> Nathanaël
Postado em: Books» English | Data: 28 dez 2011 | Autor: admin
copyright Nathaniel Feis, 2011
At some point in Je Nathanaël you write “the human body is facing a crisis” and “sex is immersed in hermaphrodism”. Well, this book seems to work in a tension between body and language, art and desire. Do you think that all these terms (and concepts) are in crisis? In what sense?
I certainly hope they are in crisis. The senses continue manifestly to be overriden by discourse in North America, even those that purport to challenge the restraint of the senses by academic (theoretical) and corporate (capitalist) structures. When I wrote Je Nathanaël, which is now over ten years ago, this crisis, for me, was most articulable through the notion of translatability — which bears an arguable relationship to hermaphrodism (in which the overlay and disruption of clearly delineated bodies and languages provokes disintegrative states impressed with desire) — which belies the possibility of origination. Je Nathanaël, like Nathanaël himself, can claim no origin, linguistic or otherwise, as the text grew out of at least two languages at once — French and English. When Nathanaël looks over his shoulder, there is nothing (recountable) to see; time is otherwise affected for him, and not construable according to the accepted linearity of Modernity. Other than the absence of a body that is on the verge always of constituting itself. This crisis is a guarantor of a kind of sensorial vigilance which we’ve relinquished in favour of a kind of systematic deadening of the senses, and of desire.
Rachel Gontijo Araujo has said that you dare to think language as body. Thinking about that tension I’ve mentioned before, could you tell me what does it mean to you to deal with literature physically?
I suspect Rachel is in a better position than I am to answer such a question. I suppose it would be necessary first to question the distinction between the two and the assumptions that define them each individually. The blatancy of the Cartesian divide between body and mind might be instructive here; many so-called post-structuralist thinkers have resisted the notion of language as something incidental, an a-priori of sentience. Of course I disagree emphatically with this kind of facile interpretation which for me is a relinquishment of thought. But I don’t align myself with a particular school of thought nor any philosophical or poetic tendency. I’m wary of wholesale subscription to any system, and prefer something more ad hoc and aleatory. This means each time finding a way to the body in language, the very thing that foresaw the body in the first place. What it may mean in the physical sense of a text is best answered, I think, by the text itself.
How is this physicality related with punctuation (for example, the absence of commas) and with the way you place the text on the page?
To this, I can only say that the disruption of syntactical authority accompanies the dismantlement of the gendered, sexed, body in this text. Je Nathanaël is a very different text in English than it is in French. And I’m curious to know what happens to it in Portuguese and Bulgarian — the other two languages into which it has been translated. Romance languages are so determined by gender that setting about this work to hermaphrodize French (one of the initial impulses of this project) required a very violent action against French grammatical strictures. This meant annihilating the subject, as in the section entitled La voix, in which the absence of pronouns rejects normative modes of address and inscription. The deception of The Voice is also the deception of language. But in English, something else happens. Suddenly, the work, like the English language, is less marked by gender, and so other strategies must be employed. None of it can be accounted for, I think, and the danger with parsing the text too closely, is that this kind of exercise strips the work of something essential: its sense.
In general terms, how well do you think sex is (re)presented in american literature?
I am afraid I cannot say much about this, as I have read relatively little of it — and besides, I don’t really know what American literature is. I’m not sure such a thing exists — anywhere; besides, there are many Americas. Still, my sense is that U.S. and Canadian literatures, while not nearly equivalent nor interchangeable suffer from both a strained prudishness and ostentatory obscenity. In North America, if we are not busy punishing the body for its excesses, then we are wanting to revolutionize it. Each extremity seems caught in a paradox of dependency. I’d rather think about something else.
You are working on the translation of Hilda Hilst’s “The Obscene Madame D”. What do you like about Hilst’s literature? Do you see any affinities between your own work and that of Hilst?
Hilst, for me is a writer who truly writes the body — rather than most who theorize the writing of the body, and thus remain squarely in their fixed categories (and stroked by their respective academies). Hilst is brash, crude, elegant, aggrieved and grievous. I first read A Obscena Senhora D after having gone a long time without reading. I am an impatient reader, and as a result read relatively little. But it seemed to me that I could read this work for the rest of my life, and that Hilst was doing something others only claimed to be doing. Her work exceeds, for me, the work of Lispector, who is or was very popular in the U.S. and France because of Cixous’ championing of it. My first thought after reading Hilst was that this was a grave mistake. However much I like A hora da estrela, it doesn’t risk itself, nor lead me to risk myself as a reader the way Hilst does. Hilst is willing to destroy the thing she is making as she makes it. Paradoxically, this is what binds her text, and threatens to destroy her reader. As for affinities between our work, it would be presumptuous for me to measure such a thing. I am a great admirer of her.
I bet you don’t like to answer this question but tell me: who is Nathanaël for you?
You’re right, I don’t at all like this question. Besides, the answer is always changing. Who Nathanaëel was in 2003, 2006 and again in 2011 is different again and again. He began as an unrealized character in Les nourritures terrestres by André Gide. He entered me as a translation. He belonged to no one, certainly not the book. Now, who can say? Nathanaël is a name that is often unpronounceable.
Luciana Romagnolli – Jornal O Tempo 24/12/11
R$31
translated by Thiago Gomide Nasser
88 pages
2011