Context N°23
Emmanuel Hocquard
Emmanuel Hocquard’s “Ma Vie Privée” appears in his collection Ma haie: Un privé à Tanger 2 (2001), not yet available in English translation. This excerpt appears with the kind permission of Editions P.O.L. The complete “My Private Life” runs to forty-two parts.
1. There’s that absurd story of the Chinese artist to whom the Emperor has offered a commission for a landscape that’ll go in one room of the palace. The painting finished, the Emperor is invited to come examine the work. Delighted by what he sees, he turns toward the painter to commend him. The painter, however, is nowhere in the room. He’s gone into the landscape. There’s something a little suspect about that story. I always get caught up there: there’s something suspect about that story.
2. Here, too, there’s something a little suspect. My sixth sense is warning me that this is a trap. I’m going to have to proceed on tiptoe. Or scuttle sideways like a crab up to the world of Official Literature.
3. Entering a bar, the Continental Op sees a sign posted:
ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR
AMERICAN OR BRITISH
WHISKIES SERVED HERE
He reacts by observing: “I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more.” (Dashiell Hammett, quoted by Steven Marcus.)
4. Did you say Literature? Last night, December 32, 1994, in answer to the question, “What’s on television tonight?” Alexandre responded: “Television! on every channel!” Well put! In answer to the question, “What’s there to read in all these literary books?” the reply would be: “Literature, of every sort!”
5. Anecdote I. A late afternoon walk around the playing fields. Light going down under the eucalyptus trees. Back to the house. Having along the way bought a roll, Life-Savers shaped, of red candies. With a hideous pharmaceutical taste. And eaten all of them. Nightfall. Disgust. Nausea. Terrible guilt. That day my life changed. Boredom and mistrust, the result of eating red candies.
6. Yesterday, aboard the Paris-Bordeaux high-speed train, a little girl reads in a loud voice: “The chicken makes eggs, the sheep makes wool, the cow makes milk.” I am struck by the complete absurdity of what I hear. And the poet, what does he make? That’s the way one becomes a liar. By repeating such absurdities in a loud voice on the train.
7. Let’s suppose, for just a minute, that a chicken could talk. And that it says: I make eggs. Does anyone think, even for a minute, that its egg-making talk would have the same meaning as that of the little girl on the high-speed train? No, of course not. The meaning could never be the same because the intonation wouldn’t be the same. If anybody asks, I’m in the chicken’s camp.
8. Supposing you stumbled on my letters and took a look at them: what I wrote my friend is not what you’d read. Because you’re not my friend. On this subject, one might say something like: you see only our profiles, while we see each other face to face.
9. Anecdote II. Nightfall. In the distance, behind the house on the rue du Village, the blackening contours of the Old Mountain. Paul and two friends are getting ready to camp there overnight in a tent. They ask me to come along too. Though I want to go the thought of it fills me with fear. I don’t dare say no and so hide myself in a bed of periwinkles, where I see them depart without me after some lengthy calling out and looking for me. Lights flicker up on the Old Mountain, whose outline is now invisible against the night.
10. Nobody ever insists enough on the one who’s addressed. Everything is there. In my end is my beginning, Dear Thomas Stearns. Dear Mademoiselle Lynx. And the madman of an Author who reads Kierkegaard to the chickens. Necessity makes men run wry, / And hunger drives the wolf from wood, dear Ezra. My intention is the one who’s addressed.
11. I’ve never had a business card. However, there was a period when I told myself that if I had to have one engraved, I’d put “television viewer” under my name. And just as television is aimed not so much at people as at television viewers, so the Literature Machine is aimed at its Readers. The reader is a piece of that machine. A machine that runs on itself and for itself. The chicken makes eggs and Literature manufactures Readers. When I write to my friend, I don’t write to a Reader.
12. In the course of producing Readers, the Literary Machine produces Authors. Cows make milk and Literature makes Authors. These days, they’re even seen on television. And that’s where the superiority of television over literature lies: it goes farther in the same direction: toward the obscene. When I write to my friend, I am content to sign my letter. I am not the Author of my letter.
13. I don’t reproach television for being what it is. It is very good such as it is and if it didn’t exist someone would have to invent it. Television shows not “things as they are” (cf. Battman, in Le Commanditaire), but “television as it is when it intends to show things as they are.” It seems to me one would need a huge helping of hypocrisy or ignorance to imagine that Literature could be more pure, in Mallarmé’s sense of that term. Literature, too, is a corrupt place, though its corruption wears a mask of all that is honorable. It’s that mask that interests me.
14. Literature is a machine to produce Literature, not thinking, not criticism. In order to study, or to critique, I have no need of Literature. No more than I do philosophy. To tell the truth, for thinking, nobody needs it. I have no need of Literature for critical thinking, but I need to think critically about Literature seeing as how I’ve so imprudently fallen into it. To think critically about Literature is not a way to make it; it’s a way to remove it, to rub it out, to undo it. And, by doing so, remove it in me, undo it in me, rub a hole in the paper of my faults. I’m in the camp of the chicken and the cow, but I think about what the little girl reads. About how there’s something a little suspect in what she reads.
15. Nevertheless, you’ll say, you write. And you publish the things you write. I write. I write out of a need to think. That’s how I’m made. I need to think by writing. For myself. I myself am the one who’s addressed, not my reader. Olivier said it—and he was right—“the reader’s the one who sinks a book.” Who makes of it something more, in place of something less. I try to write books of less. Because, for me, to think by writing is an attempt to focus.
16. The private is employed so as to focus or shine a light into obscure regions, not so as to make them more numerous.
17. Regarding literature though, that obscure region—it’s no more than a drop of water compared to the Pacific Ocean of unadulterated obscurities that make up my life. And, talking about my life—it, too, is terribly murky. I sense somehow that there’s something suspect in saying “my life.” I keep the word life under extremely high surveillance, as a doubtful concept. My sixth sense warns me that it’s a big word. One of those big words on which one constructs the kind of dam that bursts on the River K. What makes me say that my life seems suspect to me? The fact that my in my life means something different than my in, for example, my shoe. It’s got a different tone. If I write, I lost my shoe, the shoe’s the object I lost. If I write, I lost my life, I can’t simply think of my life as an object. Who’s ever bequeathed his life to anybody in his last will and testament?
18. When I was small, I copied out whole books or whole excerpts of books that I sent to my friend. I could have sent her the books, but I sent her copies, written out by hand, of books I loved. If I’d sent her the books, I would have been sending her literature. Such was not my intention. My intent was to tell her that I loved her by sending her, copied out by hand, books or excerpts of books that I loved. By sending her those copies I sent her the literal.
19. Extremely important, in my eyes, the literal. I take the word literally, that is to say, à la lettre. By definition, the literal can only relate to what comes strictly under language, oral or written, regardless of what is the truth-value of the statement. Which excludes propositions like “Édouard was literally mad” or “That literally happened to me.” Literally there means something like really.
20. It follows that if one talks of the literal, it can only relate to a proposal already made, either orally or in writing. In other words, there can only be question of the literal on the occasion of a proposal’s repetition, at an instance of deafness, or querying, or uncertainty. At a murky instance. Or with a playful intent. Children play at repeating things.
Example. Olivier says to Emmanuel: Pascalle’s dress is red. Emmanuel, who’s misheard, or who’s not sure he’s grasped what Olivier said or who’s surprised because he’s seen that Pascalle’s dress is green, turns toward Pierre who repeats what Olivier said: that Pascalle’s dress is red.
Here we have a particular type of representation. Not the representation of a firsthand observation on the actual color of Pascalle’s dress, but the re-presentation of the statement of the observation in question. No matter that Pascalle’s dress (that of the first proposal: Pascalle’s dress is red) is actually red. What counts is that the second proposal, Pascalle’s dress is red, is, literally, the same as the first. It’s this sort of tautology that produces the literal. And as = is impossible, Pascalle’s dress is red says something other than Pascalle’s dress is red. Is everything clear?
21. What I write appertains to this discrepancy.
Translated by John Latta
