Dalkey Archive Press
Translated by Lorin Stein
A series of photographs feature an array of fully-clothed characters in a pale grey room. Their attire is business-casual and inconspicuous: button-up shirts, no ties, pleated denims or twills. One woman wears a simple black dress and pumps; another is in a knee-length coral skirt with matching jacket. A faceless male takes a woman from behind as she bends over a wooden table, his hips pressed against hers. In a different frame, the woman in coral kneels on the floor, her face between the legs of a man who sits, head thrown back, on a red velvet sofa. Two men stand in front of the couch and look down at the action. The photographer is Edouard Levé.
The series, “Pornographie,” is not explicitly pornographic. None of the characters involved are naked; there is no view of sexual organs, no exchange of bodily fluids. The actions suggest sex, but the contours are misleading. A title like “Pornographie” warps the viewer’s perception of the subjects, just as a novel or a poem is tinted by its title. But do works of literature operate on the same level as a photograph? John Berger, in his book The Look of Things wrote:
A photograph celebrates neither the event itself nor the faculty of sight in itself. A photograph is already a message about the event it records. The urgency of this message is not entirely dependent on the urgency of the event, but neither can it be entirely independent from it. At its simplest, the message, decoded, means: I have decided that seeing this is worth recording.
The same can be said about a piece of literature. It is unlikely that a reader would not interpret the titles of Levé's books (Suicide and Autoportrait) in the same manner as they would the title "Pornographie." But Levé’s writing seems to function not as a diffraction of reality, but as the narrator’s reality itself. What differentiates his photography from his writing is the negation of inference. It is not simply portraiture; it is self-portraiture.
Certain works of literature seem to summon critical discourse, and others, like Levé’s Autoportrait appear to defy it. Translated deftly by Lorin Stein, Autoportrait is amazingly anti-melodramatic. Levé transcribes humdrum banalities such as “When I sit with bare legs on vinyl, my skin doesn’t slide, it squeaks” or “I can sleep with my arms around someone who doesn’t move.” What distinguishes Levé’s prose (made up entirely of first-person, declarative statements) from say, a census record, is the reticular nature of the non-narrative, non-chronological text. The sentences expose the constant flux of an isolated mind, the pronunciations a type of modern day soliloquy which reflect the dislocated nature of reality, and life in general:
I play squash and ping-pong. When I lie down after drinking water, my stomach makes noises like a water bed. I cross certain streets not breathing through my nose to avoid pollution. I am not for or against painting, that would be like being for or against the brush. When I am happy I’m afraid of dying, when I’m unhappy I am afraid of not dying. If I don’t like what I see, I close my eyes, but if what I hear bothers me, I am unable to close my ears. I cannot predict my headaches. I empty my memory. Squeezing a sponge is fun like chewing gum. (p. 48)
Throughout the text of Autoportrait, the emotional pendulum swings back and forth between intimacy and remoteness, hotness and coldness, a seemingly random compositional method which lulls the reader into a whirlpool of sensations. In one section, Levé writes, “The girl whom I loved the most left me. I wear black shirts. At ten I cut my finger in a flour mill. At six I broke my nose getting hit by car.” This dissolving of the temporal experience creates a bizarre emotional palette. Often the statements border on ridiculousness (“I am not looking to seduce a wearer of Birkenstocks. I do not like the big toe. I wish I had no nails”) and a frequent topic is boredom (“The highway bores me, there’s no life on the side of the road,” “I never quite hear what people say who bore me.”) yet the onslaught of the sentences—written without chapter or paragraph breaks—are never static enough to generate ennui. It is as if Levé uses prosaicness, often laced with absurdity, as an antidote to boredom and despair.
Levé's book Suicide, published in France in 2008 and translated in 2011 in English by Jan Steyn for Dalkey Archive Press, was delivered by Levé to his editor ten days before the author took his own life in 2007. Reading like a companion book to Autoportrait, it evokes the suicide of a childhood friend. It is compiled of similarly articulated statements, but is written in second person. In contrast to the succinct, disjunctive aura of Autoportrait, Suicide often elaborates more decidedly on experience and phenomena:
When you came back you noticed that you had left the doors wide open, and that a casserole was burning on the gas stove. This spectacle disheartened you. You sat down on the couch and felt a violent pain in your temples, as if a caliper were slowly tightening on them. You tapped your fingers on your head; it sounded hollow like a dead man’s skull. (from Suicide, p.77)
In reading both Suicide and Autoportrait, one conjectures on the identity of the “you” and the “I”; it is as if Levé—whose voice is profoundly controlled in both books—is undertaking a loaded exploration of the self, the “tu” in Suicide deputizing for the narrator’s own convoluted self in order to write with affectless clarity about his own metaphysical and emotional inquiries.
In its treatment of the "je," Autoportrait has a good deal in common with writers such as David Markson and Thomas Bernhard, and for that matter Samuel Beckett, whose short prose works such as Texts for Nothing (a rather apropos title) also feature a bombardment of first person statements:
“I’m not deceived, for the moment I’m not deceived, for the moment I’m not there, nor anywhere else what is more, neither as head, nor as voice, nor as testicle, what a shame, what a shame I’m not appearing anywhere as testicle, or as cunt, those areas, a female pubic hair, it sees great sights, peeping down…”
While Beckett and Markson are considerably more digressive and pleonastic than Levé, their shared particularity is in the self-obsessed and convincing voice of the narrator. This is true of Bernhard also, though Levé seems antithetical to Bernhard; where Levé is unduly self-possessed, Bernhard is gloriously wild.
Stein, in an interview in BOMB magazine, spoke about preserving “the slight artificiality” in Levé’s writing; this exists not in the sentences themselves but in the somewhat ironic tone of the writing. The fluidity with which Stein translates Autoportrait seems to stem from Stein’s ability to disappear as a translator, letting the dry, controlled tone of the narrator radiate through the work. One of the remarkable qualities of the text is that even though the tone is consistent throughout, the voice itself is emotionally inflected, at turns regretful or capricious. Stein captures this well.
Ultimately, a writer’s intentions—and especially those of a deceased one—can only be presupposed with semi-precision. But the beauty of Autoportrait is that the stark, sometimes farcical announcements could be uttered by almost anyone during the course of a day: “I often have trouble sleeping,” “I have sometimes made love to one woman while thinking of another,” “Hearing someone whistle annoys me, especially with vibrato.” Fittingly, near the opening of Autoportrait, Levé describes a “compulsive collector” in his family, after whose death they found a shoebox labeled “Little bits of string that have no use. Levé describes his own effort to accumulate a “book-museum of vernacular writing” in which he reproduced handwritten messages, classed by type: flyers about lost animals, announcements of a change in management, home messages, messages to oneself. “I have thought,” Levé writes, “listening to an old man tell me his life story, ‘This man is a museum of himself.”’ Italo Calvino wrote: "Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.” Massaging the prose form, Levé writes, in pointillistic fashion, a “museum of himself.” The brilliant amalgamation of his sentences give the book portent; it is as if Levé, while writing, thought: these are the only things that make sense to me, at this moment.
Translated by Lorin Stein
A series of photographs feature an array of fully-clothed characters in a pale grey room. Their attire is business-casual and inconspicuous: button-up shirts, no ties, pleated denims or twills. One woman wears a simple black dress and pumps; another is in a knee-length coral skirt with matching jacket. A faceless male takes a woman from behind as she bends over a wooden table, his hips pressed against hers. In a different frame, the woman in coral kneels on the floor, her face between the legs of a man who sits, head thrown back, on a red velvet sofa. Two men stand in front of the couch and look down at the action. The photographer is Edouard Levé.
The series, “Pornographie,” is not explicitly pornographic. None of the characters involved are naked; there is no view of sexual organs, no exchange of bodily fluids. The actions suggest sex, but the contours are misleading. A title like “Pornographie” warps the viewer’s perception of the subjects, just as a novel or a poem is tinted by its title. But do works of literature operate on the same level as a photograph? John Berger, in his book The Look of Things wrote:
A photograph celebrates neither the event itself nor the faculty of sight in itself. A photograph is already a message about the event it records. The urgency of this message is not entirely dependent on the urgency of the event, but neither can it be entirely independent from it. At its simplest, the message, decoded, means: I have decided that seeing this is worth recording.
The same can be said about a piece of literature. It is unlikely that a reader would not interpret the titles of Levé's books (Suicide and Autoportrait) in the same manner as they would the title "Pornographie." But Levé’s writing seems to function not as a diffraction of reality, but as the narrator’s reality itself. What differentiates his photography from his writing is the negation of inference. It is not simply portraiture; it is self-portraiture.
Certain works of literature seem to summon critical discourse, and others, like Levé’s Autoportrait appear to defy it. Translated deftly by Lorin Stein, Autoportrait is amazingly anti-melodramatic. Levé transcribes humdrum banalities such as “When I sit with bare legs on vinyl, my skin doesn’t slide, it squeaks” or “I can sleep with my arms around someone who doesn’t move.” What distinguishes Levé’s prose (made up entirely of first-person, declarative statements) from say, a census record, is the reticular nature of the non-narrative, non-chronological text. The sentences expose the constant flux of an isolated mind, the pronunciations a type of modern day soliloquy which reflect the dislocated nature of reality, and life in general:
I play squash and ping-pong. When I lie down after drinking water, my stomach makes noises like a water bed. I cross certain streets not breathing through my nose to avoid pollution. I am not for or against painting, that would be like being for or against the brush. When I am happy I’m afraid of dying, when I’m unhappy I am afraid of not dying. If I don’t like what I see, I close my eyes, but if what I hear bothers me, I am unable to close my ears. I cannot predict my headaches. I empty my memory. Squeezing a sponge is fun like chewing gum. (p. 48)
Throughout the text of Autoportrait, the emotional pendulum swings back and forth between intimacy and remoteness, hotness and coldness, a seemingly random compositional method which lulls the reader into a whirlpool of sensations. In one section, Levé writes, “The girl whom I loved the most left me. I wear black shirts. At ten I cut my finger in a flour mill. At six I broke my nose getting hit by car.” This dissolving of the temporal experience creates a bizarre emotional palette. Often the statements border on ridiculousness (“I am not looking to seduce a wearer of Birkenstocks. I do not like the big toe. I wish I had no nails”) and a frequent topic is boredom (“The highway bores me, there’s no life on the side of the road,” “I never quite hear what people say who bore me.”) yet the onslaught of the sentences—written without chapter or paragraph breaks—are never static enough to generate ennui. It is as if Levé uses prosaicness, often laced with absurdity, as an antidote to boredom and despair.
Levé's book Suicide, published in France in 2008 and translated in 2011 in English by Jan Steyn for Dalkey Archive Press, was delivered by Levé to his editor ten days before the author took his own life in 2007. Reading like a companion book to Autoportrait, it evokes the suicide of a childhood friend. It is compiled of similarly articulated statements, but is written in second person. In contrast to the succinct, disjunctive aura of Autoportrait, Suicide often elaborates more decidedly on experience and phenomena:
When you came back you noticed that you had left the doors wide open, and that a casserole was burning on the gas stove. This spectacle disheartened you. You sat down on the couch and felt a violent pain in your temples, as if a caliper were slowly tightening on them. You tapped your fingers on your head; it sounded hollow like a dead man’s skull. (from Suicide, p.77)
In reading both Suicide and Autoportrait, one conjectures on the identity of the “you” and the “I”; it is as if Levé—whose voice is profoundly controlled in both books—is undertaking a loaded exploration of the self, the “tu” in Suicide deputizing for the narrator’s own convoluted self in order to write with affectless clarity about his own metaphysical and emotional inquiries.
In its treatment of the "je," Autoportrait has a good deal in common with writers such as David Markson and Thomas Bernhard, and for that matter Samuel Beckett, whose short prose works such as Texts for Nothing (a rather apropos title) also feature a bombardment of first person statements:
“I’m not deceived, for the moment I’m not deceived, for the moment I’m not there, nor anywhere else what is more, neither as head, nor as voice, nor as testicle, what a shame, what a shame I’m not appearing anywhere as testicle, or as cunt, those areas, a female pubic hair, it sees great sights, peeping down…”
While Beckett and Markson are considerably more digressive and pleonastic than Levé, their shared particularity is in the self-obsessed and convincing voice of the narrator. This is true of Bernhard also, though Levé seems antithetical to Bernhard; where Levé is unduly self-possessed, Bernhard is gloriously wild.
Stein, in an interview in BOMB magazine, spoke about preserving “the slight artificiality” in Levé’s writing; this exists not in the sentences themselves but in the somewhat ironic tone of the writing. The fluidity with which Stein translates Autoportrait seems to stem from Stein’s ability to disappear as a translator, letting the dry, controlled tone of the narrator radiate through the work. One of the remarkable qualities of the text is that even though the tone is consistent throughout, the voice itself is emotionally inflected, at turns regretful or capricious. Stein captures this well.
Ultimately, a writer’s intentions—and especially those of a deceased one—can only be presupposed with semi-precision. But the beauty of Autoportrait is that the stark, sometimes farcical announcements could be uttered by almost anyone during the course of a day: “I often have trouble sleeping,” “I have sometimes made love to one woman while thinking of another,” “Hearing someone whistle annoys me, especially with vibrato.” Fittingly, near the opening of Autoportrait, Levé describes a “compulsive collector” in his family, after whose death they found a shoebox labeled “Little bits of string that have no use. Levé describes his own effort to accumulate a “book-museum of vernacular writing” in which he reproduced handwritten messages, classed by type: flyers about lost animals, announcements of a change in management, home messages, messages to oneself. “I have thought,” Levé writes, “listening to an old man tell me his life story, ‘This man is a museum of himself.”’ Italo Calvino wrote: "Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.” Massaging the prose form, Levé writes, in pointillistic fashion, a “museum of himself.” The brilliant amalgamation of his sentences give the book portent; it is as if Levé, while writing, thought: these are the only things that make sense to me, at this moment.
