Posthumous voices present
I am using my posthumous voice to explain the consequences of hypocrisy to my children. One daughter quotes Ariana Grande, the other nibbles on the heel of ballet shoe we uncovered in the car trunk. Once upon a pre-pandemic time, the grrrls danced and wore tutus. I learned how to use a curling iron so they would not feel less love than their friends when it came time for recitals. I loathe recitals the way I loathe beauty, which is to say one stays conflicted, worried, disturbed.
The posthumous voice is tempted to shove these memories into the ceiling fan and invent a religion for the end of the world. Or what goes on after one stops living in it.
Dear X Jr., what is memorable is the memorial. It is impossible to imagine life should continue its microaggressions and caricatures and dumb ponies without you.
Literature, itself, often takes the shape of a posthumous dialogue for bibliophiles. Herve Guibert says as much (more on how he says this soon), and perhaps the posthumous voice, like a last will and testament, becomes the voice one tries on, the temporality one borrows to experiment, to stand before the mirror of ones own existence and flip what remains of the “I”s. Or the “I” addressing the living from beyond the grave in a tone that is serious, absurd, worldly, having nothing to lose, having already lost it.
When the dead speak, who are we to dispute them? What facts can we hold against the ghost's eyebrows? Or their argument? The posthumous voice raises the dead; it rattles the catacombs, etc. But why.
"Faith moves those same mountains that give birth to mice, and we're supposed to be filled with wonder!"
I attended the virtual launch for The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster, a novel described by the press as follows:
The literary world owes a great debt of gratitude to the executors who, charged with burning the remaining papers of their authorial charges, refuse, instead publishing them for the fanatic and meddlesome among us. Collected here are the remaining unpublished works—diaries and drafts, aphorisms and ephemera—of the late Thomas Pilaster, compiled by Marc-Antoine Marson, a longtime friend and fellow writer with whom Pilaster maintained a healthy rivalry. With rough edges and glints of genius present in equal measure, scholars and lay-readers alike will treasure these curious texts—So Many Seahorses, The Vander Sons Company, and Three Attempts at the Reintroduction of the Man-Eating Tiger Into Our Countryside, to name a few—for generations to come. [1]
In this novel, a living author uses a posthumous voice while alive to ironize the safety from slander; Marson's entire narrative pretext (a series of introductory remarks, prefaces, foot-notes, etc.) reshape the commentary as an ongoing envy-driven slander. In the critic-peer’s urge to preserve Thomas Pilaster's true legacy lies the urge to define it.
(See page 39 please, on your own, without my assistance, like the mature mammal you tell your living relatives you have become)
Sublunary Editions publisher, Josh Rothes led a discussion with translator Chris Clarke, about this book by Éric Chevillard, a French novelist of the age which occurs when a man born in June 1964 is alive in the present.
Chevillard is known for his innovative novels, his playing with "codes of narration." He also keeps a blog which feels like its own book titled "L'autofictif": each entry is numbered and dated. On April 6th, the entry was "4635". I have taken it upon myself to translate today’s entry, “4634”, for my own pleasure, and also to share with others the flavor of this ongoing text:
Without a doubt, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s oeuvre enjoys tremendous popular success, although it doesn’t receive the consideration it deserves from academic critics or organized literati who fawned over Kafka and Proust. And what a pity—since her ambition is equal to theirs, and her text is woven from an attention to mysticism that draws her near sacred texts: “There comes a moment when a woman must choose between his face and his body. Grace be to the fat, she saved her figure (….), although things became enormous below.” Notice the formulation of images which carry fruitful plenitude and abundance at a richer density and probable vibrance than those of our current days. The dream is capable of realizing its possibility as a flying carpet.
It strikes me that a world without animals would be a more hospitable one. To be finally rid of these crabs and macaques, these parodic insults of our most subtle and experimental ways of being. Do we really need the beaver, the horseshoe crab, the peccary? Without the claims animals lay on our surroundings, our air would be purged of their discordant cries, their bitter little breaths, their grotesque braying events which rips open the silken fabric of our dreams. No more sick droppings tumbling from the sky on our fine hats, no more poisons in fangs, the end of all fangs, really. [2] And all that space just for us, for the commercial exchange of our sensitive, fragile souls—and the display and exhibition of our monumental works!
Still, no adverse effects from the vaccine. I have rarely even felt so happy.
From this entry, one learns that Chevillard received his COVID-19 vaccine and he feels rare about it. Also that he lives in a Western European country where pigeons shitting on one’s head or hat is not taken for the auspicious, life-affirming, luck-bomb that Eastern Europeans know it to be. Also that countless species bray—and this ability is not limited to the donkey.
Beyond that, one sees a similar vein that the author probes in The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster, namely the role of the critic as an interior landscape of narrative voice. [3]
The question of paratexts in the footnotes and preface kept coming up in the conversation between the translator and the publisher. A sort of hopscotch game developed wherein each space conceded included a number which then attached itself to a rock.
Both characters passed the rock back and forth with utmost civility. When Rothes admitted the preface and footnotes are critical to the narrative for him, Clarke urged caution. In an email, Chevillard told Clarke that what he likes best about the book is that the quality for the reader remains undefined: the reader doesn't know whether to laugh or be serious, and this uncertainty mimes that of the author's two sides, one which pairs satisfaction and vanity, the other which reveals dissatisfaction and shame. [4] So when Clarke asked Chevillard to write a blurb for his translation of Pilaster, Chevillard refused on the grounds of not wanting to intervene in the reader's view of the writers which, together, form a "self-portrait."
How does self-loathing and critique play into writing as a process? What does Marson's condescending treatment of Pilaster's text signify outside the particularity of the book? Maybe there is no meaning outside its particularity, and that is true of any self-portrait, however gaslit.
Clarke selected a few of "the seahorses themselves" to read aloud. his voice rich, comfortable, parsing evolution and water with slight wonder and matter of fact. Under it, the idea that things "complete each other" kept bubbling to the surface, a sort of foam, over time, a froth. This dichotomy in Chevillard's process and concept relies on the assumption of completion by difference, as this novel would be incomplete with the doppelganger to narrate it. The conflict is between the two sides of the writer--two parts so estranged that they can barely stand each other--and what he wants from the page is also what he wants from the reader.
The influence of Roman Gomez de la Cerra's Aphorisms is legible. Pilaster never manages to hit the appropriate syllabic form for a haiku except once--and he rhymes them. Clarke described the translation of this book as a practice of "translating images rather than words", particularly with the haikus. But Roman Gomez de la Cerra is dead.
END-NOTES
[1] At the online book launch on April 6, 2021, translator Chris Clarke said this translation was his master's project in translation studies at NYU. He defended it successfully, then tried to sell it, and discovered that publishers (who focus on reading brief samples) could not appreciate what Chevillard was doing in this book. The "yards-long sentences" of Marcon, for example, reveal him attempting to overwrite Pilaster in his introductions. Clarke went back and kept revisising--completing 5 or 6 other translations in the process--and finally discovered Sublunary through twitter, when Josh tweeted about looking for a Chevillard translations. One senses that both Rothes and Clarke are looking for complicated ways to describe what might otherwise be considered a trite, navel-gazing book of midcentury modernism with baroque contingencies and nods towards an emasculating ocean.
[2] Chevillard on the rise of botanical memoirs: “…while it’s not my intent to be an activist for the animal cause, I am preoccupied by the fate of these creatures, and I do rebel against man’s abuse of his power over a world he shares with other organisms no less entitled to live there.”
[3] Chevillard on psychogeographic metereology: “My response to concerns, challenges, crises, all the various events of life, is a written response. Not exclusively, of course, but it’s rare that I don’t feel a need to confront in writing the things that happen to me, to consider them in that manner. It’s a way of not being hoodwinked by the fate I’ve been given, a way of regaining the upper hand. However, I don’t have much imagination.”
[4] Chevillard on Erik Satie and auctioned time-pieces: “Beckett and Michaux were beholden to nothing. They were never bound by the demands of the system, its necessities or laws, and they never surrendered or conceded a single thing, doubtless because they had no need for fortune or glory and because the only thing that mattered for them was to create, through writing, the conditions of a life that was possible in spite of everything. Beckett and Michaux instilled shame in us like a righteous punishment, like a painful realization of what we have become. Writers these days clearly have no idea the extent to which they’re compromised.”