Please welcome to the world … ‘Paresis’ and ‘Genesis 0’, two novels of hypnotic abduction by Isabelle Nicou – now published in English translation for the first time (Amphetamine Sulphate)

Isabelle Nicou is a French writer (b.1969)

Studying philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Isabelle began researching phenomenology and the works of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, eventually working with Derrida for some years during her studies.

She published her first novel, Paresis, in 2002 and her second, Genesis 0, in 2007. In 2015, Isabelle played the role of Nora in the movie Love by Gaspar Noé, selected for the Cannes Film Festival the same year. She is currently finishing her third book, Stricture.

 

from Paresis:

—-The paresis conquered my entire right side in a procession of patient and orderly ants. Pins and needles pulsating across my cheek, my leg, my arm, followed by a disturbing heat that flooded them intermittently; then the anesthesia took everything away. There was no pain. I let myself be occupied by your absence; I waited without trying to understand. Almost without moving.
—-A few days after the first rush of desire – my mouth on your lips, seeking your tongue – after those words that lodged themselves in the pit of my being and yet held no meaning for me, when all I wanted was for your body to never leave me in peace, came the waiting, the endless putting off of things. What was so repugnant about me that your hand wouldn’t venture to touch my breasts, to reach under my sweater or stroke my stomach? That you wouldn’t make the slightest attempt to undress me or lead me to your place?
—-What was electric in our joining turned aseptic, doctored, calculated as our depravity played itself out. And if you bit the back of my neck, it was with such effort that I wondered if you hadn’t sensed, nearby, a sudden decompensation: a collapsing building, an accident, a scream…

from Paresis:

I quickly re-buttoned my dress and ran to catch up with you. You were smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk. We walked towards Bastille. The sun was very low in the sky. The feeling that I’d just decoded some part of you assuaged what was left of my confusion. I wished you had hit me. I would have let you do it; I’d do anything now for you to touch me. But like before, I was mired in the morass of indifference. Exiled to the darkest of my abandoned-little-girl fears, I dwelled on your indifference, when what I wanted was to be the beloved doll with the long, curly, blonde nylon hair, the doll that I hid behind the tool shed – buried naked in the dirt – out of love, so that mom wouldn’t force me to throw it away because it was so ugly and damaged.

 

from Genesis 0:

As soon as my eyes close, I’m besieged by waves of blood. A piece of flesh floats in with the tide. No panic, only silence and then the sound of the bloody debris when it comes crashing into my wall. I’m a rampart. An enclosure. A stronghold. Very strong, and I’m afraid of nothing. Certainly not of blood, of its stench of warm entrails and iron dust.
—-Tomorrow I’ll gain what life will lose: defeat of my body – of the teeming power of the body – that will disgorge its excess of blood and return me to myself, alone, cut off from all lineage and with no line of descent. Being done with this tension in my breasts. Done with the stigmata of your existence and all those that pass through me in the place where you cling. Done with being possessed like this, double-stitched, overlocked, woven into a web that covers me like a shroud. Tomorrow, it’s the women in my family, their tide of hemoglobin A, that I’ll abort. Once the pills are absorbed, I would wait to be delivered. Alone. Free of all lineage and with no line of descent. Eternal. The genesis and the lack. The apocalypse and its angel. Now and forever. The point zero. O.

 

Isabelle Nicou In brief, 2009

Isabelle Nicou A Bridge Too Long, 2018

 

Buy

USA (bundle offer):
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UK/EU:
Paresis: https://cargorecordsdirect.co.uk/collections/amphetamine-sulphate/products/isabelle-nicou-paresis

Genesis 0: https://cargorecordsdirect.co.uk/collections/amphetamine-sulphate/products/isabelle-nicou-genesis

 

Interview with Isabelle Nicou

AS: I’m sorry if I’m suggesting too much here but having read your books, I can’t help but imagine the difficulty you must have had when the books were initially released in France. I’m referring specifically to the idea that certain readers would lose themselves in narrative rather than the interiority. There’s a subtlety to the work that is disarming -and all the more dangerous because of that. Without wanting to give too much away, I guess, I have to ask – do you see a question here?

IN: Well, first I don’t care about “a” reader. Writing, I’m all in the stream of consciousness and don’t imagine any alterity. This is probably why I wasn’t surprised when there was no reaction to the publication of Paresis and Genesis 0 in France: I’m rather alone in my world. The narrative, as strong as it is, is also extremely common: a woman having a breakup or an abortion, you find these elements in a lot of novels. What is really important to me is how deep the “I” can get, how the first-person writing permeates the reader, how an “I” supplants another… In fact, reading, as I practice it and as I would like to induce it, is an experience of mental alienation. Just like love in Paresis, where my heroine gives life in herself, through a slight paralysis, to the man who forsakes her. To get it better, I love to quote Charles Baudelaire about this weird chiasma: “I am the wound and the knife! / I am the slap and the cheek! / I am the limbs and the rack, / And the victim and the executioner!”… This chiasma is disarming, I think. It’s the defeat of classical logic and the beginning of something else, weirder, I’m deeply interested in, something English literature loves more than the French does: the Unheimlichkeit, which deals with the moving frontiers of the ego.

AS: Danger or interiority? There is a struggle between protection and, say, projection…. A brutal understanding of certain complexities within acts and acting, wanting and delivering, praying and deconstructing…

IN: I love when you say there’s a tension between protection and projection. In both books, the heroines try to talk from the boundaries of the ego, they try to protect themselves from an alterity as well as they define themselves a hollow by this alterity. In fact, they are the frontier, not more than this, and everything that happens in their world has an immediate intimate resonance on them, as well as the opposite. It’s a baroque construction, and, therefore, it’s not a struggle between elements, it’s a sway between, like you said, wanting and delivering, praying and deconstructing.

AS: Your studies have been in phenomenology? Were these books necessary as part of your studies – to test theories, examine a bit closer to the bone than theory, say?

IN: No, philosophy is secondary to my interest for literature. When I was a kid I had a little voice in me telling I was a writer. I had nothing to say but, of course, wanted to be deep. So, I studied philosophy: metaphysic first, then phenomenology and deconstruction with a special interest for silence and via negativa. I’m sure these researches influenced my writing, but it’s not my place to analyze how much.

AS: Are you challenging the idea of god or religion? Ego is especially prominent in Paresis and, there if I knew more, I’d ask if you were challenging Freud and the later linguists?

IN: I’m not challenging anyone, I’m playing with occidental culture objects. Love and Ego, in Paresis, God and the idea of Creation in Genesis 0.

AS: There’s a hard reality to your work; they’re recognizable and all the more violent because of the subtlety. Here’s a rough question… Is this something you needed to investigate or express?

IN: Yes, definitely. But I don’t want to enter into the psychological field here. Books are symptoms, not explanations.

AS: Is it brutal…? There’re conclusions but not polemics. Is it possible that the space between those – the polemical, political, instructions and demands needed to be excised?

IN: You need a proper alterity to get polemical demands. In the stream of consciousness, the heroines are never facing any objection they don’t feel the necessity. Therefore, any kind of brutality is absent… And the more I talk to you, the more I think that my texts are more meditative than narrative!

AS: I don’t think they’re more meditative … more philosophically incisive and demanding, I suppose. Your use of theatre and Catholicism puts them in another dangerous territory as well. There’s a fine understanding, I think, of relationships and masks and, maybe not perversely, medicine. I worry that I might be mixing the two books together here but, it’s odd, I don’t really think I am… And the violence – one inward, one not necessarily so…?

IN: In Genesis 0, and also in Paresis, the figure of the witch is central, and with her, the idea of danger, of “pharmakon” which can be a medicine as well as a poison: it all depends on its use. The witch is also challenging catholic religion through its own language, at its borders… It’s a powerful woman figure the heroine claims for her in both books.

AS: The intricacies of the characters are the intricacies of language, is that too reductive? The narrator is doing more than earning the trust of the reader, it’s a challenge of ideals more than events possibly?

IN: Yes, it’s the same baroque construction: everything — characters, vocabulary, ideas… — is entangled. But I don’t think it’s challenging books. If they do something to their reader, I wish it is rapture. Somebody told me that once you get caught in their rhythm, the novels were hypnotic, that you found yourselves at the end of the text without knowing how. I wish it’s true, my intention is nothing but a hypnotic abduction.

AS: Did you know that, after finishing Paresis, that Genesis 0 would have to follow?

IN: I had Genesis 0 in mind, yes, but it was just an idea. With me, the process is quite long. There’s five years between the two novels, and between the second and the third I just finished — Stricture — there would be something like thirteen or fourteen years. And I don’t take my time, believe me: I’m just unbelievably slow!

AS: The books aren’t stream of consciousness – you edit them… or rewrite them?

IN: I rewrite a lot, yes. I try to get to the bone as much as possible. I always think of Mies van der Rohe and make “Less is more” mine.

AS: “Less is more” could also be a mantra of Beckett’s, especially in his later phase. And there’s also a thematic density to your work to match Beckett’s – pre-modern theology, perceptions of time, aesthetics. Art seems to be a major concern of your writing – whether it’s the masturbating voyeurs of the contemporary gallery scene or the snatched stillness of the Gemäldegalerie. Or a commodified Bellmer trussed up in the back of a truck. However wittily expressed, am I wrong to detect a disdain, or more accurately, disgust for the impoverished status of modern art, robbed of all possibilities of transcendence in this fallen world? And further to that, do you perhaps suggest an escape route, through play, individual artistic creation (your collages adorn the covers of both of these translations) and indeed, the incantatory act of writing itself?

IN: Yes, there’s a disgust for the art market, you’re right. Contemporary art interests me intensely and I can’t be in New York without spending time in Chelsea, but, at the same time, I’m really uncomfortable with the safe investment or the tax shelter an artist’s signature represents. Since Duchamp and his fountain, we know that art is in the way we look at something, whatever it is. And this look is a prayer or, as you said, an “incantatory act” to which I try to be as close as possible in the writing. In fact, I care about art because I claim to be an artist — and not only because or despite of my collages.

AS: Despite the on occasion undoubtedly harrowing content of these novels, would it be wildly perverse to regard both Paresis and Genesis 0 as dark comedies? The world is more often than not ridiculous, its denizens grotesque and craven. More in line with Dostoievski than Racine or Euripides?

IN: I agree, “dark comedies” fit. And I’m glad you were sensitive to the humor of these texts. It seems to me that nobody in France —publishers, PRs, journalists or readers— has ever been touched by the funniness! But, to me, the reference would rather be Philip Roth or Woody Allen, Sabbath’s Theatre or Melinda & Melinda. In Genesis 0, I think the comic elements are obvious: the heroine aborts on Christmas Eve and talks about her own mother as the Virgin Mary! Maybe it’s too tragic.

AS: I’d like to compliment you on the licentiousness of your prose. Writing erotic fiction is a notoriously hazardous enterprise … and there’s an imaginative boldness to the scenes of fucking in your books. Bodies come alive. I wondered if you could talk about this … and perhaps a little about literary influences? I imagine you’ve read the good, the bad, and perhaps even the ugly when it comes to this department.

IN: Well, when I started Paresis, I didn’t want to write an erotic fiction. I’m not a fan of the genre. But I wanted to describe the permeability of the boundaries between the physical and the psychic, the sensitive and the intellectual, and it was very necessary to address sexuality and give life to the bodies. I’m glad if it works. In general, I like texts that transcend their genre; to me, that’s where they break into what is called literature.

AS: Two other works of hypnotic abduction occurred to me whilst reading your books and I wonder if you knew either of them. One is The Driver’s Seat (1970) by Muriel Spark, in which an office worker travels to a foreign city (Rome) to engineer her own sexual murder. It’s not as lurid as it might sound. It’s really a philosophical, or perhaps, more accurately, metaphysical novel. Another is D.H. Lawrence’s suggestively titled The Woman Who Rode Away (1922), in which the female protagonist actively seeks her own carnal annihilation – and being Lawrence – is as lurid as it sounds. In a sense both of these works, and yours too I think, are unheimlich fairy tales – weird sensual fables that require close and repeated attention – and I also can’t help thinking Poe, or maybe the Brothers Grimm, are somehow behind all this. Did you read Poe as a child? In the Baudelaire translation? Childhood reading can be especially formative.

IN: Poe certainly, but not as a child, around 18 or 20, and in the Baudelaire’s translation of course. And later again, around 25 because of The Purloined Letter and the debate between Lacan and Derrida about intertextuality. Speaking of tales, it seems that I am obsessed with Little Red Riding Hood: it appears in every one of my books! The figure of the wolf is obviously still extremely attractive to me… But outside literary references and reading memories, I have nothing to say to those who would be interested in “sexual murder” or dark eroticism. Too often, eroticism is used as a screen for prurience. I’m certain my work is none of the three.

AS: I’m curious how you, as both a former colleague of Derrida’s and a writer who clearly chooses every word and nuance with the utmost care, approached the translation. Could you tell me a bit about the process, and the particular challenges you, and your collaborators Katie [Shireen Assef] and Peter [Sotos], faced?

IN: I don’t want to enter into the swampy territory of a Derridean, or not, writer’s relationship with a translator, but I found it very necessary to revise the original translation. Especially for Genesis 0, where the vocabulary is intentionally very connoted by pharmacy, biology and witchcraft. This revision was only possible thanks to Peter. As a writer himself, he helped me find the English formulations which came closest to the French text. It has been a long and tedious job and I thank him for it here.

AS: I wanted to ask you about acting. The protagonist of Genesis 0 is of course, an actor, or as an old fuck like me would prefer to say actress. Such a beautiful and resonant word to lose from the English language, but I digress. And of course, you played the role of Nora in Gaspar Noé’s movie Love, which of all his films I think, most repays repeated viewings. I found your performance (which is pitch-perfect) could be best described as haunted – which I find really curious considering how I felt much later on finally reading your work in translation. How do you think your experiences as an actor have informed your writing? And, indeed, being a writer shaped your approach to the craft of acting? What is the relationship between the two for you?

IN: First is the writing. The acting came afterwards through an offer from Gaspar who recognized I might be good at it. On the set, I was full of fear and searching for my words: nothing a writer doesn’t know about!

AS: Sometimes you just hear the title of an author’s forthcoming work and you know it’s going to be an instant classic! Can say a little more about the wonderfully-titled Stricture? What can the reader expect?

IN: Well, I don’t want to jinx it — especially since the text is just finished and not yet reread — but this third book is about ending an abusive relationship with a dead master and communication with the aliens. I know it sounds silly, but, just like in Paresis and Genesis 0, it’s about being parasitized and threatened within its very own ego. It’s always the same thing that interests me and that I try to transcribe.

AS: That sounds even better than I could have hoped for! Thank you so much Isabelle. Is there anything else you’d like to leave us with?

IN: No. Thank you, Philip.

===

 

from Paresis:

—-I’m nothing more than a gooey mass, ashamed of this ass that burns to be fucked immediately. Worn out by gazes, I want to sit down by the sidewalk and vomit myself out until I disappear – a puddle of shit, of mucus, of bile…

—-Take me in your arms, press yourself against me so I can smell the scent of your skin, so I can bite your lips. Tell me you love me, that my ass makes you hard, that you want to come in it until I scream. I’ll let you do what you want with me. I’ll be your mute little sister. You’ll bite the lacerations on my side, and I’ll hand you the knife so you can draw others that are more to your liking. I’ll anoint my body with a smothering balm for our Sabbath; I’ll obey without fear the rituals of your cold sperm. And even if you throw me to the mercy of your henchmen, you’ll be the only one to make me bleed. Mute, I’ll be. No more than a few soft moans if you agree to hold yourself within the deepest folds of my flesh. For the rest, I will always be silent. I promise.
—-In the lobby of your building, I walked past a young man. In the elevator, a woman and her baby smiled at me. Curled up in the doorway, an ear pressed to the door, I hear the sound of running water, a phone ringing, your voice saying hello… No cries of pain, no mysterious hissing: without me, your daily life is no different from anyone else’s – and I find myself feeling almost sorry for you…
—-I concentrate – it’s better not to reveal my impatience. Curled up on the doormat, in darkness, I will my way between the few floorboards that pass beneath the door…
—-But the magic misfires. Like molten lava, the spell flows back towards me and spills into my eye sockets. On the ground, my tongue grows thick with the taste of old polish. Tears and saliva drip down my neck. I’m suffocating. I stand up, wobbling, to ring the doorbell. Everything is knocking around inside me, everything hurts. Come, quickly…
—-No answer.
—-And so I yell, I call your name, I beat the door with my fists, with my chin, my forehead. I beg you to let me in. I hurl myself against the steel plating with all my weight, making a real racket.
—-On the other side of the doorway, a distraught voice speaks my name. The door opens halfway: “Do you plan on waking up the entire building?”
—-Your features are drawn, sunken in a frown that I don’t recognize. I try to push a shoulder through the threshold. Your palm crushes my right breast. The nervous rattling of a key in the lock, followed by a long howl and the sound of a collapsing mass.

—-How many hours did I stay there, in the half-darkness? Two? Three?… I hear the radio, your voice on the phone again. I must have bruises everywhere. My knees and ankles hurt. My eyes must be red, their dark circles made darker by eyeliner. I put on my sunglasses and lay down in the doorway. I hurt all over and it’s so sweet, so good.
—–There! The ridiculousness of the situation unites us, its grotesqueness intertwines us. You are here with me and you can’t do anything to stop it. I exist. The evidence of my presence on the doormat holds you in its grip. Stay still…

from Genesis 0:

—-I realized it yesterday. My habit of crossing the street far from traffic lights and crosswalks had provoked the blast of a car horn that echoed for a long moment, vibrating in my ribs and collarbone until it pushed me up against the trunk of a tree. The asphalt was still swaying to the sound of the neume, reverberating off the metal bodies of cars, when, lying on the sidewalk on boulevard de Sébastopol, teeth grinding, I distinctly heard a voice breathe behind me: “Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Is this how the child leaped in your womb?”

 

 

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p.s. Hey. This weekend the blog gets to do one of its favorite things, i.e. pulling off a kind of presto change-o number that transforms it into a kind of red carpet, in this case to help platform some  breaking news from literary underground powerhouse Amphetamine Sulfate. Trusted French friends of mine have been telling me about Isabelle Nicou’s books for a long time, so this birth is especially happy for me since I’ll finally be able to read her. Please spend the local segment of your weekend getting to know the books and then doing what comes naturally. Thanks! And many thanks to AS for putting this post together and thinking of DC’s. ** Ferdinand, Hi, Ferdinand. Nice to see you, sir. I certainly regard well appointed noise as a brain cleanser among other things. Hope it scrubbed. Hope the loop leaked, exploded, whatever need be. ** David Ehrenstein, I haven’t seen John since he moved out of my Los Feliz neighborhood quite some time ago. He’s definitely pretty up there, age-wise. A friend of mine’s publishing house here in France put out one of his old novels a couple of years ago, and my friend was in touch with him re: that and said he seemed okay. That’s all I know. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Better than its absence by a long shot. I’m afraid I’m going to have to supplement your wonderful love by making love hire you and me to teach its high school’s sex education class, G. Have a top-notch weekend! ** Sypha, I haven’t clicked on my Coil mp3s for ages. I think I’ll do that too, post-haste. ** _Black_Acrylic, Me too! When I was a kid I used to intentionally not oil my mechanical toys so they would grind and grind. ** T, Howdy, T! Thanks, me as well. it’s a crapshoot, obviously. High hopes for you guys’ easing up, but, yeah, it’s impossible to tell the future’s fortune right now. I was going to say after reading your descriptions of your videos that you should hunt them down if they’re lost, but you beat me to it. When I was in high school I made a super8 sound ‘avant-garde’ film that was or seemed so awful that even my arty friends who knew their shit told me I should hang up my wannabe filmmaker hat immediately, which I immediately did, but now I wonder if I wasn’t just really ahead of my time. Luckily, in my case, that film is long, long lost so I’ll never know. I’m really glad the sounds and noises spoke to you. Vegan chocolate cake is way up there in my estimation, or can be. Today, finally, I am hitting that donut shop, and I promise a full review, that is if I don’t die of sugar poisoning because they are severely not vegan. Have the best weekend in your recent memory! ** Steve Erickson, I’ve never watched ‘Hannibal’. You make me kind of want to. Everyone, Don’t let your weekend end before you find out what Mr. Erickson thinks about ‘THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT’S A RESURRECTION (whose excellent score suggests a shoegaze remix of orchestral music)’, which you can do by poking this. ** Bzzt, Hey, Q. You could wear it … hm, in the shower? Or, in the spirit of yesterday’s post, put it on your turntable and drop the needle on it and see if the noise it makes is art? Enjoy your scrunched weekend as best you can. ** Bill, Thanks, Bill. High compliment coming from you, sir. Damn, I missed the band camp first Friday thing again?! I really need to write that on a post-it and stick it where the sun shines. Thanks for the link/leg up! ** NIT, Morning, S. If it’s morning. I think because I always launch posts in the mornings I automatically assume everyone sees them in the morning which is quite a leap of faith now that I realise that. Awesome you thought there was coolness in the noise pile. Your first video teacher was cool, obviously. Yes, me too, big time, about those AS books with your involvement. Chomping. Soon or pretty soonish, I think? As today’s post only helps prove, AS is kind of the place to do one’s thing these days. Ha ha, I appreciate (and need) that love, thank you. Love that sneaks up behind you and musses your hair and says, ‘You’re the best, Steven’ and has the clout to make that simple gesture bring a tear to your eye, Dennis. ** Okay. Please make Isabelle Nicou’s books a great reason to hang out here between now and Monday. See you then.