Introducing Pierre Senges’s Études de silhouettes
It’s probably pure coincidence that the initials of Pierre Senges should be P.S.; however, in that post scriptum the reader might discern one of the vital principles of his prolific œuvre. In book after book, Senges has embraced his belatedness vis-à-vis the great canon of world literature by writing works that stand in epigraphical opposition to it. This principle of the post scriptum is one that Italo Calvino found everywhere in the work of Borges. As Calvino wrote:
“Each of his texts doubles or multiplies its own space through the medium of other books belonging to a real or imagined library, whether they be classical, erudite, or merely invented” (Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium, trans. Patrick Creagh, Penguin Books, 1988).
Likewise, Senges poaches characters and scenarios from the canon left and right, taking them as departures for his great human comedy. From Melville (see the mega-novel Achab (séquelles), (2015) to Shakespeare (Sort l’assassin, entre le spectre, 2006), from Montesquieu (Géométrie dans la poussière, 2004) to the Renaissance author Antonio de Guevara (La réfutation majeure, 2004), from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (Fragments de Lichtenberg, 2007) to Cole Porter (Tout est permis [Anything Goes], 2012), the figures of literary and art history provide a framework, a departure point, for Senges’s speculative commentaries and fictional glosses.
The four microfictions published here, drawn from Senges’s book Études de silhouettes (Editions Verticales, 2010), are equally indebted to another long-deceased creator whose work is now in the public domain: Franz Kafka. Each of the texts in this work proceed from the fragments and cryptic beginnings found scattered throughout the notebooks Max Brod took possession of after Kafka’s death. The results tend to be as variable as they are unexpected: outlines of tales, madcap soliloquies, fairy tale inversions, strange parables, comedic monologues. In some instances a single fragment of Kafka’s is reprised multiple times, yielding parallel but divergent texts. Other times, a unique fragment is driven to its logical extreme, or gives way to a dizzying cascade of ab absurdum speculation, and one marvels how the development could have been otherwise. As one might expect, all of Kafka’s familiar obsessions — the night and its terrors, the law, justice and its lack, bureaucracy, animals, et cetera— are here in force. Each passage begins in boldface to indicate the hand of the Prague lawyer, before giving way to Senges’s liberties.
– Jacob Siefring, translator. Gloucester, Ontario, Canada.
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When grandmother died, it so happened that the nurse was the only one at her side. She recounts that, just before the end, grandmother raised herself up on her pillow a little, as though looking for someone, then lay back down peacefully and died. The nurse held to that story a long while, omitting the rest, seeming to want to spare us any unpleasant impression: it wasn’t a matter of blood or saliva, as one imagines in the dying wards — and as for the rest of us, truth be told, we never wished to know any more, satisfied as we were with a tale of the grandmother’s death so in conformity with our desires, tranquillity, ordinariness, the little burst at the end, the hope of seeing one of her intimates, maybe a son, a husband or a father, and peace found sinking down into a bed, peace for one and all. The funeral was arranged on the momentum of that death, rapidly and without pain, without tears, without metaphysics, without invocations of one’s ancestors — it was only many years later, after other deaths, other funerals, and births, each ceremonial and spontaneous, that the nurse, the same nurse, fifteen years older, came knocking at our door to give us the other version of her tale, as though it were a gift to the weeping family, or the deliverance of a secret burdensome to her, but to us liberating; and that other version of the grandmother’s death, exactly like the first in every detail up to the moment she was described as lying back peacefully, differed only as to the death, because instead of solitary and breathless self-abandon, grandmother would have thought better of it, raised herself up once more on the pillow looking for the ghost she wasn’t able to see the first time, her eyes not searching the emptiness but the room, that veritable room, finding there neither son, nor husband, nor father, nor anyone at all: and to the emptiness, to her family who had deserted her, grandmother is said to have addressed the most violent of insults, a fusion of reproaches and expressions of love, convoking one of us after the other, under the gaze of the nurse serving as her witness, after which, literally, grandmother tore herself out of bed, finding again the strength of her youth, a strength of anger and bitterness, taking the ten steps that stood between her and the door, disappearing into the hallway, never to return, leaving behind her an unrecognizable shell, which she showed not a care for, that shell more or less like her than the rest of us, relieved, we contented ourselves then to inter it.
Someone came up to me and pulled on my clothing, but I got rid of them: to whom might this I belong, in such a hurry to part with his clothing and his peer — a madman, a nudist, an excommunicate, or a mix of all three? Would this be Adam caught by the hand of God the instant that the knowledge of good and evil obliges him to cover up his nudity with clothing after having hastily invented trousers? Would this be Faust tempted once again by the devil, Faust dressed in the old fashion of long fringed jackets, capes, surplices, by which Mephistopheles holds on to him; a Faust no longer wanting to know anything of black or white magic, of satanism or power, abandoning the devil or his representative like Don Juan dropping his mistresses? Would it be Don Juan, since we’re talking about him, Don Juan dressed in that abundance of black and gold on which the Grandees of Spain pride themselves, and in the jacket necessary to his clandestinity, Juan led by his sleeve, one doubts it, ready to flee on foot or on horseback, sending back to the convent with a single clog kick the delicious yesterday still sworn to flowers and to his lover’s rhetoric, that yesterday still nuptial, unzipped, unfurling himself in love, today unwelcome and unknown, come to sink his voracious hard-liner claws in to drag him to the notary’s, and into marriage? Would this be little Schlemihl lost in his shadow, from one day to the next rejoined by it but aware of no longer being able to resolve such an ancient divorce? Or maybe this I belongs to myself and to no one else, to a me devoid of allusion, devoid of all this literature, a me without citations, echoless, faceless, who does not compare himself but accepts to be lost like one without purpose or one damned by that absence of comparisons; a me without costume, a verisimilitudinous me if at all possible, living, determined, deduced from those three lines: not much, frighteningly, nothing nor anyone, an I which is not a living being but only a mark of punctuation added to the phrase, to lend it a bit of credibility: in short, a ruse, a device learned from typographers on which to hang everything, like a nail for a tableau. To peek at the truth, to at least approach it, supposes first to dispose of the I, as the I of those three lines does away with his article of clothing: there would remain under our gaze only a stranger, a jacket, the gesture of taking hold of that jacket and the gesture of taking it off, as a single furious movement of action and reaction — we could be happy with that, these might be stories of possession and of undressing summed up in a few words, a tale of passion, crime, or of rape by metaphor. Suppose you this: I simultaneously assume the roles of the stranger tugging at the clothing and of the one removing it, and by the momentum of this detachment, I am able to remove the me who occupies these lines and is composing them, and who still ardently longs to exist on paper — I take myself off, I do not take a bow, no, that would suppose the presence of a hat upon a head, now, at the point we have reached, there is no longer any hat, nor any head, nor any article of clothing, and if there remain some signs of a reality all the same, there is no longer anyone for them to rest upon.
It was a stormy evening, I saw the little spirit come crawling out of the bush. The door was shut again, I saw it face to face — the best point of view to rid oneself of the illusions of the first instants: also, I was able to realize this at present (face to face), the spirit had had no reason to crawl, two legs would have allowed him to advance by walking as any gentleman in his place would have done — moreover, it was a gentleman, that could be guessed from his way of looking at me, straight on, once the door was shut again: without batting an eye, as one says, without moving his brow, without having that intimidated and slightly guilty embarrassment of spirits when they come crawling out of a bush on a stormy night. I saluted him, as is fitting in such circumstances — if he had been a little spirit of the bushes in inclement weather, I would have addressed signs of conjuration to him, I would have turned to chase him, storm or no storm, and all that would have ended in a pond, out past the heath, with the promise of sorcery rites. Seeing as he was a perfect gentleman, this was hardly the case and, even before addressing my respects to him, I had to apologize in long and particularized sentences, in the language of diplomacy, for having taken this gentleman for a spirit and his armchair for a bush: I invoked the storm, the noise of the rain on the tiles of the club, the darkness, the static electricity, the frayed nerves of all present — my own embarrassment growing of course in the measure that my defense speech tapered down between me, the febrile one, and him, the gentleman with airs of a marble Jupiter: the embarrassment and the guilt, a profound guilt, followed by the shame of having committed a faux pas in that setting, surrounded by so many respectable people. Still face to face, the gentleman was gracious enough to not humiliate me in public, refraining from saying a word in response to my apple-filcher speeches — and that graciousness was an even greater humiliation to me, it was a crushing magnanimity: to shrink me down with and curl me up as I invariably do at those gatherings, sink down into my armchair, wishing for it to be deep, the better to disappear into it, by crawling if need be: to disappear like a spirit into the bushes. The cognacs were brought over, it was a stormy evening.
A young boy had a cat, his sole legacy from his father, and thanks to it he became the mayor of London. What will I become due to my animal, my patrimony? Where is it lying, the immense city? The city, I know not, its vast reaches will always elude me — as for my future decided by my patrimony, I imagine it as foreign to the honor of London, the office of mayor, and the comforts determined by a cat and by simple lines of descent: my animal would sooner make me a galley slave, a crucified robber, a burglar balanced on the roof of the house of his next victim, or a hanged man, or even a puller of teeth, in any case relegated beyond the city limits: the vanquished deprived of the honors of the vanquished. (With some luck, if the era is kind to me, my animal will make me into a collector, soothed by the rules of the collection and by the minutiae it supposes, domesticity, feeble private passions; I would then have the chance to earn my salvation while promising myself fine tomorrows: hoarding, worrying over nomenclatures (until the day comes when, fatally, the last item on my list will grab me by the throat, the one that I lack and that mocks me, and that represents my failure: then I will become once more a galley slave, a thief, a puller of teeth, I will get up from my table, leaving my catalogs behind for the police and the judges, then I will go off and strangle the mayor of London, as far as the city sprawls: he and his cat, his cat and his dad — though one may try, one does not change.)
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The four translated excerpts from Pierre Senges’ Études de silhouettes are published here with the permission of Editions Gallimard. © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 2010.