Spotlight on … Liliane Giraudon Fur (1992)

‘The first thing that strikes the reader of the fiction of Liliane Giraudon is that she doesn’t write like anyone else. Bearing vague traces of surrealism, Giraudon’s oeuvre draws comparison with that of Leonora Carrington, Gisèle Prassinos, and Rikki Ducornet; but Giraudon is not a surrealist. Neither is she a pure fantast like her French contemporary Julia Verlanger, nor a naive meliorist in spite of all odds like her other compatriot Marie Redonnet. Her voice is hypnotic, inscrutable, unique. A trip through one of her narratives is like a somnambular stroll through a rain-soaked ravine with an unreadable road map; a ramble in fugue-state through a wilderness where signposts are written in the language of emotion and the logic of the heart.

‘Giraudon is a practitioner of silent writing—that is, writing which does not explicitly signal its meaning or purpose. Her poetically-charged prose percolates with unsaid bubblings and unstated gurglings which never surge to the surface, but rush past in irresistible riptides. Her style is discontinuous, at times even fragmentary, yet image-rich and marked by descriptive precision. This disjunctive, highly-colored verbotechny results in an exquisite fuzziness a la Mallarmé. The pieces of her puzzles are like broken mirror shards, each reflecting other parts of a larger image, but never the whole. A clue may be taken from the title of her previous collection of stories (also published by Sun & Moon) Palaksch, Palaksch: a phrase employed by deranged poet Friedrich Holderlin, to mean anything…or nothing.

‘Giraudon’s operational field is a mythic space unpolluted by references to contemporary cheese culture; her characters breathe the sterile air of psycho-emotional vacuum. Her plots and themes are enigmatic and border on the unreal, if not, at times, the non-representational; but there are badges of familiar sensibility—a preoccupation with victims and victimization, revenge motifs, and acts of unrepentant enmity—conspicuous hallmarks of the cruel tale. Her inventory is stocked with fetish and fixation, aberrant behavior, medical anomaly, atavism, evolutionary warpage, and creatic compulsion. Her characters are wounded souls, lost, lonely, often self-loathing; insular anti-heroes whose private hells slowly unravel to reveal a barely controlled hysteria. Their secret selves, propelled by instinct and animal drives, are awash with dark undercurrents of primal savagery; held in bondage by a sensuality which starts out where D. H. Lawrence left off, they grope in a stew of dream and desire, around which the deformed, the disfigured, and the denatured do a dance for domination. These prisoners of the flesh, beset by strange obsessions, teased by Aeons and Archons, tortured by twisted eroticism, are gripped by predatory forces to which they are tacitly resigned. The spirit of Dr. Moreau is everywhere: hints at moonspawn and mutant progeny abound; insinuations of union between man and beasts accentuate an exploration of biomorphic boundaries and what defines them.

‘At least two of Fur’s narratives sit squarely in the grand tradition of the cruel tale: “Clothilde’s Goat” and “The Yellow Glove.” Others are about life’s cruelties: its tantalizations and temptations, dashed hopes, and damaged dreams; about dead babies whose absence is commemorated by concluding lines like: “At this time, around her, that is, here, near us, the stars continue their monotonous course; a terrible heart disease is found in all dogs.”

‘In “Lateral Life,” the subject is bodily sacrifice; in “The Lesson,” interruption, truncation, curtailment of action, inhibition of completion; in “The Peephole,” it is a masochistic ravishment persecution fantasy, with minatory spectral participants; in “The Tie,” the thinness of the veneer separating civilization from the teeming bestiality beneath. In “The Center,” linguistic interpreters inhabit a tactile sensorium which is a metaphor for the elusiveness of the abstract, the unobtainable nature of the absolute, and the ephemerality of all things; “Pauline Buisson” is about the art of suffering, how fate exacts its pound of flesh, how people get under the skin and make each other bleed; in “Wolf Pass” the keynote is the threat of the inhuman; in “Lidia’s Leg,” cross-species loss and longing.

‘From the country which gave birth to the cruel tale, to the Theater of Cruelty and to Donatien Alphonse de Sade, comes a fresh contribution to the canon of the unkind: Fur is a book of disturbing beauty reverberant with endless mystery.’ — Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

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Further

Liliane Giraudon Site
‘Fur’ @ goodreads
Carolyn Kuebler | Review of Liliane Giraudon’s Fur
Liliane Giraudon – Detached but descriptive, enigmatic but banal: verbal assemblage of fragments, and detritus
No one reads Liliane Giraudon.
LG @ PROJECT FOR INNOVATIVE POETRY
LG English language resource
Liliane Giraudon @ Facebook
Buy ‘Fur’

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Extras

Liliane Giraudon est-ce que le monde a changé ?

Liliane GIRAUDON – Surpris par la Poésie (France Culture, 2003)

Liliane Giraudon Le travail de la viande

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Interview

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

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

As you know, I am less and less inclined to separate prose from poetry; I find it increasingly difficult to say—or dare to say!—that I’m writing a poem, because today there’s an ideological investment, a mystical one in our French tradition that appears too heavy for me in relation to my own insignificant story, which can’t find its place there. I have a feeling that in reaction to the mass of culture, I’m like a biographical accident on the road—that is, I find myself there, though I shouldn’t ever have been there! However, as I go on reading and acquiring new techniques, I realize that what is happening is an act of dispossession; rather than accumulating things, in fact I’m getting rid of them! I also believe that I shall continue to write without knowing if I’ve made it there. Well, that’s my position, when I think of writing and poetry. There’s a statement I’d like to borrow from Jacques Roubaud, which in effect says that “poetry is most contemporary today because it most exactly formulates the question of survival.” I truly feel that way. There’s something in poetry that reveals the end of something, and it may just be the end that explains the ardor within.

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

I believe, contrary to what is commonly held, that in poetry there is at the same time less danger and yet more urgency. I don’t mean danger for the one who is writing but rather in relation to the act of writing itself, and less so in forms that appear less musical, such as prose. Sometimes something happens all of a sudden, and then one truly has the sense that écriture is something that can change opinions, that it might radically transform both the world and those who read. Thus, it’s difficult for me to move forward today within these categories, because furthermore, there appears to be a protective closure as soon as poetry is mentioned, one that doesn’t function in favor of poets but rather to their detriment. I have written a book called La Réserve , because for me the word brings to mind at once the reserve section in a library and the idea of an Indian reservation. It might be urgent for me to experience the reservation, in the sense that as a child, I played at Indians and was very much taken by the fact that the Indians hadn’t been beaten but had survived with negative connotations—they had been made to look like savages, like failures.

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

SG: Do you make a conscious decision, as you begin to write, to exclude a certain subject matter, all the while alluding to it indirectly, translating some of its codes so that one who might recognize them, who might have that language in his ear, might immediately exclaim: “Yes! I recognize that sentence, the way it’s been put together. It reminds me of a particular situation.” But in your texts you have excluded the situation from which the music and the language come. I suppose for you, had you kept the context, it might have appeared too direct, or perhaps unethical.

LG: It’s all very curious. At first it was a decision, a self-imposed ban for reasons that are not always clear. There’s a reason I’ve read about that photographers give. Some photographers never photograph without asking for permission first. That shows a respect for the model, for the subject. There’s something magic in that. It may be because I don’t feel I have the right to appropriate stories or reproduce things I share with people who will not have access to them. That means that I don’t want to take forms and make of them another object that would be a reflection of the ones I’ve taken, in a slightly magical way, from those who are not able to see what I’ve done. That’s called respect, but in my case it’s also a form of superstition. It’s very odd, similar to what happens among certain tribes—there are things that are allowed, others that are not. I’m sure there’s a danger in taking from others that way—a danger for them, a danger for me; not for those who read the work. And from another point of view I also know it produces the worst kind of literature, that is, either a form of reportage or the realistic novel, which may in itself be excellent but has nothing to do with literature. For me literature must free itself from both. Therefore, I escape through a form of knowledge I take from elsewhere, though in fact I have neither the tools to do that nor the power or the strength.

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

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

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

SG: That may be so, but the texts you’ve produced are obviously part of the French language, though not necessarily of that French language we’re using around this kitchen table in Marseille! You have your own style, and I might say that, contrary to what you’ve just implied, you do have a remarkable mastery over the French language; you’ve been able to make it into a language of your own within the larger confines of the French language itself. In fact that is your signature.

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

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

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

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

There you have it. I don’t believe there is a feminine écriture. I had hoped for a more violent operation, but I don’t think it happened. It must happen from time to time; what hampers me is to be a woman and write. For me it’s a hindrance. It’s the nature of co-optation by men that is always ambiguous, that’s always either seductive or protective and, at moments of fragility, is undoubtedly dangerous for women who produce art or literature. Furthermore, when you talk about publishers . . . well, Marguerite Duras had a few harsh words to say about them! I recently heard her speak on television, and I found quite curious the hatred, the disdain that she provokes among certain intellectuals today. I found that very interesting. There must be an element of what I call barbarism in her work. She really must have reached that, because over the past three to four years she’s been involved in things people say she shouldn’t have meddled with. There’s a violent reaction to her, a true desire to dismiss her through irony—calling her “that old bag”—which is really symptomatic of something!

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Book

Liliane Giraudon Fur
Sun and Moon Press

‘A dimly-lit torture chamber, a showcase displaying genitalia and other organs, a laboratory reeking of rotting flesh, a child’s room strewn with stuffed animals – such are the settings of Fur, a collection of thirteen new tales by Liliane Giraudon.

‘In a style admirable both for what it reveals and what it fails to reveal, Giraudon continues her exploration of the frequently cruel and ambiguous dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Moving through an indeterminate atmosphere reminiscent of Beckett, marginalized characters are mysteriously drawn to one another or brutally torn apart for reasons they cannot understand or which they completely ignore, for Giraudon gives no explanation, forcing us to drawn our own conclusions and leaving us with a feeling of puzzlement and wonder.’ — Sun and Moon Press

Excerpt

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p.s. Hey. Tomorrow morning I get my booster shot, and I have to go a little ways outside of Paris to do that, and god knows how long that will take, so instead of giving you post without a p.s. tomorrow, I’m going to take the day off and come back with a post/p.s. on Thursday. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I’m happy his films intrigued you. I couldn’t really see the collages because non-members can’t enlarge anything there, and they block you before you can scroll very far, but I’ll figure out a way. Your love is so agreeable! I would continue the thread, but it might start getting a little nasty, so, uh, love peering thoughtfully at the poppers for a moment then throwing the bottle out a window and saying, ‘Fuck it, let’s go to Disneyland!, G ** David, It was your birthday yesterday! Happy happy from its aftermath, dude. My birthday is exactly a week after yours aka next Monday. Uh, I don’t really dance but I can retroactively shuffle my feet and head bang gently if that helps? Did you blow Monday out in celebration? ** Maria, Isabella, Camila, Malaria, Gabriela, Thank you for giving David the celebration I couldn’t. Well, I consider feet shuffling to be dancing, so please spare my life. You’re most welcome, multiple person! ** David Ehrenstein, Oh, wow, how cool that you had in-person encounters with Dwoskin. Not me, unfortunately, as I came to his work very late. Thank you for the wisdom! ** David Fishkind, Hi. I haven’t read your new work yet due to work-related brain devouring, but today, I think. I haven’t seen ‘Last Night in Soho’ yet, no, but thank you for reminding me. I have it on one of my freebie/illegal(?) sites, so I’ll get on it. What did you think of it? ** Tosh Berman, Magically well! Dude, speaking from my current horrible experience, if you’ve found a cool producer who’s the real deal and is someone you want to work with, that’s no small thing. Very exciting! Well, aiming high is always a good thing to do just as long as you’re a little flexible once reality is in control, ha ha. I’m so sorry that things are dark for you at moment, you of all people. We’ve already traded this homily before, I think, but art will save you. Dumb sounding but true. Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Glad you enjoyed it, Ben. How’s your writing going? ** Bill, Hi. Ah, not a bad queue there. Well, except for the Weerasethakul, but you probably won’t agree. ** l@rst, Happy New Year to you, big L! I tend to space out re: Ubuweb too. Strange. Huh, I haven’t read Douglas Coupland for almost literally a billion years. 60 super short semi-interconnected stories sounds pretty doable. Okay, I’ll search it. Thanks, buddy. Is your year starting in one digestible piece so far? ** Brian, Hey, B. Yeah, Dwoskin is strangely under-known in the US for some reason. Good stuff. We’re obligated to be masked outdoors again here. I think because it’s cold out, it doesn’t really bother me. Very cool about the screenplay and the film shoot. I really hope everything falls into place and you can do that. Sounds super fun, and, as someone who’s longing to make our new film, it sounds heavenly too. ‘Phantom’ is on Broadway?! Like, again, or has it been playing there for decades? Strange. No doomy predictions, man. Let’s bump elbows in agreement. Mm, my Monday was work-y, and the film shit is getting me down, but I saw my friend Ange for a coffee and good talk. So, it was okay. Tuesday, yours, on a scale of 1 – 10? ** Okay. Liliane Giraudon is one of the most interesting contemporary French fiction writers in (not only) my opinion. Her work is little known in the English speaking world, mostly or only because only two of her books have been translated, and both were published by a small (but very good) press. Anyway, today I spotlight one of those books, ‘Fur’, which is highly recommended to you. Check it out see if you might want to join her fanbase. See you on Thursday.