Danielle Collobert, Murder, Translated by Nathanaël, Litmus Press, 2013.
MURDER is Danielle Collobert's first novel. Originally published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard while Collobert was living as a political exile in Italy, this prose work was written against the backdrop of the Algerian War. Uncompromising in its exposure of the calculated cruelty of the quotidian, MURDER'S accusations have photographic precision, inculpating instants of habitual violence.
Nathanaël’s definitive English translation of Danielle Collobert’s Murder marks the first ever of this French poet’s debut book. Originally begun in 1960 when Collobert was twenty years old, and published by Gallimard in 1964 under the auspices of Oulipo-founder, Raymond Queneau, this book laid the groundwork for what remains one of the most enigmatic and innovative bodies of work in contemporary French letters. As with the subsequent works of Collobert’s brief but impactful output, which lasted until her suicide in 1978, Murder speaks a language profoundly its own, unlike anything else she was to write, and quite possibly unlike anything else you may have read. Reading this prose gives one the rare impression of being in the presence of a voice speaking from the honest and cutting edge of present urgencies: that is, this is not a voice responding to conventions or trends in literary necessity, but one singularly engaging the emergent necessities of life itself, in all its complexity and danger. Here, in honor of Danielle Collobert and this fantastic new translation, Nathanaël and I discuss her life and legacy with an eye on her first work, Murder.
Kit Schluter: To begin, what drew you to Danielle Collobert’s work? How did you discover it?
Nathanaël: I want to say that it was accidental, but I’m quite sure it wasn’t. Unless one understands friendship as accident. I entered, as did many, into Il donc, and Collobert’s Carnets, though with an eye turned away – perhaps out of a desire not to seek the life in the work, however much it is written there, and with such determinacy; the ‘twenty years of writing’ set against the impending suicide. Still, it is a hazard of hindsight to be able to set the life against the work, though this is so obviously a deformation of the reader, and so I resist as much as I can the tidy narrative of a life fallen from letters. The short answer to your first question is: Collobert’s language. But if the virtuosic remnants of Il donc are almost a perfect epitaph to the twenty years, I was much more viscerally and immediately impelled by Meurtre; I even borrowed an epigraph from this work into We Press Ourlseves Plainly much before the idea even of translating it had presented itself to me. Perhaps most immediately because of a shared concern, or conviction, that the distinction between murder and death is unconvincing and too readily upheld.
KS: What were the circumstances surrounding Danielle Collobert while she was composing Murder? Do you find that the book draws material or imagery from her experience?
N: My knowledge of Collobert’s biography is quite limited. Not unlike her parents and her aunt, who were all actively engaged in the Résistance during WWII, Collobert, a supporter of Algerian independence, was a member of the FLN (Algeria’s Front de libération national) at the time of Meurtre. She chose exile in Italy, where she completed work on the manuscript. It may be worth underscoring the importance of 1961, for the outcome of the war, which, in French contemporary society was never acknowledged under the name of anything other than the euphemistic “les évènements” (“the events” – to do otherwise would have been, not only to have acknowledged, if only semantically, Algeria’s nationhood, but the repressive force employed by France to resist – and as it happened, to defer – decolonization and independence). On October 17, 1961, a peaceful demonstration of many thousands of Algerians living in Paris, protesting the curfew imposed exclusively upon them, and the acts of police violence to which they were systematically subjected, was violently suppressed by Vichyist Maurice Papon’s police force, resulting in the arbitrary deportation of large numbers of Algerian demonstrators, and the summary execution of up to two hundred Algerians, many of whose bodies were pulled out of the Seine in the following days; several thousand Algerians were rounded up during the demonstration and distributed among prisons, the Palais des Sports and area hospitals. Several months later, on February 8th, 1962, what has come to be known as the Charonne Massacre took place at the eponymous Paris métro station; this demonstration, organized by the Left against the paramilitary OAS (the reactionary Organisation de l’armée secrète, which violently opposed Algerian independence), and often conflated in people’s memories (and in historical accounts) with the October massacre, resulted in the death of eight demonstrators at the Charonne métro station. It is not insignificant that French FLN supporter Jacques Panijel’s 1961 film, Octobre à Paris, which documents the moments before, during, and after the October demonstration, was censured by the French government and only shown for the first time in a French cinema in 2011 – half a century after it was made.
The photograph on the cover of Murder accounts, obliquely, and somewhat prochronistically, for these activities – it is a photograph of a bombed out building in Madrid, taken in 1937 by Robert Capa, during the Spanish Civil War.
Meurtre is tempered by the residues of such histories; but the work’s strength is in its ability to evoke them without resorting to explicit accounts, or naming. The generalization of historical violence is embedded in the intimate accounts presented to the reader – seemingly placeless, nameless, they nonetheless achieve historical exactitude through relentless repetition – a reiterative (mass) murder (one is tempted to say: execution), which afflicts and incriminates the gutted bodies that move painstakingly through these densely succinct pages.
KS: The language of Murder‘s passages is slippery, but in a productive kind of way. Although Collobert’s later work seems almost entirely irreverent of traditional genres and forms, the language of this early work, written around the age of twenty, seems to skirt the boundaries between the short story and the prose poem. Nobody is named, no locations are specified, no motives for actions are explained. And yet these prose pieces seem to function toward the development of short narratives that retain these traditional tools of the “short story,” however non-traditionally they might be getting used.
How would you address the issue of genre in this book? What are we dealing with here? Do you sense any influences informing the form of the pieces in Murder, or does this seem to be a mode of writing that Collobert can call entirely her own?
N: I would resist attempting to attribute a generic definition to Meurtre; I would not seek to inscribe it in a lineage, either. Which is not a rejection of eventual antecedents – often Collobert’s work is read against Beckett, for example. But a habitual reliance on lineage as a way of reading seems limiting to me, and a decidedly academic concern. Before even beginning to attempt to make this kind of attribution, one would need to recognize the distances the text has had to travel between French and English, and then acknowledge the divergences between generic constructs in those two (much more than two) literary cultures (though there is increasing adherence to English language delineations in French, which is indicative, perhaps, of a desire for change, but more cynically, of the global influence of specifically American industry, since this direction is distrustful of the generic fluidity for which French literature of the twentieth century came to be known), and take some note of the development of those movements over time, because, like anywhere else, they are not static, whatever limits are imposed to prevent alterations from loosening them from their categorical holds. Which is to say that the bolstering of the boundaries governing generic territories, such as they are defended, is in large part contextual. I would argue that it is no less accurate to categorise Meurtre as prose than it is to categorise Il donc as poetry; Meurtre has a strong poetics, as is Il donc continuing to grapple with the sentence. But one might suggest just as convincingly that all of her work has something of the film script (her language is at times much more succinct than passages in some of Antonioni’s film scripts, for example, which read like prose). I might offer these lines of Derrida’s as more eloquent provocation: “ ‘What / is…?’ laments the disappearance of the poem – / another catastrophe. By announcing that which is /just as it is, a question salutes the birth of prose.” (Tr. Peggy Kamuf)
KS: Collobert, in the final passage of the book, defines the book’s namesake, murder, as follows: “One does not die alone, one is killed, by routine, by impossibility, following their inspiration. If all this time, I have spoken of murder, sometimes half camouflaged, it’s because of that, that way of killing” (96). This, for me, is provocative and explosive language. And, I should say, that goes for the whole book: this isn’t a neutral work, but one that digs in its heels and takes a firm political stance. What political urges do you find central to Murder?
N: You have identified what is for me perhaps the most powerful passage from the work (these are the same lines I borrowed into the afore-mentioned epigraph). Out of this passage, I would signal the unlikely conjunction of routine and inspiration. There is here the suggestion of the sublimation of emotion into bureaucratisation. “That way of killing” is not distinct from the way of language, from a poetics or an aesthetic impulse; ‘inspiration’ is the incipit of murder – the very breath of it. This admission walls the text off from anything resembling hope. And yet it is also anything but nihilistic. It is snared by its own realisations – with emphasis on the real.
KS: Anxiety and contemplations of what may exist outside of life—I don’t know if it would be fair or accurate, exactly, to say “death” in this case, but let’s hold that word in the air—seem to form the backbone of Collobert’s writings. Take the opening passage from Dire II,
the only thing — to begin again — if possible — words again — the equivalent of a death — or even its opposite — or maybe nothing
to be here — the calm — deteriorating from tension — the world around that does not stop — but could stop — the breath that could stop now — one moment after another — same equality hangs — same cold hardness — same taste faint and mild — to put up with going toward the same moments again — to continue only the breath — breathing — lengthen the gaze — simply
Or the opening passage from the tragic Survival, the last book she was to publish before taking her own life in 1978,to be here — the calm — deteriorating from tension — the world around that does not stop — but could stop — the breath that could stop now — one moment after another — same equality hangs — same cold hardness — same taste faint and mild — to put up with going toward the same moments again — to continue only the breath — breathing — lengthen the gaze — simply
I leaving voice without answer to articulate words sometimes
only silence answer to other ear never
if to mute the world not a sound
darken into the blue cosmos
more question than vertical travel
I leaving slippage to the horizon
everything the same everything mortal starting from the I
on all legs fleeing the horizon
at last only hearing music in the cries
enough enough
exit
enter born on debris hardly recognized the ground
emerged from salted vase the fetus from sewer
solar plexus gnawed anguish diffusing lungs breath panting
It’s clear how much formal difference there is between these two passages, though their arguments seem closely related. Murder, at times,seems to be grappling with these subjects, though in a very formally different language. What individuates Murder from the rest of Collobert’s work? What does it share with the rest of this work?only silence answer to other ear never
if to mute the world not a sound
darken into the blue cosmos
more question than vertical travel
I leaving slippage to the horizon
everything the same everything mortal starting from the I
on all legs fleeing the horizon
at last only hearing music in the cries
enough enough
exit
enter born on debris hardly recognized the ground
emerged from salted vase the fetus from sewer
solar plexus gnawed anguish diffusing lungs breath panting
N: Your question raises, for me, one of the problems with complete works, in which an author’s discrete works are presented together, chronologically, and subjected to a regularized form; the distinctions between editions, formats, etc., is belied by the inclusion in a single – edited – volume of otherwise disparate books. In this instance, though formal singularities appear to be respected, the consistency of the typeface and page size, and margins, suggests a continuity between works that I would resist over adherence to. In my reading of her work, Collobert doesn’t appear to be casting herself across volumes and years, through a single project such as Edmond Jabès’s Le livre des questions, for example, in which le livre, though comprised of many volumes, is approached as a single work determinedly extended over most of the writer’s life – however much certain questions continue to return for Collobert. In each instance, the formulations are cast against renewed formal and narrative concerns, evidently resisting uniformity. These considerations aside, even resorting to emblematic concerns can cause problems; you’ve proposed, with some hesitation – and justly so, I would say – that Collobert’s work has as its primary inscription, ‘death’; but one could say without exaggeration, I think, that literature’s first – perhaps only – concern is morbidity. For Collobert, it is against language itself – the French language specifically, that the question must be posed; and it is not enough to have posed it, or, perhaps, to have been deposed by it. In the passages you quote from, death, as I read them, is not outside of life, nor is it outside of language; it is the very stuff out of which the text fails to speak. The anticipation of articulation, breath’s detachedness from ‘the world’, wields silences in the place of what might otherwise be. Language, here, is arguably an ontological impossibility. By the time Collobert arrives at Il Donc, something of language has been irrevocably destroyed – it seems annunciatory of the destruction of the body through which it might otherwise pass (Paul Celan’s work comes to mind as a corollary, a similarly culled language, to the point of near disappearance, if one takes, for example, the early Todesfuge and sets it against a poem like the posthumously published Ein Blatt – A Leaf). Meurtre’s grapple is at the level of the sentence; the accumulation of the many suspended, tortured lives, yields a murderous certainty; killing and being killed partake of the same movement. If one wanted, as you suggest, to read the rest of the work against Meurtre, one might, perhaps too hastily, propose the following works as demonstrations of Meurtre’s proposal.
KS: Let’s keep thinking about this, this constellation of themes, and take a look at some passages from Murder.
I have a chance of getting out. A single chance among thousands. I remain arrested before the number of ways offering themselves to me. I don’t know what to do, which path to take. This choice requires an intense reflection, and puts me in a state of very great perplexity. A single chance. Many might think that due to the infinitesimal possibility of success, I ought to make a decision whichever one. It is very much what I am tempted to do, sometimes, in moments of discouragement. But my will is strong and the choice too important so as not to have a last burst of lucidity at the decisive moment. I remain therefore in expectancy and in the fear of the irremediable. [...] Sometimes I get up with the light sensation of decision. I go toward the entrance to the labyrinth which for a long time has seemed sweet and good for me. When there remains but one step to take to leave this world definitively, to start down that unpredictable path, and perhaps finally make it out or lose myself for good, suddenly I balk, I back up. Once again, it’s too soon. Nonetheless one day I will cross the threshold of the labyrinth, but toward what? (17-18).
From one house to another, the men brace themselves, against the walls, clutching the rope with both hands. Sometimes their boots slip on the seaweed, or else the shingles collide between their feet. [...] It’s a difficult road during the storm. Only the strongest risk it, as well as the elderly, who would never agree to take another path. [...] and yet what force is in this desire to walk alone, upright, from one end of the harbor to the other, directly into the storm. Trying to be upright, alone, against the sea, alive, powerful, mortal (50).
There’s more to hear, hear the voice, the questions, encourage oneself, protect oneself, struggle as well to go all the way to the end, with that immense cowardice of preferring words, their edifice, to the small, inconceivable gesture, that I am not yet able to make. Don’t slide just yet, keep holding back until the choice, or rather refuse that choice, that possibility (97).
These passages, combined with others in the book, add up for me to a certain general existential argument that Collobert’s work continued to make until the end of her life. To boil it down to a few phrases, it seems that she is arguing that to embrace life one must embrace mortality; that to embrace mortality one must embrace the absolute solitude of living; that to embrace this solitude one must confront the fear of what she calls “losing oneself,” even if that lostness be irremediable. However, something about her understanding of the relationship of life and death reminds me of Rilke’s concept of Das Große, or “The Big Thing,” which he develops in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: the inexpressible fear of the death that is, to paraphrase, growing within us from our birth as a ripening fruit. And yet, there is perhaps a crucial difference between Collobert’s “getting lost” and Rilke’s “The Big Thing”. While Rilke’s term figures death as an existential inevitability of life, Collobert’s term is more politicized and argues that our deaths are imposed on us by social forces over which we have no control. Rilke’s death grows from within and thus one must die alone, while Collobert’s is imposed and thus one is forced in death into the company of an enemy. That is the sort of solitude she is discussing—the solitude we are forced to find when in company we cannot allow ourselves to tolerate, company that is expressly against the freedom of our wills.
N: Your question seems to be calling up an irrevocable rift in the apprehension of death; some would argue that the boundary lies at Auschwitz, others, that it is endemic to modernity. Certainly, Benjamin writes of the loss of an important function of the house once people cease to die within their own walls; Rilke distinguished between ‘serial’ and ‘proper’ death; in the same Notebooks you quote from, he writes: “Now there are 559 beds to die in. Like a factory [fabrikmässig] of course. With production so enormous, each individual death is not made very carefully; but that isn’t important. It’s the quantity that counts.” I am quoting Rilke as quoted by Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz, in which he writes: “In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced.” (tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen) In my own stubborn misremembrance, Vladimir Jankélévitch writes (my translation), “Death died in the death camps”. (His actual claim is that forgiveness [le pardon] died in the death camps). The mortality Collobert is grappling with in her work is post-mortal, I would say, in that it is stripped of its ontology, and offered to cold scrutiny (the so-called empiric scalpel); whatever intimations exist in Rilke, and may be fastened to an understanding of modernity, Collobert’s language comes after WWII. It is imprinted by it. But the political dimension of this morbid actuality is not, I would argue, unilateral: the enemy is also oneself. The figures moving through Meurtre are murdered and murderers, they are both executioner and victim; the force driving them to deaths sustained or committed is never made explicit or specific; one might go so far as to say that the vital impulse of this work is stifled by the permanent recognition that one stands ever before a firing squad (a perhaps more temporally torqued version of the vital corpse is Ortega y Gasset’s man who enters into battle with a wound in his temple). I am not convinced however that Collobert’s ‘we’ ever designates a collectivity; there is no indication of a shared plight of solitude; when she writes ‘we’, the we is inhuman in that the individual elements that comprise it have no individuation, they are hulls of selves, like the scraped crab on the beach; they have abandoned themselves to a cadaveric assembly line cum funeral procession.
KS: One of the distinctive traits of Collobert’s work is her play with the grammatical gender of French. There’s a nice story, told by Jean-Pierre Faye, in the foreword to first volume of her Oeuvres (P.O.L.), in which he, upon receiving a copy of Collobert’s Dire, begins editing the text by circling inconsistencies in the narrator’s gender. In one sentence the narrator is referred to with male adjectives; in the next, female; in some, the narrator is referred to with both, by turns male and female. It is only after reading further in the text that he realizes that, in fact, this is a very deliberate part of Collobert’s language, perhaps its singularizing trait. Do you see Collobert as part of a larger tradition of Francophone writers experimenting with gender in their texts? What distinguishes her play from the others’?
N: One might see continuities between Collobert’s refusal to settle on a single gender – a way, perhaps, within the confines nonetheless of French grammar, to unsettle the ‘I’, pluralize and fragment it, and resist the facile habit in the reader to conflate the narrative ‘self’ with that of the writer – and Nathalie Sarraute’s neutral ‘il’. Collobert’s ‘il’ becomes depersonalized (it), while the intent of Sarraute’s ‘il’ (he) is to generalize away from gender specificity, and away from the French grammatical intention which determines that ‘il’ stands in for (erases) ‘elle’ (even when bias indicates otherwise). In an interview with Simone Benmussa, in which Benmussa asks Sarraute to qualify her thinking about ‘le neutre’, Sarraute replies: “For me, the neuter [le neutre] is the human being. There is a word for that in Russian, it’s tcheloviek and in German Der Mensch, the human being, male or female, regardless of age, regardless of sex. In French ‘être humain’ is ridiculous. In fact, in Elle est là, I say: ‘It’s a human being, it’s ridiculous but it must be said.’” Sarraute is adamant her concern is not androgeneity, nor, do I think it is a concern of Collobert’s. Away from the syntactical injunctions of Romance languages – for monolinguistic English speakers, for example – it is nearly impossible to appreciate the grammatical dictatorship under which one lives in such linguistic regimes (Sarraute’s further discussion of Russian indicates the impossibility of avoiding gender altogether in language; and as Benmussa points out, Der Mensch too is gendered masculine). To misapprehend the specific violence done to the mind, and by extension, to thought, under such a regime is to misapprehend much of what has taken place in French thought over the course of the twentieth century, whether Sarraute’s neutre, Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style, Glissant’s Antillanité, Derrida’s Monolinguisme or Jeanne Hyvrard’s Pensée corps, to name but these. To return for a moment to the brief passage quoted from Sarraute, it is utterly telling that these problems become most evident in translation; it is through recourse to other languages (Russian was Sarraute’s first language) that she is able to articulate her concern. A grammar wishes itself to be hermetic; but is rendered porous (or revealed to be thus) precisely through the work of translation.
KS: In your own text, “(Self-)translation: an expropriation of intimacies,” you write, “Syntactically speaking, the sex of the sentence is not (necessarily) transferrable. A body thus destabilised loses sight of its referent when transversing into another language. English’s pronominal preoccupation, for example, singles out the subject’s gender as part of speech, which in French, again for example, is severally located in the sentence. Where one benefits from the ambiguity the other falls into normality. To dislocate gender’s stranglehold in French, one must strive for discord, grammatical disagreement in the place of English’s mis-fitted neutering.”
Did you find these grammatical differences between French and English coming into play in your translation work on Murder? Did you have to bend the rules or experiment with English grammar to make it speak the sense of Collobert’s prose?
N: In translating the Collobert, I resisted such acrobatics, which I tend to resort to far more sparingly in the translations of other authors’ works than I do of my own. To try to reproduce the movement between genders in Collobert’s text would have been to falsify it in English (largely in light of the fact that they are marked adjectivally with the first person pronoun as referent). Because the larger questions of the work remain otherwise transmittable. This may appear as something of a conservative decision, but to have done otherwise would have been to have submitted Meurtre to contortions it itself doesn’t resort to; it would also have been to treat English grammar as though it were interchangeable with French grammatical concerns. It is also worth underscoring the degree to which this tendency is much more prevalent in Collobert’s later works. If I may speak for a moment of Je Nathanaël, a work I published in both French and English versions, the very impetus of the French work, which was to hermaphrodise French (an impossible project, and one which necessitated enormous constraint, such as limiting myself to invariable adjectives, the imperative and the second person singular in the present tense), all but disappears in English in which gender is differently marked – and often suffers from (and is at times priviledged by) being unmarked (the so-called neutral). Rather than try to force the English into a discourse and grammar that weren’t its own, I allowed the text to become something else – at the risk of introducing a possibly (false) universalising strain in the work. In the case of a work like Collobert’s Il donc, Norma Cole’s decision to translate “il” as “it” is a perfect rejoinder to Collobert’s French impersonal pronoun. In Meurtre, there is only one instance in which, mid-passage, I let the sea’s pronoun slide from the more habitual “it” in English, to “she” as it becomes increasingly anthropomorphized in the text.
KS: Françoise Morvan, in her introduction to Oeuvres I (P.O.L.), speaks of a community of French poets who have, since Collobert’s passing, kept her memory alive: François Bon, Jean Daive, Ludovic Janvier, Bernard Pingaud, Jacques Roubaud, Claude Royet-Journoud, Alain Veinstein. Now, Collobert passed away in 1978, and it wasn’t until twenty-six year later, in 2004, that the first edition of her complete works was published in French. In this light, it seems that though her memory has not been dead, it has existed more in the underground. How do you understand Collobert’s influence, in France and abroad? Are there any key figures who have especially helped to keep this influence alive?
N: I’m not in a good position to answer this question, though I am suspicious of the homogeneity of the list of writers such as it is presented. Norma Cole, for example, might have been included among the keepers of Collobert’s memory – her translations have been tremendously influential on poetics and textualities specific to the United States, much as Paul Celan’s have been – producing departures from their initial languages, and localised styles. Collobert’s work was very marginal when she was alive; though Meurtre was originally published by Gallimard with the support of Raymond Queneau, after having been first rejected by Éditions de Minuit, her subsequent works did not meet with such favour; and in fact, Survie was first published in Italian translation before it was published in French. This is indicative of nothing, except that the vagaries a work can be subjected to are legion. One need only sample other near buried works that have met with subsequent irrefutability (Kafka, Benjamin, Robert Walser, etc.)
KS: It seems though that now this work is getting attention from the younger generation of French writers. For example, I first found out about Collobert from two young poets, who live in Marseille and run a wonderful journal of poetry, politics, and aesthetics, La Vie manifeste. One of these poets has actually dedicated much of her personal studies to Collobert’s work, recently writing both her undergraduate and masters theses on her works.
Given this sort of attention from certain contemporary poets and publishers, do you sense that Collobert’s work is experiencing an increase in readership or influence? If so, what about her work do you see as keeping her a vital figure for poets at work today? What alternatives does her work offer that can’t already be found in someone else’s poems? What can we learn from her that we can’t find elsewhere?
N: I would hope that Collobert’s reach would exceed that of so-called poetries, and circulate unencumbered through and outside of prescribed genres (even those which wish themselves to be encompassing – even these end up inventing asphyxiating constraints). I do think, however, that the demands of the text are not consistent with the consumptive speeds our worlds are submitted to today. This may account for some of the time it has taken for Collobert’s work to reach this far. It is quiet, and committed to a degree of precision that language seems nearly incapable of at this time of bulimic production. It may not even be useful to resort to comparatives in search of its specificity. Because this is something it claims without invention; and in my reading it is in time, in the time of (her) writing, and all that it has subsumed into it.
***
Nathanaël is the author of a score of books written in English or French, including Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal, We Press Ourselves Plainly, and Carnet de somme. Je Nathanaël exists in self-translation, as does the essay of correspondence, Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book), first published in French as L’absence au lieu. Other work exists in Basque, Slovene, and Spanish (Mexico), with book-length translations in Bulgarian and Portuguese (Brazil). A contributing editor to Aufgabe (NY) and Recours au poème (France), Nathanaël’s translations include works by Édouard Glissant, Catherine Mavrikakis and Hilda Hilst, the latter in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo. Recognized by a PEN Translation Fund fellowship, Nathanaël’s translation of The Mausoleum of Lovers by Hervé Guibert will be published in 2014 by Nightboat Books. She lives in Chicago.
- Interview by Kit Schluter
The first English translation of this French poet, now an influence on many young American poets, who died at the age of 37 in 1978. Beverly Dahlen comments: "Collobert's dash is a materialization of the gap within speech and the rush to close even as one discloses it... the page bears the record of these bursts of language ...Collobert insists on `being without a subject,' as if being were radically different from, absolutely divided from its subject. And like an archeologist she preserves the fragments of this ruined subject against time, `to reproduce the duration' ...appalling in the intensity of their imagination of the literal body transmuted into writing." Michael Palmer comments: "She enunciates the words for desire and for loss the other words with harrowing intensity. IT THEN explores the limits of the phenomenal body and of speech by the agency of a prose which defies category."
In a presence already dissolved
[excerpts from the Journals of Danielle Collobert, 1960-1961, translated by Norma Cole.]
1960
January
"She was sitting by the bridge on the bridge a lot of people were watching
the barges unload suddenly the rock she was sitting on started to roll -
it was a big granite slab block She yelled - everyone turned to look at
her - The rock picked up momentum nothing could stop it - the people
couldn't understand - Little by little she leaned her upper body forward -
until she was laid out on the slab -- Simultaneously she felt a great
emptiness inside a hole a descent - No one moved from the bridge
captivated by the movement..."
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I don't ever want to learn anything again -
just people -
I really only get close to them in bed - their nakedness - essential --
to understand - grasp by means of gestures - looks - more than with words
already so many men ...
February
I've been walking for a long time -- it's 9:30 - it's cold I rarely see
streets or people at this hour in this neighborhood the houses are mute --
people pass quickly - closed walking tightly -- don't know how I got to
this neighborhood - slept at J.'s and walked all the way here -- like it
follows logically - strange
looking at a long and empty day -- nervous --
there's that exhibit at the Musee d'art moderne to kill time, not out of
love -
that cold strange room last night - seeing myself again in all the bedrooms
- dislocated -- blurred -- bodiless inside those walls -- maybe a little heat
remaining --
sudden silence -- cold -- and all of a sudden solitude returns -- bad --
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watching the kids in the square just now -- retrieving childhood sensations
-- earth and water -- fuzzy sensations -- a smell --
scattered images --
the dining room door ajar and my grandfather in bed -- face to the wall --
women sitting around the kitchen table speaking quietly -- and weeping --
reds and pinks --
the boy in blue -- on a hook hung from the balcony of the house at one corner
of the square -- and the Germans all over -- the hook -- the garden -- the
entry -- the doorway with masses of red fuschias -- garden masses of apples --
one evening in the "house in back" eating pink rat poison and shrieking --
terror --
flowers -- frost on the window -- feet warming at the stove -- scorched
socks -- after school--
the storms and wind in the pines at Compostal -- the fire in the living room
hearth --
listing images when really the smells are what returns most vividly --
roasted coffee -- detergent -- overripe pears in the loft -- smell of wood and
wet ground --
March
Such a strange night -- on the Quai des Fleurs -- I've been living here for a
few days -- very nice apartment -- They're sleeping -- the table faces the
window where I write -- the Seine -- the lights -- water -- calm came back --
like glancing crystal in the water -- rising and falling -- as real as my hand
-- my face in the pane -- the Seine's reflections disrupting the lamplight's
opacity -- like crossing dream with reality -- and then a car passes -- from
light to opacity -- disappearance --
tranquility -- very rare peacefulness - after days of emptiness -- empty
enough to put off getting up -- because of the emptiness itself -- and after
-- completely futile efforts to fill in --
why despite appearances I go to such lengths to achieve this feeling
emptiness -- of discomfort -- as though every gesture --every movement were
bringing me nearer to death --
the sensation of emptiness disappeared in that orgasmic moment --
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have possibly never been so far into that solitude as these last months --
it still might not be enough -- there is a vague form of stability left here
-- of security -- some doubt about what I can stand --
more wandering -- add leaving the country -- breaking all bonds -- or
whatever -- being broke in a country I don't know -- maybe --
probably an illusion -- equating being alone in a room for days -- and going
off somewhere --
April
Departure -- tomorrow -- real escape -- I'm going to Tunisia -- calm --
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tunis 1
here with no break -- already the same life -- I go to cafés -- I make love
-- I go to films -- I talk to people -- no distance -- I've already been here
since forever --
but still it's the East -- the light -- the colors -- the beauty -- at least
this: I have new eyes -- senses beginning to function again as though after a
long illness -- this morning very early -- in the village -- scarcely daybreak
-- through the grillwork on the window -- some noises in the covered streets
-- after making love all night -- body heavy and hot -- impression of
tiredness -- of well-being -- H. motionless -- head on my belly -- almost cool
-- a smell I couldn't place -- almonds and oranges -- old food -- and then
suddenly in the silence -- a very long sound -- very low -- the slow
modulation of the muezzin -- extraordinary beauty --
now here -- in the café -- seated on matting -- they're playing cards --the
patron sitting on a chair by the stove closes his eyes -- head thrown back a
little -- he is tall and lean -- looks high as a kite -- they aren't paying
any attention to me -- I'm fine here -- it's raining out -- sound of rain on
the steps --
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday
ran into R.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
the building's terrace and the little hut below -- just room for a bed --
when I came back at 4 -- air cool -- the whole town below -- early movement in
the direction of the station -- to the left -- the quality of the air --
especially that -- staying there a long time looking down at the town --
September
Saturday -- evening -- a café -- I'm far away -- toward Aubervilliers -- I
walked a long time -- spent the last few nights walking -- here the old
neighborhoods-- the houses -- hallways staircases -- little courtyards -- what
goes on in the daytime -- warehouses -- workshops -- people -- their night
deserted -- a few lights farther off -- near the trees -- I'm cold -- bitter
taste of cigarettes -- voices -- a woman singing -- an accomplished liar's
voice -- slightly hoarse -- sad -- a little raw --
go back and sleep -- get loaded -- no -- stay -- stay up -- nurture this --
thing that returned by chance -- the silence inside --
November
he just left -- when he leaves I never know when I'll see him again -- always
chance encounters -- or nearly -- today I asked myself what little errors
we've let come between us -- I don't know yet -- I can barely guess --
why such tenderness in his gestures -- after -- where there is usually
distance --
don't be taken in by tenderness -- protect yourself from it -- I'm sucked in
too easily -- his presence I already live too much in these days -- not enough
resistance now -- or irony --
December
I am calm -- finally without anxiety -- a certain balance --
Y. -- circle around his presence -- no more severing -- or waiting -- calm --
a kind of delight -- also -- being with him -- finally this is a story I like
-- I feel good --
but when I'm like this I don't do anything -- unable to write a word -- I
only write in an anxious state (oh sure)* -- or in times like that -- ideas
for novels arrive -- the story of the port for example -- stupid -- the novel
is basically a pacific creation -- that releases what's essential -- sensation
of well-being allows time to stretch out -- necessary to the novel -- whereas
the anxiety produces something strong -- complete -- at once -- no going
beyond -- (?)* momentary fixity -- in the anxious state --
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
totally out of it -- what am I doing here -- with these kids -- feels like
sweet and well-behaved girls -- never been so isolated in the middle of a
group -- almost peculiar --
get out of here at the first possible moment -- get away from it -- before
the end of resistance -- of rebellion -- before boredom -- exhaustion
1961
February
Algeria 2 -- as if this is really the beginning for me --
Said
September
Tonight I'm starting over -- after these parenthetical months -- for them --
go real slow -- like the first time going out after being locked up for ages
--
tonight calm at last -- window open -- a little wind -- gentle -- feeling my
bathrobe -- music below -- I just picked up K.'s journal -- always the way to
get back to work when it's not happening -- Kafka or Beckett -- to start up
again --
nothing is finished -- the problem hasn't been resolved -- but I'm at the end
of my rope -- still struggling with it -- because it would be easier to keep
going with them than pick up my life where it left off --
these months speak years -- many new things -- to be completely current with
present events -- living the news as it happens -- with no time lag -- now
it's difficult to become nothing but a spectator again --
what counted was the immediate -- objective justification was impossible --
for what I was doing -- theoretical questions useless -- when I make theory
for others -- I end up not believing it -- immediate action justified
immediately in its entirety -- uncomfortable position but real --
for months no writing -- impossible to reconcile the two --
walk paying attention -- I've lost sensation -- closeness of the outside
world around me -- I'm not connecting with things any more -- could be
irreparable loss -- trying now to recover sensations -- objects for instance
-- the table's smoothness -- its color -- my hand on the paper --
it's raining -- that helps me -- I feel better -- more differentiated from
things -- from the outside --
blur already --
October
continuing -- I'm alone in the gallery space -- no options -- walls -- I
touch the walls -- I press myself against them -- I'll lean from one to the
other -- I stayed in the corner opposite for ten minutes -- now I'm in the
middle of the room on a chair -- writing on my lap -- the empty space all
around -- spinning --
what to do -- yell -- call out -- for someone to come -- wait -- slow death
--
explosion inside my head -- words -- invent words -- fast -- absence -- non-
sense of words --
I can't --
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December
waiting -- days -- time passes filled with little things -- cling to the
slightest incident -- the most expected event -- the most foreseeable with
hope for some hidden thing concealed inside the opacity of stillness -- I
can't because I know what the end of waiting is -- the possibility of radical
change -- definitive -- there are lots of examples of such possibilities but
they crumble before any obstacle -- the real presence of people -- of objects
-- the world -- the margin between the image of suicide and reality's
uncertainty is too great --
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
story limited in time -- will end on a specific date -- with departure of a
train -- wonderful impression of clean -- retreat -- irreparable -- it's there
in a presence already dissolved -- almost weightless -- if he knew --
Footnotes:
1. Although placed in Tunis this passage actually describes the village of Sidi Bou Said and the café "des Nattes."
2. At this time D.C. became a part of a network supporting the F.L.N. [National Liberation Front].
Danielle Collobert, Notebooks, 1956-1978, Trans. by Norma Cole, Litmus Press, 3003.
Born into a Breton family active in the Resistance during the Second World War, Danielle Collobert moved to Paris at the age of 19. There, she took her own life in the summer of 1978. These notebooks were found in her posession at the time of her death. "Beyond everything she has discovered her own utter nakedness: that owned by nights of relentless attention to the other, or reflected in mirrors of all-night cafes where you can look, listen or simply wait, attending the blank page, from which the lassitude of daybreak will rescue you, overwhelm you"--Uccio Esposito-Torrigiani, from the postface.
Reading Danielle Collobert
by John Taylor
Collobert (1940–78) is the author of five haunting books of prose and prose-like poetry which the Parisian publisher POL has just brought back from oblivion. It is both moving and fitting that Meurtre (Murder, 1964), Dire I (Say I, 1972), Dire II (Say II,1972), Il donc (It Then, 1976) and Survie (Survival, 1978) are now gathered under one cover, constituting the first volume of Collobert’s collected works, Oeuvres I. A second volume, Oeuvres II, comprising her journal, her several radio texts, and miscellaneous writings, will appear next year.
This is no routine reissue. Pages by Collobert may perplex, but not a single passage leaves indifferent. Her strange and unsettling prose combines dire pessimism, penetrating lucidity, as well as a willingness, as the author puts it in Dire II, to examine the conditions necessary to simply
keep living — to appear to oneself perhaps from time to time still — without an image — without a reflection — only to hear oneself — the breath — the cry — the words — sometimes — before vanishing — to trace out something — somewhere — for nothing — certainly without necessity — to be there — yet — still — to try.
This is a writer who has left all security behind and is inching her way along a frazzled tightrope suspended over the most desolate abyss imaginable. Think of Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”—about which more appears below.
Collobert explores the very slight possibilities of love, the alluring ambiguities of gender, perhaps also schizophrenia, in any case “impersonalization,” and above all death as the source, foundation, and destination of all living. She confronts these themes head on, all the while generalizing her approach by asking whether writing about them is really “possible.” The sparse, stark texts of her last book, the ironically entitled Survival, announce her ominous conclusion: writing is impossible and so is living. She committed suicide on her thirty-eighth birthday in a hotel on the rue Dauphine in Paris.
For the past quarter-century, a handful of important French poets and writers have continued to speak and write about these unusual books, long out-of-print yet once highly regarded. In her brief but sensitive editorial note to Oeuvres I, Françoise Morvan reveals that a “friendship chain” including Jean Daive, Ludovic Janvier, Claude Royet-Journoud, Alain Veinstein, Jacques Roubaud, Bernard Pingaud, and François Bon has kept Collobert’s name from being completely forgotten and has seen this project of a collected works through to completion. As for the single yet strong North American link in this chain, the Canadian poet Norma Cole has labored incessantly for Collobert’s cause. She has translated Il donc as It Then (O Books, 1989), Survie as Survival (for her anthology Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, Burning Deck, 2000), and has recently rendered Collobert’s journal as Notebooks 1956–1978 (Litmus Press, 2003).
Collobert’s five books form a single “black diamond,” Morvan remarks aptly. The metaphor at once negates and affirms, seemingly giving a definitive answer to a terrifying question and thereafter shining like an awe-inspiring, admonishing lampion. Such is the tension of Collobert’s prose, and such is its ambivalence. Which reminds me of how other French writers—Arthur Rimbaud, Pierre Jean Jouve, Edmond Jabès, Louis-René des Forêt, Pierre Guyotat—contemplating the “end of writing” (and the “ends of writing”), the temptations of “silence,” unanswerable questions, and the riddles of gender have similarly mined the no-man’s land between prose and poetry in order to create a unique work of art out of several specific works. The books of such authors could well be subsumed under the title “Oeuvre”—in the singular—as actually occurred in the case of the 1987 Mercure de France edition of Jouve.
Collobert’s collected works exhibit this unity. From the onset she focuses on death: it is her personal nemesis, as is illustrated by one of her earliest Notebook entries, dated February 1957:
shock at becoming conscious of this obstacle that preceded everything — attached to the obstacle — not an obstacle — not even a breakdown — real fear — of the emptiness — nothingness — fear stronger than anything — I’m putting in time — just putting in time — like the rest of the world.
Probably written four or five years later, one of the interconnected texts of Meurtre notably begins:
I have the impression that I am experiencing a death. I no longer have a center—not that it moves around inside me, in constant, even perpetual motion—but no localizing of it is even possible any more.
Yet however precisely rooted was her personal despair, Collobert’s literary vision displays a universalizing propensity. Motivating her is a downright courageous effort to transcend the gloomy introspection of a specific individual—herself—and to stage “the uncertainty of meaning / the endless distancing / the impossible discourse” (It Then, my translation) as fundamental attributes of the human condition. Although these efforts to transform her individual plight into that of Everyman and Everywoman were ultimately insufficient to save her from an early suicide, her writings depart radically from confessional literary genres. “One does not know, one has never learned, how to write that word, End,” she observes in Meurtre, “to place it in the center, in the middle, to protect it well, not to leave it alone, elsewhere, isolated.” Montaigne viewed philosophy as “learning how to die.” In her writings, Collobert similarly dares to place Death exactly where it dwells in her personal life and where it secretly dwells in any human being: at the very center.
Not surprisingly, the realist imagery and straightforward sentences still used in Meurtre disappear by the time she composes Dire I (the first version dates to 1966) and especially Dire II (written around 1970). Even in Meurtre, she experiments with narrative gender-switching and increasingly “impersonal” representations of herself, her characters or, more accurately, humankind. As the factual world fades from her purview, what is left is a voice, at once resolute and inconsolable; or, rather, voices that are alternatively attributed to feminine and masculine speakers. Sometimes these voices seem disembodied (as the title Dire suggests, with its additional connotations of “saying,” “statement(s),” and with its quasi-theatrical injunction “to say,” “to tell,” “to speak”), while at other times a mere “defeated body” is left; it has lost all capacity to articulate meaning. Collobert’s project fascinates because it pursues this redoubtable contradiction—bodiless speech, speechless bodies—to perilous limits (beyond them looms self-annihilation), all the while presenting this speech-body split as an incontrovertible element of all human experience.
After her death, Jacques Roubaud wrote a halting, strangely punctuated poem about her. He notes how she was incessantly pushed further “down the path. of / poetry towards the impossibility of. / poetry of the impossibility of / personal poetry, towards / [telling] the story of the impersonalization of / poetry.” Collobert’s prose reflects this austere progression, as it evolves from the hard-hitting realist narrative framework of Meurtre (a novel initially published by Raymond Queneau at Gallimard), through Dire I (with its discontinuous story lines), then through Dire II (where she focuses on “each word — to avoid the soft calm sliding — prefer plummeting to that”) and It Then (whose “shreds of articulation” are sometimes arranged into skeletal verse), to the completely broken-up syntax and drastically minimalized grammar of the six harrowing (prose-like) poems of Survie, published by Emmanuel Hocquard at Orange Export Ltd. a few months before her death. The first piece of this sequence begins, in Cole’s translation:
I leaving voice without response to
articulate sometimes words
that silence response to other ear never
if to muteness world not a sound
plunges into blue cosmos
no more question that vertical journey
I leaving slide to horizon
all equal all mortal leaving starting
with the I
at full speed fleeing the horizon
at last to hear only music in the screams
enough enough
exit.
For Collobert, everything that is mortal begins with the “I.” Her writing grapples from the beginning with subjectivity; she seeks an “exit” from its grip. Yet the impersonalization that her books trace out does not really parallel the self-transcending, “de-selfing” aspirations of post-war French poets like Yves Bonnefoy, Pierre-Albert Jourdan or Philippe Jaccottet, who seek out luminous presences—beyond or other than the self—most often in nature. Collobert seeks another type of escape from the imprisoning Cartesian cogito ergo sum. Rather like Nathalie Sarraute, she posits an extreme humanism in which she continues to refer to human beings yet makes no specific references to a particular person, especially herself. A person is now “impersonal,” as in an impersonal verb construction, as in “it is raining.”
What is this “it”? A substance like a cloud? A pure phenomenon? Or some sort of vague border between the two ontological categories? Philosophers from Schelling to Sigwart, from Emmanuel Lévinas to P. F. Strawson, have wrestled with this enigma. Similarly, once Collobert’s narrative is no longer predicated on a specific person or on particular characters, she can both emphasize the body as a universal “substance” and focus on the utter phenomenality of human experience, especially as we face up to death and stand across from the “other” (be it another person or our apperception that we are double, that we are witnessing ourselves acting). Hence Il donc construed in English as It Then and not He Then (or Thus He), though Collobert is obviously also playing here with gender: the metamorphosis of she’s into he’s, and back again. In her last writings, “I’s” and “you’s,” when they are retained at all, are given few, if any, recognizable characteristics. They are not really (or fully) characters.
Interestingly, Collobert’s attempt to impersonalize her own “I”—dismissed as meaningless chronological filler, a negligible “time of what” by the final text of Survival—was initially political. During the years 1961–63, she worked clandestinely for the Algerian National Liberation Front. She was even forced to hide out in Italy for a while because of her political involvement in the Algerian War. After this period, her impersonalizing quest became essentially literary as well as “geographical.” She began taking countless trips, both inside herself and to remote foreign countries. On some “inner voyages,” she in fact ventures no less far abroad. Such results from drug-taking, as evinced by the Notebooks. She records her hallucinogenic experiences with the curiosity, if not quite the maniacal precision, of Henri Michaux. “Acid — electroshock,” she writes for example, “variations on the real — deep // following the preceding state — this time very good — no real violent anxiety — just at the moment of trying to write felt the sensation of doubling — ‘government’ of the unconscious speaking ‘with clarity.’ ”
Equally revelatory of her literary quest are the frequent trips outside of France. In Dire II, the narrator (who possesses neither name nor sex) evokes a yearning for “somewhere — that place sought for such a long time — so many attempts.” The Notebooks bear witness to the specifics of her insatiable wanderlust. Collobert shifted constantly between Paris and various sites in the Far East, North Africa, South America, the United States, and Europe. Her longtime friend and collaborator, the Italian writer Uccio Esposito-Torrigiani, testifies—in his perceptive postface to the Notebooks—to an
almost perpetual motion in which contradictory motives fused: the need to escape, the attraction of distant, “exotic” countries as bearers of nameless signs guaranteeing silence, solitude; and simultaneously a sort of proof by geographic exhaustion that she would not be content anywhere, that places were but names, and that, wherever she went, she would “not [be] going towards anything.”
One recalls Pierre Reverdy, for whom “everything is the same, whether here or there.” Which of course is another way of admitting to oneself that one is left, all alone—anywhere and everywhere—in the dungeon of one’s own self.
The Notebooks surely acted as the traveling laboratory in which Collobert distilled her most representative style, those bursts of allusive (and elusive) meaning that are separated by no other punctuation than dashes. In the Notebooks there are subjectless, hence relatively “impersonal” passages like “always on the move — a bag — not much gear no things — no books — only an old copy of Têtes-mortes had for years — Bing Bing // unnecessary this house — bag suffices . . .” This passage is dated November 14, 1975. About the same time in It Then, Collobert depicts this mental and bodily state more abstractly: “always movement // from the violent to the imperceptible — the immobile — immobility never — a semblant settling at best” (my translation).
If there is a remote echo of Sarraute in Collobert, there is an even more distinct one of Beckett. The passage cited above mentions Têtes-mortes (1967/1972), the French volume of Beckett’s short prose that includes Bing (Ping, in English). Collobert’s Notebooks mention a meeting with Beckett as early as June 1967, then in August 1971 “To Berlin — to see Sam” (where Beckett actually was staying at the time), and finally a mysterious 25 May 1976 “with Sam [in Bassano] // at the moment of speaking — death.” There is also a 1974 entry that reads: “S. in the blur — tied to Paris and a certain life — the power of certain words and their lack of weight in other situations — this summer one last try.” But I find no trace of Collobert in either Anthony Cronin’s Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1996) or James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996).
This is not to say that Collobert’s mature style and ideas are derivative. After Meurtre, she especially creates her own particular world. This mainly derives from her eccentric use of pronouns and other grammatical markers of masculinity or femininity. In his preface to Oeuvres I, Jean-Pierre Faye (who published the first edition of Dire I and II at Seghers-Laffont) points out that Collobert bases what he calls her “dialogue of voiceless bodies” (specifically in Dire I) exclusively on the presence or absence of the silent letter (and feminine marker) “e.” Throughout Collobert’s Dire I, this silent “e” is present when one expects it to be absent, and vice versa. Its presence or absence bewilders, though hardly in the same way (or for the same reasons) as the missing “e” in Georges Perec’s novel, A Void, which appeared in France as La Disparition in 1969.
Such grammatical word-play is completely unorthodox and—one must add—dead serious. It is only after close study that apparent solecisms can be interpreted as the keystones of a highly conscious literary construct. For the French reader of Dire I, a misprint seems to mar the very first paragraph. When the first person singular “je” is introduced in the fourth sentence, and because the author is a woman, the reader too quickly assumes that a female narrator is musing. But suffixes reveal that a man is narrating, and this uncertainty about gender increases in perplexity through the third, sixth and finally eighth paragraphs, when a sentence employing a feminine case (“tu est passée ici”) suddenly crops up.
Thereafter, the reader penetrates further and further into a disturbing labyrinth of changing or indeterminable gender. Sometimes “I” and “you”—are in dialogue, while at other times the dialogue arguably occurs within the same body, as when the narrator admits “facing me, [is] myself” or later and even more explicitly: Whom is this about now? As if lost in this sequence flowing from me—liquid losing its shape its precision—slowly but surely having become mud, magma.” In such instances, a conflict seems to have arisen, within the same body, between an “anima” and “animus,” though it is not ultimately of Carl Jung that one thinks in these psychoanalytically evocative passages, suggestive almost of schizophrenia.
With these jousts of gender, Collobert also sometimes mirrors tense amorous dialogues. In these attempts to reach the “other,” the dialogue often results in a single “body over there,” as she writes in Dire II, “knotted / knotted to words / the strangulation of breath / loss of ground / hanged / swaying inside words.” Though such scenes conclude in an utter failure to attain the other, to establish contact, to communicate, it is still “toward another body,” as she declares in It Then, that “words are incessantly projected.” Within the abstractions of Collobert’s writing often can be felt this unmitigable yearning for a safe and embracing harbor that is not the “I.” Christen this harbor the “not-I.”
The grammatical idiosyncrasies with which she first experiments in Dire I increase in the three books that follow. She eventually no longer uses “I” and “you” at all. By Dire II, she has proceeded far down the path, as Roubaud put it in his poem, toward “impersonalization.” During her last eight years, she can only increasingly struggle to surmount those “thousands of words,” as she phrases it, that are necessary “before saying ‘I’ — before something happens.” This path at once to herself and away from herself grew very steep, as she climbed the mountain of words. It was of no return. - John Taylor
Selected Works by Danielle Collobert in Translation:
It Then. Trans. Norma Cole. Out of Print.
Notebooks 1956–1978. Litmus, $12.00.
Survival. Trans. Norma Cole. Burning Deck, $15.00.
Selected Untranslated Works:
Cahiers [Memoirs]. Out of Print.
Chants de Guerre [War Songs]. Out of Print.
Dire I et II [Say I and II]. Out of Print.
Meurtre [Murder]. Out of Print.
Des Nuits sur les hauteurs [Nights in High Altitude]. Out of Print.
Oeuvres I. POL, €28.
Recherche [Search]. Out of Print.
In a presence already dissolved
[excerpts from the Journals of Danielle Collobert, 1960-1961, translated by Norma Cole.]
1960
January
"She was sitting by the bridge on the bridge a lot of people were watching
the barges unload suddenly the rock she was sitting on started to roll -
it was a big granite slab block She yelled - everyone turned to look at
her - The rock picked up momentum nothing could stop it - the people
couldn't understand - Little by little she leaned her upper body forward -
until she was laid out on the slab -- Simultaneously she felt a great
emptiness inside a hole a descent - No one moved from the bridge
captivated by the movement..."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't ever want to learn anything again -
just people -
I really only get close to them in bed - their nakedness - essential --
to understand - grasp by means of gestures - looks - more than with words
already so many men ...
February
I've been walking for a long time -- it's 9:30 - it's cold I rarely see
streets or people at this hour in this neighborhood the houses are mute --
people pass quickly - closed walking tightly -- don't know how I got to
this neighborhood - slept at J.'s and walked all the way here -- like it
follows logically - strange
looking at a long and empty day -- nervous --
there's that exhibit at the Musee d'art moderne to kill time, not out of
love -
that cold strange room last night - seeing myself again in all the bedrooms
- dislocated -- blurred -- bodiless inside those walls -- maybe a little heat
remaining --
sudden silence -- cold -- and all of a sudden solitude returns -- bad --
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
watching the kids in the square just now -- retrieving childhood sensations
-- earth and water -- fuzzy sensations -- a smell --
scattered images --
the dining room door ajar and my grandfather in bed -- face to the wall --
women sitting around the kitchen table speaking quietly -- and weeping --
reds and pinks --
the boy in blue -- on a hook hung from the balcony of the house at one corner
of the square -- and the Germans all over -- the hook -- the garden -- the
entry -- the doorway with masses of red fuschias -- garden masses of apples --
one evening in the "house in back" eating pink rat poison and shrieking --
terror --
flowers -- frost on the window -- feet warming at the stove -- scorched
socks -- after school--
the storms and wind in the pines at Compostal -- the fire in the living room
hearth --
listing images when really the smells are what returns most vividly --
roasted coffee -- detergent -- overripe pears in the loft -- smell of wood and
wet ground --
March
Such a strange night -- on the Quai des Fleurs -- I've been living here for a
few days -- very nice apartment -- They're sleeping -- the table faces the
window where I write -- the Seine -- the lights -- water -- calm came back --
like glancing crystal in the water -- rising and falling -- as real as my hand
-- my face in the pane -- the Seine's reflections disrupting the lamplight's
opacity -- like crossing dream with reality -- and then a car passes -- from
light to opacity -- disappearance --
tranquility -- very rare peacefulness - after days of emptiness -- empty
enough to put off getting up -- because of the emptiness itself -- and after
-- completely futile efforts to fill in --
why despite appearances I go to such lengths to achieve this feeling
emptiness -- of discomfort -- as though every gesture --every movement were
bringing me nearer to death --
the sensation of emptiness disappeared in that orgasmic moment --
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have possibly never been so far into that solitude as these last months --
it still might not be enough -- there is a vague form of stability left here
-- of security -- some doubt about what I can stand --
more wandering -- add leaving the country -- breaking all bonds -- or
whatever -- being broke in a country I don't know -- maybe --
probably an illusion -- equating being alone in a room for days -- and going
off somewhere --
April
Departure -- tomorrow -- real escape -- I'm going to Tunisia -- calm --
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tunis 1
here with no break -- already the same life -- I go to cafés -- I make love
-- I go to films -- I talk to people -- no distance -- I've already been here
since forever --
but still it's the East -- the light -- the colors -- the beauty -- at least
this: I have new eyes -- senses beginning to function again as though after a
long illness -- this morning very early -- in the village -- scarcely daybreak
-- through the grillwork on the window -- some noises in the covered streets
-- after making love all night -- body heavy and hot -- impression of
tiredness -- of well-being -- H. motionless -- head on my belly -- almost cool
-- a smell I couldn't place -- almonds and oranges -- old food -- and then
suddenly in the silence -- a very long sound -- very low -- the slow
modulation of the muezzin -- extraordinary beauty --
now here -- in the café -- seated on matting -- they're playing cards --the
patron sitting on a chair by the stove closes his eyes -- head thrown back a
little -- he is tall and lean -- looks high as a kite -- they aren't paying
any attention to me -- I'm fine here -- it's raining out -- sound of rain on
the steps --
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday
ran into R.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
the building's terrace and the little hut below -- just room for a bed --
when I came back at 4 -- air cool -- the whole town below -- early movement in
the direction of the station -- to the left -- the quality of the air --
especially that -- staying there a long time looking down at the town --
September
Saturday -- evening -- a café -- I'm far away -- toward Aubervilliers -- I
walked a long time -- spent the last few nights walking -- here the old
neighborhoods-- the houses -- hallways staircases -- little courtyards -- what
goes on in the daytime -- warehouses -- workshops -- people -- their night
deserted -- a few lights farther off -- near the trees -- I'm cold -- bitter
taste of cigarettes -- voices -- a woman singing -- an accomplished liar's
voice -- slightly hoarse -- sad -- a little raw --
go back and sleep -- get loaded -- no -- stay -- stay up -- nurture this --
thing that returned by chance -- the silence inside --
November
he just left -- when he leaves I never know when I'll see him again -- always
chance encounters -- or nearly -- today I asked myself what little errors
we've let come between us -- I don't know yet -- I can barely guess --
why such tenderness in his gestures -- after -- where there is usually
distance --
don't be taken in by tenderness -- protect yourself from it -- I'm sucked in
too easily -- his presence I already live too much in these days -- not enough
resistance now -- or irony --
December
I am calm -- finally without anxiety -- a certain balance --
Y. -- circle around his presence -- no more severing -- or waiting -- calm --
a kind of delight -- also -- being with him -- finally this is a story I like
-- I feel good --
but when I'm like this I don't do anything -- unable to write a word -- I
only write in an anxious state (oh sure)* -- or in times like that -- ideas
for novels arrive -- the story of the port for example -- stupid -- the novel
is basically a pacific creation -- that releases what's essential -- sensation
of well-being allows time to stretch out -- necessary to the novel -- whereas
the anxiety produces something strong -- complete -- at once -- no going
beyond -- (?)* momentary fixity -- in the anxious state --
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
totally out of it -- what am I doing here -- with these kids -- feels like
sweet and well-behaved girls -- never been so isolated in the middle of a
group -- almost peculiar --
get out of here at the first possible moment -- get away from it -- before
the end of resistance -- of rebellion -- before boredom -- exhaustion
1961
February
Algeria 2 -- as if this is really the beginning for me --
Said
September
Tonight I'm starting over -- after these parenthetical months -- for them --
go real slow -- like the first time going out after being locked up for ages
--
tonight calm at last -- window open -- a little wind -- gentle -- feeling my
bathrobe -- music below -- I just picked up K.'s journal -- always the way to
get back to work when it's not happening -- Kafka or Beckett -- to start up
again --
nothing is finished -- the problem hasn't been resolved -- but I'm at the end
of my rope -- still struggling with it -- because it would be easier to keep
going with them than pick up my life where it left off --
these months speak years -- many new things -- to be completely current with
present events -- living the news as it happens -- with no time lag -- now
it's difficult to become nothing but a spectator again --
what counted was the immediate -- objective justification was impossible --
for what I was doing -- theoretical questions useless -- when I make theory
for others -- I end up not believing it -- immediate action justified
immediately in its entirety -- uncomfortable position but real --
for months no writing -- impossible to reconcile the two --
walk paying attention -- I've lost sensation -- closeness of the outside
world around me -- I'm not connecting with things any more -- could be
irreparable loss -- trying now to recover sensations -- objects for instance
-- the table's smoothness -- its color -- my hand on the paper --
it's raining -- that helps me -- I feel better -- more differentiated from
things -- from the outside --
blur already --
October
continuing -- I'm alone in the gallery space -- no options -- walls -- I
touch the walls -- I press myself against them -- I'll lean from one to the
other -- I stayed in the corner opposite for ten minutes -- now I'm in the
middle of the room on a chair -- writing on my lap -- the empty space all
around -- spinning --
what to do -- yell -- call out -- for someone to come -- wait -- slow death
--
explosion inside my head -- words -- invent words -- fast -- absence -- non-
sense of words --
I can't --
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December
waiting -- days -- time passes filled with little things -- cling to the
slightest incident -- the most expected event -- the most foreseeable with
hope for some hidden thing concealed inside the opacity of stillness -- I
can't because I know what the end of waiting is -- the possibility of radical
change -- definitive -- there are lots of examples of such possibilities but
they crumble before any obstacle -- the real presence of people -- of objects
-- the world -- the margin between the image of suicide and reality's
uncertainty is too great --
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
story limited in time -- will end on a specific date -- with departure of a
train -- wonderful impression of clean -- retreat -- irreparable -- it's there
in a presence already dissolved -- almost weightless -- if he knew --
Footnotes:
1. Although placed in Tunis this passage actually describes the village of Sidi Bou Said and the café "des Nattes."
2. At this time D.C. became a part of a network supporting the F.L.N. [National Liberation Front].
Danielle Collobert, Notebooks, 1956-1978, Trans. by Norma Cole, Litmus Press, 3003.
Born into a Breton family active in the Resistance during the Second World War, Danielle Collobert moved to Paris at the age of 19. There, she took her own life in the summer of 1978. These notebooks were found in her posession at the time of her death. "Beyond everything she has discovered her own utter nakedness: that owned by nights of relentless attention to the other, or reflected in mirrors of all-night cafes where you can look, listen or simply wait, attending the blank page, from which the lassitude of daybreak will rescue you, overwhelm you"--Uccio Esposito-Torrigiani, from the postface.
Reading Danielle Collobert
by John Taylor
Collobert (1940–78) is the author of five haunting books of prose and prose-like poetry which the Parisian publisher POL has just brought back from oblivion. It is both moving and fitting that Meurtre (Murder, 1964), Dire I (Say I, 1972), Dire II (Say II,1972), Il donc (It Then, 1976) and Survie (Survival, 1978) are now gathered under one cover, constituting the first volume of Collobert’s collected works, Oeuvres I. A second volume, Oeuvres II, comprising her journal, her several radio texts, and miscellaneous writings, will appear next year.
This is no routine reissue. Pages by Collobert may perplex, but not a single passage leaves indifferent. Her strange and unsettling prose combines dire pessimism, penetrating lucidity, as well as a willingness, as the author puts it in Dire II, to examine the conditions necessary to simply
keep living — to appear to oneself perhaps from time to time still — without an image — without a reflection — only to hear oneself — the breath — the cry — the words — sometimes — before vanishing — to trace out something — somewhere — for nothing — certainly without necessity — to be there — yet — still — to try.
This is a writer who has left all security behind and is inching her way along a frazzled tightrope suspended over the most desolate abyss imaginable. Think of Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”—about which more appears below.
Collobert explores the very slight possibilities of love, the alluring ambiguities of gender, perhaps also schizophrenia, in any case “impersonalization,” and above all death as the source, foundation, and destination of all living. She confronts these themes head on, all the while generalizing her approach by asking whether writing about them is really “possible.” The sparse, stark texts of her last book, the ironically entitled Survival, announce her ominous conclusion: writing is impossible and so is living. She committed suicide on her thirty-eighth birthday in a hotel on the rue Dauphine in Paris.
For the past quarter-century, a handful of important French poets and writers have continued to speak and write about these unusual books, long out-of-print yet once highly regarded. In her brief but sensitive editorial note to Oeuvres I, Françoise Morvan reveals that a “friendship chain” including Jean Daive, Ludovic Janvier, Claude Royet-Journoud, Alain Veinstein, Jacques Roubaud, Bernard Pingaud, and François Bon has kept Collobert’s name from being completely forgotten and has seen this project of a collected works through to completion. As for the single yet strong North American link in this chain, the Canadian poet Norma Cole has labored incessantly for Collobert’s cause. She has translated Il donc as It Then (O Books, 1989), Survie as Survival (for her anthology Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, Burning Deck, 2000), and has recently rendered Collobert’s journal as Notebooks 1956–1978 (Litmus Press, 2003).
Collobert’s five books form a single “black diamond,” Morvan remarks aptly. The metaphor at once negates and affirms, seemingly giving a definitive answer to a terrifying question and thereafter shining like an awe-inspiring, admonishing lampion. Such is the tension of Collobert’s prose, and such is its ambivalence. Which reminds me of how other French writers—Arthur Rimbaud, Pierre Jean Jouve, Edmond Jabès, Louis-René des Forêt, Pierre Guyotat—contemplating the “end of writing” (and the “ends of writing”), the temptations of “silence,” unanswerable questions, and the riddles of gender have similarly mined the no-man’s land between prose and poetry in order to create a unique work of art out of several specific works. The books of such authors could well be subsumed under the title “Oeuvre”—in the singular—as actually occurred in the case of the 1987 Mercure de France edition of Jouve.
Collobert’s collected works exhibit this unity. From the onset she focuses on death: it is her personal nemesis, as is illustrated by one of her earliest Notebook entries, dated February 1957:
shock at becoming conscious of this obstacle that preceded everything — attached to the obstacle — not an obstacle — not even a breakdown — real fear — of the emptiness — nothingness — fear stronger than anything — I’m putting in time — just putting in time — like the rest of the world.
Probably written four or five years later, one of the interconnected texts of Meurtre notably begins:
I have the impression that I am experiencing a death. I no longer have a center—not that it moves around inside me, in constant, even perpetual motion—but no localizing of it is even possible any more.
Yet however precisely rooted was her personal despair, Collobert’s literary vision displays a universalizing propensity. Motivating her is a downright courageous effort to transcend the gloomy introspection of a specific individual—herself—and to stage “the uncertainty of meaning / the endless distancing / the impossible discourse” (It Then, my translation) as fundamental attributes of the human condition. Although these efforts to transform her individual plight into that of Everyman and Everywoman were ultimately insufficient to save her from an early suicide, her writings depart radically from confessional literary genres. “One does not know, one has never learned, how to write that word, End,” she observes in Meurtre, “to place it in the center, in the middle, to protect it well, not to leave it alone, elsewhere, isolated.” Montaigne viewed philosophy as “learning how to die.” In her writings, Collobert similarly dares to place Death exactly where it dwells in her personal life and where it secretly dwells in any human being: at the very center.
Not surprisingly, the realist imagery and straightforward sentences still used in Meurtre disappear by the time she composes Dire I (the first version dates to 1966) and especially Dire II (written around 1970). Even in Meurtre, she experiments with narrative gender-switching and increasingly “impersonal” representations of herself, her characters or, more accurately, humankind. As the factual world fades from her purview, what is left is a voice, at once resolute and inconsolable; or, rather, voices that are alternatively attributed to feminine and masculine speakers. Sometimes these voices seem disembodied (as the title Dire suggests, with its additional connotations of “saying,” “statement(s),” and with its quasi-theatrical injunction “to say,” “to tell,” “to speak”), while at other times a mere “defeated body” is left; it has lost all capacity to articulate meaning. Collobert’s project fascinates because it pursues this redoubtable contradiction—bodiless speech, speechless bodies—to perilous limits (beyond them looms self-annihilation), all the while presenting this speech-body split as an incontrovertible element of all human experience.
After her death, Jacques Roubaud wrote a halting, strangely punctuated poem about her. He notes how she was incessantly pushed further “down the path. of / poetry towards the impossibility of. / poetry of the impossibility of / personal poetry, towards / [telling] the story of the impersonalization of / poetry.” Collobert’s prose reflects this austere progression, as it evolves from the hard-hitting realist narrative framework of Meurtre (a novel initially published by Raymond Queneau at Gallimard), through Dire I (with its discontinuous story lines), then through Dire II (where she focuses on “each word — to avoid the soft calm sliding — prefer plummeting to that”) and It Then (whose “shreds of articulation” are sometimes arranged into skeletal verse), to the completely broken-up syntax and drastically minimalized grammar of the six harrowing (prose-like) poems of Survie, published by Emmanuel Hocquard at Orange Export Ltd. a few months before her death. The first piece of this sequence begins, in Cole’s translation:
I leaving voice without response to
articulate sometimes words
that silence response to other ear never
if to muteness world not a sound
plunges into blue cosmos
no more question that vertical journey
I leaving slide to horizon
all equal all mortal leaving starting
with the I
at full speed fleeing the horizon
at last to hear only music in the screams
enough enough
exit.
For Collobert, everything that is mortal begins with the “I.” Her writing grapples from the beginning with subjectivity; she seeks an “exit” from its grip. Yet the impersonalization that her books trace out does not really parallel the self-transcending, “de-selfing” aspirations of post-war French poets like Yves Bonnefoy, Pierre-Albert Jourdan or Philippe Jaccottet, who seek out luminous presences—beyond or other than the self—most often in nature. Collobert seeks another type of escape from the imprisoning Cartesian cogito ergo sum. Rather like Nathalie Sarraute, she posits an extreme humanism in which she continues to refer to human beings yet makes no specific references to a particular person, especially herself. A person is now “impersonal,” as in an impersonal verb construction, as in “it is raining.”
What is this “it”? A substance like a cloud? A pure phenomenon? Or some sort of vague border between the two ontological categories? Philosophers from Schelling to Sigwart, from Emmanuel Lévinas to P. F. Strawson, have wrestled with this enigma. Similarly, once Collobert’s narrative is no longer predicated on a specific person or on particular characters, she can both emphasize the body as a universal “substance” and focus on the utter phenomenality of human experience, especially as we face up to death and stand across from the “other” (be it another person or our apperception that we are double, that we are witnessing ourselves acting). Hence Il donc construed in English as It Then and not He Then (or Thus He), though Collobert is obviously also playing here with gender: the metamorphosis of she’s into he’s, and back again. In her last writings, “I’s” and “you’s,” when they are retained at all, are given few, if any, recognizable characteristics. They are not really (or fully) characters.
Interestingly, Collobert’s attempt to impersonalize her own “I”—dismissed as meaningless chronological filler, a negligible “time of what” by the final text of Survival—was initially political. During the years 1961–63, she worked clandestinely for the Algerian National Liberation Front. She was even forced to hide out in Italy for a while because of her political involvement in the Algerian War. After this period, her impersonalizing quest became essentially literary as well as “geographical.” She began taking countless trips, both inside herself and to remote foreign countries. On some “inner voyages,” she in fact ventures no less far abroad. Such results from drug-taking, as evinced by the Notebooks. She records her hallucinogenic experiences with the curiosity, if not quite the maniacal precision, of Henri Michaux. “Acid — electroshock,” she writes for example, “variations on the real — deep // following the preceding state — this time very good — no real violent anxiety — just at the moment of trying to write felt the sensation of doubling — ‘government’ of the unconscious speaking ‘with clarity.’ ”
Equally revelatory of her literary quest are the frequent trips outside of France. In Dire II, the narrator (who possesses neither name nor sex) evokes a yearning for “somewhere — that place sought for such a long time — so many attempts.” The Notebooks bear witness to the specifics of her insatiable wanderlust. Collobert shifted constantly between Paris and various sites in the Far East, North Africa, South America, the United States, and Europe. Her longtime friend and collaborator, the Italian writer Uccio Esposito-Torrigiani, testifies—in his perceptive postface to the Notebooks—to an
almost perpetual motion in which contradictory motives fused: the need to escape, the attraction of distant, “exotic” countries as bearers of nameless signs guaranteeing silence, solitude; and simultaneously a sort of proof by geographic exhaustion that she would not be content anywhere, that places were but names, and that, wherever she went, she would “not [be] going towards anything.”
One recalls Pierre Reverdy, for whom “everything is the same, whether here or there.” Which of course is another way of admitting to oneself that one is left, all alone—anywhere and everywhere—in the dungeon of one’s own self.
The Notebooks surely acted as the traveling laboratory in which Collobert distilled her most representative style, those bursts of allusive (and elusive) meaning that are separated by no other punctuation than dashes. In the Notebooks there are subjectless, hence relatively “impersonal” passages like “always on the move — a bag — not much gear no things — no books — only an old copy of Têtes-mortes had for years — Bing Bing // unnecessary this house — bag suffices . . .” This passage is dated November 14, 1975. About the same time in It Then, Collobert depicts this mental and bodily state more abstractly: “always movement // from the violent to the imperceptible — the immobile — immobility never — a semblant settling at best” (my translation).
If there is a remote echo of Sarraute in Collobert, there is an even more distinct one of Beckett. The passage cited above mentions Têtes-mortes (1967/1972), the French volume of Beckett’s short prose that includes Bing (Ping, in English). Collobert’s Notebooks mention a meeting with Beckett as early as June 1967, then in August 1971 “To Berlin — to see Sam” (where Beckett actually was staying at the time), and finally a mysterious 25 May 1976 “with Sam [in Bassano] // at the moment of speaking — death.” There is also a 1974 entry that reads: “S. in the blur — tied to Paris and a certain life — the power of certain words and their lack of weight in other situations — this summer one last try.” But I find no trace of Collobert in either Anthony Cronin’s Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1996) or James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996).
This is not to say that Collobert’s mature style and ideas are derivative. After Meurtre, she especially creates her own particular world. This mainly derives from her eccentric use of pronouns and other grammatical markers of masculinity or femininity. In his preface to Oeuvres I, Jean-Pierre Faye (who published the first edition of Dire I and II at Seghers-Laffont) points out that Collobert bases what he calls her “dialogue of voiceless bodies” (specifically in Dire I) exclusively on the presence or absence of the silent letter (and feminine marker) “e.” Throughout Collobert’s Dire I, this silent “e” is present when one expects it to be absent, and vice versa. Its presence or absence bewilders, though hardly in the same way (or for the same reasons) as the missing “e” in Georges Perec’s novel, A Void, which appeared in France as La Disparition in 1969.
Such grammatical word-play is completely unorthodox and—one must add—dead serious. It is only after close study that apparent solecisms can be interpreted as the keystones of a highly conscious literary construct. For the French reader of Dire I, a misprint seems to mar the very first paragraph. When the first person singular “je” is introduced in the fourth sentence, and because the author is a woman, the reader too quickly assumes that a female narrator is musing. But suffixes reveal that a man is narrating, and this uncertainty about gender increases in perplexity through the third, sixth and finally eighth paragraphs, when a sentence employing a feminine case (“tu est passée ici”) suddenly crops up.
Thereafter, the reader penetrates further and further into a disturbing labyrinth of changing or indeterminable gender. Sometimes “I” and “you”—are in dialogue, while at other times the dialogue arguably occurs within the same body, as when the narrator admits “facing me, [is] myself” or later and even more explicitly: Whom is this about now? As if lost in this sequence flowing from me—liquid losing its shape its precision—slowly but surely having become mud, magma.” In such instances, a conflict seems to have arisen, within the same body, between an “anima” and “animus,” though it is not ultimately of Carl Jung that one thinks in these psychoanalytically evocative passages, suggestive almost of schizophrenia.
With these jousts of gender, Collobert also sometimes mirrors tense amorous dialogues. In these attempts to reach the “other,” the dialogue often results in a single “body over there,” as she writes in Dire II, “knotted / knotted to words / the strangulation of breath / loss of ground / hanged / swaying inside words.” Though such scenes conclude in an utter failure to attain the other, to establish contact, to communicate, it is still “toward another body,” as she declares in It Then, that “words are incessantly projected.” Within the abstractions of Collobert’s writing often can be felt this unmitigable yearning for a safe and embracing harbor that is not the “I.” Christen this harbor the “not-I.”
The grammatical idiosyncrasies with which she first experiments in Dire I increase in the three books that follow. She eventually no longer uses “I” and “you” at all. By Dire II, she has proceeded far down the path, as Roubaud put it in his poem, toward “impersonalization.” During her last eight years, she can only increasingly struggle to surmount those “thousands of words,” as she phrases it, that are necessary “before saying ‘I’ — before something happens.” This path at once to herself and away from herself grew very steep, as she climbed the mountain of words. It was of no return. - John Taylor
Selected Works by Danielle Collobert in Translation:
It Then. Trans. Norma Cole. Out of Print.
Notebooks 1956–1978. Litmus, $12.00.
Survival. Trans. Norma Cole. Burning Deck, $15.00.
Selected Untranslated Works:
Cahiers [Memoirs]. Out of Print.
Chants de Guerre [War Songs]. Out of Print.
Dire I et II [Say I and II]. Out of Print.
Meurtre [Murder]. Out of Print.
Des Nuits sur les hauteurs [Nights in High Altitude]. Out of Print.
Oeuvres I. POL, €28.
Recherche [Search]. Out of Print.
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