as the world gets larger and larger .

     When you get a rise out of the boss's confidence, there's no more need for
women .

     Would she my faillus cuntinue to succor  . . . 

     I'll be dead as long as anybody else, and yet at this hour I'm alive .

 . . .  if that were to happen while reading it? Obviously, since it isn't the
truth !

I observe, I who have succeeded by my own means in reaching my sixtieth,
that we belong to a fragile generation . . . Up to now, not one of us has reached
his eightieth !

     There are more and more fewer and fewer friends .

     Without memory, all's new .

     My love, I always wrote the same thing. When will you notice that ?

     Your reason's my folly.
     On the day of one's death, one should change names. However . . .
      . . . I walked into a bar
     A blonde belle . . . 
     We never said a word !

And if I only had a few more minutes to live, I'd make the best of it and
sleep .

In order to offset that famous "prophetic gift of oneself" that all of us have, so they say, more or less without our knowing it, he had modified a number of comments.

I'm a near goner but I've got to go
had

become:
I'm not feeling so bad, but I'll stay .

Until the end, I'll hesitate between these two epitaphs:
Died for having closed his eyes upon a dream
Died for having looked life in the face .

Moi

Une scoumoune atavique m'a valu de venir au monde. Je n'étais pas fait
pour vivre. Mais alors, pour quoi ?

D'une part, j'avais le sentiment de n'éprouver plus rien à son endroit ( . . . !); d'un autre côté je devais souffrir son affection maladive.

A l'instar de Joubert arrachant des livres les pages qui lui déplaisaient, il avait, lui, supprimé de ses propres ouvrages ce qui lui semblait superflu, c'est-à-dire presque tout. Subsistaient aphorismes, réflexions, portraits, «romans éclairs», échantillons . . .

Je serai mort aussi longtemps que n'importe qui, et cependant à l'heure
présente je suis vivant. J'ai prié jusqu'à minuit et je suis crevé. J'ai faim .

Qui a dit: L'un des charmes du style est dans la précision des équivoques ?

Si je crache dans la soupe c'est pour lui donner du goût.
Je suis un malade, mon père le sait .

Jusqu'à l'âge de huit ans je n'ai ri ni souri—depuis, j'ai adopté un certain
rictus .

Enfant, ma mère me gourmandait parce que je ne mangeais pas; par la
suite, j'ai eu tellement faim que ça m'a à jamais coupé l'appétit .

Comment traduire l'effort qui consiste à essayer de traduire, d'une langue
en une autre, une expression intraduisible—et de telle sorte que cela ne trahisse
pas l'effort ?

Je tente de suivre un discours qui part seul dans la nuit et je reste avec le

souvenir de cette petite aventure. C'est comme si l'on perdait quelque chose de
soi et qu'on en éprouve du chagrin .

     On n'a que ce que l'on invente .

     Les maux de tête sont très prés du crâne .

     On se sent de plus en plus étriqué à mesure que le monde s'élargit .

     Jouir de la confiance de son patron et ainsi ne plus avoir besoin de femme .

     Encore eut-il phallus que je la connasse pour que je le susse

Je serai mort aussi longtemps que n'importe qui et cependant, à l'heure
présente, je suis vivant .

       . . .  si cela se passe quand on le lit? Evidemment, puisque ça n'est pas vrai !

Je constate, moi qui suis parvenu par mes propres moyens à la soixantaine,
que nous sommes d'une génération fragile . . . Jusqu'ici, aucun d'entre nous
n'a atteint quatre-vingts ans !

     Les amis nombreux de moins en moins ne sont plus de plus en plus .

     Sans mémoire tout est nouveau .

     Mon amour, j'écrivais toujours la même chose. T'en rendras-tu compte ?

     Tu es la raison de ma folie.
     Du jour que l'on meurt on devrait changer de nom. Mais voilà . . .
      . . . dans le bar où j'entrai
     une blonde si belle . . .
     Nous ne nous sommes rien dit !

Et s'il ne me restait plus que quelques instants à vivre, alors j'en profiterais
pour dormir .

Pour dévier l'effet de ce fameux «don prophétique de soi» que chaque individu possède, paraît-il, plus ou moins à son insu, il avait modifié certaines remarques.

Je ne vais pas bien, mais il faut que j'y aille
                                  cétait

devenu:
Je ne vais pas mal—partant, je reste .

Jusqu'à la fin, j'hésiterai entre ces deux épitaphes:
Mort pour avoir fermé les yeux sur un rêve
Mort pour avoir regardé la vie en face .