I went out for lunch today with Nathalie Stephens where, as it happened, the conversation steered to Anne Hébert (I sweat it wasn't me), whom Nathalie felt offered an important or at least interesting parallel project to her own. The connection came through the double entendre of "l'entre gens" -- which can be translated to point to writing that is "between genres" or writing that is "between genders." Nathalie's newest book Je Nathanaël (Bookthug) reaches toward what she describes as a hermaphroditic language -- a language deliberately situated between -- while it simultaneously seeks to deprivilege the binary of poetry and prose.

Her new book was launched last night at the Lexiconjury, where she delivered a truly transformative reading. Transformative in the sense that the room became sealed into a vacuum of silence, lit by the soft, insistent, and intense light of her voice. Time dissolved with the beckoning of a narrative, of vague yet warm bodies filled with rush, of desire in the broadest sense, chasing after the mythical Nathanaël, an absent signifier appropriated from the work of André Gide. As a result of the hermaphroditic ambition of the text, and the fact that it was originally conceived in French, the poems are all written in the first person with the declensions of the Second Person Singular -- quite literally an address to concupiscence. a. rawlings, mc, followed the reading by commenting on the immense "vortex" that had suddenly claimed the room. We were there. We were gone. It was a trip.

[from Book Five -- and apologies for formatting woes: objects in quotation are not necessarily as they appear]

I said yes. I was caught off guard.
I lost track and left the book open at a blank page. So I followed an altogether different line of thought.
The anxious body undoes itself. Becomes other than the word or gesture that follows closely.
Touch would erase everything. Down to the shiver provoked by a gesture just beginning.

One voice carries another.
The echo is insurgent.
Bones knock together denying the text its impermeability.

As such, the echo carries the fruit of the word's hermaphrodism.

The question that I have as I emerge from such lines, as indeed from the work as a whole (including both readings that I was able to see of hers over the past 24 hours), relates to the undertone of insanity, of madness, perhaps irrationality in such lines. I suppose what I am wondering is whether hermaphrodism is a symptom of or escape from the displacement of language (which, I believe, the poems foreground and provoke). As we never speak from a stable 'I', speech (language, locution) itself becomes intertwined with the fact of disaccommodation. If, as Foucault argues, language provokes madness (or, perhaps, that madness is a symptom of language), what freedom does hermaphrodism propose? Does it change the categorical a priori of language by dissolving the binary logic that leads and creates the displacement? I suppose, in this new way, desire becomes a non-hierarchical subject to subject and object to object impulse (or would that be subject and subject and object and object?) -- the self moves through the world without the self-conscious abstraction that invents madness to justify itself.

There is, I believe, a utopian core to this book that, ironically, seems to thematize the failure of literature, the failure of language, to do what it promises: free us to the now. Consider the anti-literary strain of these lines, taken haphazardly from 3 pages of Book Five:

I entreat you to read eyes closed, to love body open, to break with the organisation of emotions.

The book is, must be, a call to the senses. There is little else to do than leave it.

... one cannot help but resent the text for existing in the first place.

Language's first defect is its inability to articulate itself.

But the resistance to language in these lines finds at least one possible reversal in an oddly modernist nostalgia for that moment that Umberto Eco would describe as life within the perfect language, when words and worlds were united:

If long ago the word was equivalent to breath and poets were impatient to breathe, today the word is an obstacle to breathing.
We all breathe poorly. The echo dies, see for yourself.
Nathanaël must know this, he who remains silent.
He brings the word back to the body, takes breath into his hands.

In these lines, I cannot help hearing the elegy for echo in terms of a gesture towards the mystical -- when an echo was the voice of Echo, calling out lonely with the hope of love; when the sounds of nature were all perfectly intermingled with the voice of divinity. Is this what we all long for? Or is this a flicker of Late Contemporary nostalgia at the very end of the age of irony?