Author: DC (Page 901 of 1103)

 

‘Lithuanian auteur Sharunas Bartas is the kind of filmmaker one would immediately be tempted to label “pretentious” and “self-indulgent” because there is absolutely no concession whatsoever that he gives to the viewers in terms of the narrative, artistic, political and personal ambitions of his films, burying them deeply within their part-hyper real and part-surreal constructs. All his films have hinged themselves onto a particular moment in Lithuanian history – the nation’s independence from the USSR, just prior to the latter’s complete collapse – and they all deal with the loss of communication, the seeming impossibility of true love to flourish and the sense of pointlessness that the political separation has imparted to its people.

‘The characters in Bartas’ films are ones that attempt in vain to put the dreadful past behind them, traverse through the difficult present and get onto a future that may or may not exist. With communication having been deemed useless, they hardly speak anything and, even if they do, the talk is restricted to banal everyday expressions. Consequently, Bartas’ films have little or no dialog and rely almost entirely on Bressonian sound design consisting mostly of natural sounds. Also Bresson-like is the acting in the films. There are no expressions conveyed by the actors, no giveaway gestures and no easy outlet for emotions.

‘The outdoor spaces are deep and vast in Bartas’ films while the indoors are dark, decrepit and decaying. The landscapes, desolate, usually glacial, nearly boundless and seemingly inhospitable, are almost always used as metaphors for a larger scheme. His compositions are often diagonal, dimly lit and simultaneously embody static and dynamic components within a single frame. Interestingly, his editing is large Eisensteinian and he keeps juxtaposing people, their faces and landscapes throughout his filmography. But since the individual images themselves possess much ambiguity of meaning, the sequences retains their own, thereby overcoming the limitations of associative montage.

‘In many ways, the cinema of Bartas stands in between that of Andrei Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr – both filmmakers concerned with chronicling life in a communist state. While the childhood memories, existential crisis and spiritual yearning in Bartas films directly has its roots in Tarkovsky’s films (all the films starting from The Mirror (1975)), the visual (dancing in entrapping circles, meaningless glances and chatter over banquets and eventual self-destruction of the drifting characters) and aural (the Mihály Vig-like loopy and creepy score consisting of accordions, accentuated ambient noise) motifs, stark cinematography and political exploration are reminiscent of Bartas’ Hungarian contemporary. But, more importantly, it is the attitude towards his characters that puts him right in midpoint between Tarr and Tarkovsky.

‘Bartas’ work has so far been characterized by two impulses – a warm nostalgia and sympathy for his characters that betrays the director’s hope and love for them, as in Tarkovsky’s cinema, and an overpowering cynicism, clearly derived from the (post-neo-realist) films of Tarr, that keeps remarking how the characters are all doomed and done for. This (unbalanced) dialectic is evident in Bartas aesthetic itself, which employs copious amounts of extremely long shots and suffocating close-ups. In the former, characters are seen walking from near the camera and into the screen, gradually becoming point objects eaten up by the landscape while, in the latter, Bartas films every line and texture of their faces with utmost intensity in a way that obviously shows that he cares for them and the pain that they might be experiencing.’ — The Seventh Art

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Šarūnas Bartas @ IMDb
Šarūnas Bartas Resource Page
Video: ‘Šarūnas Bartas: Army of One’ (extract)
Šarūnas Bartas on DVD
Šarūnas Bartas films @ Mubi
‘Dancing on the edge of a volcano’
‘Sharunas Bartas – Planète Bartas’
‘La ligne zone de Sharunas Bartas’
Šarūnas Bartas @ Eurêka!
Šarūnas Bartas’ ‘Three Days’ @ Playtime Magazine

 

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Extras

Interview (in French)

Interview (in Lithuanian)

Kino Pavasaris 2011: Šarūno Barto retrospektyva

 

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The Elusive Present: An Interview with Šarūnas Bartas
from Mubi

 

Xenia Drugoveyko: You are always making films on the border of narrative and documentary cinema: one dissolves in the other. To what degree is this effect intentional and to what degree is it accidental?

Šarūnas Bartas: The real life events are closer to me. That’s why this documentary effect is not accidental – it is achieved by combining a number of interconnected technical and dramatic methods. By the way, I am trying to avoid the word “narrative” – I think it has become outdated in relation to cinema. This term is not a genre and not a category – it’s from an area of philosophical categories. I do prefer to juxtapose the narrative and documentary cinema. You were quite correct in noting the dissolving effect. This is what the concept consists of: the relativity of the divide between life and its artistic comprehension.

X. D.: In your works everyday situations and relationships are often transformed into surreal ones…

S. B.: We don’t actually live in a real world, but in one we quietly agreed to call “real”. It’s limited by what we saw and heard. Or, more like, what we allow ourselves to see and hear. So, it turns out each of us constructs his own internal reality. There are similarities, perhaps, in the picture of the reality that you and I have, but we can hardly imagine how the world is seen by, say, an Indian or a native of Cote-d’Ivoire. There is another , unfortunate circumstance common to all of us – the elusiveness of time. Every new minute is not like the one that passed. There is no concept of “present”; well, there is but it’s too conditional. And more so than even the past and the future about which at least we are sure to possess a set of memories or notions. In this lies the essence of surrealism in my films: a gradual understanding of the everyday life through the prism of the inner subjective perception.

X. D.: This surrealism is built on metaphors. When are they born, during the script writing or in the process of shooting the film?

S. B.: I never invent metaphors. It’s awesome if a thought takes on some unusual form, but I wouldn’t attach the actual term “metaphor” to my films. If a metaphor is some intentional expression taking on some esthetically distorted form on film, then what I have happening is the complete opposite of that. A visual image – the reflection of the reality (mine every minute one of the imagined reality of the character) – a priori contains an expression. Although, one person will see it as parable, and the other as a very direct statement, read without italics and quotation marks. Because for this person it will intersect with his picture of reality.

X. D.: Your films are so unhurried; it is as if they move with the pace of a real human life. What does it have to do with?

S. B.: I am trying to make films about very simple things. And, admittedly, when it comes to simple things, we are quite unskilled in contemplating them, and in vain are rejecting them as an obvious granted. We don’t have such a habit – so it takes a lot of moral strength, effort and time. That’s what I give myself and my viewers; time. To set the pace for a film, the editing tools are not enough; you need a basis for choosing this or other tempo. Same, actually, goes for the other technical details: for example, the currently popular in documentary and pseudo-documentary films shaking camera, shooting with some insane-to-the-viewer angle. Sometimes it’s justifiable, but more often, unfortunately, it looks like silly excess.

X. D.: Your films have few words in them, and at times are pretty much silent, but all the everyday sound seems to be the real music. How do you compose it?

S. B.: It’s a very interesting process: there’s, as they say, enough algebra, as well as harmony. When we technically build the soundtrack, we bump up or turn down this or that element. As a result, unwittingly, the audience’s attention is focused on the sound of steps, clanking of the dishes, sounds of voices, singing of birds. It creates an illusion that the viewer picked it all up himself out of the usual everyday din.

X. D.: And this unfailingly makes you feel not like a member of the audience but a part of the action.

S. B.: It’s wonderful, if so, but, to be honest, I never specifically aim for it. On the other hand, I do have to watch the footage, judging it from a point of view of the audience. At this point I often feel myself as a part of the life on the screen. Though, I think, the secret is not in the sound and not even in the pace: it’s just when a person understands and accepts (and it hardly ever coincides with each other – at least not with my films), he always becomes a participant.

 

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10 of Šarūnas Bartas’ 13 films

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Frost (2017)
‘The film tell the story of Rokas, a young man from Lithuania, who has never experienced war but has grown up in its shadow. Transporting a truck of humanitarian aid from Vilnius to Ukraine, he enters a journey of discovery and sacrifice, crossing borders between countries, between people. A rare film. An absolute masterpiece. Bartas is the greatest filmmaker alive.’ — MUBI

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Peace to Us in Our Dreams (2016)
‘“Humans always doubt,” says a father to his daughter. “Just imagine if suddenly everything (were) clear. What would you do?” What indeed? Such questions serve as a substitute for drama in Sharunas Bartas’ “Peace to Us in Our Dreams,” an old-school broodfest in which a man, his daughter and his violinist companion openly ponder Big Themes during a country getaway. Ideal for viewers who find Ingmar Bergman too loose-limbed (or resent the relative humor of Bela Tarr), the movie at least casts a spell with its bleak woodland scenery. The unabashedly private musings may prompt nostalgia for a period of art cinema when self-seriousness signaled seriousness, though one wishes the insights here were less banal. Although this isn’t one of the acclaimed Lithuanian director’s dialogue-free efforts, there’s little about it that will alter his reputation for forbidding fare.’ — Variety

Trailer

Peace to Us in Our Dreams – Interview – Sharunas Bartas

 

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Eastern Drift (2009)
‘Abandoning his previous trademark ultra art-house austerity (“before there was a world of silence — now my characters are speaking,” he has commented) in films like 2005’s “Seven Invisible Men,” Bartas now ventures into gangland terrain more closely associated with the likes of Robert Guedigian (“La ville est tranquille”). He pays homage to his genre forebears in a steely, resolutely unflashy style — subtly and ably scored by Alexander Zekke and shot in a cobalt-heavy palette by Bartas himself — that skirts ponderousness but ultimately yields low-key rewards.’ — Hollywood Reporter

Trailer

 

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Septyni Nematomi Zmones (Seven Invisible Men) 2005
‘The most unusual of all Bartas films, the pre-apocalyptic Seven Invisible Men (2005) starts off like a genre movie – a bunch of robbers trying to evade the police after stealing and selling off a car. It is only after about half an hour, when one of them arrives at a farm that is near completely severed from the rest of the world, that the film moves into the world of Bartas. In the final few minutes that recall Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986), we see the house, in which the characters have been living in, burn down to dust. But, unlike Tarkovsky, it is Bartas’ cynicism that overwhelms and he sees his characters as ultimately self-destructive beings that have lost all control of their lives and hope for a better future.’

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Freedom (2000)
‘The most rigorous of all Bartas films, Freedom is the kind of film Tarkovsky might have made had he lived to see the new century. Like the Russian’s characters, the people in this film are all marginal characters (and are often aptly pushed from the centre of the frame towards its margins) who want to escape the oppressive, unfair politics of this world and become one with nature and the unassailable peace it seems to possess. Bartas expands the scope of his usual investigation and deals with a plethora of themes including the artificiality and fickleness of national boundaries, the barriers that lingual and geographical differences create between people and the ultimate impermanence of these barriers and the people affected by it in this visually breathtaking masterwork.’

Excerpt

the entire film

 

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A Casa (The House) 1997
‘Shot almost entirely indoors, The House follows a young man carrying a pile of books as me moves from one room of the Marienbad-like mansion to the other, meeting various men and women, none of whom speak to each other and who might be real people of flesh and blood, shards of memory or figments of fantasy. The house itself might be an abstract space, as in The Corridor, representing the protagonist’s mind with its spatial configuration disoriented like the chessboard in the film. Furthermore, one also gets the feeling that Bartas is attempting to resolve the question of theory versus practice – cold cynicism versus warm optimism – with regards to his politics as we witness the protagonist finally burn the books, page by page, he had so far held tightly to his chest.’

Excerpt

 

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Few Of Us (1996)
‘Few of Us (1996) is perhaps the least political of the already highly noncommittal works of Sharunas Bartas. With an eye for small and intricate changes in seasons, terrains and time of the day comparable to that of James Benning, Bartas pushes his own envelope as he lingers on eyes, faces and landscapes for seemingly interminable stretches of time. Each image of the film carries with itself an air of a still paining, vaguely familiar. All this sure does bring to surface the experimental and, I daresay, self-conscious nature of Bartas’ work, but what it also does is familiarize us with the hitherto alien and draw connection between this abstract representation of protagonist’s cultural disconnection in Tolofaria and the typical Bartas territory of desolate, directionless lives lead by the people of post-Soviet Lithuania.’

Excerpt

Excerpt

*

p.s. RIP Susan Hiller. ** Hey. Early tomorrow morning I fly off to the West Coast of the USA where there are some screenings of PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT. Here is how I think the blog will function beginning tomorrow. There won’t be a p.s. in the morning for the obvious reason. I then plan to do the p.s. from the West Coast on Friday and Saturday, meaning the posts/p.s.es will be launching roughly nine hours later than they usually do. Beginning on Monday, the 4th, the p.s. portion will be taking a vacation for a while as I’ll be busy with the screenings and traveling. My guess is that will be the case for roughly a week or so. Then I’ll be back in my p.s. persona as usual, posting from the West Coast until I fly back to Paris in the 17th. I will give a heads up as to exactly when I’ll be back to interact in one of the severely truncated p.s.es/hellos that’ll be appearing daily beginning on the 4th. If that makes sense. And, as usual, all the posts, barring your regular escorts outlay, will be restored ones until I’m back in Paris. And, as always, feel very free to leave comments while I’m away because I will respond to them when I return. Cool, thank you. ** JM, Hi. Oh, Nik saw your comment and he responded just below it, if you haven’t yet noticed that. Happy the book yesterday had a hook. ** David Ehrenstein, Foucault isn’t a character in Christophe’s play, but his last days in the hospital are described at length by the Guibert character. ** Steve Erickson, Ack, well, I just hope that the issue is identified clearly and treated as royally as possible ASAP. I’ll go see what you think of the Sneaks, as will … Everyone, Steve weighs in on the new Sneaks album ‘Highway Hypnosis’ right here. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yes, so sad about Susan Hiller. A fantastic artist. I was friendly with her personally in the past, but I hadn’t communicated with her in a long time for no good reason. But, yes, really a loss. ** Misanthrope, Hey, G. I’m oblivious too, and I’m the one going there. Well, that LPS is one very, very lucky fella, and I hope his luck is lifelong and that he doesn’t keep pressing it. Okay, I don’t know if that’s good news about the cough diagnosis, but it sounds like it could have been worse? Guzzle those meds. I loved The Little Rascals. I think sometimes it must have been a huge influence on me as a kid, how they were always being so hyper creative and putting on plays and weird shit. ** Nik, Hey. Yeah, I remember how school’s reading assignments curtail the solo adventuring, but it sounds like that school will lead you to useful places. Hopefully. Great, great that Ann’s class is exciting you. I can only imagine. Cool, man. I look forward to hearing how it goes along the way. In LA, some PGL related stuff we need to do for the DVD Extras, seeing friends I haven’t seen in ages, probably traveling out of LA a bit, art, soak up the vibes, … Well, today Zac and I have to talk to our French distributor about some stuff, like when they actually need the new trailer and poster because they aren’t quite finished yet. And packing and the usual pre-trip stressing out. Enough to fill up this last day in Paris for sure. Thanks about the jet lag. I’ll definitely need that. Lag murders me, and yet I have to jump right  into hosting screenings and stuff, so, yeah, thanks, buddy. I hope your day is kind of wondrous. ** James, It is, and I’m obviously happy you agree. No, I haven’t started the Kathryn Davis book. I’m taking it on my trip, so hopefully I’ll start it while away. Time’s the weirdest thing ever, that’s for sure. Fantastic about the editing, my favorite part, as you know. Yeah, looking forward to seeng you in the flickering light. Oh, right, digital doesn’t flicker. In the wash. ** Tyler, Hi. I saw the email. I’ll hope to respond today, but, if preparing to fly away in the morning eats my day, I’ll get back to you once I’m settled overseas. Thanks! ** Keatonn, So are mine. Those rhythms, the fuckers. I’m super anti-suicide. If you’re old and dying, that’s different. But suicide is a too charged subject for me. Not in my work, obviously, but in the real. I’ve always thought living is just the most awesome thing. I get greedy about it. I’m a weird cat,  apparently. Very interesting thoughts there on that stuff for sure, pal. ** Okay. Today’s post focuses on an interesting filmmaker whom you might or might not know, as posts here so frequently seem to do. As stated above, the blog will see you tomorrow, and I will see you via the p.s. at a radically different time again on Friday. ‘Til then.

 

‘With Christine Brooke-Rose’s last novel, with the nouveau novelist reflecting the old, and vice versa, Brooke-Rose has found her paradoxical form. The death of the author is proof of the life. “La representation est la morte.” Brooke-Rose quotes Derrida in her essay “Id is, is id?”. Of course, Life, End of begins its final “representation” in an intimate impersonality, a tonal state of oxymoron, an absence of presence. Someone is not looking in a mirror. Or rather, a mirror is not being looked in. Instead, “the head top leans against the bathroom mirror so that the looking glass becomes the feeling glass. But what does it feel? The position is for body balance during the brushing of teeth and the washing of face neck arms and torso”. A stream of consciousness at once acute and numbed tells us what it means to get up and get dressed with great difficulty. A page later in the flow of it, the question about feeling returns: “but who feels what?”. Another page on, “does steel or glass or napkin or ground or earth or universe feel? Humans invent gods of various kinds to think so”. A meditative mind, connected and disparate, ponders and enacts what it means to feel in the light of an absence of feeling, to see the self in the light of an absence of self.

‘The story is very simple. A woman (a “doctor in mere Language and Literature” – a character? a narrator? the author? all three?) is getting older. Friends visit, people care, or don’t. Things worsen. She has a couple of falls; “the author collapses, into the character again”. A table with wheels is bought, to make things easier, and it causes a raft of new difficulties. She likes to write, “just for fun, for therapy, for the happiness of wordplay, the deep joy of sentences creating other sentences”, but writing is getting more and more difficult as time passes.

‘A play of light and shadow, depending on the time of day, projects the protean faces of the great artists, thinkers and mythical characters who have been part of the woman’s life on to a stone wall outside. Mozart, Beethoven, Athena and Christ are nothing but shadow and light on stone. Nothing much happens, other than “the swift dismantling of a lifetime’s independence”. It feels epic. In a flurry of hilarious and crushing selfishnesses and unlooked-for generosities, the world closes in – “the armchair, the world” – and the old person fluctuates between being just another dismissible and invisible old person and a crucial centre of consciousness.

‘A “hip-bone” used to balance a body carrying a tray across a room becomes a vital means of “articulation”. But articulation is going, the way of all flesh “‘even languages die, like species, thousands per century” – and nothing is simply personal in this helpless leave-taking, because at all points the meditative narrator/non-narrator comments on a mirrored set of goodbyes and hierarchies in the larger world. A bigger dying is happening: “so the world doffs its ozone hat and says goodbye”. The import is much wider, the personal is always political: “modern powers, like old monarchies, don’t hear the people till they flood the streets of the whole world like blood in blocked arteries. Can we marginalise three-quarters of the world population and get away with it? Can we imagine the other?”.

‘The narratorial consciousness, daunted, sharp and utterly contemporary, comments on its own fading progress, on the rhetorical closedness of contemporary rhetoric, and then on the empire-building acts of the “Unilateral States of America”. Life, End of is about all sorts of critical reductions. In a discussion about what creates an “. . .” and a “you”, and what it means to write anything for publication in an era when no one is much interested in anything other than “the author’s tooth-ache, sex-life, quarter-hour of glory” at the expense of being interested in “the writing of fiction and its problems”, it critiques its own readers, in all their possible generosities and closednesses. Or is this, after all, only a story of social graces? Its increasingly likeable, grumpy old lady holds forth.

‘Good manners are timeless, spaceless, classless: simply the ability to imagine the other. As an intelligence officer learns to do, if efficiently backed and not corrupted, experiencing a whole war from the enemy viewpoint. And as a novelist does all the time, creating characters. And actors.

‘In a fusion of weariness and sprightliness, Life, End of becomes its own thesis on creativity in action. It suggests at all points that really, creativity lies in imaginative selflessness, in an openness to connectivity and empathy or “the ability to imagine the other”. The “performance” here, given with a formal distance reminiscent of Greek tragedy, is one of voice and inferred response to voice. It is a question of dialogue. “Who’s talking to whom?” The narratorial voice is a fine creation, funny and “intelligentle”, bolshy and consumed by a fetish for identification and categorization, which it knows is its own doom.

‘It divides people into T. F.s (True Friends) or O. P.s (Other People, or “Old People, Over-sensitive People, Otiose, Obdurate, Obsolete people . . . Omega people. Omega. The end of the alphabet. The end of life”). In this last fictional Brooke-Rose opposition, “other” becomes the opposite of “true”, and anyone un-able to be empathetic is inviting a falseness. This “ability to imagine” is pressed formally even further, when the reader is asked, politely of course, to enter (and therefore create) a lived text -via writing which is as fluid and closed/ open as another’s thought process. In fact, the reader of Life, End of is always being conjured up and interrogated, simply because this novel’s narratorial self is such a measured avoidance of the first-person. Its mode is stubbornly, ingeniously immersed in the difficulties of grammatical and real-life passivity.

‘It never simply says, “I can’t pick up an object”, but instead up-ends such a structure: “objects also have trouble being picked up”.

‘This asks the reader both to accept this passivity and to be active, to make the personal (and by inference larger-than-personal) connection, to allow for all that goes on slalom-like between intelligent people, all that is written, read, sung, pictured, thought. A discourse that zigzags like blood pressure, changing registers, personal one moment, metaphysical the next, philosophical, catty, humourous (sic), technical on the disciplines shared, frivolous, rhetorical, witty, political, historical, personal again.

‘It is up to its reader to notice how words and images accrue meaning in context, and how the recurring image of a mirror, or “mouroir” might reflect into and out of the text, with “old age a mirror of childhood . . . the child trips towards its mother, the old towards Mother Nature, looking into a glass darkly”.

‘Life, End of is rarely dark. As you might expect with Brooke-Rose, it is gravely playful and connective, so that even at its most hopeless, even when it most closely courts an end, it refuses its own darkness. Its end is plain and lyrical. “The time, the time for everything is gone.” But the synapse connections, from word to word, word to book, book to reader, person to person, never actually stop. How can a discussion of the removal of the self – which is what this novel is, formally and substantively – be so full of the evocation of self? How can a novel about ends be so full of overtures, so that almost every unexpected connection between a word or a thought, a phrase or a sentence, becomes a possible new start? Is it possible to outface meaninglessness with so much determined meaning? And who dies first, the character or the author? “Ah, identity again”, the narratorial voice sighs, caught up in the dialogue between life force and death force, exhausted and relieved. In the play of the mind regardless, in the very recording of the process of dying, through this lovely, playful, heartbreaking, wise, angry and endlessly moving novel which even in its last line is still punning on language, literature and ends, there is, of course, an ending, and yet there is no such thing as death.’ — Ali Smith

 

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Further

‘Christine Brooke-Rose: the great British experimentalist you’ve never heard of’
‘On Christine Brooke-Rose’ @ Bookforum
The Christine Broke-Rose Papers
CB-R @ goodreads
‘Flinch Wince Jerk Shirk’
‘The life and work of the late, great experimental writer, Christine Brooke-Rose’
‘Where Do We Go from Here?’
‘THE CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE SOCIETY SYMPOSIUM’
‘WHOSE AFRAYED OF CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE?’
‘The Criticism of Christine Brooke-Rose’
‘The Lunatic Fringe’, by Christine Brooke-Rose
‘R.I.P. Christine Brooke-Rose’
‘Christine Brooke-Rose, for whom Cooking Metaphors Don’t Fry’
‘Literature’s Ghosts: Realism and Innovation in the Novels of Christine Brooke-Rose’
Audio: ‘Red Rubber Gloves’, by Christine Brooke-Rose
‘The Secret Code Language of Bright Kids’
‘Place and Space in Christine Brooke-Rose’s “Life, End of”‘
Buy ‘Life, End Of’

 

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Extras

Manuscript for Christine Brooke-Rose’s ‘Xorandor’

 

Pages from Christine Brooke-Rose’s ‘Thru’

 

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Interview
from The Review of Contemporary Fiction

 

Q: In your essay “Ill Iterations,” which you wrote for “Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction,” you mention the difficulties experimental writers face when they are male, but you say also that the differences are compounded when the experimental writer happens to be a female. Will you talk about those difficulties for the woman writer?

CBR: Yes, although it took a long time to become aware of them. Once in Paris, quite a long time ago, Helene Cixous rang me up and asked me to write something about the difficulties I’ve had as a woman writer. Naively, I said, “Well, I haven’t had any difficulties as a I “woman” writer. I’ve had difficulties that “any” writer would have; can I write about that?” And she said, “Oh, no.” She wanted something feminist. I was a bit antifeminist in those days, in the early 1970s. I didn’t consciously feel that I had had any difficulties. My later revision of that feeling came from genuine experience. As I look back over my career I realize that, in fact, I did have difficulties, but I took them for granted, as part of the nature of things. From the moment I went experimental, however, when I wrote Out, and my then-publishers couldn’t understand it and turned it down, I did actually start having difficulties. And when I wrote that essay for you, I started looking back and thinking about it, trying to fathom it out, and I became aware that the woman experimental writer has more difficulties than the man experimental writer, in the sense that, however much men have accepted women’s writing, there is still this basic assumption, which is unconscious, that women cannot create new forms. They can imitate others, they can imitate their little lives, tell their love stories and their difficulties and so on, and they do it extremely well. I’m not downgrading that kind of writing. But if by any chance they dare to experiment, then they are imitating a male movement, and usually one that’s already dead. In my case, I always get the label “nouveau roman” in English because “nouveau roman” is, from the English point of view, safely dead and no one talks about it anymore. In other words, all one is capable of as a woman is to do what the men do, and not so well. There is an unconscious refusal, really, to look at what I’m doing in any kind of detail. Whereas men experimenters or innovators of any kind do get that sort of attention.

Q: What does the phrase “utterly other discourse” from “Amalgamemnon” mean for you? Do you feel that you are writing “utterly other discourses”?

CBR: In Amalgamemnon, it doesn’t actually mean that. It doesn’t refer to the writing, it refers to the woman reading and thinking quite other things until she has to switch back to talking to the man. In fact, though, I do feel that my writing is differen
t. I haven’t actually seen other writing quite like mine, but it is very difficult for me to say how “other” it is, or even whether it’s any good. I can’t really judge it, so I can’t really answer that questions. I do what I want to do.

Q: But you did make a conscious decision at one point in your career to write the indeterminate novel, rather than something realistic?

CBR: What a strange opposition. The realistic novel has its own indeterminacies. But anyway, it didn’t happen that way at all. It was much more negative than that. I was simply dissatisfied with what I was doing. I had written four novels, which are really quite traditional, satirical, comic novels. I did experiment with time in one of them, which was written backwards, for instance, so that in each chapter the hero gets younger and younger. But that was still classical irony. They were basically traditional modern novels, if I can use such a phrase, in that the main concern was, like most novels, epistemological, concerned with reality and illusion. But I felt it was too easy. It was great fun, but it wasn’t what I wanted. Originally, when I was very young, I used to write poetry every day, but I soon discovered that I was not a poet; but that urge to write poetry . . .

Q: But you are a poet.

CBR: Perhaps, but I had to get around to it in a very different way. I then thought I had found myself as a novelist, but after those four early novels I realized it still wasn’t what I wanted. So eventually—yes, I do now write very poetic novels, more deeply poetic at any rate than the poems I was writing every day. At the time of this dissatisfaction, I suppose it was Nathalie Sarraute’s The Age of Suspicion, and her putting the modern novel in question, which was the first turning point for me, much more so than her novels, for although I like them very much, I can’t say there’s a direct influence of Nathalie Sarraute on what I write. Whereas Robbe-Grillet did have a direct influence, at least on Out. But I soon got out of it. So it wasn’t a decision to write indeterminate novels as such. It was simply a decision not to go on writing as I used to write. But the other thing that happened was much more important. I had a very serious illness, lost a kidney and had a very long convalescence. I fell into a semi-trancelike state for a long time. I was very much thinking of death as the meaning of life. And I began to write Out, which is a very “sick” novel. I think one can feel that. I imagine a time when the whites are discriminated against; the whole color bar is reversed. But the reason the whites are discriminated against is because they are sick, dying from this mysterious radiation disease to which the colored people are more immune. My protagonist is a sick old man who cannot get a job and cannot remember his previous status. This exactly reproduced the state of illness that I was in, so in that sense of protection it was still a very mimetic novel. But I wasn’t consciously trying to do anything different. I started writing a sentence and fell back on the pillow exhausted. I didn’t really know where I was going, and it took me a long time to write it. I was groping. So I don’t think it was a conscious decision. But then with Such I really took off on my own. I don’t think there’s any more influence of Robbe-Grillet on Such. I would say that Such is my first really “Me” novel, where I don’t owe anything to anyone else.

Q: Can you characterize that “Me-ness”?

CBR: I think Such is more imaginative, for one thing. It’s still, of course, concerned with death since the man dies and is brought back to life. Again, I don’t explain why. I get much more interested, in fact, in the impact of language on the imagination. I suppose it’s really with Between that I discovered what I could do with language. With Such it’s still a fairly straightforward use of language, but very much in another world with this slow return to reality as the man comes back to life, but he then sees the stars as radiation. And having hit on that idea but not really knowing where I was going, I then had to do a lot of work, learn something about astrophysics, for example, since I was using it as a metaphor for the world. It’s in Such that I discovered that jargon, of whatever kind, has great poetry. For instance if you take a scientific law and use it literally, it becomes a metaphor. Of course, this is a schoolboy joke. If the teacher says, “Weight consists of the attraction between two bodies, ” everybody giggles. But if you take it further and use more complicated astrophysical laws about bouncing signals on the moon, for instance, to express the distance between people, then it becomes a very active metaphor. Yet it’s treated as ontological in the world of the fiction, like a sunset or a tree. So this sort of thing, you see, isn’t a conscious decision, it’s a discovery.

Q: Is that how you would define the experimental novel?

CBR: Yes, in a way. People often use the term “experimental novel” to mean just something peculiar, or as a genre in itself (on the same level as “realistic” or “fantastic” or “romantic” or “science” fiction). But to experiment is really not knowing where you’re going and discovering. Experimenting with language, experimenting with form and discovering things, and sometimes you might get it wrong and it just doesn’t come off. When I discovered that there is great beauty in technical language (and this comes into its own in Thru where I actually use critical jargon as poetry), I also discovered that there’s beauty and humor in confronting different discourses, jostling them together, including, for instance, computer language. In Such it’s astrophysics and in Between it’s all the languages, the lunatic, empty speech-making of different congresses, political, sociological, literary and so on, and of course, actual languages, different languages, all jostled together, since my protagonist, who’s a simultaneous interpreter, is always in different countries. Discourse became my subject matter. So discovery is one meaning of “experimental,” and this would be, to answer your earlier question, my “utterly other discourse,” where the actual language is different from the language you and I are using now, or that I find in other books. The second meaning is to see how far I can go with language, with vocabulary and syntax, and this is much more conscious. In Between, for example, a sentence can continue correctly, but by the end of it we are elsewhere in time and space. And I chose an imposed constraint, not using the verb “to be,” just as in Amalgamemnon I decided to use only non-realizing tenses and moods like the future, the conditional, the imperative.

Q: Your work, for many readers, is extremely demanding. Although novels like Amalgamemnon provide realistic details as a frame for the abstract elements, it’s often difficult to separate them. In fact, the text seems quite porous as the abstract and realistic commingle. One must read in a new way, so to speak.

CBR: I don’t apologize for that at all. One of my aims in writing the way I do is to teach people to read. They have forgotten how to read. I want what Barthes calls the writerly text as opposed to the readerly text—the readerly text is the consumer product, which can be flicked through. I’m not against that—to read on the train or in the bath. But where is the pleasure of reading if, in fact, you’re just going to skip through description? The very word “redundancy” comes back here because, as you know, structuralists did a lot of work on this—what is the description, what is the effect of the real, how is the effect of the real provoked, and so on. There is a vast amount of redundancy in the realistic novel which the reader skips. That was the point, swelling the detail to fantasy pitch, the fetish object. But today people get that from other media and read just for the plot, for the event, and they don’t really want to know what the writer is doing. I think this is a tremendous loss. So what Barthes calls the writerly text is the text which the reader is writing with the writer—I want to share my writing with the reader. Of course, that means the reader has to wake up and see what I’m doing. All the writers of the postmodern movement are doing this; I’m not the only one. Many people say that my novels are difficult; indeed, a lot of people complain about it, but when my fans say that, it’s a compliment. They go back and see that I’ve done this, or that. They say my books are slow reading, and consider this a pleasure. If I achieve that, then I am very pleased.

Q: Your two most recent works, Amalgamemnon and Xorandor, seem, in many ways, more readable than some of the earlier works—also innovative, but more accessible. Are you doing this intentionally?

CBR: Probably, yes. It’s a little exasperating to be told all the time that one is difficult and unreadable, but also don’t forget that my path had to go through Thru, which is a very special sort of unreadable book. I had to write it because—there I was teaching narratology and being a writer. The contradiction, the tension, was such that I had to write Thru, which is a novel about the theory of the novel. It’s the most self-reflexive novel that it’s possible to write. It’s a text about intertextuality, a fiction about fictionality. But it is very difficult and I knew that I would be rapped on the knuckles. Still, I needed to write it, I needed to send up the structuralist jargon, also to use it as poetry, to use the very jargon on narratology as metaphor, in a way, to deconstruct it. It’s a very Derridean book. In fact, all the things it spelled downwards in the beginning, announcing certain themes acrostically, are straight out of Derrida. I was influenced by Derrida at the time, but I didn’t want to do just a deconstruction of realism. . . . Yes, that really is a very difficult novel. It was almost written tongue-in-check for a few narratologist friends. I never thought it would be accepted. It was something I had to do. My publisher loved it; at least my editor loved it, the publisher was perhaps not quite so pleased, and of course, it didn’t sell. And after that I did realize that I had probably, career-wise as they say, done myself a lot of harm because I was really dismissed as completely potty, doing surrealistic tricks and typography, and so on. It’s written for people who understand narratology and the crisis of representation. If you like, it’s a little bit as though I wrote a book entirely on engineering that only engineers could understand.

Q: However, many readers, particularly American readers, know narratology in fairly superficial ways, and they probably could follow much of Thru—more than you might think.

CBR: That’s good, because I had so accepted the fact that people found it unreadable that, I suppose, with Amalgamemnon I really did make a big effort. There were many versions of that. It took nearly nine years to get it right, although I did produce a critical book as well. It took me so long to get it right, partly because of this question of tone, because the future tense can sound very portentous, and I didn’t want that, but also because I wanted it to be readable, and the first versions were not. They were kind of thick and dense. So yes, there has been a conscious effort. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s also come naturally. I’m more at ease, and I’m happier in my writing, as you pointed out yourself. Perhaps I communicate better and have simply learned my trade. It’s taken me a long time! But it’s true that in Xorandor I went back to telling a story, though I still had to do it in this way, with the kids quarreling about how to tell it themselves. Yes, I quite agree. The two novels I have in my head that are to follow will probably be easier to read. But I still think that people should take pleasure in reading, that it is up to the writer to write in such a way as to direct the attention of the reader to the richness of the possibilities of language. Because otherwise we’re just going to lose language, this sloppy, almost un-English English that everyone is talking. People are just not aware of the solidity of their language. It’s sliding away. Of course, something always comes to replace it, but I still think that unless we do something the whole reading and writing capacity is going to just disappear. Do what? Well, all one solitary writer can do is to fight against this consumer-product attitude, to make people enjoy working with you.

Q: Then can we assume that we do not need to worry that you’re moving towards realism?

CBR: Were you worrying? Well, I might be, you know. I have nothing against realism. Why not? I think I say somewhere in “A Rhetoric of the Unreal” that realism may come back, but in a new form, refreshed by all this. We already have magic realism and hyper-realism after all. Fantastic realism. The real made unreal and vice versa. Sometimes there is a period of tremendous experiment, and then somehow the old thing comes back again, renewed by all the experimenting that’s been going on. That may be the only useful purpose of such an experiment, I just don’t know. But that doesn’t concern me too much. I also think that the way “experiment” is set against “realism,” the way I and others are said to be working against the “realistic” novel, is a great oversimplification. Even the most experimental, most postmodern writer is still basically realistic. They may not be “imitating” reality, in the sense of reproducing a familiar situation, but ultimately they’re representing something. There’s always a representative function simply because language is representative. There have been very naive attitudes towards representation, and we’ve all become much more self-conscious about it, but I don’t think we can actually get out of representation.

 

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Book

Christine Brooke-Rose Life, End Of
Carcanet Press

‘She is eighty. Facing death, she becomes ‘a cruising mind’, lost in sequences of unabstract comic detail, in – as the title implies – a kind of index, rigid, arbitrary, pointing backwards into the lived text. The head top leans against the bathroom mirror so that the looking glass becomes a feeling glass. She is getting worse day by day, and yet she goes on, deeper into meaning, into non-meaning, with a kind of wry eagerness. She is not disappointed with her life. In order to distract herself, to place herself, she attends to what the media say about the world as if what they say was actually the world. She reflects on her own career, on her experiments with narrative, and on the narrative she is writing here: therapy, fun, but anything else, anything more? What is its purpose, and what the purpose of the life that lives it in the writing? She discovers how, as in fiction, as in any form of experiment, the difficulty for the handicapped is less the handicap than other people, and they too have their lives and handicaps. She becomes like them, she becomes one of them, an other person. Reasserting herself, at the centre of the book, in a mock-technical lecture from a character to an author who is not interested, she comes to accept that her experiments in narrative are like pain-killers, and that they no longer matter, like life.’ — Carcanet Press

 

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Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** JM, Too true. Awesome, I look forward to seeing and maybe even meeting Adam. I don’t know ‘Calendar Girls’. I’ll check. My mom used to take me to see musicals sometimes, but not that one. I saw ‘The Music Man’ with Dick Van Dyke, and I liked it! Best of all luck with that. Big lush day! ** David Ehrenstein, Christophe’s play involves the ghosts of a number of French artists of different stripes who died of AIDS meeting up and talking about, well, AIDS and dying mostly: Demy, Guibert, Serge Daney, and others. And its mostly a comedy. ** kier, Hey, hey! Ha ha, you caught that. Well, there’s always a very small chance they’ll renig at the last monent, but the huge chances are that, yes, PGL’s French poster will be a drawing (maybe two) of yours, maestro! We’re supposed to finish it before we leave for the US on Thursday, and, if we do, I’ll send you a jpeg. And of course grab you an actual poster. Well, the first poster was in English, and also the French distributor didn’t really like it. We like it okay, but it was far from our decision or first choice. So we don’t mind, obviously. We’d actual proposed a poster with your art originally back then to our international distributor, but they said no because they thought people would think it was an animated film, ha ha. Fabeldyrene was actually there for quite a long time, but it was near death when we visited Kongeparken. I got in touch with the guy who designed it, and he says it’s safely in storage. No, no Norway news yet. We’re nervously watching our email. I don’t think there’s a problem, but I do hope we get firm positive news soon. I’m pretty sure I can get you into ‘Crowd’ if it sells out. I’m good. Just in pre-trip mode, and trying to get things done, meaning a bit stressed and out of sorts. Hooray about the nearly finis MFA! Snowy, sigh. We might get some snow today or tomorrow, but all that’ll mean is it will be more of hassle to go to the airport, so meh. So good to see you, pal! Hopefully Oslo news and poster very soon! ** Grant Maierhofer, Hi, Grant. Ooh, that video looks tasty. I’ll hit when I’m done here. Thank you! ** Dominik, Hi! Yep, it was sweet: London. Mm, to be honest, I wasn’t so into ‘Sorry Angel’, although I do like Christophe’s films. People liked it, or some did. Personally, I think there are other films of his that I’d recommend watching first. The play was a bit mixed for me. It’s part of a trilogy of projects about AIDS that he just completed. There are things I liked about it, but it was also really conventional theater-like and sentimental in a way that didn’t get to me so much. Cool that the Schroeder left a mark. I leave for the West Coast very early on Thursday morning. I’ll be doing the p.s. off and on while I’m away. I’ll explain how that’ll work tomorrow. You have an amazing week … well, I was going to say ‘too’, but mine will likely be a bit stressy and then swamped by jet lag. See you soon! ** Steve Erickson, The only thing I can suggest, which I’m sure I’ve suggested before, if what my host suggests to those having issues: Either clear your cache or trying accessing the blog in a private browser window. I’m sorry. Oh, shit. I hope the arm thing turns out to be something easily solveable. They don’t have any clue what’s causing it? ** _Black_Acrylic, I don’t think I knew about Flamingo Land, which is odd since I’m such a wannabe expert. Cool. Wow, you send your zine to the printer so soon? I didn’t realise it was that close to reality. Excitement central! ** Nik, Hi. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride is truly one of the most genius things to exist on this plant we call Earth. I like thrill junkie parks. Six Flags Magic Mountain is one, and it’s a heaven on earth candidate. I’ll look up Houdini’s Great Escape. Promising moniker. That definitely helped, thanks, man. Six Flags Great Adventure is firmly on my to-do list. Great about the first day! That Rimbaud line is interesting because every translator seems to totally reinvent how it works, sign of a great original sentence, I guess. I’ve never been to Joe’s Pub. It’s pretty legendary. No, sorry, I haven’t gotten to the email yet. I’m scrambling to finish stuff before I leave. I’ll try to get to it before I fly away on Thursday morning if I can. If not, I will as soon as my jet lag dies. You have a great day, and great second day too! ** Misanthrope, Kings Dominion has Twisted Timbers which is highly rated among roller coaster rankers. Tomorrow … means today? If so, I reroute my best wishes to the here and now. Fuck, man, yeah, let the doctor have at you. Enough of that shit. ** Jay, Hi there! Great to see you! Oh, that’s interesting about the evolution (devolution?) of your relationship with coasters. Yikes. Well, me, personally, my great love is dark rides, so hopefully you still have those to indulge in. No souring whatsoever. All things park-related are manna on my front. Take care. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. I like kiddie lands and rides too. it’s frustrating to be told one is too old, i.e,. large to ride them, although kiddie rides are often better from relatively afar, except, well, if you’re a kid. Oh, never mind. I want to go to Shanghai Disney bad! You guys should go. You really should. ** Okay. Today … oh, yeah, I decided to throw some more light on the work of the great Christine Brooke-Rose. One of those ‘doesn’t get enough due’ greats, in my opinion. Check it out. See you tomorrow.