“I Don’t Exist”: On The Death of the Author, Dissociated Narrators and the Compound Poet in Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl and Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene

“I Don’t Exist”:

On The Death of the Author, Dissociated Narrators and the Compound

Poet in Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl and Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene.

By

Annika Reinds

Master Thesis Literary Studies – Literature and Culture - English Student number: 6309208 Supervisor: Dr. Jane Lewty Date: 30-06-2014

Table of Contents

Introduction

In his essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), Roland Barthes argues for excluding the intentions of the author in the reading of a text. Accordingly, he claims that “[w]riting is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. [It] is that neutral, composite, oblique space […] where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body of writing” (n.p.). Therefore, at the moment a text is written, its author dies. Hence, it is not the author, but the language that speaks and, in fact, there is no author for Barthes. He claims a text is written by a ‘scriptor’, who is “born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate” (n.p.). This term he believes to be more suitable than the word ‘author’, as the latter wrongly suggests the writer to have authority over a text, while in actuality he solely exists to produce it. Instead, the reader plays the most important role in the interpretation of the text and it is therefore the reader who has such authority. In order to have that authority and utilize it, however, the text should be detached from its writer and from any authorial intentions, so that an infinite amount of reader’s interpretations can come into existence. According to Barthes, texts are therefore “eternally written here and now”, because the “origin” of meaning lies in its “language” and the reader’s impressions thereof (n.p.).

The death of the author occurs at the moment when “a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, […] outside of any function” (n.p). It is at that moment that “the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death [and] writing begins” (n.p.). Moreover, the author is an invention of modern society, a society that emphasizes the prestige of the individual. The author as an individual has derived his/her high status from the capitalist society that highlights the power of the human person. As a result, continuous attempts are being made to connect authors to their work, bringing to a focus their biographies and seeking the meaning of an artwork in the voice of the single

person who created it. Barthes disagrees with a reading that centers on authorial intent and, instead, asserts “[i]t is the language that speaks, not the author; to write is […] to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’” (n.p.).

Using linguistics to support his argument, Barthes explains that in that field of study it is generally argued that, “the whole of the enunciation is an empty functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors” (n.p.). In other words, the writer or speaker has no necessary function in the act of expression and, linguistically speaking, the author is simply the person writing the text: “the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I” (n.p). The word “I” implies there is a subject, but what it refers to is not important in the

understanding of what is being said or written, neither does the utterance necessarily make the “I” known to its listeners. The subject is, therefore, “empty outside the very enunciation which defines it” (n.p.) and this enunciation always reoccurs when the text is read.

Moreover, “[t]here is no other time than that of the enunciation” (Barthes n.p), which means the writing of a text takes place when it is read. Hence, a text’s “temporality is

different” (n.p.) if the author’s intentions are not taken into consideration. The death of the author “utterly transforms the modern text” (n.p.) because the idea that there is no other time than the time of the articulation, changes the perception of time. When the author is taken into consideration in the reading of a text, the author is necessarily temporarily situated before the artwork. Chronologically speaking, the author always exists before the text. The absence of the author in the process of the writing of a text, however, places a text always in the contemporary. There is no longer a preceding and a present or a before and an after, there is only the “here and now”. Moreover, if we consider the author to be dead, the scriptor’s hand is not attached to any voice. Rather, it is “borne by a pure gesture of inscription […] traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself,

language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins” (n.p.). If an author wants to express him/herself, the thing to be expressed is only a “ready-formed dictionary” (n.p.), containing words that can only be explained by using other words. This dictionary, is where the scriptor draws his writing from, and it never ends: “life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred” (n.p.). In other words, the book is only constructed from a web of symbols, all of which are unending imitations of imitations, and life is in turn an imitation of this book. According to Barthes, a text is therefore nothing else than “a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (n.p.).

Whereas criticism written before Barthes’ article was published has usually been centered on the discovery of the meaning of a text, which in turn was mainly attributed to the discovery of the author, Barthes argues for interpreting a text as it being that previously mentioned multidimensional space. Moreover, this multidimensional space needs no detecting but rather “disentangling”. The aim is not to attribute a single interpretation to a text. For Barthes, then, the essence of writing is that:

A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.

In other words, a text’s destination is its reader and only the reader can grasp its plurality. “To give a text an author [therefore] is to put a limit on that text” and “close the writing” (n.p.). Instead, the author must die in order for the reader, who too must be “without history, biography, psychology” (n.p), to be left to interpret a text freely.

As might be expected, there has been criticism against Barthes’ theory. Much of this criticism is centered on the conviction that the birth of the reader does not necessarily require the author’s death. That is to say, the context in which the reader reads a work should be taken into consideration, but that does not automatically imply authorial intentions should be declared irrelevant. Moreover, it can be argued that it is indeed possible to reconstruct an author from his writings (deathoftheauthor.com, n.p.). It is, however, not the aim of this thesis to either fully support Barthes’ claim that the author died (and, moreover, has always been dead), nor to completely discard it. Rather, Barthes’ theory functions as a starting point for the analysis of two Post-Barthesian collections of prose poetry that each take into

consideration the function of the author, the difficulties one can encounter in the process of understanding a text as well as that of writing it, and its connection to the failed (re-) discovery of the identity of the self (as an author and an individual) and the other. Both Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl and Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene foreground, disconnect and reconnect the practice of writing poetry and the concept of identity. The analysis of both books will, to a large extent, be based on two theories from critics of contemporary poetry, namely those as described in the articles “The New Thing” by Stephen Burt and Tony Hoagland’s “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment”.

In his article “The New Thing”, Stephen Burt writes about a shift that has occurred in recent American poetry. Arguing that for the past decade (his article was published in 2009), the most prominent new American poets were “slippery, digressive, polyvocalic, creators of overlapping, colorful fragments” (n.p.), whose poems were personal though they weren’t recollections of the poets life, neither were they a recreation of objects, but instead they raised philosophical questions. This literary movement, however, seems to have reached the end of its newness and, instead of Tony Hoagland’s suggested alternative of the

in poetics, a shift from “performing art to hard craft” (n.p.), one which he calls “The New Thing”. It intimates such poets as Rae Armantrout, Robert Creeley and Objectivist poets, who were in turn influenced by William Carlos Williams, the latter having coined the slogan ‘No ideas but in things’. The New Thing takes over William’s idea and seeks “well-made, attentive, unornamented things” (n.p.) by observing “scenes and people (not only, but also, themselves) with a self-subordinating concision” (n.p.). Remarkably, some of these books have an autobiographical element to them, but Burt adds:

Lyric poetry may be […] the self in private speech—but it may “take a tone” learned from speech amid others: […] often aware that who we are depends on where we are, in space and in a social order—on what we own, what we see, and what we know, and on how “we” or “I” can imagine a “you.” (n.p) In other words, even poetry that appears to be a reflection of the self is always influenced by external sources, the self therefore is never exclusively “the self”.

In his article, Burt quotes Williams stating that a poem “is a small (or large), machine made of words. […] It isn’t what [the poet] says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes” (n.p.). In line with Barthes, who argued that rather than the author it is language that speaks, and that writing is only an act of language, of taking words from an already formed dictionary, Burt asserts that meaning must be found in the poem itself.

He writes that “when [poems] seem hard to pin down, it is because they leave space for interpretations to fit” (n.p.), therewith emphasizing the role of the reader in defining the meaning of poetry.

According to Tony Hoagland, many contemporary poets eschew the narrative because of its emphasis on foregoing and present and its reliance on progression. In “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment”, Hoagland writes that among today’s poets “there is a widespread mistrust of narrative forms and, in fact, a pervasive sense of the inadequacy or

exhaustion of all modes other than the associative” (n.p.). The narrative has attached to it, a sense of over-familiarity, which is exactly what contemporary poets are shying away from, because “these stories of the self [...] are an exhausted resource” (n.p.), argues Hoagland. Narrative poetry, he claims, implies to many a “first person autobiographical stor[y]” and there is a certain tendency to view narrative poetry as incompatible with the multiplicity of the modern age. Narrative is associated with development and fulfillment, ergo it is

unsuitable to illustrate today’s heterogeneity. Of particular importance for this thesis is Hoagland’s assumption that contemporary poets avoid narrative because;

Narrative [...] and other poetries of sustained development, seduce and

contain; its feature is the loss of self-consciousness; in the sequential “grip” of narrative, the reader is “swept away,” and loses not consciousness, perhaps, but self-consciousness. (n.p.)

Although, the poetry discussed in this thesis is partially autobiographical, there is certainly a rejection of the narrative in both works. Hence, the reader is less likely to lose

self-consciousness, as Hoagland puts it. Similar to Barthes, therefore, Hoagland emphasizes the importance of the reader in the process of giving meaning to a text, by highlighting it is essential for readers not to be “swept away” by the narrative, lose self-consciousness and not lose their own identity in the text.

Another important aspect of Hoagland’s argument is his statement that, “[n]arration (and its systematic relatives) implicitly honors Memory; [while] the dissociative mode primarily values Invention” (n.p). Spoken thusly, authorial intention seems relevant in

narration while it is refrained from in the dissociative mode, as invention implies the author’s biography is of less importance. However, Hoagland warns: “we give away one of poetry’s most fundamental reasons for existing: the individual power to locate and assert value” (n.p). According to him, the predominant poem of our time is a lyric and dissociative poem,

with the “dissociated self” as a subject. In poems like these the self is ungraspable and

ephemeral and “elusiveness is the speaker’s central characteristic” (n.p.). Dissociative poetry, however, is not always detached or devoid.

The dissociated-improvisatory mode can represent vivaciousness of self, or uncontainable passion, or the fractured wash of modernity, or an aesthetic allegiance to randomness. The intention of the maker—if we can recognize what it is—makes all the difference. (Hoagland n.p.)

Significant in this quotation is Hoagland’s emphasis on the intention of the maker of the poem and his addition that we might not be able to perceive what it is. Although this seems contrary to Barthes’ argument, since taking into consideration the intentions of the creator in the interpretation of any work of art is specifically something he objectifies against, Hoagland continues by stating that,

Some of the stated, advertised intentions of “elusive” poetics are to playfully distort or dismantle established systems of meaning, to recover mystery in poetry, to offer multiple, simultaneous interpretive possibilities for the energetic and willing reader to “participate” in. (n.p.)

This line of argumentation falls into place with that of Barthes, with the only addition that it is now the author’s intention to give the reader an active role in the process of attributing meaning to poetry. This raises the question of how problematic it is when the writer

intentionally offers the reader the possibility of multiple interpretations. Is it necessarily

wrong that it is intentional? Barthes argues that the author’s intentions should not be taken into consideration but only because it imposes a limit on the text that these authors

specifically attempt to dispose of.

The aim of this thesis will thus be to show that Barthesian thought is relevant in the reading of Ventrakl and Schizophrene. Whereas Christian Hawkey is attempting to (re-)

construct an author from the past and gradually discovers he is incapable to do so, Kapil’s book revolves around the dissociation of the self and a general existential doubt. In addition, the writing process is a focal point in both works and each contains an explicit description of the author’s objective in writing their book. Zooming in on the criticism of Burt and

Hoagland, this thesis will review the role of the author in these collections of prose poetry, which emphasize invention and dissociation whilst maintaining autobiographical elements.

Chapter 1: On Ventrakl

Christian Hawkey’s collection of poetry is, in fact, not solely authored by Christian Hawkey. Instead, as the book’s subtitle points out, Ventrakl is “[a collaboration]” between Hawkey and the Austrian early twentieth-century poet Georg Trakl. It is made up of Hawkey’s idiosyncratic translations of Trakl’s poetry, which he calls a “form of ghostly reanimation” (6) and addresses issues that are common in contemporary American Poetry amongst which are “a problematizing of monological authorship [and the] use and

problematizing of biography, of how to represent a life” (Kelsey, n.p). Besides his

remarkable translation methods, Hawkey also uses photographs and imaginary interviews to compose a book that, as Dan Rosenberg argued,

offers a pulsing afterlife precisely because it doesn’t pretend to give us the “real” Trakl of the past. [Because] as Hawkey reaches back toward the

historical Trakl […] he finds it not in the past, but in a present made surprising and new by his submersion in all things Trakl. (n.p.)

Hawkey is, therefore, reader and writer simultaneously and finds his co-author in Trakl. Ventrakl is therefore “a book about what happens when two literary hearts beat as one. [It is] an act of transubstantiation, with one poet taking possession of the words of another and making something altogether new” (Pitts n.p.). The book is thus a reanimation of other writings and is simultaneously co-authored and authorless. Although it was Hawkey’s objective to create what he calls “an inbetween voice”, there is an urge to understand Trakl through autobiographic material and the inability to do so is a major theme of the book. As was mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, Roland Barthes views writing as “the destruction of every voice”, as a process of composing something entirely new and destroying all previous identities. This chapter will explore the ways in which to read

Ventrakl is a book of poetry that contains elements Stephen Burt assigns to poetry of “The New Thing”. Burt’s analysis of poetry of “The New Thing”, as mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, notices a tendency in the usage of “material objects as models” (n.p.) for poetry. Emphasis on material objects also manifests itself in the introduction to

Ventrakl, wherein Hawkey writes about how “books - of the living or the dead - are the truest

ghosts among us, the immaterial made material” (6). The phrase “immaterial made material” suggests that books are thoughts made into objects or things, a notion on which Hawkey bases his translation methods. According to critic David Kennedy, Ventrakl is “in dialogue with Trakl and his poetry [but] it is also in dialogue with ideas of reading and writing and with the idea of translation itself” (Kennedy, n.p.). These translations are not literal

translations, as Hawkey attempts to include in his translation that which is outside or beyond the text. He thus uses translation as a ghostly mediatorship. His methods vary from searching for specific colors in Trakl’s poetry and altering and rearranging the lines in which they occur to form new poetry (a method he calls poetics of inventory), making homographonic drafts that focus on the visual aspects of translation (words from different languages having the same sounds or sights) and using online translation machines or spelling check to translate the words back and forth. In addition, he also put some of the poems in a glass jar and left it outside for a year to decompose after which the leftovers were repositioned, and shot a copy of Trakl’s poetry with a 12 gauge, then translated the remains with a dictionary.

A poem titled ‘You bent my Megahertz’, was probably written using the

homographonic draft technique. Megahertz is of course a very technical term: “Herz, n. a unit of frequency, equal to one cycle per second” (Oxford English Dictionary). However, it is also the German word for “heart”. In this poem, physicality and romance, therefore, stand in contrast with modern day technique. We see these contrasting elements in the rest of the poem as well. On one hand the poem is about moths, mouths, geese and on the other hand it

is about Visa cards and diamond-studded trampolines, modern inventions that did not yet even exist in Trakl’s time. The poem expresses a longing to go back to the period in which Trakl lived. Before the “shining wedge of visual decline” (the visa card) (31).

Two of Hawkey’s other translation methods revolve around Trakl’s poetry as an object, in which the object that is the book plays a central role while authorial intentions are considered less relevant. Hence, there is a connection between these translation methods and the movement of “The New Thing”. Ventrakl thus is a real collaboration between Trakl, who wrote the initial work, and Hawkey, who takes Trakl’s poetry as an object and creates another object from it. Moreover, quotes that can sometimes be found at the end of a ‘chapter’ are helpful in understanding Hawkey’s ideas on translation and also provide us readers with an insight into the critical framework in which he locates his own work. He, for example, quotes Jean Laplanche (translated), which reads as follows: “The movement of auto-translation, the drive to translate (Trieb zur Ubersetzung-to use Novalis’s term) issues, springs up, not from the translator but from the untranslated or this imperfectly translated, which endlessly

demands translation” (41). Hence, the text itself – the object - calls for translation and

demands interpretation as if there is an element within the text that is not the translators, nor the author’s, but instead belongs to the text itself. As critic John Olson, wrote:

There is a language behind the language, a pure language, a sonorous stream of essences [and] to reach that intensity requires a trance equal to that of its original composition. It takes translation out of the library and into the rarefied air of revelation (20).

In other words, Hawkey, as a translator, has the job of translating what is beyond the text or behind the language and what belongs to the object. In order to truly translate the work, he needs to be in a state similar to Trakl’s psychological experience when the latter wrote the original work.

The result of this project is what Hawkey calls “Umdichtung”: “not a poem translated from another but a poem woven around another, from another, an image from another image, a weaving or an oscillation around or from, a form of understanding” (45). Ergo, Hawkey’s

umdichtungen are poems inspired by other poems, translated not literally but according to the

image painted in those poems and created out of what Hawkey understands these poems to mean. Olson takes this premise even further; arguing that Hawkey was even more free in his translation as his inability to speak German prevented him from falling into the trap of translating the words literally:

Hawkey, who did not speak or read any German at the outside of this project, seems to have found that more of an asset than a liability in his initial attempts to cross the boundary of subjective and historical limits and enter into a true collaborative spirit, one that would otherwise have been marred by a too literal or faithful translation (20).

Hawkey was unbounded by any associations that language may call to mind and was therefore freer to experiment with his translations.

Emphasizing the importance of recognizing what is behind the text, Hawkey writes about what happens when no one is speaking. In an attempt to translate the word Schweigen, Hawkey gives the following definition:

the silence of one who could speak, but chooses not to, or, since such a choice is another way of speaking- a child’s close-lipped, furious gaze – perhaps we should say it is, simply, the silence of one who chooses not to speak for things which have no words, no language, or human language, the language of a cow, for example, when I look into its eye […]. There’s a gaze that empties

itself of speech, of words, […] you could simply bypass the visual by walking up to an eye and simply licking it, or a text, yes”.

Underlining the inability of the eye of the cow to speak, Hawkey seems to suggest that one learns to use his senses in order to understand something; by “simply licking” the eye/the text, rather then attempting to translate it literally, one can grasp its true meaning. Following this passage is a quote from Barthes that reads, “How beneficial it would be … to gain a vision of the irreducible differences which a very remote language can, by glimmerings, suggest to us” (68). This quote supports the previous interpretation; if one looks behind the language, one might find a text’s true meaning.

Further elaborating on the idea of translation, the narrator gives his reader a

description of the process of translating a poem, specifically the poem “Grodek”, and uses its previous translations to do it. According to him, Grodek

is a poem that directly bears witness to the poet. […] It is also an event, a specific historical event. Maybe this is why the poem resists, resists

translation, any form of translation. Or perhaps it demands a specific category of translation: a faithful one. (78)

What is a faithful translation, however? As the narrator explains, the poem that is most lively in English is worst in terms of accuracy. The question that remains, then, is whether or not we regard this – the influence of the translator on the poem, this aspect of collaboration - as problematic or whether this way of translating might be the most faithful option, because it includes not only the author but also the reader. Karla Kelsey claims the following on this subject:

Concerned with translation, influence, and the intersubjective space opened by the act of reading, the book presents a paradoxical occasion of unique identity and supreme interdependence. This book manages to be at the same time an overheard emotional utterance that comes from a particularly felt subjective location (that is to say, the lyric as conventionally described) and a discourse

on language, identity, politics, and the making of life and of art […]

Ventrakl is the intersection of Hawkey and Trakl, the space occupied by the

reader. By collaborative identity.” (Kelsey, n.p.).

Ventrakl includes photographs of Trakl and his family, which might initially give the

reader the impression that this is a biographical work. Hawkey, however, explains his choice of including photographs as follows:

In the case of his life, I was also interested in starting from a non-linguistic space: images, and most importantly photographs. What traces or traces of a life could I find there, translate there? Does one defer to the magic of the photograph, the weirdly doubled aura of the historical author portrait? Can one engage it actively, generatively, using writing and the visual editing and manipulation tools now packaged into all our writing technology (crop, rotate, enlarge) to either exaggerate its magic or dispel it? Both? (7)

Hawkey’s explanation for incorporating photographs because they are ‘non-linguistic’ objects is interesting in multiple aspects, not in the least because he tries to find a way to ‘translate’ them. In line with the objectives of the New Thing movement, the poet observes an object and translates this into a poem.

In the first ‘chapter’ of the book, titled Neither Of Us Is Powerless, the speaker is trying to locate Trakl by using a photograph and constantly enlarging it. However, this process results in indistinct pictures, which symbolize that what the speaker is looking for cannot be found. Starting with an attempt to locate the place where the photo was taken on the basis of geographical elements such as the beach, sea and “diminutive waves”, the speaker then asks himself “how is such a narrative possible?” (19) and tries to unfold the story behind this photograph. The narrator’s use of the word “narrative” is interesting. As noted earlier in this thesis, Tony Hoagland writes that among today’s poets “there is a

widespread mistrust of narrative forms and, in fact, a pervasive sense of the inadequacy or exhaustion of all modes other than the associative” (n.p.). Narrative has attached to it, a sense of over-familiarity and that is exactly what contemporary poets are shying away from, since “these stories of the self [...] are an exhausted resource” (Hoagland n.p). The speaker of

Ventrakl, too, wonders whether turning this into a narrative is even possible:

when your own posture, however, offers no discernible narrative. You seem and do not seem to be speaking. You seem and do not seem to be listening to someone outside the frame. […] It seems to me […] I see you, you seem to say. (21)

The excessive use of the word ‘seem’ implies that Hawkey is attempting to construct the narrative, but fails as he does not actually have any factual knowledge of the events, a given that is emphasized by the ‘holes’ and the ‘bottomlessness’ that form central elements of this part of the book.

The recurrence of the ‘holes’ throughout the entire book, points to the fact that this book is a bottomless hole, in which things disappear but out of which no coherent narrative can be formed. It is as if the self’s narrative consists of many holes in which things disappear and get lost: “A history of holes and what we put inside them, lose inside them” (Hawkey 19). They are also a metaphor for that which is untranslatable. As Terry Pitts argued, this book ascertains that,

The way that reading another’s poem inherently involves speaking it (even if silently) in the reader’s own voice and accent and patterns of speech. Thus, reading becomes an act of translation, reanimation, and, ultimately, ownership, opening the door for new modes of writing that will carry the intermingled DNA of two poets. (n.p.)

However, this is sometimes problematic, as in Ventrakl some things prove to be

untranslatable. On page 34, several definitions of the word hole are given, amongst which are the words “flaw” and “weakness”, and the phrase “an area where something is missing”, which all can be read as referring to the flaws of translation, in which something literally goes missing, but we do not know what that something is. Furthermore, many definitions are concerned with the mouth: “the area or space between the two front teeth suggesting

entrance, permissiveness, or deviancy” / “a defect in the mouth”. The emphasis on the mouth here suggests a connection between speaking and holes, and therefore points to the fact that, in Ventrakl, all speech is translation and no translation is without flaws. Simultaneously, these holes form a metaphor for the unknown family history of Trakl and the inherent consequence that Hawkey cannot fully get to know or understand Trakl. “It is a family that remains untranslated - riddled by holes” (38).

The photos used in an attempt to (re)construct Trakl, are used in a similar way to how his poetry is used to (re)construct him, namely by constantly altering them. “As the book progresses Hawkey reads each image, zooming in on details both visual and biographical, panning with narrative both supposed and actual” (Kelsey, n.p). The fact that this narrative is “both supposed and actual” is important because the invention of narrative results in Trakl himself becoming a construct, rather than a real person (Rosenberg, n.p.). This morphing process is indeed affirmed in one of the book’s imagined interviews, in which Hawkey says to Trakl, “I am—here, now—just as complicit in the construction of your self as your friends were, you were. . . . I am repeating, reinscribing the myths” (60). In this same passage, however, the speaker constantly uses the phrase “I know”, to indicate what he knows about Trakl’s life, which are both facts and emotions. Amongst them are, for example, the love for his sister and the sadness he felt before his own death. The repeated use of the phrase “I know” does, nonetheless, reaffirm the fact that the process of getting to “know” this person is

limited, as through the constant repeating of this phrase, the speaker’s insecurity that derives from the unknown, is actually emphasized. Trakl himself, even “courted and encouraged” (60) these myths about himself, and therefore helped to create the constructed poet that is not who he was as a person. A similar thing happens near the end of the book where the narrator, in an attempt to describe Trakl’s sister, cannot go into this without going in autobiographic mode. What follows is an overuse of the phrase “I could”, referring to the fact that the narrator could describe their biography/life, but then wonders what the use of this would be: “I could provide dates about her life, I could provide facts” (121). Then follows a chronology of the sister’s life, which is purposefully put together as very cold and factual.

When looking at a photograph of a very young Trakl, Hawkey at first mistakes him for his sister. Similar to Barthes’ notion of the coming about of a text, Hawkey writes “the moment the image exists it is freed of that instant [the recording of it], separated from it, and it passes through hands, in and out of albums, boxes, a frozen moment in time that moves through time [until it reaches] me, the viewer” (115). The viewer may well be Barthes’ reader, who now looks at Trakl’s picture that is set free from its origin. Similar to how the picture once it comes into being is separated from the moment of its recording, texts, Barthes argues, are “disconnected” from their “origin” once the narration of a fact starts. Hawkey, furthermore, describes how he wanted to see the image, which he has mistaken for an image of his sister, as a token that she is indeed “another part of yourself, the Other of your self”, but resists this reading and his “subjective gaze” and instead tries to locate the image

historically and let it be a “record that has nothing to do with me” (115). Which results in the following analysis:

It is the viewer, then, who looks back, who must translate the photograph against itself, translate time against itself, put the image back into time, back

into a century, a country, a culture, back into the camera, the lens, the moment the shutter clicked and the location of the shutter when it clicked. (116)

The viewer must translate the image, in a similar way that readers translate a poem every time it is read, the word “translate” here being used to describe the process of interpretation, on which later on in this chapter, more will follow.

The concept of constructing the narrative returns as an important motive in this part of the book: “I know I can see this as a line, a moving line, a narrative” (61). The phrase “I know I can see” implies that it is one possibility to view this as a narrative but also suggest reluctance by the speaker to do so. The reason for this is that Trakl is at “a fixed point” […] “unable to move, move on, construct a narrative stronger than the one the attending doctors constructed for you” (61). The idea that Trakl’s life is a constructed narrative (be it by

himself or others) supports the idea that he, himself, becomes a construct. This is what makes it impossible to get to know Trakl through his work.

As mentioned before, this book is a collaboration between two people, namely Christian Hawkey and Georg Trakl. Even the cover of the book illustrates this collaboration as the faded image of the back cover shows on the front cover and vice versa, giving the impression that the book is transparent. Earlier, it was explained how Hawkey, with some of his translation methods, treats Trakl’s poetry as an object. Amy Henry points us to the relevance of the techniques Hawkey used to translate Trakl. With regards to the decomposed excerpts of poetry that had been standing in a jar of rainwater, Henry argues that more than just inspiring, the themes of “decay, rain, time and ruin were frequent subjects of Trakl” (14-15). In other words, Hawkey’s methods of translating include Trakl’s larger themes and are therefore translated on a different level and thereafter rearranged by Hawkey. Hawkey shooting one of Trakl’s books is also considered relevant by Henry, as Trakl used to be a soldier and, she adds, “the decline in his mental state that led to suicidal feelings made Trakl

“as damaged and blown apart mentally as the book Hawkey shot” (15). Henry, however, concludes, “Hawkey’s innovative approach yields a biographical poetry that will help readers learn about Georg Trakl, as well as poems that on their own would stand as skillful and inspired”(15). Although Hawkey expresses a wish to get to know Trakl, part of the book is the discovery of the inability to get to know the ‘real’ Trakl.

Rather than help readers learn about Trakl, this thesis argues that the book shows one reader’s quest to get to know Trakl and the difficulties that arise from this project. “The younger poet's inability to pin down the “real” Trakl is especially powerful in the repeated dialogues — almost interviews — to which Hawkey's narrator subjects the dead poet”. Hawkey’s narrator and Trakl indeed have dialogues that often confuse rather than illuminate, and only enlarge the gap between the two authors, rather than drawing them closer together. When the narrator for the first time describes what happens when the two poets meet, he writes:

When we address each other we do not use names, have never used names. We are both equally tired of them, weary of them, the way one wearies of the same taste, the same food, the same brand of food. And the space in which we meet? It can most easily be described as a room, a nearly empty room. It has walls. A drawn curtain. A desk-shaped table with two chairs. The light above the table is real. (24)

This “room” functions as a metaphor for any poem, while the dialogues that take place inside the room symbolize the process of reading and understanding poetry. At first the speaker is completely oblivious to the poet and can’t get through, now, as he is working hard, the poet tries to make contact, though the process is slow and takes a lot of time. The poem is staring back at him and the poem in turn symbolizes the poet – or more precisely, the poem and the

poet are one. This reminds of Barthes’ argument of the death of the author, but in Ventrakl what has taken place is submersion.

The poet is not dead, but instead, is what will be called a “compound poet”. It is a ghost that has emerged from this collaboration between Trakl and Hawkey, came into being through the merging of the two poets and has now become a separate entity. Similar to the author in Barthes’ theory, the compound poet only exists together with the poetry, is “ born simultaneously with” it, and is therefore inseparable from it. Different from Barthes’s “scriptor”, the compound poet came into being through collaboration, through the fusion of two individuals. Moreover,

Ventrakl sets up the quest to commune with Trakl and to allow such

communion to express and shape Hawkey himself. […] Hawkey asks himself not only to animate and hear Trakl’s words, but [also] to become the words themselves [and] to create an authentic relation between author and author, reader and text”. (Kelsey, n.p.)

This authentic relation is highlighted by the poets’ wariness to use each other’s or their own names, which has distancing as well as familiarizing elements to it. Distancing because names are very closely connected to identity. Familiarizing because not using names implies a certain amount of anonymity which allows all readers to become one with them. Although, both they and the readers of the poetry know what their names are, by not using each other’s names the difference between the two authors fades and, more importantly, the compound-voice, the voice of the compound poet, is automatically pushed forward; it is the merger of the two ghosts that our focus is drawn to. Furthermore, it contributes to the process of putting one beside himself; as long as the subject is not named, the subject is not affirmed.

In the preface to the book, Hawkey explains his motives and methods for writing

Voices pass through consciousness, sometimes called upon, other times without request. […] Our bodies, our heads, our skulls, are voice chambers, sound chambers, wherein our own voiced selves and the voiced selves of others constantly enter and exit, and are changed by our bodies upon entrance, exit. Consciousness, at least metonymically, is voiced, and the voice […] is less a vehicle for “self-presence” than a void, a blank space at the site of intersection. (5)

In other words, voices of other people enter and exit our consciousness and the self functions as an embodiment of the voice of the self and other voices. What Hawkey is writing

therefore, is a book in a voice that represents the void or blank space that is our consciousness and which is inhabited by our own as well as other people’s voices. Hawkey’s voice,

moreover, is again in itself inhabitable for other people. Remarkably, Hawkey writes that this voice does not function to explore Hawkey’s “self-presence”, as if to warn his reader not to search for Hawkey as an author in this book, but rather readers ought to fill its blank space.

In the process of reading, the reader activates the words, of that which Hawkey documents through the writing of this book.

What happens when those voices are of the deceased […], poems written nearly a full century ago? To read is to animate words, let them speak with you, alongside you, as you. To read a poem is to allow a text and its voiced accents (timbres, tonations) to unfold within one’s reading voice, thereby forming a loop, a voice-over--a between voice. […] And to read the deceased is to reanimate their words; the between-voice is a ghost, a host” (Hawkey 6). The idea that “to read the deceased is to reanimate their words”, is similar to Roland Barthes’ notion that a text is “eternally written here and now”. According to Barthes, it is not the author, but the reader, who gives meaning to a text, which can be translated into the thought

that when we read poetry, we reanimate the words of the poet. Neither Hawkey nor Trakl are present in their “real self”, the authors of this book are “ghosts”, whom together form the compound poet. What happens is that Ventrakl “ceases to bear the imprint of either author and becomes a strange, mutant creature of raw, unbridled existence” (Olson, 20). The work thus stands on its own, its creator being part of the work and non-existent outside the work, or at least not detachable from it.

Different from Barthes’ theory, is the compound-voice that Hawkey invents. The collaboration between text and reader forms a between-voice, in the form of a ghost (not a spiritual ghost, but ghostly in the sense of “a being between states, a “being terrified, a being beside himself, ek-static” (6)). This, however, suggests involvement of both author and reader in the text and the notion of a ghost, moreover, implies a connection with the dead author that Barthes would not make. Hawkey continues by stating that a “collaboration between the living and the dead is the meeting of ghosts because writing is, in the purest sense, an act that sets the fiction of one’s self aside” (6). Simultaneously though,

the book moves through the interior of Trakl […] and out, into the world through Hawkey’s consideration of himself as reader, as writer, as individual […] Such a project, authentically performed, entails plurality laced with the “taut wire” we might call identity” (Kelsey, n.p.).

This book, therefore, also traces the path of someone who is simultaneously reader and author and is in search of his own identity.

In a dialogue between the two authors, Hawkey’s character tries to engage Trakl into a conversation about a certain event in his childhood. The latter, however, is either not willing or unable to give the answers the former is looking for:

You once, as a child, walked into a pond. / Yes. / And your mother located your body only by the position of your hat floating on the surface? / The stars

can be a lonely tent. / I see. Submersion, then, becomes a kind of

companionship? / The stars can be a lonely tent. / I’m not sure I follow you…. / Listen, can you point me to the nearest whorehouse? (25)

Hawkey’s narrator tries to direct the conversation to a certain point in history in which he believes a significant event happened to Trakl. Although he is already aware that the event has taken place and is informed about the details as well, he tries to grasp what is behind the story and at first seems to understands the other’s answer (“I see”) but later, as he tries to interpret this answer, receives the same response and admits to be confused. Trakl then entirely withdraws from the conversation in a very provocative manner and the first is left without any answers. This is one of the many examples of Hawkey attempting to understand Trakl by trying to map out his life but failing in the attempt. This results in an “increasing sense of bewilderment [as] the reader comes to realize that Hawkey cannot, in the end, identify with Trakl, or even seriously understand him” (Perloff, n.p).

About the location where the two always meet, Hawkey writes,

The room we eventually abandoned is anyone’s to inhabit. Ultimately these are not my poems. Nor are they Trakl’s. They occur at some site between our languages, texts, names, as well as between our (ghostly) bodies redoubled by the erotics of collaboration and translation” (8).

This statement emphasizes Hawkey’s double role as both reader and writer in this process. “The room”, as mentioned earlier, symbolizes the book that is created. Readers of the book are invited to visit the space in which this collaboration came into existence, by reading the book. Because these poems are neither Trakl’s nor Hawkey’s, the reader is free to make the poetry her own. This, as Barthes would argue, indicates that there is no longer a limit on the text. The authors have left the room; they have left their work. What is left is Ventrakl, a book written by a compound author who only came into existence at the moment the text was

written and has written a work which is open for the reader to interpret, as “the true place of writing, […] is reading” (Barthes n.p.).

There seems to be a discrepancy between what Hawkey expects from his own readers and what he set out to do when he started this project as a reader himself. His attempt to understand Trakl and know everything there is to know about him through his texts is contrary to Barthes’ idea of how to read a work. However, while working on the project, Hawkey gradually adapts his strategy, as is shown by him quoting Jack Spicer saying, “the dead are notoriously hard to satisfy” (26), which refers to how translating a text, or in this specific case a poem, needs to satisfy the original poet. It is perhaps not, however, Trakl but Hawkey that at this point is hard to satisfy.

In an article on Jacques Derrida’s Translation theories, Arka Chattopadhyay describes how Derrida argues that translation is mainly concerned with that which is beyond language: “the original always already lack its translation, [it] demands translation” (n.p.). Derrida therefore calls translation a “Hyphen”. “It shows us the difference between the effable and the ineffable. Derridean ethic of translation is all about admitting the lack and then trying to make the lack functional” (Chattopadhyay n.p.). In the process of translating Trakl, Hawkey thus gradually realizes he is translating the “lack” of Trakl’s poetry and needs to therefore satisfy himself rather than Trakl. Furthermore, “holding on to the lack instead of filling it up becomes the translational strategy in Derrida” (Chattopadhyay n.p) and, hence, the difficulty of translation that Hawkey encounters is that of coming to terms with not being able to fill up this lack but instead only foregrounding it. If he succeeds, however, “translation does not merely forward the legacy of the original; it has its own life” (Chattopadhyay n.p). This is indeed what happened in Ventrakl, the compound poet has created a work that stands on its own in which the gap between the two authors and the two languages remains in tact.

In “An Argument For Archipelagos”, Hawkey provides the reader with a very factual biography of Trakl, including his name, place and date of birth and family dynamics but then swiftly changes from the conventional form of biography to a more impressionist mode of writing:

He was rumored to have intimate relations with his own already you bore me, although it’s more likely that I saw myself walking through deserted rooms. […] what also darkened the days of those years, you tell me, moon-bright sonata. (29)

Assuming that it is Trakl who utters the sentence “already you bore me” and therewith interrupts the narrator’s summary of the poet’s life, by saying that the narrative of his own life is boring him, the deserted rooms then symbolize the memories of events past that he is unwilling to revisit. In another scene in which the two poets sit opposite each other again, Hawkey attempts to make contact with Trakl, but fails continuously as the latter is “unable or unwilling to look up, to look at [Hawkey]” (35). There is “no flicker of recognition. No sound. [...] no eye contact – recognition - nothing” (35). Again, there is the metaphor of reading as it symbolizes the struggle experienced by any reader of poetry, as well as Hawkey’s individual problem of not being able to find Trakl in it.

In another conversation between the two poets, Hawkey asks Trakl about his relationship with his sister. First being asked about the love for his sister, he answers “I do not comment on undeserted rooms” (36) and when being asked about their connection instead, he replies “I will say this only once: the only sister with whom I’ve had “intimate relations” is the one inside me, the one who, right now, with these words, speaks” (36). The idea that his sister and Trakl are morphing, that she is inside him and speaks through him, can be linked back to that earlier moment in which Hawkey finds a picture of Trakl but mistakes him for his sister. And Trakl himself appears to suggest a merger between him and

his sister as he suggests he is his own sister. This is how Hawkey interprets his words as well: “Is this who I am speaking with?” (36). What Trakl seems to indicate, however is that it does not matter who is speaking. This is emphasized at the end of the conversation as Hawkey asks “Who is writing then?”, the reply to which is that “who is”, which is affirmed again with “who is” (37). Remarkably, this is not a question but an affirmative statement. Who is a person, and can be any person.

This interaction connects Hawkey’s work to Barthes’. Who is anyone and

simultaneously no one: neither Hawkey nor Trakl is writing, instead the reader is. Who is the reader, not Hawkey, Trakl or his sister. The narrator’s question of whom he is speaking with, is in the process of reading Trakl’s work, the question of who has written it. Trakl’s answer that he will never get anywhere if he takes it “so literal” can than be read as a translation of Barthes’ argument that connecting a work to a specific author limits the reader in her

interpretations and therefore limits the text. The narrator seems to slowly realize this himself and therewith becomes aware of the limitations of his own project. As Marjorie Perloff argues, “the more information the author of Ventrakl has about his subject, the less he really knows him. The very words of the poems, so direct and unambiguous in their familiar Deep Image versions, become opaque” (n.p.).

In another dialogue, Hawkey asks Trakl where he places himself, to which the latter replies that he does not place himself, but instead is “placed – we are placed – in a gorge” (49). This is a reference to how we should read Trakl’s poetry. As the interview continues, Hawkey presents his analysis of Trakl’s poetry to the poet himself, specifically addressing historical events (the Industrial Revolution) that are relevant for Trakl’s time and attaching certain emotions to it (impending dread). Trakl, however, makes clear that we should use our animal instinct when reading poetry, because animals read everything “more immediately in time” (49), therefore, the reader should “widen [his] nostrils when reading any text” (49).

These claims support Barthes’ idea that rather than placing a text within the time-frame it was written in (in this case reading Trakl’s poetry and interpreting its themes as applying to the Industrial Revolution), we should read a text “here and now” and use our own environment when giving meaning to a text.

In addition, the chronology of the life of Trakl’s sister is followed by and put in contrast with blank space, that is in turn filled with some short sentences. The blank space and short statements symbolize how little we know about Trakl’s sister and how much blank space there is left to be filled in, even after we have read the entire course of her life in factual statements in the aforementioned chronology. It is interesting that Hawkey would choose to include a timeline of the sister’s life rather than Trakl’s. One reason for this may be the suggested merger between the two siblings combined with Hawkey’s wish to get to know everything there is to know about Trakl. Even though Hawkey fails in his quest, this

inclusion of factual statements emphasizes that in order to translate a poet, factual statements and text alone are not enough.

As has been argued throughout this chapter, the aim is to translate that which is beyond the text and produce a work that stands on its own, that has its own author; the compound poet. The phrases “a side room”(126) and “a private act in a public space” (127), may refer to the meetings between Trakl and Hawkey, which also took place in a small room and are now public in the form of this book. There is so much blank space because we, as readers, are supposed to fill it in, and therefore, the book and the act of reading it, now become “A public gesture in a public space” (132). Moreover, the statement “And the space there. A room” (138), reconnects this entire process of reading poetry to Hawkey’s meetings with Trakl, which also took place in “a room” that was a metaphor for poetry. The “public gesture” is, here, the reading of poetry, as carried out by the public, as carried out by Hawkey: “Already they were translating” (139).

Hawkey does, however, find in Trakl a close friend: “Today I tell him what I saw

during the morning, what I did. […] “I had nowhere to put this feeling. Which is why, afterwards, I immediately came here” (104). Besides the fact that this passage shows that

Hawkey views Trakl as a confidante, there is a literal reference to the writing of poetry in this passage, namely that Hawkey does put down his own feelings in this book. However, it simultaneously suggests he uses the writing of this book as a form of escapism from the own body and into the submersion of the body of the compound poet. The notion that the two authors become one is further elaborated on as the narrator writes:

We are two sternums, facing each other. Two ribcages. I do not know, at this hour, where the space my chest inhabits ends and his begins, where one language ends and another begins. Seen from the perspective of dreams (aerial, suspended, looking down at the room) I see the dots of our heads, divided by a narrow wooden table: a line, a border line, an equation. […]and the thin yellow pencil moving back and forth over the border, because of the border, erasing it with our movements, our awareness of the border and our movements there” (85).

Whereas this passage indeed shows how the two authors become one as their compound poet comes into existence, it simultaneously shows how the narrator dissociates himself from himself, or how his self is fragmented. The more the poets grow together, the more the narrator distances himself from himself, which is highlighted by the fact that he observes the two bodies from above: he has left his own body and now looks at how his body and Trakl’s submerse. They are aware of the border, yet they erase the border as the poem comes into being. The realization of the author’s death, of the fact that Hawkey is unable to ever fully understand Trakl, but also that he himself, as the author of this book is “dead” is a gradual process, though Hawkey does realize his own “dead” will come: “perhaps when I leave this

room I should see myself as a corpse, a zombie, a limb thudding on the floor” (92). The process of dissociation from the self is followed by the death of the self. Eventually, the book ends with the translation of one of Trakl’s poems and then on the final page is a photo of Hawkey with a Trakl mask on his face, as a final assertion that this is a collaboration between Hawkey and Trakl; it is the portrait of the compound poet.

Chapter 2: On Schizophrene

Tackling issues of migration, mental illness, racism and trauma, specifically in relation to the partition of British India in 1947, Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene consists of fragmented prose poetry that is based on a previously written, yet unfinished, book by the same author. The book starts with a section titled passive notes, which is comparable to Hawkey’s preface in Ventrakl as in this section the author explains her methods and motives. Kapil describes how “for some years, [she] tried to write an epic on Partition and its

trans-generational effects” (i), which include schizophrenia, domestic violence and relational

disorders. However, she considered her project a failure and threw her notebook, “a hand-written final draft” (i), into the garden, only to retrieve it a couple of months later and start writing again “from the fragments, the phrases and lines still legible on the warped, decayed but curiously rigid pages” (i). This method of composure may remind of Hawkey’s technique of burying poetry in a glass jar to let it decompose for a year, but there are two significant differences. Hawkey purposefully buried Trakl’s poetry already aware he would retrieve it later, while for Kapil, the disposal of her book was a movement of rejection. Moreover, whereas Hawkey buried poetry written by another poet, Kapil discarded her own work and, therewith, her own historical legacy. Besides this being a book on Schizophrenia in relation to migration, therefore, this book also focuses on issues of the fragmentation of the self and the relation between those two.

The New Oxford American Dictionary describes Schizophrenia as follows:

A long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.

Schizophrene analyzes how immigration has caused schizophrenia, which, as can be read

above, induces a sense of mental fragmentation. This chapter will therefore examine how a, at least partially, autobiographical work written from the perspective of a fragmented self functions in a post-Barthesian era.

Taking into consideration Stephen Burt’s theory of “The New Thing”, indeed a large part of Schizophrene’s subject matter is concerned with objects and observing “scenes and people (not only, but also, [Kapil her]self)” (Burt, n.p.). Burt contrasts two types of poetry in his essay, namely those that consist of chiefly personal narratives, yet are fragmentized, evasive and digressive and those whose poets belong to a new movement in poetics; “The New Thing”. Poetry of the latter strives to produce and represent durable, unadorned objects or things, the result of which is poetry that both faithfully represents the thing depicted and is a thing in itself. Although Burt presents the two as opposites, Kapil’s Schizophrene does not explicitly fall into either one category. The book is indeed composed of vibrant fragments that are simultaneously personal and not directly related to the poets life, yet it also heavily relies on objects. Moreover, Burt associates poetry of “The New Thing” with “articulating sometimes harsh judgments, and […] casting backward looks” (Burt, n.p.), which is applicable to Schizophrene as it investigates the mental problems people have experienced after the partition of British India. Moreover, although fragmented, Kapil’s poetry is based on real events. Even the associative leaps that make up these fragmented passages are based on reality; on other people’s history or on Kapil’s own dreams and thoughts. Fragmentation is part of reality for immigrants and schizophrenic people, and these poems are therefore accurate in their fragmentation.

Schizophrene is a work that simultaneously consists of fragments, lays attention

outside the self, and depends on material objects to tell its story. As critic Jai Arun Ravine writes:

Schizophrene begins with several different departures: a book, an aeroplane, a boat, a suitcase, a ferry. In mapping this field of departures and flight paths, in drawing a line from schizophrenia to im/migration and back again, the LCD display crackles, the grid snaps – a zig-zag stem becomes a triptych becomes a door. (n.p.)

This is a list of a strikingly large amount of objects that are used in the construction of this narrative and in linking its themes of mental illness and migration. As the process of connecting these two themes is acted out however, material objects lose their solid form. Besides objects being used as the starting point for the “narrative” of the story, the zig-zag stem becoming a triptych becoming a door, alludes to the loss of instability of even solid objects. This loss of reliability in the steadiness of material objects forms a metaphor for one of the central themes of the book: Schizophrenia. The illogical associative jumps, of which Burt argues they are not compatible with “The New Thing”, are thus not unrealistic, but instead allude to the very real illness of schizophrenia and are therefore real in the mind of the subject. Hence, these illogical interconnections actually do represent reality for the schizophrenic self. As Lauren Russell argues, although immigration and schizophrenia are linked in this book, “impressions pathologized as “delusional” [could] be accurate

perceptions of insane realities” (n.p.). The horrific events described by Kapil did indeed really occur, and are therefore realistic, no matter how absurd and psychotic.

Schizophrenia, as mentioned before, involves a damaged sense of reality, which causes delusion and mental fragmentation. The changeability of otherwise solid objects is thus used to explain the predicaments of schizophrenia. “What Kapil is interested in are not the objects, but the way pulsation and frequency of the invested movement opens up new narrative possibilities to talk about mental disorder” (Valle, n.p.). Accordingly, the objects in

defining entities that symbolize the book’s actual themes. The latter, for example, being the case in the section titled “Electrobion”, in which the speaker is unable to name and identify certain objects: “There’s a word for this, I can’t recall…” (30). This incapability to name objects can be read as symbolizing the speaker’s confusion and sense of loss and

homelessness that result from migration and mental illness.

One object that deserves special consideration is the unfinished notebook on which

Schizophrene is based. By writing the first book, the “immaterial [was] made material”, as

Christian Hawkey would argue. Kapil’s observations, observations of others but also herself, were made into an object, an object that was, however, discarded by its maker and is

therefore considered a dead object. Near the end of the book the speaker tells about ripping a page from the notebook and putting it in a “false environment” (63), therewith mimicking the immigrant’s experience of being displaced, describing the page as “brittle”, “damaged”, and literally “dead” (63). There is even a funeral for the torn out page, which is a metaphor for the writer saying goodbye to her former self; she buries her former self as the self that wrote the page and then destroys it. However as Andrea Quaid argues, “while the resilient pages turn away writer and word, they also absorb and preserve the story that, in epic fashion, articulates not an “individual sorrow” but the tale of a now dispersed community” (n.p.). In other words, the dead of the writer (about which more will follow) and the previously written notebook do not end the story. Instead, the story is what remains. This is not the story of the author but the story of no particular person, the story consisting of fragments of lives of people from the community.

Schizophrene becomes, therefore, the “book without a purpose / with a dead start”

(24), as Kapil writes in the chapter titled Abiogenesis, its title referring to “the supposed production of certain living organisms directly from inanimate matter, rather than by the reproduction of existing organisms” (Oxford English Dictionary). Naming it so thus hints at

Schizophrene being a product made from inanimate matter; it is the product of observation of

an inanimate object, to refer back to Burt’s theory of The New Thing. As Lucy Biederman notes, “Kapil’s [Schizophrene] becomes a record of something that is not, a lacuna – and, complexly, a reminder both that the previous document once existed and that it exists no longer” (n.p.). Similarities can thus be drawn between Schizophrene and Hawkey’s Ventrakl as both find its origin in a “book before written” (Kapil, 5): the first being based on the notebook, the latter on poetry by another poet. For both, emphasis lies on the book as an object rather than on authorial intention and additionally, in both cases their origins were destroyed, literally (through decomposition in nature or by shooting it) but also

metaphorically, for as will be discussed in the next section, their authors no longer exist. In Schizophrene, the narrator describes how, at the moment of disposal, “the book’s genetics split, opening wide then bursting on the chrome” (56). The portrayal of the book’s genetics breaking apart implies a divide between the object and its origin. Assuming that a book’s genetics or origin consists firstly of its author and secondly of the events (real or imagined) it is based on, we can recall Barthes’ essay on the Death of the Author. As

mentioned earlier, in this essay he writes how a disunion between text and writer takes place at the moment an occurrence is being narrated, the account of which has no purpose other than the act of telling it, at which moment the author of a text enters into his/her own death. The splitting up of the genetics of the original notebook that was used to compose

Schizophrene when it was first disposed of, implies a break between that book and its author,

but Barthes’ argument insinuates there is also a breakage within its genetics; a split between the story and its author. The moment the author dies, is for Kapil the moment in which she discards her previous book. After a pause, however, Kapil starts writing again, but now her aim has changed. She indeed narrates a story that has no function other than “the very

throwing away her previous book and therewith splitting its genetics) and so now the “writing begins” (Barthes n.p).

As a reason for throwing away the notebook, the narrator writes “reading these words [she] can’t have them in [her] house” (11). It therefore appears that by throwing it away, she attempted to dispose of her own memories and family history. Distancing herself from her own memories that have been written down in the book as a narrative, the “immaterial made material” is tossed away and literally disposed of, turning it into an act that embodies the fragmentation of the self. Although there is a sense of Kapil herself being present in

Schizophrene, given the book contains autobiographical elements, much of the narrative is

only indirectly connected to Kapil’s life:

Narrative is conveyed through an ancestor or in an interview […], through a notebook holding corroded sentences which survived the snow, or through dreams [which] create a fractured portrait [and] allude to – without articulating directly – a fragmentation of the self and society (Scheiwe, n.p).

Observing objects (the notebook), other people and herself, thus results in an

autobiographical work, which does not have a sole subject, but instead the multiple subjects are composed of a fragmented self and society. Schizophrene is a book that “documents the fragmentation of self and society and is itself a fragmented document” (Kelsey, n.p.). What is retrieved later is assembled in a fragmented book composed of fragmented memories about ‘a wife’ and a ‘he’, a ‘girl’ and her ‘grandfather’, and ‘they’. All these words indicate a

dissociation between author and narrative, while a link between the narrator and the girl can be read between the lines: “I don’t see her, I feel her” // “her grandfather gets up. She gets up. And they go” (14). While the first part of this quotation indicates the implied link, the second insinuates that the girl and grandfather literally walk out of her memory/the narrative.

It is, moreover, noteworthy that none of the characters in the book have a name. Calling to mind the passage from Ventrakl where the avoidance of using names was regarded as being at once distancing and familiarizing, similarities can be drawn between the two works. Kapil’s eschewal from giving names to her characters is likewise distancing because, as was the argument in the chapter on Ventrakl, names account for a large part of someone’s identity and so the absence of any named characters turns them into anonymous subjects. Moreover, the distinction between author, narrator and subject becomes less distinct, even indefinable. However, Kapil’s choice to not name her narrator or characters may be related to her goal to describe the problems of an entire community, which in turn can be connected to the familiarizing element of having nameless characters. By not explicitly identifying her subjects, readers will more easily be able to connect with the characters on an emotional level; they will recognize themselves in her characters and will not experience that boundary that would have been set by identifying these characters as individual people.

Kapil even views herself as a semi-anonymous person as is demonstrated by her describing herself as simply “a girl”. What Kapil does in this instant, is what Burt describes as something common for poets of “The New Thing”, namely to observe her self with “self-subordinating concision” (n.p.), thereby turning herself into an object, an instrument

disconnected from her self as an author. In addition, Kapil and the first person narrator seem hardly distinguishable. As Karla Kelsey argues,

from “Passive Notes” through to the three-page “Acknowledgements and Quick Notes” that conclude the book, she makes no distinction between herself as writer and the “I” of the text, making clear that the author is, herself, one of the displaced. (n.p.)

However, Kelsey also states that, “while the book contains substantial research, Kapil thoroughly penetrates the text with a first-person sensibility, providing us with a model of