Sphinx: A Word is a Form [1]
Two Uncollected Poems by Liliane Giraudon
Translated by Jeff Nagy and Lindsay Turner
With An Introduction by Amandine André
Over the course of her long and varied career, Liliane Giraudon has proven to be one of the most singular voices of the twentieth century, taking on the still-unanswered questions that have marked our time. Her work relentlessly deconstructs dominant representations, addresses itself to issues of gender and class, and investigates the political and philosophical implications of these issues, which also provide the particular form for her texts. That form is at the heart of an inclusive, multiple aesthetic, incorporating a wide range of materials and artistic practices: collage, drawing, documentary, citation, notetaking, photography, and performance. Her work marks a shift in the nature of the writing practice itself, revealing the workshop where the poet carries out her bricolage, in the sense of Lévi-Strauss’s description of the “savage mind” of the bricoleur. Giraudon’s artistic project is a move towards the making-savage of poetry.
Not poetry but that—I write prose in prose [2]
What form would suit an anarcho-queer poetry? An anarcho-queer poetics must give form to a symbiotic community of heterogeneous, antagonistic entities in the same syntactic body. It has to escape from all identification. The phrase “Not poetry but that—I write prose in prose” insists on not belonging to the genre of poetry. A first problem with the identity of this proposition: the assertion contradicts the form in which it arises. And a second: the use of the dash indicates a separation [3]—further underscored by the italics—while the terms following the dash end up included in the first part via the word “that.” And a third: the repetition of the term “prose” no longer insists on the nature of the proposition, but splits in two the term that would seem to provide a definition for it. On the one hand, this term is stripped of its qualifying function. On the other, in its duplication, it loses a unique meaning. And so the aspects and meanings of “prose” multiply. In this way, the proposition becomes stateless, as it were, belonging no longer to a genre but inhabiting them all. Part denaturalizing operation, part poeticizing of the prosaic—and vice versa.
In prostate you’ve got prose [4]
Playing up the prose of the poem also means exposing things that have traditionally been considered base and trivial matter: entrails, genitals, feet, fluids, food. Sex, for Giraudon, is also a textual practice, whether this means changing it or proposing it as a favor:
Real writing is a sexual favor. The most virtuosic of sexual favors. [5]
Giraudon’s textual practice should be thought alongside the notion of montage, through tools like the mixing board and the sewing machine. As a contemporary of the great artists and thinkers of montage—Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker—Giraudon works on language and the page to similar effect. What she calls prose is essentially the act of reframing a cropped image, and all of her work tries to reveal the context and situation that made some particular shot possible—or to reveal what happens outside the frame (which is also what gets left on the cutting-room floor of history). Reframing, montage, and re-montage: Giraudon’s process links moments of time, tying the gestures of yesterday and today together in solidarity. In this way, a gesture that began in another century finds its conclusion or its continuation in a “now.” Hence the prevalence of proper names and allusions in her work: they serve to activate the present, plugging it in to a past now reoriented towards a future. She builds solidarity between herself and these names, and between them and the strangers who will read her texts. As the ancestor of montage, sewing also aims to make texts and reading practices into the dressings, cross-dressings, and disguises one needs to circulate in forbidden spaces.
She (here you must always hear “The Poet”) notes that she discovered a poem by Adilia Lopez. Adilia Lopez is another poet of the same sex that she and The Poet love.
Yesterday I thought of Queneau, executioner of Bessette. His way of holding someone while letting go. She wrote of it: “A sort of tenderness links the executioners. Tenderness for their victims.” The placement of the period grammatically reinforces the violence of the link. But Queneau isn’t the only one. Executioners are sensitive men, too.
Yesterday is him, is her, is tomorrow. [6]
If there are so many specters proliferating in these texts, they’re there to perform surgery on reality: enhancing it with its own repressed content, revealing what’s been cut out of the story. They also function to spread singularities throughout the textual space. The proliferation of beings has a particular, centrifugal effect: the I of the poem splits into all of its counterparts, increasingly unmoored from its own identity as it multiplies. It becomes the living mouth through which the dead finish their sentences. The poet’s creative logic transforms the speaker into “her,” a grammatical third person that isn’t the result of a cleavage between self and other, but the aesthetic and political inclusion of both in a common destiny.
so scared you piss of it
Porcelain the eyes are closing
so scared you piss of it
Porcelain the eyes are closing [7]
A common tongue and a common destiny are often connected through the body and its byproducts: urine, shit, and blood. Giraudon seems to want to clean and prepare her tongue the same way that the dead are cleaned and prepared. What is most striking in Giraudon’s work is that her thinking refuses to abandon any living thing. She refuses to abandon them, not to death—because death is the passage between two worlds, which is its own outrageous cunning—but to nothingness, to total destruction. This perseverance and persistence is translated into a practice of writing, one that never fails to pull out and emphasize axes of domination, particularly in poetry and art, where women are relegated to the role of muse, housewife, or secretary. Conscientiously, meticulously, and strategically erased by men, they are conspicuously absent in theoretical texts. There’s a peculiar operation that culture always applies to the representation of the male poet, a sort of idealization; the curse always leveled on poetesses is political. Giraudon documents this aspect of the concrete life of marginalized artists for her readers: economic banishment, artistic devaluation, madness brought on by poverty and scorn, elision from history, exhaustion due to their proletarian condition—an exhaustion redoubled if or when they become mothers—mutilated lives.
Giraudon’s aesthetic is a materialist one, preoccupied with ways of life, and above all with giving form to what, in the crucible of the world, can only find a diminished, partial existence. The moment you give form to something is also the moment when commonality and sharing begin. Giraudon is a materialist as Godard’s films are materialist, in that she reveals the processes of production behind the text; and materialist also in the sense that the life of the author shows through: her grounding in Marseille and in Provence, her taste in food, her favorite cigarettes and books, her periods of health and illness.
Philosophy names and reflects on the idea of a life “in form”; but it’s literary practice that takes this idea in hand, that really concerns itself with it. Literature is not only a discourse that speaks through style, it’s a praxis for which style is an ethics. Literature means taking up arms against all the ways—even the sophisticated ones—of refusing to pay attention to the “how” of different lives.
And so it is also through literature—understood as the infinite discourse of “how,” which is to say the place where we can explore the fact that no life can be separated from its form, the fact that every struggle for life is fought through its forms—it is through literature that this book will make its way. [8]
Liliane Giraudon’s poetics of art and action: piracies, holdups, misappropriation of both economic and symbolic capital—her work is a grand sabotage of the summonses inflicted by the powers that be.
Notes:
[1] Liliane Giraudon, La Sphinge mange cru (Marseille: Al Dante, 2013).
[2] Giraudon, “Chanabaja.”
[3] We should keep in mind that “sex,” the etymological origin of which is still debated, has been connected to “secare,” which means to “cut or divide.” Sexus therefore being the division of a species into males and females. Source: Historical dictionary of the French language, A. Rey.
[4] Giraudon, “Chanabaja.”
[5] Giraudon, Le garçon cousu (Paris: P.O.L.,2014).
[6] Giraudon, La poétesse (Paris: P.O.L., 2009).
[7] Giraudon, “Chanabaja.”
[8] Marielle Macé, Styles: critique de nos formes de vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2016).
Liliane Giraudon
LA VALLÉE CLOSE
hello dear Akram
the holy alliance
of spectacle and commodity
finally accomplished why cine-
poem when French
film croaks under false
legends and the poem
it has trouble
getting with the times
now mute black and white
we made fish tagine
in tangier a cine-poem without
bothering about colors only
maybe sparks of non-
light in the light any one
sign might lead to another
desire to see and to know
logic of fantasy a past
transmuted to present
when business is business
facts or documents poetics
involving reflection critique
and humor desires in also
the bodies that one in djellaba
all of the human species
bodies like flesh not like
form tears in stock like
laughter an in-between interstice
or interval since pasolini
says it the only poetry’s the poetry
yet to be done poetry’s in the act
of doing poetry but first
you have to wrench the poem
out of poetry extract an aching
tooth soothe cine-
poem dominating
the market which means resisting
the market (which means the public)
cultural goods being used
by the masses translate as slaughter
and submission not image
of reality maybe reality
of the image our intertitles seen
in freeze-frame
reflexive exteriority between
figure and place as response
to the absence of dogs with
the choice of a title arabs
like cats dispersed
moments and missed appointments
the in-between interval
consecutive past traces
of a present interstice
of fiction and documentation
to imagine dear akram
that what we did
that almost-summer there in tangier
might be a cine-poem
here we must greet
in the designer necklaces line
of charles cros or germaine dulac
to a still-living jean-claude
rousseau son of lucretius cousin
of petrarch whose “enclosed valley”
takes its place in the genre here designated
in sun petrarch’s suns yes
a geography book a painting
by giorgione an erotic photo
the vaucluse fountain a factory
abandoned double sestina
vaginal character of the tempest
closed valley unscripted
six subtracted from one all the elements
gravitate in a single orbit
a meeting an abyss a gap
some water a love a story
of love always that risk
of burglary a lesson
pure atomic desire the shot
breaks a dark then to endure
to endure passion is to make
a film bring in the burning laundry
the enclosed valley this character
from behind watching the stars
a stone set on a book
when beauty sees itself
nothing is seen the air and the light
I called a little too early but
you weren’t at home the boy
crossed the room his voice
in the telephone where do you live
he lives in the image a bath
room and the bed open
it’s his only piece of luggage
thrown across the void
he says I still have a lot
of things to try out with the sound
between prose and poetry image
and reflection lyricism and documentation
he’s the one who narrates the boy
crosses the room giorgione
first taken for titian if the plot
like the paths leads to
the cliff we make for the cave
its striking image this absence
compartment breath indistinct
epigrams the sighted images
they’re what watch us a
perfect mobility so intrinsically
posthumous that we can only repeat
if once there ever was a cine-poem
it would have to be dear akram this one
thrown across the void la vallée close
Liliane Giraudon
CHANABAJA
(parody)
“I am what I write. What I write is another. Prove to me that you are not what you are, language. That I am, and that I is…” – Oskar Pastior
In prostate you’ve got prose
Not poetry but that—I write prose in prose
My back to the elm tree roses undone
The other side’s that
Not dead—saying I’m not like myself anymore
Trembling for him a
Beauty so perfect without prosthesis
Put these two under your tongue
You’re sort of losing the real
Meaning in its light
In prostate you’ve got prose not poetry but that I write prose in prose
Back to the radiator roses undone the other side it’s ok no one believes it
Sleepless mouth shining saying “I’m not like
likemyselfanymore”
Trembling we say for a leaf
Beauty so perfect
Without prosthesis
Repeating put these two under your tongue it’ll all go faster
you’ll see you have to take our word for it
You’re sort of losing the meaning
Sub-real in its light
The refrigerator spinach-green
In slow sentences that ward off the future
A gull coming from heaven
Sub-cloud asks if the criminal
Did he make it out of the crime
Not the crime not really
Not more or less something else altogether
War for example
Hasn’t stopped
Telling him but he doesn’t hear
Still so beautiful
A gurney a blue undershirt
A gull coming from heaven
Sub-cloud the odd harmonious socks who’d dare call them musical
asking if the crime
Did he make it out of the crime
Not the crime really just a necktie
Neither more nor less
Something else entirely
War for example hasn’t stopped not against your bodies not in their heads everyone knows it
Telling him but he doesn’t hear
But who’s listening
Still so beautiful and the silence in all this you hear it because he’s the music
His name on the tag
Just one T like his beauty
All those years to learn
Radiant corridor
The one who waits back of room number
One swift line in the night
Commerce of birds and the wind
Run through the trees all redone
Dreaming that he’s the one whose smooth
Flat stomach’s cut open
That name on the tag with just one
T like his beauty
All those years to learn
Radiant corridor just a bike left leaning there
She waits surprised such a simple object exists
survives in this world since forever so totally
Back of room number
Simple line in the night
It’s quick
Commerce of birds—why not add a little meaning
And the wind in the trees too why not
These biscuits turn to glue
Hard to swallow
The thing and the word for it
Dreaming with your mouth full
He’s the one they open
That smooth flat stomach
so scared you piss of it
Porcelain the eyes are closing
so scared you piss of it
Porcelain the eyes are closing
These are the lower tears she thinks
Pray but what (Bleeding Christ of Cuzco)
He takes her in his arms impossible
They’re nailed it’s up to you to—
Fill it in a letter’s wrong
Or missing “r” I’m sure the candle
Lit the other morning trims
And the peonies’ restrained color
A bird’s stomach the father’s corpse
So scared that while you piss
Porcelain (the eyes are closing)
These are the lower tears
She thinks pray you ought to pray but what
Bleeding Christ of Cuzco or the one in Lima
He takes her in his arms impossible they’re nailed but if Adilia said it then
The Roman Catholic Church has more sex appeal than an X-rated film
that’s not what she said
They’re nailed it’s up to you to —
Fill it in (“snuff” or “hold”)
Surely just the candle
The one lit
the other morning that Thursday
which is Juno’s day
All the peonies restrained in their water
A bird’s stomach
The father’s corpse
(…)