Infinite Nadja and Hope
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Infinite Nadja, is a book of quotations similar to those found in chain
bookstores. These aphoristic tomes offer the comforting and inspiring words of
contemporary and historical figures in a collection of quotations, which
transcends both the ideological and temporal limitations of the authors and
their writing. Therefore the collected wisdom of the book of quotations is in
conflict with its own existence. Even though Nadja and hope mean the same thing
on an etymological level, they cannot be substituted one for the other. Hope
may be what the name means, but it cannot stand for that meaning.
As
a means of negotiating a space between myself and the characterization of
Breton’s Nadja, I began collecting quotes with the intention of substituting
the name Nadja for hope. By inserting both myself and the character in the quotations,
I complicate their authorship. The following examples provide a sense of how
the substitution works:
“There is
no nadja unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with nadja.”
-Baruch
Spinoza
“Nadja deceives more men than
cunning does”
-Vauvernargues
“Nadja is
not a feeling.”
-Katherine
Patterson
“There
are no situations without nadja.”
-Clare
Boothe Luce
While the “meaning” of the
quotation remains the same, the substitution (and subsequent transformation of
the quotation) forefronts the space between meaning and understanding, and
underlines the difficulty of producing either. By abdicating my authorship, or
at least surrendering it in part to the character for whom I am named, I am
employing a strategy similar to the one used by Breton and the Surrealists. The
work begins to explore the space between meaning and understanding, and between
the name and the named. The work is dedicated to Nadja, but not myself. There
is distance in the same.
The character of Nadja, despite her chancey origins,
remains a conventional muse for Breton. She is essentially tragic, mad, and
enigmatic. In enacting the primary operation of substituting the name for the
meaning of the name, I have rescued Nadja from her fate, and transferred her
from being just a vessel available to Breton, into an embodiment of a state of
beyondness. In one sense, this transfer is a reflection of the fundamental idea
of hope, a condition that exists outside of current constraints. In another, I
am re-imagining Nadja as a spectralization of possibility. Her being remains,
then, a subject of chance.
The
physical look of Hope retains the small, diaristic scale of the pocket novel, which
suggests an intimate relationship to the audience. The work is held in the
hands of the viewer/reader, it requires the durational aspect of reading a
bookwork, it even invites sitting with the work. I have transformed the text and it remains eminently
readable.
While
watching a bootleg movie on the Internet, there are times when the viewer becomes
annoyed with the gaps in scenes, or with indecipherable conversation caused by
digital loss or pooling. Similarly, in this bootleg, the viewer/reader is still
able to parse the narrative, even as it is challenged by my alterations. An
excerpt from the bookwork illustrates how the substitution functions:
The whole morning, too, I have been bothering myself
about hope; it was a mistake not have made a date with it today. I am annoyed. I suppose I observe it
too much, but how can I help it? How does it regard me, how does it judge me?
It is unforgivable of me to go on seeing it if I do not love it. Don’t I love
it? When I am near it I am nearer things which are near it. In its condition,
it is certainly going to need me, one way or another, and suddenly. It would be
hateful to refuse whatever it asks of me one way or another, and suddenly. It
would be hateful to refuse whatever it asks of me, one way or another, for it
is so pure, so free of any earthly tie, and cares so little, but so marvelously
for life.[1]
In
my work, the text has undergone a mechanical alteration; instead of being
translated from unlike to unlike (language to language), the translation occurs
in the way the bootlegged text misleads the reader through doubled sentences,
changed words, and through the substitution of ‘Nadja’ for ‘hope’. In order to
prevent the book from being interpreted as another official translation, I
transcribed it in Microsoft Word, the most common word processing software.
While the program provides basic image tools, it doesn’t allow any
sophisticated formatting or high resolution.
I approached the photographs from
the Grove Press edition of Nadja, which I used for this project, in a similar manner. I
scanned them in the most cursory fashion without removing any pages from the
book. Several images retain scan shadows, and the image quality when rendered
through Microsoft Word (and additionally through the software on lulu.com), is
poor. Additionally, every page is paginated, even the traditionally empty ones.
Normally the fly pages would be left blank, but my strategy in subverting this
publishing convention is to keep the work ‘whole’. A completely paginated book
doesn’t look right, so it’s a simple way of alerting the viewer to the presence
of something outside of convention, something that might lead to another
something, and then to another after that. The quotes on the back of the book
function in a slightly subversive manner as well. In a sense, I’ve used
conventions (numbered pages, quotations) to lead the viewer into the work and out of the book. The viewer/reader is
constantly being reminded that there is a place and a state outside the text,
even while they are reading what is mostly a coherent novel. Consistent with
this deliberate repositioning is the question of the jumps, which occur in the
temporal placement of the drawings. They are mentioned as having taken place in
November 2009, while other events happened in the regular time of 1928. My
intention is to use this fluidity of time to create a temporal pool, similar to
Kristeva’s liquefied mirror. Emerging from this pool, and complicated by the
trouble the interface has with formatting, the book resembles a cheap,
unsanctioned translation.
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