Danielle Collobert (1940–1978)

The text of this book is sourced from several notebooks and loose pages found in the Paris hotel room where Danielle Collobert committed suicide. While the postface in the book is somewhat unclear on the matter, it suggests that Collobert intended for this writing to be published. Spanning over 20 years of her life, the text resembles Collobert's poetry from the book If Then in form, though the content is in most cases less abstract. Fragmented phrases separated by dashes describe her interior life, her extensive travels, her relationships with men (though always rather vaguely), her recurring need for solitude, and above all, her experiences with writing. Throughout there is a haunting, hunted desperation in her words, as in each new place she finds herself, she encounters the same familiar struggles with indifference and anxiety, always with death not far from her mind. It would be a bleak text even if she had not taken her own life, but knowing that she did adds an extra lens of grief to the reading.… (mehr)

Not so much a single narrative as a serpentine network of fragments, character sketches, and poetic-philosophic meditations, many taking place in a generic city, possibly the same one, peopled by unnamed and sometimes ungendered characters, narrated either in first or third person. Stylistic shifts occur with frequency, sometimes approaching more straightforward realism, other times recalling the interior journeying of the philosophical fiction of Maurice Blanchot (both pre- and post-Murder) and Hélène Cixous (post-Murder). Also present are shades of Kafka and Beckett, particularly in the wearying resignation to carry on in the face of inexplicable callousness and outright violence, the continuing threat of ignominious defeat, the fear of one's inability to reach the end.

There is a restlessness to Collobert's prose, a perpetual unsettled feeling, and an underlying current of menace, carried through scenes of implicit and explicit violence, both physical and emotional, likely informed in part by her involvement in the Algerian independence movement, yet transcending any specific historic moments. As with her poetry in It Then, she is able to write her way around events and experiences without naming them, yet still branding their implications upon the reader's mind (though in the later It Then her approach is even less direct, employing an impersonal pronoun, and leaving a certain distance between the reader and the text, allowing one to touch the edges of the isolation and pain without fully absorbing it). Here, in Murder, a fractured yet forceful portrait forms of the bleakness of existence, with no hope beyond that same beleaguered resignation to keep moving forward to the end.

Little by little, abandon sets in. One does not die alone, one is killed, by routine, by impossibility, following their inspiration. If all this time, I have spoken of murder, sometimes half camouflaged, it's because of that, that way of killing.… (mehr)

(This will require several readings, but here are some reading notes from the first attempt)

Text is divided into three parts: (1) introduction of the body; trapped, isolation, orientation of the body within its container, 'this restricted space'; somewhat recalls the experience of the creature in Beckett's novel The Unnamable; (2) frustration at 'useless waiting for healing'; 'awaiting a word-cure'; (3) application of 'word-cure'; transposing body into text, experience into words, culminating in the text (It then — migrated / transcribed).

The writing of the body, description of the visceral process of writing about (often painful) experiences, committing them to the page, these experiences of the body, the physicality of this process, and the incompatibility of fitting words to experience:

'sometimes — a form
contradiction — to glide the body into word — trading
form
from blood to drawing
never'

But also how the body cannot explain itself without words:

'mute body
traded for articulation
the utterance'

'a container of identity'

'a place then — to dream up a place where identity happens'

'It then — its breath — the story of words — the written
object — its rhythm — how it means to beat in speech — to
melt words to recognize there the edge of a body perhaps'

Collobert has a way of writing around experiences, of leaving the heart of them untold, but instead circling around them and probing at their edges. Implicit horror and violence pervade the text, and yet the use of the impersonal pronoun 'it' leaves a certain distance between the reader and the text, allowing one to touch the edges of the isolation and pain without fully absorbing it. A remarkable feat, and one which is reflective of the best that poetry can offer us.… (mehr)