*
TDR: If language were a double edge sword, what
is on either end of the blade?
NS: My experience of language is quite
otherwise. I am not sure that language can be reducible to a binarism
like this, with a clearly defined line partitioning it into distinct
halves. Nor is the distinction between an inside and an outside in
language, a here and a there, consistent with the kinds of fluctuations,
the sort of pliability and porosity it is exposed to, through the body
and its articulations. Certainly, the Cartesian project of language is
one of containment, delineation and repression -- determinedly so -- but
on closer inspection, and when approached as a furtive, mutable, entity,
it reveals itself quite quickly not to be revelatory, nor to be
so clearly mappable, located, in any one place. And so as for the
ontological question, the is of the thing, I don't understand it
as articulable, nor even as desirable to articulate. The saying of it,
the putting into language of the thing it might be, runs the risk of
fixing what cannot be fixed, for having already run out of itself.
TDR: How long did this particular work take to put together?
NS: Time is difficult to account for. There is perhaps no chronology to
the work. Other than the body's own chronology which is suffused with
and suffuses the book. I am being difficult. My hesitation comes from
this : that I am not ever certain when a book begins, in part because I
am distrustful of the whole notion of origins, but also because I reject
the moment of inscription as the moment of the book's inception. To
speak of a line of time is to adhere to a temporal construction that is
incessantly belied by things that cannot be accounted for, in and
outside of language. In some ways, it is possible to say, I think, that
language has no time : that is, it is out of time, it has no time of its
own, it is timeless. It is also marked by time much as is the body.
There is an indistinction that takes place. And so of this work about
which you're asking, I might say that the manuscript arranged itself
like this, in a kind of gesture toward undoing itself, an accretion that
was also one of erosion. I could say : I made it. But this would only be
true if by the same turn I acknowledged that it made me. Back and forth
like this.
TDR: Do you think an artist’s mental landscape
is threatened by urbanization, the creation of physical structures?
NS: I could answer : No. Flatly. I would want first to understand what
artist is in relation to city and how the mind is a landscape, what a
landscape is and what distinction can be made between physical and
non-physical structures. What is a structure? My own artistic practice
presses very closely against the city and its built things, in
hesitation, with fervour, horror, often, and some degree of a kind of
madness. I worry that the urban / rural distinction is misleading. And
hesitate to project a Romantic ideal of something approaching the
Sublime onto the thing called nature, of which we are a part, of which
we are ... apart. Rurality does not necessarily offer the kind of
environment that makes for an exigent art practice, nor is it without
its own measure of threat. Just last week, in the middle of Iowa, I
wandered off a hiking trail onto a shooting range. Is it possible to
escape built things and the violence in them? Our own violence?
TDR: Is the process of acknowledging or identifying
"sacrifice" a theme you explore in your work?
NS: Not necessarily. I am troubled by the religiosity of the term
"sacrifice". It's one I'm not comfortable with. And certainly,
the foundational sacrificial gesture involves a disengagement of the
self in favour of a hegemonic power, in the Torah, a petulant
"God". Is it possible to think "sacrifice" away from
theology? I fear these terms offer a convenient hatch away from personal
implication. Is that not one of the job's of religion?
TDR: When you're writing do you know before you place pen to page what
language is going to come out?
No I don't. Not unless I am responding to a specific request. The
languages present themselves as they need to, each and both with
increasing difficulty.
TDR: What is the process of translating your own work entail?
I used to say of self-translation that it was redundant work, a
repetition of sorts, and unnecessary, because in the doubling, I lost
parts of myself. I am not sure now that I feel this way. The work of
translation allows for a different reading of the work, and enables it
to move through me again, differently inflected. It makes foreign and
less recognizable while also pulling it in a little bit deeper.
TDR: Can you describe the writing process for
your book Je Nathanaël,
(Book Thug, 2006) what inspired it, Gide influenced it, and how
perhaps the two books complement one another or don't?
NS: What is perhaps most curious, in the context
of my writing practice, about Je Nathanaël, is that it is a
translation without a "source" text. This is a notion, in
translation theory, that, along with "target text" is very
problematic and one that I have critiqued quite extensively elsewhere.
In the writing of Je Nathanaël, I could not decide which
language best suited the body of the text, nor could it decide for
itself. Such that, in addition to wanting -- failingly -- to
hermaphrodize the French language (in Book I, "L'autre corps"
/ "The Other Body"), and to offer response to Gide's Nourritures
terrestres (Fruits of the Earth), my desire to read and write
translation / translatability / transgendering as echoes of one another
became (dis)embodied by an indistinction in languages : I was unable to
choose one body of language over the other. Eventually, I decided to
pull the whole text into French and to publish the English subsequently
with Book Thug. Even though the Book Thug edition indicates
"translated from the French by the author", there is in fact
no first text, just as there is, perhaps, no first body (of desire), but
a multiplicity of trajectories, many of which smothered in favour of
One, to suit the approved constraint of social, heteronormative
discourse. Both books are translations, and not necessarily of each
other, such that neither can claim the space of "origin". The
work came out of me undecidedly.
Gide's Fruits of the Earth is perhaps the
most beautiful expression of desire in language that I have yet
encountered in literature. He addresses the work to Nathanaël, an
imagined young man to whom he would teach fervour, and the impermanence
of any single one experience. To be able to move through and not stop at
a single thing. Even the book which he has written, he urges Nathanaël
to throw it away once he has done with it. But Nathanaël never comes
into being in Gide’s work. And so my project began there, with the
recognition of the misuses writers make of their personages. What does
it mean for Nathanaël -- unrealized -- to remain trapped in the pages
of Gide’s book? Is it possible for him to be freed of it? Might I be
able to open that passage? And in doing so, do I not catch in the same
bind?
Je Nathanaël is my expression both of
desire for Nathanaël and of desire to be Nathanaël. It is at
this moment that I began to open to questions of the transformable
(untranslatable) body. Of articulations of desire that are not bound to
the homo-hetero, male-female dichotomies. The questions remain
questions, and this is as it should be. But Je Nathanaël, and
other texts from that time -- All Boy, for example -- mark a turn
in my work to face language, and the body, differently.
The Book Thug edition, as an object, is graceful
and spare. Jay has a great ability to
listen and respond to a text and we share a similar book aesthetic. It
is not irrelevant that Jay has himself a relationship to a literary
tradition that informs my own -- early 20th century French literature --
and so we are able to meet at points outside of the crass market
dictates of North American publishing. Book Thug has many strengths, and
one of them is Jay's willingness to resist and disrupt the complacency
that tires so much of Canadian writing. There is a kind of freedom
there, that I find so seductive, and deeply intelligent.