Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader. Nicole Brossard
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movement from thought to word and from word to thought, what happens in your eye?
i go at your project in pieces because literally it burns me. each fragment becomes my ‘integral’ of you, the total work in the sense of an equivalence, of a shared reading facing the certainties i sometimes push away with tears, with forgetting or again with writing so as never to forget even if it is never entirely a question of memory: ‘a convenient fiction’ to quote Murray whom you quote yourself.
reading the text of your project, i become aware of the extent to which our fictions intersect: looking in our respective circles for the statement of the theory and the theory of play which will put into motion the very emotion of motion.
the waitress just brought me another beer. of course, that doesn’t interest you. however, in your text you write and oriented toward action in everyday life. i am obstinately looking for traces of everyday life in your work. nothing. everything is in the beyond. entirely real however in each of your gestures/ totally abstract. sometimes i even pronounce ‘an abstraction’ in your presence. you know however about my fever for everyday life and reality. my desire for words, my appetite for what allows me to imagine the real.
here i am trying to write by exploring all the mechanisms that serve to distract this i (permanent and unexplored) for you have clearly seen in your text of the project that nothing is written about identity without this motivation-mobile as is said about meaning on the look out or about meaning upended, turned back on itself. in reading you i am constantly seeking to displace myself in your words, to see them from all their angles, to find areas of welcome there: m’y lover, my love.
if i am writing today it is so i can read you better provocatively so as to speak at last of the systems obsessing us: the brain produces its drugs which are our utopias.
three poets, three women who are poets, have just sat down at the next table. i know them, we greet each other. Picture theory: these women and i are products of the same system. our albums of perception are full of complicity. we know the structure. but today, i stay alone at my table because i want to go on reading the text of your project.
i read your text and without second thought i note that you have written your name as a reference among others, with a publication date in parentheses. i put the number (4) before inscribing Lovhers and i can only make headway by initials. just imagine a little what fiction might mean in these circumstances. an excess of realism compelled to be revealed only behind a screen of skin: mine. it’s the tension demanded by any application of emotion. tension that gets a quality of attention. maybe there is a link with what you call the sources of ideological transformation.
my friends have left. there are some men, two i’ve spotted, who pass back and forth in front of the sidewalk café. they are crazy, i think. madness is on the loose here, scarcely noticed. i think they’re all crazy. some are my age, others yours. their bodies are very affected. each madness has its own look, as if a crucial incident gives everyone’s life its style.
since 1972, you say, there has been a tendency to distinguish two types of content in long-term memory: episodic and semantic. on that subject, i refer you back to Prochain épisode and Trou de mémoire by an author you probably don’t know. they are books valuable for exploring what you call the ‘forms of consciousness.’
i think all those books you surround yourself with excite you in a vital way. me too, mind you. as if each book produced emanations. we play then with the invisible. seduced, carried away or touched to the quick. each time the strategy of the books must be unmasked and we leave foundering there in the course of the reading, our biological skins.
B. N. says in an interview (exit, winter 76–77): ‘certainly the volcano liberated Lowry, but something unusual happened, a simultaneous relationship between himself and his character, more than an identity, an exchange of personality … In fact, a passage from one to the other, from the writer into his writing until he actually confines himself, so that he is not liberated in the sense you say, but is put into his own inferno. There is an interview with Lowry where he is asked what he would like to write and he answers: Under, under, under the volcano.’
that’s the worst thing that could happen to me. it did happen to me. since then I haven’t stopped reading/deliring to climb back up to the surface, to find my surfaces again. which no doubt explains my obsession with surfaces of meaning.
i read the text of your project and i find it provocative. it takes spaces away from me. in what way is it important for you to understand the mechanisms of creativity? gap, uncertainty, excess, ellipsis. everything has to be transposed, doesn’t it? especially don’t confound the surfaces of meaning and the sense of this text. there is no confidence here though something is being confided to you. i said text but it may be a real letter. Y. V. says it plainly in the fire Episode of La grande ourse: ‘This text was written before it happened to me.’
La Cour is full. a little girl is having fun picking up the plastic arrows they put in our glasses. i think she’s very pretty. H. just came out of the Faubourg. in great shape.
when you quote Sullerot: ‘Not just the dandies but also the “lionesses”!’ what do you mean? has the thought of dying in venice crossed your mind? Your text of the project is full of this type of allusion: that excites me and you know it as on those evenings when you wait for my reaction and you are present, sober, at the metamorphosis. Sober and enraptured, already familiar with the place where you know how to put your hand so as to bring about the effect of reality: lovhers. while i am still trying to read/delirium.
i don’t stop reading/deliring: ‘After the first time i love you doesn’t mean anything’ – ‘Me too is not a perfect answer, because what is perfect can only be formal, and form is missing here.’
you know if you want to get back to the feminine condition over which you pass so rapidly by the way, it increasingly takes the form of our liaison, that is to say the coherence there is between what you write and what i am writing.
you should say acknowledgement. W. and Z., whom you know, spent three years of their life recognizing the words one by one, not all of course, because some of them are unacceptable, unusable, at least in their present state.
i am telling you about my passion for reading you hidden behind these quotations. the facts are such that your project of the text and the text of the project are completed in the taste of the words, in the taste of the kiss. i know that you are real to me/therefore.
Amantes
1980, tr. 1986
SOUS LA LANGUE/UNDER TONGUE
tr. Susanne de Lotbinère-Harwood
Le corps salive, rien pourtant n’est prévu, ni l’abondance des touchers, ni la lenteur furtive, la fureur exacte des bouches. Rien n’est prévu pourtant c’est à la hauteur des yeux que le corps d’abord touche à tout sans prévoir la peau nue, aussi bien le dire, sans prévoir la douceur de la peau qui sera nue avant même que la bouche signale l’état du monde.
Rien ne suggère ici qu’au moindre toucher le regard déjà défaille à vouloir déjà prévoir un tel rapprochement. Rien n’est prévu sinon que la respiration, la répétition des sons entre les chairs. Fricatelle ruisselle essentielle aime-t-elle dans le touche à tout qui arrondit les seins la rondeur douce des bouches ou l’effet qui la déshabille? Rien n’est prévu pourtant au bout du corps la peau fera image du corps car il n’y a rien sans image au bout du corps ce sont les images qui foudroient l’état du monde.
The body salivates, yet nothing is foreseen, not the wealth of touching, not the furtive slowness, the exact frenzy of mouths. Nothing is foreseen yet at eye level is where the body first touches everything without foreseeing the naked skin, and it needs saying, without foreseeing the softness of skin that will be naked even before the mouth signals the state of the world.
Nothing here to suggest that at the slightest touch