Phantoms of the Mind: Short Stories Book

A notable property of words: loosened from the moorings of their ordinary usage and placed in unexpected, perhaps confusing, maybe even entirely ungrammatical juxtaposition, they gain much more in meaning than is lost. Forced to think outside the automated comprehension of ordinary word-use patterns, the reader must discover each word as new, considering its shape and form and potential shades of meaning. Slivers of interpretation otherwise buried beneath the weight of past use are suddenly uncovered, found to be all the more potent. Breaking language frees it. Carving a new space around every word gives it space to breath and grow in unexpected ways.

Brossard's words are like this. Apparently denying ordinary prose/poetry distinctions, Brossard forges a powerful language that flutters impressionistically, while delicately expressing great depths. Any given phrase will be initially beautiful, then cryptic, later rediscovered in full meaning. To make the most of this, there's a certain demand of re-reading. How to ensure that every reader will actually commit such time to this? An ingenious solution: the book contains the novella of Mauve Desert, twice, before and after translation by an obsessed reader whose notes compose the central third part. The structure forces the story to be read, then mulled over, then re-read in a new configuration, sometimes illuminating the earlier version, sometimes seeming to spin away in new directions instead. Of course, these discrepancies also encourage a certain flipping back and forth for comparison: another reading of the first version, affording its defamiliarized dialect another opportunity to be absorbed. Of course, the "translation" is a meaningful construct in its own right: a chance to look at the variability and subjectivity of words, meaning, understandings private and public. I say "translation" because here it is English to English. In the Quebecois Brossard's original, it would presumably have been French to French. (Or is Quebecois an altogether bi-lingual culture? Could she have written it in English to French or some such herself? I have no idea.) In any event, this has been translated into English from some form of French original, with extreme deftness, by Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood (seriously, translating a book about translation is a truly heroic act). For maximum effect, read the original and translation side-by-side for a full four-fold echoplex of variations.

And, finally, like the best experiments (I will be recommending this to you, Troy), this is a fine and punchy story in its own right, a teen pushing through through the motel-studded veneer of the american landscape and into the unmarred enormity of its desertlands, juxtaposed against the legacy of Los Alamos. "Lying under the Meteor's headlights was the body of a humanity that did not know Arizona. Humanity was fragile because it did not suspect Arizona's existence." Actually, let me just transcribe that whole section, it is wonderful:
At night there was the desert, the shining eyes of antelope jack rabbits, senita flowers that bloom only in the night. Lying under the Meteor's headlights was the body of a humanity that did not know Arizona. Humanity was fragile because it did not suspect Arizona's existence. So fragile, I was fifteen and hungered for everything to be as in my body's fragility, that impatient tolerance making the body necessary. I was an expert driver, wild-eyed in mid-night, capable of going forward in the dark. I knew all that like a despair capable of setting me free of everything. Eternity was a shadow cast in music, a fever of the brain making it topple over into the tracings of highways. Humanity was fragile, a gigantic hope suspended over cities. Everything was fragile, I knew it, I had always known it. At fifteen I pretended I had forgotten mediocrity. Like me mother, I pretended that nothing was dirtied.
Shadows on the road devour hope. There are no shadows at night, at noon, there is only certitude traversing reality. But reality is a little trap, little shadow grave welcoming desire. Reality is a little passion fire that pretexts. I was fifteen and with ever ounce of my strength I was leaning into my thoughts to make them slant reality toward the light.

Some other points that continue to circulate in my brain that I don't seem to have included in the original review:

-Maurice Blanchot gets quoted, which makes lots of sense in the lineage of using abstract narrative to create interesting and flexible theory-space.
-since the original novella mostly occupies that kind of abstract theory-space, the in-story translator, in order to better grapple with the text, writes extensive notes on concrete physical details that inform but mostly to not actually enter her own version.
-As in Celine and Julie Go Boating, there's an attempt here to rescue a character doomed by narrative /conceptual determinism. Here, through the process of translation. Translator vs. author with a life in the balance. Which actually means that there's still dramatic tension in the novella the second time around, even though we know what happened the first time.
-I've barely touched on the actual theory here, but whenever I give this the time and attention to start to penetrate it, there's quite a lot of interest. In every sentence, practically. The bit about the concrete calming fears of the desert (teeth and venom and exposure) vs. the diffuse ambiguous televised fears of civilization is going to stick with me, for instance.