12/7/2023 0 Comments A lovers discourse![]() Guo’s novelistic writing is not particularly narrative, or linear, or uplifting. She has spoken out against the self-censorship caused by authoritarianism, but also the kind created by the demands of the market. Guo seems interested in describing distance rather than points of commonality, capturing an inability to talk rather than a global conversation. The work of Xiaolu Guo both plays with this globalization of literature and rebukes it. Guo gives her characters scope to live and suffer, so her book’s final affirmation has a hard-won quality that carries weight. Along the way, it’s capacious enough to touch on moments of real darkness, while somehow managing to be mordant, funny and, ultimately, life-affirming. The book moves briskly from the canals of North London to Scotland, Australia, Germany and China. What propels the book forward is in part the sense of suspense that hangs over the nascent relationship: Has our heroine made an enormous mistake getting together with an itchy-footed boat lover? But there’s also something compelling about the breadth of the world the narrator inhabits. There are shades of Lydia Davis in her carefully etched sentences as she details the ups and downs of the relationship without sentimentality. The truthfulness and accuracy of Guo’s language gives the book mischief and energy. She paints a vivid but unflattering portrait of her new dwelling in her adopted country. To manipulate absence is to extend this interval, to delay as long as possible the moment when the other might topple sharply from absence into death.Guo is an unsparing noticer. Absence becomes an active practice, there is a creation of a fiction which has many roles (doubts, reproaches, desires, melancholies). Hence I will manipulate it: transform the distortion of time into oscillation, produce rhythm, make an entrance onto the stage of language (language is born of absence: the child has made himself a doll out of a spool, throws it away and picks it up again, miming the mother’s departure and return: a paradigm is created). Whereupon I know what the present, that difficult tense, is: a pure portion of anxiety.Ībsence persists - I must endure it. ![]() ![]() This singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable present I am wedged between two tenses, that of the reference and that of the allocution you have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you). Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved’s absence actually a preposterous situation: the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory. (But isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.)ĥ. A (classic) word comes from the body, which expresses the emotion of absence: to sigh: “to sigh for the bodily presence”: the two halves of the androgyne sigh for each other, as if each breath, being incomplete, sought to mingle with the other: the image of the embrace, in that it melts the two images into a single one: in amorous absence, I am, sadly, an unglued image that dries, yellows, shrivels. I waken out of this forgetfulness very quickly. The Absent One: Any episode of language which states the absence of the loved object-whatever its cause and its duration-and which tends to transform this absence into an ordeal of abandonment.Ĥ. ![]()
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