Dire-II

It's so strange.

After the lovers' bodies trying so desperately to intertwine, to hold in Dire-I...les doigts s'enlacent...au moins, ils tentent de...Dire-II hands down a dismal sentence with such finality...

The odd thing is that when the author starts casting her words in the form of poetry, vertical runs of words formulating an abortive and protracted attempt to speak-- or an attempt to capture the phenomenology of speaking itself--the frustrating chaos, continual dispersement and tendency towards entropy is so repetitive that it actually becomes funny...

This is so obviously counter the author's intention--which is a painful sincerity--from which it is hard to look away for that reason--and I think this is where I heard Beckett in here. It's hard not to.

This is the Beckettian specialite--the gallows humor intrinsic to language itself, its ridiculous surfeit of insufficiencies and derelictions, lacunae, its obvious cenotaphs.

But whereas one senses Collobert wanted an enlightenment of empathy, one knows Beckett was as consciously indebted to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton for some of his effects as he was to the bleakest philosophers of our race.

Because Beckett loved the existential slapstick of it all.

The question of sensibility is always pretty much an axe planted between the eyes.

Danielle didn't play Whack-a-Mole the same way Beckett played Whack-a-Mole with language.

Except she did.

At least in these passages in Dire-II. For this reader.

It's so funny. The intentional fallacy thing.

It makes me think about God. The Credo quia absurdum thing.

Because. The. Emptiness. Is. Funny. And. Beautiful.

Lucifer made to sit on the kitchen floor all day. For acting up.

Discovers Imagination the Toy.

Exemplum:

recommencer
bouche overte
visage nu
toujours vertical
mis a nu
les yeux fermes
ne voit pas
pas d'images
rien avant--pas de signes
fin du temps
arret
veut sortir
dechire un mot
pas fini
pas encore
ouvre les levres
tire de loin
drague le corps
dechire
douleur
ramene un mot
ou non
surface opaque--ne franchit pas
muraille dehors
s'emplit la bouche...

This goes on for forty pages or so, this closing aporia in Dire-II.

I don't feel guilty for finding it funny.

Because it is.

Whether the author intended it or not.

It reads like a torturous, neverending Elocutionary Manual in which the speaker never actually gets to speak (the title of the work, of course).

All these verbs of failure or horrible misapproximation, like dechirer, repeat sickeningly.

She clearly admired Beckett and this is the late sixties when literature is all about Beckett at the height of his reputation--and that ability to negotatiate the philosophical Darkness which was so clearly here to stay (Cold War entente-not-so-cordiale--after the worst war the world had seen).

And I think some pretty valid arguments can be made that 1968 was one of the three most important individual years in the 20th century.

So I think Collobert's ouevre shows she was about as thoroughly situated as an author could be in that time.

She's aware of and militating for the ascending Third World; she's being a writer of conscience; she's trying to balance these concerns with an awareness of where language was going, forging ahead--when it wasn't allying itself with a rather creepy philosophical Obscurantism that moved it back towards the medieval.

Because one could make that argument about Beckett's aesthetic as well. There is a certain thematic indulgement in the master. Without his sense of humor, it would all fall apart. Even more than it does--and he intends it to--I mean.

If Beckett hadn't been born Irish...and just a bit of an asshole...

And that's not even an aporia.

That's a no-brainer ellipsis.