Danielle Collobert

Oh fuck.

I didn't know Danielle Collobert was dead.

Usually, I say I'm about two years behind what's happening in the world, but in this case I'm thirty-two years behind.

That's rather a precipitous decline. Even for me.

It just occurs to me that I never read a single bit of biographical information on her. I was just assuming she was alive and well and mid-career.

James Chapman sent me a bunch of P.O.L. novels a few summers back, but I was fully embarked on one of my oh-too-typical summers of pleasure, programmatic mental impairment and oblivion and only read a few of them, like Cadiot's Fairy Queen, which seemed to me charming if slight (without the Stein mythos would it really even be readable?)

He wanted me to do a translation of a novel that didn't really appeal to me and had already been translated to acclaim a generation ago, so nothing came of the solicitation. I politely wussied out. (He would have had to clear it through P.O.L. anyway--or whoever had the rights on that one--but I think he had already been in conversation on that with the relevant people.).

And then I pointed out to Jim that most of these authors were being translated by the best translators out there, like Norma Cole and Cole Swensen, etc. So that doesn't exactly make one feel the need to put one's hand in, either.

Lately, I have grown hungry for something different in my reading and have been enjoying several of these P.O.L. volumes.

I've been acquainting myself with Danielle Collobert's novels, or her books that vaguely resemble novels, if you will. The author wrote novels which are really paragraphed poetry--her finely worked prose poems tend to concatenate into novels.

I've been enjoying this rather large volume of Collobert, Oeuvres I. (I don't believe I own Oeuvres II so I'll have to attempt to rectify that soon--if there is such a creature.)

Here's the horrible truth at Wiki.

I'm assuming "seminary text" is a slip in sprachgefuhl (by the most likely non-anglophone author of this article) for "seminal text."

I don't know how to correct Wiki, sorry.


Danielle Collobert

Danielle Collobert
Born July 23, 1940
Rostrenen, Brittany

Died July 23, 1978
Paris, Île-de-France

Occupation poet, novelist, and short story writer

Nationality French
Period 1961-1978

Subjects death, madness, schizophrenia, gender

Literary movement prose poetry, experimental poetry

Danielle Collobert was a French author, poet and journalist, born in Rostrenen, Côtes-d'Armor on 23 July 1940. She died, by her own hand, in Paris on 23 July 1978.

Her mother, a teacher, was obliged to live in a neighbouring village, and thus, Danielle grew up at her grandparents' house, where her mother and her aunt would return whenever they so could. Both entered into the French Resistance.

In 1961, having abandoned her university studies, she worked at the Galerie Hautefeuille in Paris, where she wrote Totem and many other texts that would three years later be part of her seminary text, Meurtre. In the April of that year, she published, at her own expense, Chants des Guerres (War Songs) with Pierre-Jean Oswald publishers. Some years later, she would destroy the early editions of this, her first published book.

She engaged in the FLN and was involved in missions in Algeria. After a self-imposed exile from May to August 1962 in Italy, she returned to collaborate with the Algerian magazine, Révolution Africaine, until it stopped being published during the Presidency of Ahmed Ben Bella. After rejection by Les Éditions de Minuit, her cause was supported by Raymond Queneau, which led to Gallimard publishing Meurtre, in 1964.

After joining the Writers' Union in May 1968, and soon after turning up in Czechoslovakia during the Soviet backlash to the Prague Spring, she would travel near continuously from 1970 to 1976. Her travels would strongly influence her later writings. In 1978, she asked Uccio Esposito-Torrigiani to translate her last work, the ironically titled Survie (Survival), into Italian; reportedly, she wanted it published as quickly as possible. Survie came out at the end of April, and Danielle Collobert would die by suicide, on her birthday, three months later, in a hotel on the rue Dauphine in Paris.

An experimental writer, Collobert wrote in a haunting, pessimistic, tense and stark style of 'prose poems.' Her work showed an obsession with death as the destination of humankind, the ambiguity of gender, travel and madness.

Bibliography

Chants des guerres, Éditions P.-J. Oswald, 1961 (later by Éditions Calligrammes, Quimper, 1999).
Meurtre, Gallimard (Lagny-sur-Marne, impr. É. Grevin et fils), [Paris,], 1964.
Des nuits sur les hauteurs, Éditions Denoel (preface by Italo Calvino)
Dire : I-II :+un-deux+, Paris, Seghers : Laffont, 1972, 27-Mesnil-sur-l'Estrée, impr. Firmin-Didot, 192 p., collection Change, série rouge.
Il donc, Laffont, Paris, 1976.
Survie, Éditions Orange Export Ltd, 1978.
It Then, O Books, 1989 (trans. Norma Cole).
Notebooks, 1956-1978, Litmus Press, 2003 (trans. Norma Cole)

Further Reading

"The Path to Impersonalization (Danielle Collobert)," by John Taylor, 'Paths to Contemporary French Literature', volume 2, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2007, pp. 149-155.


It's ironic that this article wants to equate her work with the suicidal impulse.

Because the books are very much in love with life and the perfect shape of its most "unharmed" moments.

Or at least that's how they start out.

She is in love with even the infinitesimally small details of that sensuous panoply which is life, and most of her paragraphs do indeed read like prose poems. The words are finely-sieved. While it's every bit as precise as one could ask--Flaubert?--it's not meticulous in the way that Flaubert wanted to be. Somehow it's more accurate even than Flaubert. I suppose that's because this is more "first person," even when the author is employing the third person. I guess I'm saying she knows how to conflate the third person and the first person in an impressive authorial empathy.

To generalize perhaps dangerously, one of the big differences between (belletristic) American novels and French novels--and again, I'm using "novel" loosely here, as reading Collobert is rather like reading a genre-remaker like Teresa Cha--is that ability of so many French writers to equate language itself with Eros, and to understand how intimately linked the erotic and death are. The tonal gamut of of this linkage/equation runs from the decadent (Genet) to the erotic/mythological (Cocteau) to the erotic as the eerily familial burden of the human (Duras, Yourcenar).

Collobert too has this quality in spades.

Dire I-Dire II (To Speak) are two linked works. The first book is more traditionally novelistic in that its prose poem-like paragraphs do have some investiture in a loosely-basted form of narrative. But it's very much a Floating World type of autobiography (I'm guessing about the autobiography).

But Dire-II then strips down the author's aesthetic. It's like going from a hall of Canovas to one populated exclusively by Giacomettis. It's a total sea change in prose, and the sense of distillation/erasure is the predominant one. We begin to wonder if this second text is a reduction of the first. The second book sometimes feels like reading Leslie Scalapino (marvelous experience!) with all these dashes and ellipses in grammar and imagery, in vision. Or maybe it's like Barbara Guest's poetry when she reached that last Sun & Moon collection and was writing poems like "Geese Blood."

Abstractions pile upon numinous abstractions, and this technique risks becoming a little overwhelming, risks opacity, but the world she's describing just coheres, and the reader senses that these two books form a diptych. The reader senses that a forceful aesthetic break is the hinge between these two works, and this makes for a dramatic reading experience.

But now, seeing the biography, this casts a shadow over Dire-II. One wonders if the fragmentation is actually a sign of the beginning of the psychic disintegration of the author, or a fatal psychological remove from a mainframe we must remain in to survive...the word desaccoupler strikes a sort of knell in my mind here. Well, the des- words come swarming in...desavouer, desarticulation, se dessaisir... Because this is what the language is beginning to do. Disengage. Unmake the world.

Dire-II begins to read as a book in which the world's substance (which Collobert reaches for so longingly in Dire-I) begins to dissolve into shadows, and what one perceives as aesthetic bravery is simultaneously intuited to be a form of retrecissement...a shrinking back, a withdrawal of language's pseuodopodia...

In a way, this tinge of doom is reminiscent of the experience one gets reading Teresa Cha's masterful lyric epic, Dictee. Although there, the death that already suffuses the work culminates in the author's fucking horrible murder just as she delivers the book to the world. This becomes nearly mythological in force. How can it not be? Who delivers a masterpiece of the age and then gets murdered randomly on the street practically the same night. Who is scripting reality? How can someone not be?

You can see Collobert lived with a strong ethical commitment and as the biography reveals she experienced the horror of the Holocaust and the second World War and its aftermath through living nerves, not books, and doubtless the Algerian situation later wore her down. Maybe she felt dirty just being part of that process, that culture, which was obviously still thoroughly atavistic, continuing to perpetrate the same sort of imperialistic savagery which had just nearly destroyed it from without.

In a sense, she saw her culture was commited to a form of protracted suicide.

She saw the learning curve of her culture had flatlined.

Perhaps she figured she was just mirroring her culture, or answering it in a logical fashion with her suicide.

Perhaps if she had removed herself from her culture entirely.

But that's easier said than done.

All these useless perhapses.

Because what happened is what happened.

And her books say that too.

The last book is a very small book, and should properly be considered a linked series of poems more than anything else.

The language is quite naked here, the nerves are ragged, and the phrases do read like explanations in a suicide note....

"balance au chaos sans armure
survivra ou non resistance aux corps la duree longue de vie
je parti l'exploration du gouffre
tatonnant contre jour..."

The last page refers to fragments imperceptibles a petit oeil du temps vision nulle / sur l'espace jamais plus d'un grand champ"

The images begin to sound like some of Plath's last poems.

"Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof taps."

("Words," Ariel)

Or Plath in "The Night Dances"...

"The comets
Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off--"

The lines there echo the line above by Collobert so closely it's scary.

It's strange.

I was reading two works by Nathalie Quintane a few days before this, and there that author has such a resilience and a playfulness--a jouissance to protect her.

Is that generational? Or is it sensibility?

What they saw differently in life? Or how they experienced/processed it?

I didn't check Quintane's birth year. She might be of a different generation that didn't experience that War firsthand.

Quintane has the distance and attitude of your typical American language poet.

Here the des- is a different one: maybe desinvolture.

I don't say that as an accusation.

I think the works are similarly ethically invested.

It's just there's a safer distance.

From everything.

Smart gal.