“Yet, I also began to have the sense, fostered in part by the cross-contamination of research, that around the world enclaves that never knew one another—writers who could not have read each other—still had communicated across decades and across vast distances, had stared up at the same shared unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, heard the same unearthly music: a gorgeous choir of unique yet interlocking imaginations and visions and phantoms. At such times, you wonder as both a writer and an editor if you are creating narrative or merely serving as a conduit for what was already there.”

So writes Jeff VanderMeer in a searching, enlightening recent article at The Atlantic. Happily, he and his wife the amazing editor Ann, co-founded this site, Weird Fiction Review, for this very purpose: to explore enclaves of Weirdness around the world, Weirdness that may have developed outside of other influences, or braided garbled versions of such influences into its own traditions, or responded to reigning forms of Weirdness but not been heard in return—putting all these in conversation with each other. WFR is a showcase for the Weird in all its international glory, adding far flung members to the “gorgeous choir.” Here the Weird—its ancient and evolving records of encounters with radical alterities—dovetails with the very contemporary project of exploring the earthly alterities of other cultures, at once refuting and embracing universality, or else fractally complicating its older, easier models with new particulars.

A brief index, then, of my selected contributions to WFR since its inception in 2011: authors translated or profiled in the rich field of the French and Belgian Weird, to point your way to some of the rich reading to be found on this site. After all, there’s something of a love affair between French and English literatures, especially where the fantastic is concerned. French Decadents were reflected in the dark mirror of their British brethren and in the American “weird tale,” somber hybrid of fantasy and horror. Even contemporary genrebending movements of literary fantasy like the New Weird (China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer) and New Wave Fabulism (Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem) cite the contes cruels and fantastique as forerunners. But why should the last communiqués from French shores date more than a century back, or to the Surrealists at best? Consider this effort an overdue letter between two long-divided lovers once close, but fallen largely out of touch, a billet doux to rekindle the relationship between the French and English fantastic.

These traditions, twinned at birth, have as much to learn from their independent evolutions as from their history of mutual influence. Seeing where they vary and diverge can only fertilize, diversify the conversation, and seed the ground for future exchange. The postwar fantastique, steeped in decades of surrealism, drew new life from continental fabulism (Calvino, Kafka, Schulz), which married folklore with experimental form; the South American magic realism of cosmopolitan expatriates (Paz, Borges, Cortázar); and the frenetic inventiveness of a new field, genre fantasy. Contemporary French fantastical movements like La Nouvelle Fiction seek to rouse French writing from “the slumber of psychological realism,” and have much to offer recently renewed interest in the metafictions of Coover, Barth, and Barthelme. The Belgian School of the Strange is another domestically vibrant but internationally overlooked tradition on display here.

Francophonia features writers and styles, from classical to experimental, clever to vengeful, understated to outrageous, wistful to wicked. Here are Académie mandarins and contemporary hopefuls, one-hit wonders and the unjustly forgotten, bestsellers and writer’s writers, scholars and dabblers, outsiders and literati. Some are sui generis, some descended from long tradition; all are united in their use of the unreal. Together, they have won every major literary prize in France and Belgium, and many minor ones, several times over: the Goncourt (in the novel and short story categories), the Femina, the Renaudot, the Rossel, the Grand Prix de l’Académie française (for a single work and for lifetime achievement),  the Grand Prix National des Lettres. Six are Chevaliers of the Order of Arts and Letters (and four of the Legion of Honor). Most of these authors have never been translated into English, while translations of the others are outdated, out-of-print, or obscure to begin with (tiny print runs from tinier presses).

Given the breadth of historical span, the variety of theme and subject, the diversity of form, you’ll find: refashioned fairy tales, insinuating fables, absurdist prose poems, macabre parables, mocking twists, haunting ambiguities, austere mysteries, gory histories, cunning disappearances, unforgiving metamorphoses, unbidden malice, crippling rue, singular creatures, terrible decisions, vertiginous terrors, glorious paradox (cerebrally Borgesian and playfully Lewis-Carrolingian alike), lonely reverie, outlandish ribaldry, radical subjectivities, subtle slippage, sudden madness.

“We like to think that we understand our universe,” writes VanderMeer, “but I came away from these readings with a sense of weird fiction as a potentially powerful way in which to find the distance and the universality to grapple with the negation of that idea.” There are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than are dreamt of in our anthologies.

Some Belgians:

• Thomas Owen (1910 – 2002): with Jean Ray, regularly cited as a pillar of Belgian fantastical fiction, and the nom de plume of Gérald Bertot: criminal lawyer, art critic, mystery writer, and career manager of a flour plant. In more than 300 stories over the course of his lifetime, Owen refined the tale of supernatural horror to an almost anachronistic degree of economy and purity. His unsettling work has been compared to that of Poe and Buzzati. A consistency of worldview emanates from Owen’s oeuvre: an existential dread, one that Thomas Ligotti correctly identified (in a blurb where he name-checked Owen) as “the nightmare of being alive.” His story “Kavar the Rat”  and a nonfiction appreciation of Lovecraft are available here at Weird Fiction Review; his story “The Women Who Watch” is available at The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review. Audio versions of both stories are at Pseudopod.
• The only child of writer parents, Jean Muno was born in a Brussels suburb in 1924 — the year André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto, as Muno is fond of pointing out. A schoolteacher for much of his early life, in 1955 he settled with his family in Malaise (Flemish: Maleizen), a hamlet of Walloon Brabant near Belgium’s linguistic border. For the rest of his life, Muno could not resist making jokes about where he lived, especially given the unsettling fantastical nature of his fiction. Consistent in these tales is a scorn for suburbia, its stagnant mores. Muno is adept at dissecting that morally bankrupt land of the averted gaze, and ventriloquizing the puffed-up bluster of its hypocritically indignant inhabitants. These days, the corruption of the suburbs has been done to death, but Muno was writing at the height of suburban social critique and expression of ennui. The plots kick off with some Cheeveresque trifle over stubbed pride, and yet beneath these one senses an abyss always yawning, of which sudden swerves of phrase or story make us abruptly aware. The good citizens — nosy neighbors in prudish provincial towns ruled by fear and vestigial Christianity — waver between ignorance and precarious comprehension. How paltry are things on which they stake their identity: front steps that “had the clean distinctness of a set of false teeth.” His tale “The Ghoul” is available at Weird Fiction Review.
• Anne Richter (1939 — ): anthologist, scholar, and formidable writer of fantastical short fiction, editor of the groundbreaking anthology Le fantastique féminin, named for her 1984 monograph on female contributions to the fantastical corpus, in which she asserted: “Women move at the heart of magic realism in a more spontaneous and concrete way than men; they do not reflect on it, they reflect it as though it were their natural and daily element… With neither argument nor pride, women enter easily into the supernatural, whose existence seems, a priori, indisputably obvious to them.” Her work has appeared online at The Collagist and is forthcoming in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology of feminist speculative fiction, Sisters of the Revolution.
• Eugène Savitzkaya (1955 — ) is a creature of limens, spaces of detente, unlikely juxtapositions. Belgian by birth of Ukranian descent, long admired but little known, Savitzkaya is generally classed as a poet despite having penned plays, essays, and more than twelve novels. And these novels — plotless, impressionistic, glories of language and consciousness, brief unchaptered bursts all from France’s leading avant-garde publisher, Minuit — surely they partake more of poetry than prose? Savitzkaya stands at the consciousness-expanding intersection of Weird and experiment. His work is available online at Drunken Boat and Anomalous, and forthcoming in Gigantic.
• Bernard Quiriny (1978 — ): heir to the Belgian School of the Strange, contemporary critical darling Quiriny synthesizes disparate fantastical influences from Borges to Calvino, Robert Louis Stevenson to Enrique Vila-Matas in his playful, prizewinning, postmodern takes on classically fantastic themes. He has also written two novels: Les assoiffés (Seuil, 2010), a satirical dystopian alternate history of Belgium as a feminist totalitarian state, and most recently Le village évanoui (Flammarion, 2014). A profile of the author can be found at the NEA Writer’s Corner. His work has appeared in English at Subtropics (with author interviews in English and the French), The Coffin Factory, World Literature Today, here at Weird Fiction Review, and Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2012. New work is forthcoming in Bengal Lights and Subtropics.

Some French:

• The early work of Pierrette Fleutiaux (1941 — ) was exclusively fantastical, and drew the admiration of Julio Cortazar. Her 1984 collection Les Métamorphoses de la reine, contemporary subversions of Perrault, won the Prix Goncourt for short stories. The first story from this collection, “The Ogre’s Wife,” was published in Grand Street (trans. Leigh Hafrey), selected for inclusion in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 1992 by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and also adapted into an opera.
• There’s something oddly joyous in the stories of Jehanne Jean-Charles, even at their most malicious. She’s been compared to Saki, Bradbury, and Matheson, but the wink of her trick endings is one not of smugness but of merry complicity — a wink from your stylish, daffy aunt, the absent-minded one who wears galoshes, knows magic, and has unmanageable hair. “Isn’t life grand?” she’s apt to exclaim, giddy in the face of blackest misfortune, as if the universe had in causing suffering merely proved its infinite variety and capacity for surprise. Which is not to say that tragedy in her tales lacks suitable solemnity, that moving moments don’t get their due gravity. But bad things do befall the bulk of her characters, without apology or redress, sometimes even without explanation. The famously taboo-breaking Jean-Jacques Pauvert, her editor, said of her, “If she were English, she’d be read the world over.”
• If Serge Brussolo (1951- ) is often called France’s answer to Stephen King, it is largely because of how consistently his countless titles (almost 200, sometimes at a pace of five or six a year) have become bestsellers. One of France’s most prolific authors, he has has worked with almost every major publisher in almost every genre: science fiction, fantasy, historical (WWII, Egypt, Middle Ages), suspense/thriller, horror, crime, and YA. Brussolo is most noted for his violent originality, the seemingly bottomless fecundity of his imagination, and the breathless sense of dread, a visceral fatalism, that pervades the worlds he creates. Brussolo’s protagonists, sometimes even entire communities, are often cut off from the larger world. Among his recurrent themes are the decay of social order, the illusory consolation of religion, imprisonment, and madness. His prose is marked by a density of playful neologisms, and an energy from feverish riffing on images and ideas that concretizes dreamscapes. His novel The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, forthcoming in 2016, will mark his English-language debut.
• André Pieyre de Mandiargues (1909–1991) was a French writer of the fantastic whose prolific output included poems, plays, essays, novels, and short stories. He also translated works by Yeats, Mishima, and Paz. Initially affiliated with Surrealism, he went on to be known for his flamboyant style and fascination with the erotic and macabre. His 1967 Goncourt-winning novel La marge was translated as The Margin (Calder & Boyars, 1969) by Richard Howard, and his novel La motocyclette (Gallimard, 1963) made into the film The Girl on a Motorcyle (1968) by Jack Cardiff. His story “The Red Loaf” is available at Words Without Borders.
• Noël Devaulx (1905–1995) is the secret master of the 20th century French fantastique. His prose has the shimmer of Mérimée and the seemliness of Flaubert; clearly, he keeps Nerval by his bedside, the better to read it by the light of a Baudelairean lunacy. In his hands, the Kunstmärchen—nine collections’ worth, over nine decades—is reinvented as the vessel of a personal metaphysics; evident in every one is his mandarin mastery of narration. Jean Paulhan, an early champion, famously called his hermetic, exquisite tales, oft-featured in the Nouvelle Revue Française, “parables without keys”: spellbinding, even when perfectly obscure, for the secret to his prose is promise.
• Writer, poet, and painter Pierre Bettencourt (1917–2006) was, despite coming from a prominent family, a retiring figure and lifelong outsider artist. He self-published his first works on a family-owned press during the Nazi occupation. He later published Antonin Artaud, Francis Ponge, Henri Michaux, and Jean Dubuffet. In the 1950s and 60s he was a frequent contributor to the Nouvelle revue française, and Gallimard later put out a volume of his selected works. He can be read online at Weird Fiction Review, The Collagist, and Anomalous.
• Marcel Béalu (1908–1993) was best known for the delicacy with which he explored dreams and the unreal in poetry, prose, and painting. A retiring figure, he ran a Paris bookstore by the Jardin du Luxembourg named Le Pont Traversé after a novel by his friend, critic and editor Jean Paulhan. There he held readings for a small circle of surrealist and fantastical writers; it is said Lacan, among his first customers, purchased Shakespeare’s complete works and forgot to pay for them. His 1945 novel L’Expérience de la nuit was translated by Christine Donougher as The Experience of Night (Dedalus, 1997). My translations of his work have appeared in Joyland, Anomalous, Unstuck, and The Café Irreal.
• Jean Ferry (1906–1974) was primarily a screenwriter, best known for his collaborations with Clouzot, Buñuel, Louis Malle, and Georges Franju. A satrap of the College of ‘Pataphysics, he was known in his time as the greatest specialist in the works of Proust’s neighbor, Raymond Roussel. His only book of fantastical tales, The Conductor, was first published in 1953 and reprinted three times by various publishers, most recently in 2011 by Éditions Finitude.  Andre Breton called Ferry’s story “The Society Tiger” “the most sensationally new poetical text I have read in a long time.” I received a PEN America grant to translate his work, which has appeared in Subtropics, Weird Fiction Review, PEN America, Sentence, Anomalous, The Coffin Factory, Birkensnake, Gigantic, and The Café Irreal. In November 2013, Wakefield Press published my translation of The Conductor.

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Alisa and André Breton at the Port-au-Prince airfield in December 1945. Paul Laraque (left of the Bretons), Mme. W. Lam, Dr. Pierre Mabille, le peintre Wilfredo Lam. On the right: René Bélance, Mme. Mabille, Regnor Bernard, Edris St. Armand and M. de Peillon, Ministre de France (photo from the Incomplete Works).

As Jacques-Stephen Alexis articulated in Paris, 1956 at the first International Conference of Black Writers and Artists, the Caribbean has always been a crossroads of civilizations, even before its multifarious encounters with Europe after Columbus. Published in the quarterly magazine Présence Africaine in the same year, Alexis’ piece “Du Réalisme Merveilleux des Haïtiens” covered a wide range of topics concerning Haiti, its history, politics, society, and culture, with the aim of bringing more international attention to Caribbean social realism and artistic expression. Through this discourse, he maintains that “primitive cultures” (as with Haitian art or “cousin” African art) possess a complex, visionary consciousness that profoundly engages the real world, inextricably bound to myth, symbolism, and the sacred.

While many are aware of the history of slavery and colonialism, until recently, relatively little recognition has been accorded to the study of post-colonial issues and the artistic expressionism stemming from it. In the case of the Antilles, it is crucial to understand how the merging of worlds led to a simultaneously collective and individualized consciousness of reality, which matured in the context of the surreal.

As Alexis discusses, the pre-Columbian Taìno peoples of the Caribbean integrated over a long period of time, gradually sharing and developing agricultural techniques, cultural traditions of art, music and dance, folklore, and religious beliefs. With the arrival of the French and the Spanish, an incredible diversity of African peoples were imported under slavery and exploited in the sugar cane fields to cultivate the major cash-crop of the region. The enslaved peoples of the islands and the imported African slaves reproduced an artificial version of the métissage that had occurred naturally before European interference: once again the Caribbean became a crossroads of cultural and linguistic exchange. With the “Code Noir,” the French empire established elaborate and strict rules to counterbalance the overwhelming ratio of slave populations to European colonists. Eventually this lead to increasingly violent conflicts, which lacked leadership until the Vaudou priest François Mackandal united a full resistance, whose legacy lived on long after being burnt at the stake, eventually culminating in the only salve rebellion to have succeeded in establishing independence – the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) – merely two years after the inspirational French Revolution.

While this seemed like an immense victory, the nascent “Black Republic” had its fair share of problems internally in addition to being denied recognition by any other nation for many decades. Isolated and alienated, Haiti struggled to consolidate power and revitalize its agricultural economy. By 1825, France had returned with a large fleet to seize the island once again, forcing the president at the time to pay a controversial indemnity of 150 million francs (later 90 million francs) in exchange for diplomatic recognition that finally came nearly a decade after signing the treaty. In the decades to come, Haitian politics and government remained incredibly turbulent during their independence. The two-caste system with a francophone Elite and a Creole peasantry had resounding effects across Haitian history and further impregnated the people’s consciousness with ideas of slavery, inferiority, and exploitation. This continued into the US occupation of Haiti lasting from 1915 until 1934. A major identity crisis reemerged among a French-educated generation of writers and artists, who equipped themselves with the means to confront the socio-cultural problems arising from the various forms of oppression by slavery, colonization, and occupation, engrained in the collective memory of these cultures.

Post-Negritude writers in Martinique and Haiti looked to Surrealism as a philosophical and psychological platform for reflecting on cultural identity, consciousness, and issues arising from post-colonialism in the Antilles. After a single edition of a publication called Légitime Défense, named after a short book by André Breton, the French state shut it down and more or less indirectly punished the Martiniquan students who took part in it. Their intentions were infused with Marxist dialectical materialism and surrealist ideas, which Breton himself is cited as having encouraged this group to engage with political and aesthetic ideas. While the publication and the group may seem inconsequential, it was the first time that colonial subjects used the language and medium of the oppressors to “talk back.” Almost contemporary to the Surrealists’ outrage at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, the resounding message of Légitime Défense would extend far and wide.

The above history served as the fecundation of the soil where surrealism would plant its seeds in the 1930s and ‘40s. Surrealism offered a method for reconsidering cultural identity. While Surrealism developed in post-WWI Europe, an unexpected chain of encounters occurred in the 1940s between Surrealists escaping a second European war and Caribbean writers, whose interactions further developed a long-running inquiry into the issue of alterity and cultural identity in the Caribbean, once again transformed into a crossroads of consciousness and poetry.  Writers from the Caribbean were interested in Surrealism from Europe because of its potential for providing a medium for articulating and reflecting on black consciousness – not necessarily for anything else. In the same way, European surrealists were interested in Haitian Vaudou because they saw in it confirmation of their own ideas on the dream, trance states, and automatism.

Nevertheless, this exchange was very rich for literary and artistic expression. Pierre Mabille was a doctor at the main hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1940. Mabille’s pursuits in psychoanalysis and the hermetic sciences greatly influenced his involvement in and contribution to the Surrealist movement, providing it from early on with a strong undercurrent of sociology and anthropology. One of his legacies that survives in Haiti today is a multidisciplinary review, Conjonctions, which he established in 1946 concerning various topics within Haitian culture. Before being appointed as the French cultural attaché, he helped found the Haitian Bureau d’Ethnologie, seeking to call attention to the dynamic intellectual value of Haitian folkloric and Vaudou traditions. The Catholic Church, in league with the state, pushed back with anti-Vaudou laws enforced against practitioners. Ironically, this anti-Vaudou position of the Church and state ended up legitimizing evidence of the complexity of their beliefs and practices and sparked a further interest from a more international community.

In 1945, Mabille invited surrealist André Breton to Haiti to give a series of lectures that would inspire a generation of writers, poets, and artists. On the very night of his arrival, Breton’s own definition of surrealism was quoted back to him by heart from the renegade poet Magloire St. Aude. This was the first of many encounters that formed a surrealist crossroads that would have far-reaching implications for the writers and artists of the Caribbean and the political scene with which they were engaged. A mutual self-recognition occurred during Breton’s time spent in the Caribbean, where he articulated what had only implicitly been represented before his arrival. Breton’s self-exile underlined surrealism’s sensitivity to the issues of otherness, displacement, and inter-cultural relations. The eventual fall of the Haitian government, who attended his infamous talk at the Rex Theater, is increasingly attributed to Breton’s catalytic speeches.

Years later, J.S. Alexis argued that because of an overly constructed social conscious and adherence to modernization, people on a whole have only served to alienate themselves from what “primitive thought” engages in everyday life: authentic and culturally relevant forms of expression. The separation of the sacred and the mundane is what constricts the expansive and transcendent ideas alluded to in surrealist thinking. Alexis’s term le réalisme merveilleux, commonly understood as magic realism (the same term used by Alejo Carpentier), described the way that Haitian writers and artists see the world around them and experience social reality, the world, and modern life. Haitian consciousness, largely influenced by local tradition and Vaudou, does not differentiate the sacred from the quotidian. Some things can be simple, but as Mabille strived to show, Vaudou religion and Haitian thought recognize their own concepts that deny that same simplicity in the way that it readily synthesizes diversity, naturally translates the marvelous into a vision of reality, and revels in notions that defy duality through multiple-aspect deities, sympathetic magic and the paradox of the undead.

These ideas would find their home in the works of writers such as Magloire St. Aude and René Dépestre in their respective works featuring zombies: Veillée (1956) and Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (1988). Over time, zombies become a metaphor for Hegelian slave dialectic that is so prominent in Surrealism and it embodies a paradox we now so commonly recognize as the undead: soulless, enslaved beings with no right to live on their own. At the level of abstraction, the implied zombification of mankind can be seen in popular media today, as we are unable to die (that is, be transformed), so we continue in a condemned state of not being able to live.[1] In 1938, Mabille published Egrégores ou la vie des civilisations in response to major philosophical influences on Surealist ideas on the individual and human civilization: “Life is a continuum in which all things interrelate. Death as finality is denied because everything is capable of transformation, everything exists in a state of latent potentiality, capable of being realized or activated by desire.” [2]

While many of these writers remain untranslated, the growing recognition of Caribbean authors over the years has rendered some of their works available in English. Jacques-Stephen Alexis’ first book is available under the English title General Sun, My Brother (originally published in French, 1955) as well as some of his short stories from his collection Romancéro aux étoiles. The novel portrays the troubled life story of a laborer and his wife living in the slums of Port-au-Prince and working in the cane fields. Alexis’ marvelous realism depicts how the supernatural was a part of enslaved peoples’ everyday experience of social reality, while his short stories showcase the orality of Haitian storytelling, infused with references to Creole culture, Vaudou, and folklore.

In 2012, England’s Nottingham Contemporary presented an extensive exhibit on Haitian art named after the deity of the crossroads, Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou. The publication coming out of the exhibit contains a beautiful collection, spanning more than seventy years of popular art and documenting the influence of the Vaudou religion on the visionary imaginations and ingenuity of some of Haiti’s most significant artists. The illustrated publication is accompanied by a combination of recent and republished texts in English from a wide array of artists and writers. In the (roughly translated) words of J.S. Alexis, “Haitian art is indeed a presentation of the real followed by a procession of the weird, of fantasies and waking dreams, of mysteries and the marvelous…”

Included in that anthology is an extract from Michael Richardson’s book Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, which compiles a comprehensive history of the Caribbean, the development of Surrealism, and explores a number of writers, philosophers and intellectuals, many of which were yet to be translated.

Further Reading:

Pierre Mabille

André Breton

Alfred Metraux – Le vaudou haïtien (English translation available)

Caribbean Writers:

Dany LaFerriere

Edouard Glissant

Jacques Stephen Alexis

Aimé Césaire

Michel Leiris

René Depestre

René Ménil

Magloire St.Aude

Jacques Roumain
On the Caribbean and Caribbean Surrealism:

Refusal of the Shadow (by Krzysztof Fijalkowski Michael Richardson)

Kafou: Haiti, Art, and Vodou (Nottingham Contemporary, 2012)

Publications by Jean Michael Dash (Caribbean Scholar and Translator)

Bibliography:

Refusal of the Shadow (by Krzysztof Fijalkowski Michael Richardson)

Kafou: Haiti, Art, and Vodou (Nottingham Contemporary, 2012)

“Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens” (Jacques-Stephen Alexis in Présence Africaine, 1956)

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“The plague takes slumbering images and latent disorder, and suddenly propels them into the most extreme movements. The theater, too, takes gestures and drives them to an extreme; like the plague, it reforges the chain between what is and what is not, between the virtuality of the possible and what has been materialized in nature…” ~ Radovan Ivšić, A Tout Rompre

Like its counterpart in fiction, the theater of the weird exists on the margins of mainstream culture, where its deadly accuracy when targeting the shibboleths of the cultural consensus can be safely muffled before its subversive potency does any visible damage. Although Antonin Artaud, Alfred Jarry, and Raymond Roussel are the best- recognized creators in this domain, its roots go deep, and this tenacious theater would include works by such little known malcontents as the mocking blasphemer, Oscar Panizza, the “drunken Shakespeare” Christian Dietrich Grabbe, and their heirs in Dada and Surrealism. Although unjustifiably overlooked outside of Europe, the theater of Radovan Ivšić holds its own with the best of his peers in this domain.

In Radovan Ivšić we have one of the great rebels, one of les grands insoumis, of the last century. It is indicative of his refusal to compromise the ideals of his youth and make humiliating concessions to power that both the fascist and communist governments of his native Croatia banned his poetic and theatrical work with equal alacrity.

© Petar Dabac

Born in Zagreb, the capital city of Croatia in 1921, Radovan Ivšić discovered the works of Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Mallarmé as well as the publications of both the French and Yugoslav surrealists as a teenager, at a time when the clouds of war were gathering over Europe. He describes the atmosphere of that time as dazzlingly effervescent, but charged with shadows cast by the obscure presentiment of the looming debacle. Reason had foundered, and the radical prescriptions offered by these works seemed to be the only legitimate recourse to the growing threat of both physical and psychological violence.

It was during this time that he arrived at the realization that his vision of a poetry inseparable from life could best be embodied in the theater:

While poetry continued in my eyes to show proof of the mind’s non-submission to the force of things, I then discovered that poetry also involved the body, space, colors, shapes, and nature—in other words, that poetry is essentially and concretely connected to the fate of human freedom.

For Ivšić, theatrical space offers the ideal spot for opening that space within the spectator that allows experience of individual singularity not as a rupture, but as a vitally essential difference that makes it possible for the world to breathe. He saw the play as the result of a dark conspiracy between the world and the individual, who intentionally withdraws from this relationship in order to return by means of the Trojan horse of fiction. In his theatrical work, he strove “to open a space analogous to that of Greek tragedy, born from the exchange between the individual voice and the collective voice, inside of which individuals can be encouraged to see themselves in the violence of what connects them and what keeps them apart from the group and the world.”

His first play, Airia, already demonstrates the radically free use of language that would characterize all his plays. Ivšić recalled its genesis was inspired by the performance of a Strindberg play whose cries and convulsions he found overwhelming, combined with his innate sovereign indifference to what was passed off as reality. The primordial significance of love as a transformative agent but one supersensitive to oppression also sketches its first appearance here.

His radical use of language is characterized by a subversion of everyday syntax and the use of parallel monologues that favor evocation over description. This creates conversation in which the sense of each character’s identity is reduced rather than reinforced over the course of the play. In Airia, this erosion of identity is exemplified in the name of one character, a woman only known as !?… Yet paradoxically, as the characters’ identity is worn away like this, the space needed to reveal what makes them truly singular is allowed appear.

Crilice: It would be easier for me if you had a name.

!?…: But that’s impossible.

Crilice: Without your name, it feels like I keep losing you.

!?…: I am more naked this way. And if I abandon your embrace one day, I will not leave you with an empty name.

Étienne-Alain Hubert has observed that the stripped-down syntax characteristic of Radovan Ivšić’s poetry makes each word appear as if encased in a void, therefore granting each of them their maximum power to radiate. Brought to the forefront of the stage, Ivšić uses it to create the “corporeal writing” prescribed by Mallarmé. By providing a space for this corporeal writing, Ivšić felt the theater could offer poetry a vehicle that could open wide the horizons, but only on the condition that it rejected blind allegiance to the realist influence prevailing in contemporary theater in favor of a dream-lit veracity.

Eschewing conventional dialogues and stereotypes allowed him to imagine a space free of this realist or baroque gravity of language, gestures, and décor. Only by clearing the stage of these set pieces was it possible for his vision of an alchemical meeting of body and idea to materialize, essential for this kind of corporeal writing. The primal power of Greek theater, exemplified in the chorus, gave him the weapon he needed “to strike the world in its heart.” Radovan Ivšić stressed that the greatness of Greek tragedy lies in that crucial moment “when the individual emerges from the choir, when the speech of the individual begins to distinguish itself from the collective speech.”

Restoring this chorus was the impetus for the writing of Narcissus, which Ivšić viewed as a complement to Airia: “if Airia was the space, Narcissus was the heartbeat that supplied that space with life.” The choral recitation was entirely built around the different qualities of the voices involved, so that while the group was captured as the echo of the individual voice, the individual voice in turn returned as an echo of the group. He described this as being not only a poetic problem but a significantly political one. As a prime example, Ivšić points to the choirs of totalitarian societies in which the individual voice is annihilated by the monotonous chanting of the group in praise of their dictator.

Narcissus was performed twice clandestinely before being banned by the fascist dictatorship that had taken power in Croatia and collaborated actively with the Nazis. The limited edition of 100 copies, which he printed privately in 1942, was not only seized by the government as “degenerate art,” but rumors circulated through Zagreb that the poem had personally put the dictator Pavelic beside himself with rage. Allegedly his response on reading it was to bemoan the depths to which Croatian poetry had fallen. This only confirmed to Ivšić and his friends that they were on the right path.

Ivšić’s next major creation, his play King Gordogan, reflects the murderous atmosphere of this time transposed into a fairy tale environment permeated by the darkest of black humors. Although it would be impossible not to see the influence of Jarry’s Père Ubu on this sovereign, Ivšić notes that Sade was equally influential in this work—primarily Aline et Valcour ou Le Roman philosophique, as this was the only work by Sade he had read at this time. In fact, he had obtained his copy in exchange for almost his entire library.  Explaining the play’s genesis to Charles Flamand in an interview published in the first issue of Le Surréalisme même (1956), Ivšić recalled how in February 1943 during the German occupation, when they were denied everything, even the possibility of “walking by moonlight and touching the bare night” he was indulging in “that gratuitous activity, or, if you prefer, that monstrous perversity that consists in coupling words.”  This opened up a world of oaths, imprecations, and proverbs for the poet such as “may a black hump swell up on your back,” that was not so much in imitation of Balkan folklore tradition but a new way of viewing his past experiences.

This practice gave Ivšić the key to creating a poetic core in which the creation of a curse or oath was accompanied by the emergence of an unexpected image. “May scabies ride you, you beaked bear!” He felt these proverbial expressions would lend themselves admirably to theatrical dialogue because of the extreme condensation required by the stage. The dialogue thus inspired became the first scene of King Gordogan, a bloodthirsty buffoon of a tyrant who lops the ears of his subjects so he knows they have paid their taxes, and has an eye removed from those who cannot pay. Later, he exults at the prospect of hanging his only son and describes it as one of his finest moments. A former stable boy who usurped the throne from his doddering predecessor, the benign King White, he holds the King’s daughter prisoner in a white tower at the edge of a forest. Indicative of how far from conventional moral standards Ivšić’s play is taking us, the princess holds no resentment of her captor but is grateful that he has taken on the onerous tasks of ruling:

“He reigns in my place and—he’s told me so—it isn’t easy to reign as it was in the time of my father, King White. Today, to maintain order in the kingdom, he has to strangle some ten thousand subjects a day with his own hands. Think for a moment what a lot of work that would be if I were queen! By the time I had strangled five, my white hands would be numb with weariness. And how many more would be left for me to strangle? Ten thousand minus five! Figure it out yourself, I’ve forgotten mathematics” (II, 4).

The king’s logic for eliminating poverty in the kingdom is of a piece with this for it will impose six time the burden on the poor while exempting the rich from any taxation at all. He is accompanied by his Royal Eyegouger and Royal Earsnipper on his tax-collecting rounds, which have become markedly less fruitful in gold coins or body parts as by the time in which the action of the play takes place (the three hundredth day of his reign), there are very few subjects left to supply either, as bemoaned by the Royal Eyegouger when commanded by his king for his day’s tally:

“Only twelve, my king, by my poor mother! Five blind men, five one-eyed men, and a couple of squinters.”

The only challenge to Gordogan’s rule is in the person of a strange knight who has recently entered the kingdom and who Gordogan believes has been foreseen in a prophecy as a potential troublemaker. Complicating matters is the fact that this young knight cannot be slain by anyone who has committed murder, which, as Gordogan’s Fool notes, makes him perfectly safe in their land. Gordogan evades this threat by giving the knight a draft brewed with the herb of forgetting. No longer distracted by duty, the knight falls in love with the wild woman of the forest, Joline, who inspires what’s left of the local inhabitants with dread. She lurks invisibly in the night, her presence only made known through her mad laughter (which Radovan saw as a violent rejoinder to the laughter of Moliere’s smug servants, who he believes, since they first stepped on stage, have occupied too much space in the theater with their healthy, good sense, and triumphant mediocrity).

As Gordogan prepares to hang his son, soon joined at the gallows by Princess White, the Fool scans the horizon frantically for the knight—the lovers’ only chance for rescue. His excitement on seeing the knight and Joline appear on the horizon causes him to fall from the roof, breaking his neck, the hangman does his work and the knight rides off with Joline, totally forgetful of his original purpose, desperately in love. Now alone in his kingdom, having “tsaffed” [slain] the last of his subjects, Gordogan contemplates his future: “May a tail sprout from my forehead if I know what I am going to do now.” An idea soon comes to mind and he heads off into the forest to cut the trees down one by one.

It is important to note that this play is not a political allegory like one found in the engaged theater of writers like Brecht. For Ivšić, it was supremely important that the critical dimension—eliminated by the needs of ideology—be allowed to emerge—without which no innovation in the theater would be possible. Ivšić points out that it is for this reason that plays written for an idea or an ideology are worthless—they close down the horizon rather than open them to the magic of coincidence and the unexpected.

Gordogan would not be performed live until French radio broadcast it on April 18, 1956. When it was finally staged for the first time by a French theater company, it was coincidence alone that dictated its opening performance took place at Sade’s ancestral castle, the Chateau La Coste.

Contrary to expectations, matters only grew worse after Tito’s communist government liberated Croatia from the Nazis and established control of Yugoslavia. The continued repression of his work by the new government, for the same pretexts announced by their predecessors came as a traumatic shock to Ivšić and his fellow poets. He was stupefied to find the communist authorities used the same justifications to ban his work as the fascists they had just defeated. He recounts how, at one point, he wondered if he was losing his mind, or just too stupid to grasp the subtlety of the new government’s cultural policies. It was soon all too clear that for the authorities, there was no legitimate artistic activity outside of socialist realism. Complicating matters was the great number of artists, including friends and people he had admired, who found it easy to turn their back on the past and take up positions in the new order. One of his cruelest disappointments was the sight of the former animator of Yugoslavian surrealism, Marco Ristic, turning into a mouthpiece for the new regime. The former comrade of André Breton completely renounced his past activities and was named ambassador to Paris.  Incapable of making such concessions, Ivšić found himself unable to mount his plays or publish his poems. He attempted to maintain his work in the theater with plays using puppets and marionettes for a time, but despite some positive results, it ultimately proved too disheartening to continue pursuing. He turned to translation to make ends meet. Among the authors he translated from the French were Maeterlinck, Molière, Rousseau, Proust, Apollinaire, Ionesco, and Breton.

In 1954, Radovan Ivšić finally managed to escape Zagreb and emigrated to Paris in 1954 at the age of 33. Within a few days of his arrival he met surrealist poet Benjamin Péret and, a short time later, André Breton. The latter, impressed by his reading of King Gordogan, which he described as a peerless work, “limned with the dew of primal innocence,” quickly invited Ivšić to join the daily meetings of the French surrealist group that were then held at the café Le Musset. From this time to the formal dissolution of the group in 1969, Ivšić was a prominently figured in all its activities. While his texts and photographs appeared in all their publications, he was also known for his work for sound. The sound system that he installed in the gallery that housed the international surrealist exhibition of 1959 on Eros created a stir for its unprecedented use of the sounds of lovemaking. As Ivšić recalled, unlike most openings, this one was unnaturally quiet as the guests were riveted to the recorded sighs and murmurs filling the gallery.

André Breton and Radovan Ivšić in 1954, by Sperry Lea

It was shortly after his arrival in France that Ivšić wrote Aquarium, a no act nightmare that never ends, inspired by a dream he had while still living in Zagreb. This dream had struck him so forcefully that he immediately noted it down under the heading: “Are we allowed to dream?”

Aquarium takes place in a concentration camp, one of the many claustrophobic bone mills of that time, to which a journalist has been sent to write an article to counter the lies spread by hostile elements about “the atrocities allegedly practiced in our exemplary camps.” He quickly becomes snared in the bureaucratic doublespeak of the camp’s authorities. They question the validity of his documents and seek proof of their suspicion that he is up to no good and should be incarcerated as an enemy of the state. He is blissfully unaware of the increasing hostility that follows his every move and word, because of the entrance of Plume, a former lover who still owns his heart. Here the violence is not that caused by a bloodthirsty tyrant, but is of a more psychological nature: it is the mind that is the prime target. Many of the camp’s brass are incapable of speaking lucidly from being continuously immersed in this doublespeak. All the dialogue goes round in vicious circles, thereby hollowing out and enclosing the theatrical space in an absurd and inescapable prison. The play ends with soldiers hauling Plume and the Journalist off the stage in different directions once his sole defense against their authority, his identity card, flies out of his shoe and falls to the stage. Before he can retrieve it, the Ear in the Leather Jacket, the prison’s representative of the secret police, pockets it, thus delivering him definitively into the world of the camp as a prisoner.

Jean-Paul Goujon, in his preface to the complete theatrical work by Radovan Ivsic published by Gallimard in 2005, describes Aquarium as embodying the tension and anxiety inherent in living in a country where there is no hope, and dreams themselves are hunted down like wild beasts. But Radovan does not mimic the doublespeak used by jailers of all stripes. Instead, he replaces it with an inane babel of talk on subjects, from offering cloves of garlic as if they were cigarettes to stamp-collecting, never omitting the fact that all these conversations are fed on the horrors of their speakers’ actions, only overtly made evident when a young woman attempting to escape the camp is shot and dragged off with no more ceremony than a slaughtered chicken. Here Ivšić uses poetic subversion to bring about what Péret called “a rectification of the universe,” to open wide the horizons that a simple realist depiction of this situation would leave depressingly shut.

If Aquarium can be seen as a kind of antithesis to the earlier King Gordogan with respect to the horrors that have defined modernity, Ajaxaja combines elements from both, and at the end brings us full circle in a bloodthirsty display that proved fully prophetic of the carnage that would dismember Yugoslavia a little under a decade after the play opened in Belgrade. (It ran a week before being closed definitively for “technical difficulties.”)

In Ajaxaja, we find ourselves in a world where it morally impossible to breathe because the words that give us breath have been poisoned. As Goujon notes, the language of assassins plays incessantly in the background like “a murderous litany.” The play’s tension is indicated in its subtitle, il moci reci, [pouvoir dire in French] which means both the power to speak, and the speech of power—the diktat. Being able to speak is relentlessly countered by what power speaks creating the fulcrum on which our freedom pivots. This power is first shown in the character of he director who is the dictator in the theater but a servile lackey to those in power. These Authorities, the Complete Works (they appear on the stage like a mobile bookcase of old tomes) regard him as a useful pet to whom they can toss a bone now and then in the form of a grant or cultural medal. Here the mental extermination at work in Aquarium has evolved radically in a world dominated by brainwashing and servile slogans  “If you are for progress, be for progress. All power to the power.” The last poet in his deep-sea diver’s suit is heard in a hushed silence constantly broken by the roaring thugs that protect the authorities. Incapable of even miming the doublespeak of their masters, in which an invisible poison has destroyed words by reversing their meaning, these mottorrors can only speak in truncated growls that more resemble the machinery they ride than language. The diver’s final soliloquy on the death of language is abruptly broken off when these motorrors cut his lifeline.

The theater’s role as a cultural mask for an oppressive authority is shaken and finally cast down by the appearance of Ajax from ancient Greek theater and Xaja from a remote future. Their improbable love shakes the very foundations of this world and artist and dictator alike are consumed when the cultivated violence of the guardians of order is unleashed in a final frenzy that attacks all indiscriminately. As in King Gordogan, all have been slain in the last scene save for Ajax and Xaja, who have vanished in the distance like their counterparts the Knight and Joline, leaving but one bloodthirsty figure contemplating the carnage. Bringing the evolution begun in King Gordogan full circle, Ajaxaja ends with the character of a messenger, who has only appeared as an onlooker throughout the play, delivering the sole lines he has in this work. Calmly looking over the wreckage of the Complete Works and their minions who slaughtered each other in their blood driven frenzy, the messenger—an angelic young boy—stares straight at the audience and says with grim foresight of things to come: ”there wasn’t enough blood to suit my taste. When I grow up you’ll see what’s bloody.”

Radovan Ivšić’s work revolves around several key elements that can be broken down to Love, Liberty, and Language. They are intimately interdependent and like the plague contamination of one will quickly infect the others. Conversely, as Annie Le Brun points out, the radical health of one can rejuvenate the others. In these plays, it is in the figures of the lovers—Joline and the Knight, Plume and the Journalist, Ajax and Xaja who hold that power. They may not vanquish the horrors that surround them, but their shared uncompromising passion gives them the strength to desert thus preserving their freedom (Plume and the Journalist have the opportunity to escape but this is aborted when he turns back to retrieve his identity card, thus demonstrating his inability to abandon everything for love).

For Radovan Ivšić, freedom is impossible in a world where love is made impossible—and conversely, love that deserts “the ready-made formulas carved to channel it into an acceptable form” has the power to bring these oppressive systems crashing down upon their ears (as shown in Ajaxaja). But only a vital language that holds “the living words of our memory, the sun, the moon, the stars, the animals…” as Annie Le Brun puts it, has the strength to carry the analogical repercussions that give poetry its formidable presence. The doublespeak that holds the floor in all modern societies, whether of totalitarian or neo-liberal tendencies, is too limp and aseptic to give words that charge. In fact, doublespeak’s purpose is to ensure that words are unable to nourish anything but those activities that sustain the existence of the powers that be. For this reason, Radovan Ivšić states that:

The main question that arises today is how prevent the establishment of a coercive relationship to language? Are we going to successfully master language, in other words tame it, domesticate it, and ultimately enslave it in the same way we are trying to enslave nature?

This is echoed with even more chilling implications by Ivšić’s companion, Annie Le Brun’s question in her book The Reality Overload:

In the same way that grains and vegetables are tampered with under the pretext of making them more pest resistant […] among the words that we are led to believe are still capable of provoking excitement, there are no longer any that are not actively working against the ideas they allegedly express

For Ivšić and others who claim the insolent health of surrealist thought, the only space that can give individuals the strength they need to refuse the world such as it is—dedicated to reinforcing all that is unacceptable in the human condition—is the material presence of our imaginal space. When we recognize that words live in us as we live in them, we can gain access to what Ivšić calls a “strange freedom and gravity.” He follows this by saying:

Poetry is no longer the province of specialists or aesthetes: it is life tested by thought, it is thought tested by life; it is the body interrogating the imagination, it is the imagination interrogating the body.

As Alain Joubert notes,

For Ivšić it is of primordial importance to ‘restore language to its true life […] by leaping in a single bound to the birth of the meaningful,” something Breton recommended at an earlier time. He thus puts himself in the position to inspire the image by induction so that it will form—or not—in the mind of the reader, instead of being provided to him irrevocably on paper. A latent image then slowly appears downstream of language, allowing the reader to partially forge it personally, enriching it through its clarification, and causing it to magically move from the state of evocation to that of revelation.

As I noted in an earlier text [written for the performance of King Gordogan in New York in 1997] the true significance of Radovan Ivšić’s work lies in the fact that “desire never caricatures itself; that the misery that is in the world is not confused for the world; and that the unacceptable human condition is not the fruit of divine malediction but a subordination of the rhythms of desire to those forces that seek only to extinguish passion in the interests of their own smooth functioning.”

For poetry is always essentially different or it does not exist… it never follows its old footprints but is always in discordance with the dominant expression of its time. It is perhaps for this reason that Saint John Perse called the poet the “guilty conscience” of his time.

The authorities in Ajaxaja promised to erect “thundering stadiums” upon the ruins of the theater.” In a time when fear is promoted and an impossible security promised in return for our freedom to think and love as we like, Radovan Ivšić reminds us that the theater is dangerous, but it can only be so

Once it refuses to serve

Once it no longer lauds the all-powerful

Once it no longer bows to gold

Once it sings of love

Once it sings of life.

The post Theater as Plague appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

I confess I know little, and almost all of it circumstantial, about this atmospheric sketch of a gutter-dwelling worm. It was written by André Bay (1916–2013), for more than four decades a senior editor at Éditions Stock. Among the diverse writers he championed there were Jorge Amado, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Wolfe, Anaïs Nin, and Virginia Woolf. His was the first French translation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night; he also translated Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, and Jonathan Swift. In 1948, along with Raymond Queneau, founded the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger, a literary prize for the best foreign novel. He was also an artist and art critic.

Born André Pierre Robert Dupont, Bay was given his pen name by his close friend, painter Mario Prassinos. Prassinos frequented Surrealist circles—his sister, poet and painter Gisèle, numbered among them—and it is likely that he introduced them to Bay. Among them was a writer named Lise Deharme (née Anne-Marie Hirtz, 1898–1980).

Deharme’s first encounter with the Surrealists is immortalized in Nadja by André Breton, who was so enchanted with her glove that he pinned it to the wall and dubbed her the Lady of the Glove. Deharme is remembered, in Marie-Claire Barnet’s words, as the “first impossible mad love dreamed of by André Breton,” but her reputation as an author in her own right has recently been recovered from oblivion by the vein of feminist scholarship that also restored the likes of Leonora Carrington and Gisèle Prassinos. According to Barnet, Deharme was a prolific organizer of Surrealist salons, and the founder of a subversive publication, Le Phare de Neuilly [The Neuilly Beacon],  which featured James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Jacques Lacan.

In 1937, José Corti published Le Cœur de Pic [Heart of Spades], a book of Deharme’s children’s poems paired with black-and-white photo-assemblages by Claude Cahun (brought back into print, after long years during which it was a collector’s item, by Éditions de MeMo).

The transgendered Cahun—artist photographer, poet, and writer—was the niece of fantastical symbolist Marcel Schwob, soon to appear in these pages. Cahun’s twenty illustrations, made from unusual juxtapositions of ordinary things, are compositions of miniature worlds that elevate ordinary objects—dolls, dollhouse furniture, flowers, leaves, seeds, forks, spoons, scissors—into the mysterious and extra-ordinary. Cahun herself was interested in objects domestic and Surrealist.

Man Ray once described Deharme’s house, where she held her salons, as “a rambling affair, filled with strange objects and rococo furniture.” After her book with Cahun, Deharme then became to be known in the Surrealist circle as “la Dame de Pique,” or the Queen of Spades, as in this photograph by Ray:

Deharme exhibited a wicked sense of humor in her supernatural writings, and Barnet claims the charm of her writing is that it is “more venomous than it first appears.”

But then Deharme in any of her Surrealist incarnations would bear as little resemblance as an incarnated card from Lewis Carroll (a favorite author of the Surrealists) to the terrifying creature André Bay describes in his mysterious and moody little fragment. If any readers out there have any more clues to the circumstances surrounding its composition, please do leave a comment!

The post About André Bay’s “The Queen of Spades” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Night travelers step from the train. I’m freezing. Footsteps hammer the street, shaking white droplets loose. The gutters are streaming. Mice are nibbling on cobwebs. Cows moo in the mist. Everywhere, without speaking a word, they fear the Queen of Spades.

She is a woman, a monster, some claim; others maintain she is a gigantic insect; the truth is that all those who’ve ever come near her are dead.

I slip into a sewer, my shoulders smack the walls, I am a hunchback. I walk toward a light that is forever retreating. I seek the Queen of Spades; unlike the others, I have no wish to kill her, just to see her. The sewer widens and deepens, a hernia of rubber; soon I will no longer be able to exit the intestines of the Queen of Spades. Perhaps I am already dead, among those who vanish without a trace. The hernia swells, hardens, takes on a geometric shape, becomes an underground boulevard where I’m driving, borne toward a pale egress that keeps shrinking. Just before the fall, I brace myself and pull up short, barely making it. My limbs are icy. Everything is naked, strange, and lonely.

I sit down, feet dangling in the emptiness over a great misty plain, a vast yellow moonless sky. Not a sound. An empty space where distant forests trace the outlines of dark mountains. But from here I will see the Queen of Spades. I’m alone, I’m wearing shorts and clogs, I am ageless.

I see her—the Queen of Spades! She’s walking. Her black body lies somewhere in the valley, crushing the grass, but her shadow is slender as a tall mannequin’s—you can make out her spine, she has long stiff arms that toss mad hands about, hands that are hairs. For a head she has but a clump of bristling hair growing from a single root. This shadow grows, leans forward, stretches out, can suddenly turn out to be right overhead, and the terror of these substanceless limbs is paralyzing. Like all monsters, the Queen of Spades is alone. I feel almost friendly toward her, but at the same time, I’m afraid she’ll find me, follow me into the sewer. What would she do with me? I am with her, since I see her. But no—all I see is her living shadow, a shadow that no longer looks like her at all.

Peasants have told me that they thought they’d killed the creature by killing its great flaccid body, but their efforts were wasted. Now the villages are empty all around; those who remain have gone to ground in their houses. They hardly dare to go out in the daytime to gather food in the fields no one now owns. It is not certain that the Queen of Spades means its victims harm. They fear her like death, without knowing…

And yet I leaned forward to try and surprise her. But she seemed too far away, and I clung uselessly to the edge of the cliff. In the sewer behind me, I heard movement. When suddenly I turned around, my clog rang against the cast iron, and the vibrating sewer amplified the sound. The valleys made echo. I trembled, unable either to advance or retreat. Something hirsute, sticky, warm, took me by the shoulders, lifted me up before I had the strength to put up a fight. I fainted in the arms of the Queen of Spades.

The post The Queen of Spades appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

It is customary to establish reality before disrupting it, but some works are uncertain from the get-go. We all know that voice, of contemplation or reserve, into which madness gradually leaches, or in which it is revealed to have been lurking all along—the idea of a weird tale being to leave us without a place to stand, or a leg to do it on, before the vast, malign indifference. Still, there are stories where our first step falls not on firm ground, but on sand at the water’s edge. And already the tides, rushing out, are robbing us of foothold.

The water’s edge, that porous border, is a good place to start with Eugène Savitzkaya: a creature of limens, spaces of detente, unlikely juxtapositions. Belgian by birth of Ukranian descent, long admired but little known, Savitzkaya is generally classed as a poet despite having penned plays, essays, and more than twelve novels. And these novels—plotless, impressionistic, glories of language and consciousness, brief unchaptered bursts all from France’s leading avant-garde publisher, Minuit—surely they partake more of poetry than prose?

The intersections of the Weird and what is often called “experimental” writing have been covered before: Burroughs, Ballard, Donald Barthelme, Blake Butler, Brians Marcus and Evenson, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves… Like “world” literature, “experiment” is a baggy category, a catch-all for whatever balks the casual reader: strange line breaks, eccentric page layouts, lack of characters or plot, lack of setting or signposts… Another feature might be emphasis on language: meticulous, painstaking emphasis, the sense that at every moment the entire work hinges on, lives or dies by the next word choice, the syllable-by-syllable propagation of some established rhythm. It’s not that the prose is abstract—in fact, it is often exceedingly concrete, blunt, simple, stripped of metaphor and complex syntax—but that (as in Evenson, Butler, or even Beckett) something has been subtracted from it, making us work harder for a fuller picture of what is being described. The result is a certain destabilization, dislocation, an alienation that does not distance you so much from the text as lock you alone inside it. Hence the usual adjectives: hallucinatory, intense, incantatory… the feel and unease of Weird. You’re not sure where you are, because if you are where you think you are, it can’t really be that way, can it? The author can’t mean it.

Consider the opening paragraph of Savitzkaya’s short eulogy “In Memory of Tabacchino,” in the latest issue of Anomalous:

Tabacchino was a child. Tabacchino was a dormouse. Tabacchino was a dog, a bird, a squirrel, an almond tree, a living being. Child, dog, dormouse, bird, squirrel, or almond tree, he breathed, drank water, had a clean smell, a unique charm, and grew old. He bore inside him sap that flowed groundward through openings planned and improvised. The wind would muss his hair, rumple him, refresh and sometimes torment him. The first Tabacchino to get the coup de grâce was the almond tree: drought, then woodcutters. They wept then, lovers of almonds, the child first among them. No one could put the tree back as it had been. The dormouse, terrified by an owl, succumbed to a heart attack, rotted, and was scattered to the winds. Not the slightest sign of that bird in the skies now. Seek the dog’s grave in vain. Then came the child’s turn: crushed, ground, and scattered.

What, exactly, is Tabacchino? All of these things? None of them? Is he really a man; are these merely metaphorical comparisons? And if so, are his transformations meant as fable? If this is allegory, where is the key? (One might also dismiss this as “poetry.”)

Degrees of reification have sometimes been used to draw lines: between spec fic and lit fic, between allegory and story, between poetry and fiction. If the monster’s a metaphor, it’s lily-livered literary, but if the monster’s a monster—well, now we’re talking. Speculative fiction is the imagined made real, so that it must be contended with, at a physical, visceral level: blood and guts, meat and sweat. Literature, ever polite, merely entertains the imagined, as in a parlor of conjecture.

But I would argue Savitzkaya’s very power derives from his refusal to reify, his insistence on simply stating. Reification, Savitzkaya shows us, can in its own way be a kind of reassurance, a signposting, letting us know where we stand. When we tightrope between is-it? or isn’t‑it?, a fuller reification tips us off, tips us to one side. As an elaboration of the simply stated, reifying is also a bringing-into-the-world that entails history and rules and a certain kind of sense-making: all the basics of that spec staple, coherent worldbuilding.

Savitzkaya’s Russian mother is said to have fed him on fairy tales, and “In the Rediscovered Book” (also in Anomalous) certainly owes more to that tradition, but as usual, slips from classifying grasp. Its sinuous first sentence takes us straight into the world inside a book inside the drawer of a small platen press in the cellar of a house in the mountains. We spend the rest of this short piece there, punctuated by something like a refrain. Three times throughout, it is stated that there is no point peering nearer, or bending closer to sniff: the world of the book, being described, is immediate and blindingly obvious, assaults the senses. Of course this organizing chorus, a tactic borrowed from lyric or joke, clarifies nothing, may not even organize, may indeed only provide the appearance of organization. The minutely detailed world of Savitzkaya, who once devoted a monograph to Hieronymous Bosch, is never far from violence, nor the blithe ignorance that is the other side of its coin:

All the book’s children were in love; they polished their nails, smoothed their hair, and painted their lips. At night in the book, trucks passing by on the road crushed the sheep, then the dogs who’d come to devour the dead or wounded sheep, then other wilder dogs drawn by the fresh flesh of the dead or wounded dogs and the reek of the sheep’s remains. Night in the book smelled bad… At the heart of the book, the balloon exploded, and the charred navigator landed on the pines. The young woman watching the scene let herself be bitten and eaten by ants. Only the children kept playing.

Or consider this vow of vengeance from “Tabacchino”, which smacks of Arcimboldo whimsy and childish caprice:

Whosoever scattered Tabacchino’s body: I would have shattered his bones, those of the torso and those of the head, I would have scored into his skin as into calf leather, annulled the order of his fingers and replaced his tongue with a pepper of the brightest red. And his nose with a sprouting potato.

We cling to every word as if to handholds in a rock face, because at every moment we have no idea what to expect. In the absence of conventionally established expectations, anything is possible. Every word defers the promise of sense; in fact this creeping progress is Savitzkaya’s narrative drive. Story lies in smithereens. This is narrative atomized, moving forward by crumbs; we can see no further than the next word, focus yoked to this infinitesimal progress, like a tile in a vast mosaic, a scrutiny of minutiae, while all around us is a spreading sensation of alarm that the bigger picture, could we but see it, is quite terrifying.

Through language, Savitzkaya lends, extrudes consciousness into things alien to him: animal, vegetable, and mineral alike. This, the imaginative process by which writers bring the strange closer to us, often  finds itself inverted in Savitzkaya’s work: we are brought closer to the strange, the alien. As Rokus Hofstede (trans. Donald Gardner) notes at Poetry International, Savitzkaya’s voice,

“sometimes sombre, sometimes intimate, but always sensual… sings of metamorphosis, of unity and dissolution. The world appears to him as a garden in which everything and everyone – plants, insects and people – are doomed to change, to melt away and disappear.”

Among his more famous novels are pseudo-biographies of his son, then his daughter in their infancy, and of young Elvis. From the succinct sections of these novels something emergent arises, a portrait of development and transition through accretion of fantastical detail. His record of infancy—that of son Marin, daughter Louise, and even himself, in stories like “The Rubber Animal”—is something like a mushroom coming to life: the dawning of some powerfully alien intelligence.

In “Family Portrait,” (forthcoming in the next issue of Unstuck), this intelligence is applied to death, whose harbinger is a wasp:

A wasp visits my mother, who is lying in her room. The wasp is truly golden and soot-streaked. Its abdomen is separated from its thorax by only a filament thin as a hair, which seems very close to snapping. The wasp says to my mother:

I know this room, I’ve been here three times before and I drank a good amount of sugar from your glass of blackcurrant cordial, the walls of this room are much too close and the window cold and hard like the tall sky.

And the wasp says:

I am a woman you met in the train taking you to Germany; it was I who, having put you at ease—you, sad and shattered—stole the envelope containing all your photos, my heart and my nerves are in my thorax and my abdomen contains the rest, and this clear division makes me invincible.

And the wasp says:

I have always been a wasp, golden and soot-streaked, social, relentless and quivering; the world doesn’t frighten me, already I have begun to eat you, I devoured your children and soon I will tell you how I went about it, I work the best when ignored, I am most effective when believed absent, I am also all the women who have harmed you.

If writing is a record of thought, then the thought process here is lyrical, fractured, unpredictably foreign.

While Gian Lombardo has translated some of Savitzkaya’s prose poems in Rules of Solitude (Quale Press, 2004) and the anthology When the Time Comes: A Selection of Contemporary Prose Poetry (Quale Press 2002), the work of Savitzkaya’s that most clearly maps onto the Weird—while far from the majority of his oeuvre—has yet to be explored in English. Savitzkaya is minimal without being skeletal; in fact, in few words he is almost lush, an impression derived from the swerve of his language, coloration through unlikely word choice. Lusher, I think, than his avant-weird American counterparts, though both draw power from rhythmic devices. Above all he is authoritative. By refusing to say more, he makes us make do with what is said. Whatever is said simply is, though it can’t be.

The post Experiments with Weird: Eugène Savitzkaya appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Usually, I don’t advocate transposing the writer’s biography onto the writer’s work, especially since I am not going to dwell on it here, but in the case of Carrington (1917–2011), her biography is part of her lexicon and it warrants noting. Just to summarize an extraordinary life that could fill volumes, Leonora Carrington was a prominent surrealist, and came onto that scene at the tender age of 19, when she fell in love with the movement, and one of its prophets Max Ernst, after attending the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition. She met Ernst a year later, and they ran away together to the South of France, until the German Occupation split the couple and she fled to Spain.  After a short stint in an Institution, she came to New York around 1941 awaiting clearance to migrate to Mexico, where she would finally settle for her long life of painting.

It is unfortunate that most people only know of Leonora Carrington the painter, and not the writer, as the two are one-in-the-same.  Both image and word serves as an inner bestiary (her language is spoken with animals) in which Carrington explores her most pivotal autobiographical moments through symbolism and Jungian analysis, creating bizarre and unusual narrative that can be read without her biographical transparency laid upon the story or tableau, but is more jarring and stirring when done so. “White Rabbits” is a prime example of this visual and textual exchange.  Carrington wrote this story in 1941. She was twenty-four and just arrived in New York in a pretty intense state of transition.  The war had brought a lot of friendly Surrealist faces to New York, including Ernst with his savior, patroness, and new lover Peggy Guggenheim).  I can’t help but wonder if the later two were models for the diseased neighbors that appear later in the story. Nonetheless, surrounded by these friends tainted with painful memories probably left her feeling alienated and alone.

Similarly, the narrator in “White Rabbits” has undergone a very adult transition—moving away from home sans friends and family–and is completely alone in a decaying and alienating city.  She grows bored, which when combined with curiosity is an alchemical formula for Weird experiences.  It was true for Alice in Alice in Wonderland, and it is also true for the narrator in “White Rabbits.”

For the bored and curious Alice, a bit of the weird hops into her life in the form of a talking and dapper white rabbit who she follows down a rabbit hole and into a surreal and fantastic adventure. For Carrington’s protagonist, the same formula applies, but her situation is far removed from the idyllic childhood Alice flees. You don’t know why the narrator has fled London for New York, but she finds New York disappointing–“I had not imagined New York like this.”– Nothing at all like a Wonderland.

Rather than looking through a rabbit hole, she looks through windows and onto her balcony. But for this young lady there is no giant, tardy, talking rabbit (no, those eponymous symbols come later I am afraid), but curious neighbors: a beautiful woman who empties bones into the street. When the strange lady asks the narrator to come over, and bring some rancid meat, the lonely femme, buys meat to rot on her balcony so she’d have an excuse to go down the rabbit hole.

Just as an aside, Carrington adored Lewis Carroll as a child, so it doesn’t seem like a stretch that in responding to her personal life and ambivalent future in New York City, to her friends and former lovers, that she fractured Carroll’s famous coming-of-age tale to serve this transitional autobiographical fragment.

When the narrator comes out at the end, she is before a decrepit house filled with ravenous rabbits that devour her rancid meat like land-walking piranhas. You can take the symbolism of the rabbits as far as you want, but their appearance is so brief that the obvious inferences are probably the more correct ones in this case.  They eat meat. They are carnivorous. It is said that people who keep rabbits, typically herbivores, are often vegetarians themelseves, making an implicit statement that they are animal friendly.  In the case of the neighbors, their rabbits eat meat, and in turn their owners eat them. It is a jarring image, as well as another painterly technique translated into a writer tool.  Foreshadowing in this story is the equivalent of a visual composition, where the position of the rabbits is the guide for the eye into the narrative.

In fact, the moment the narrator enters the house the entire story seems to transmute from words on a page to images on a canvas. Or, you realize, perhaps it was a canvas all along. The narrator’s stark loneliness imbues the story implicitly like the faint yellow ochre contour lines of an underpainting.  But as she begins to indulge her curiosity and visit her neighbors, colors and costumes begin to flood the reader’s mind, and what begins as a modern story in New York City begins to morph into something that seems varnished with age.

While the narrator moves through the story, the other characters are posed and described in solid-color robes that connote costuming from any Florentine Renaissance painting chosen at random. The story itself is full of chiaroscuro–the opening scene describes the building as burnt out relics of London, a place where the narrator tries to escape, and seems to have returned to a decayed version of itself. The images that make up the final scenes are revealed to the narrator and reader through light–the neighbor carries a torch that dictates where the eye is to fall, what the eye is to see.  It introduces us into the tableau by alighting on the rabbits. 

To me, this achievement of a verbal painting is weirder to me than the weird within it. Despite the disturbing images conjured, the technique makes me curious…it is stimulating…it appears to be opening up a rabbit hole into Carrington’s world that I, and other readers, feel compelled to slide down, regardless of the consequences.

The post Down, Down, Down: Leonora Carrington’s “White Rabbits” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.