Diffraction, Handwriting and Intra- Mediality in Louise Paillé's Livres-livres

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Diffraction, Handwriting and Intra-Mediality in Louise Paillé's Livres-livresKiene Brillenburg WurthPublished online: 11 Jul 2014.

To cite this article: Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (2014) Diffraction, Handwriting and Intra-Mediality inLouise Paillé's Livres-livres, Parallax, 20:3, 258-273, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2014.927633

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Diffraction, Handwriting and Intra-Mediality in Louise Paille’sLivres-livres

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

(Received 16 July 2013; accepted 15 October 2013)

The first thing I’d say is that words are intensely physical for me.I find words and language more closely related to flesh than to ideas.

Donna Haraway, How Like a Leaf1

Introduction

As a dynamic of interference, diffraction has a long history in art and culturalcriticism. This dynamic may take the form of a reading strategy, a creative – or ascientific –intervention, or any other experimental act or observation. Diffractionis what comes in between, affects and alters, however minimally. As a readingstrategy, Iris van der Tuin has observed, diffraction ‘is meant to disrupt linearand fixed causalities’.2 It is a critical strategy of reading one text throughanother, interweaving multiple threads generated by this reading and thusaffecting both texts. When we read diffractively we are ‘attending toentanglements’ as we are reading ‘important insights through one another’.3 Inthis way our reading impacts not only these insights, but also the critical projectsand systems underlying these insights. Reading diffractively is to uproot. Ideasbegin to drift, as texts, insights or materialities ‘diffract’ differently with everyother relational encounter.

There is a poststructuralist echo to this multiple reading strategy. It seems a smallstep from Barad’s textual intra-activity – reading texts through one another – toJulia Kristeva’s and Roland Barthes’ treatment of intertextuality in the 1960s.Coining the term intertextuality to replace Bakthin’s all too human notion ofintersubjectivity, Kristeva repositioned the literary word at a crossroads of ‘textualsurfaces’, always already multiple instead of stable anchors of meaning.4

Correspondingly, texts for her worked as nodes in an ever-expanding networkrather than as self-same entities. The meanings of these texts are never fixed.Meaning emerges, so to speak, out of relations with other texts, their mutualentwinement. One text has always already passed through another.

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parallax, 2014Vol. 20, No. 3, 258–273, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927633

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In the 1980s and 1990s, the idea of the ‘inter’ began likewise to signal the space-timeof an interminably differential movement in studies of intermediality.5 In thesetheories the ‘inter’ of intermediality is not a space between two entities – two artforms or media, as in: the interactions between media – but rather the irreducibledifference out of which art forms or media temporarily emerge. The ‘inter’ or in-between is, in Henk Oosterling’s words, ‘the movement that inevitably positions’such entities, though this movement can never be reduced to these ‘positions taken’and can only ever be described afterwards.6 The ‘inter’ here comes closest to themilieu of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the middle out of which the rhizomegrows and overspills, without beginning or end, without linearity or causality.7 Thisis why I have referred to the ‘inter’ of intermediality as a ‘force of giving’ rather thanthe ‘in-between of the given’.8 Still, it is hard to shake off the suggestion of aconnection, a connection linking pre-existing points or givens, from the prefix‘inter’. I therefore propose to reread the ‘inter’ of intermediality here in terms ofBarad’s notion of the intra-active: an entanglement at work within the given.9

‘Intra’ connotes within, inside, rather than between, and is therefore the moreappropriate prefix to think through the primary entwinement of texts.Reformulating intertextuality in this ‘internal’ way, I see a diffractive networkwith every text taking on a different shade in its entanglement with another. Thereis no foundation. There is interminable shape-shifting. Entanglements come priorto entities.

In this article, I focus on primary entanglements as the co-materialization of theverbal and visual in contemporary literary handwriting. As we will see, this is aspecial kind of writing. It is a writing meant to be seen and engaged with as matter.It tends to be non-linear and almost completely illegible. We find such literaryhandwriting in the work of the French-Canadian book artist Louise Paille, whocopies or overwrites. Her artistic method is that she copies by hand complete literaryworks into second-hand books: textbooks, atlases, medical books or books ofliterature. Once these literary works have been copied they are no longer(completely) legible, nor are the books they have been written into. In this way,I show, by using the method of overwriting, Paille makes literary texts present andabsent at once. On the one hand, overwriting literary texts by hand, she makes themmaterially and visually present as patterns of handwriting; she creates these texts anewas visual patterns. Paille forges a writing to be looked at rather than a writing to beread. Another way of putting this is to say that Paille is creating texts anew asopaque webs, rather than as ‘see-through’ texts: she is weaving text, through ahandwriting that cannot be read, as a visual surface that is ‘just’ a surface, ratherthan a medium for reading. So, on the other hand, this means that literary textsdisappear as text in Paille’s work: they appear as visual artwork to disappear as amatter for reading.

How should we read this remove of literature?10 What does the illegible signal inPaille’s project Livres-livres (1993–2004) – books handwritten and transfiguredwithin books – that came into fruition in an age of digitization and informationoverload? Using Vilem Flusser’s philosophical work on writing alongside Paille,I show how handwriting morphs into visual rhythms and intensity patterns in Livres-

livres: rhythms of lines, ink and colour, and patterns of interferences that record the

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interlacing of written and printed text. I then argue that these rhythms and patternsmaterialize as scores for a diffractive reading of a most radical kind. We are notsimply reading one text through another, the one tangled in the other. We arereading this entwinement itself as an intra-medial event.

The Touch of Handwriting: Entwining Authenticity and Forgery

Before starting to analyse the transfiguration of handwriting into visual rhythms inLivres-livres, it is necessary to consider the matter of writing ‘itself’. It is a strangeparadox to speak of writing being transfigured into visuality. As Marshall McLuhanand others have claimed, alphabetic writing precisely signals the transition from anacoustic into a visual space.11 Alphabetic writing has always been of the order of thevisual. Yet, writing is iconoclastic. It is of the order of signs. Inscription, VilemFlusser speculates in Does Writing Have a Future?, revolves around the erasing of theimage.12 To illustrate this he recasts the creation myth as a myth of inscriptiondirected against the image:

God forms his likeness on clay to bury his breath in his likeness. Godinscribed not amorphous clay but an image. He wrote not against the

given [ . . . ] but against something made (the image ‘God’) [ . . . ] The

gesture of writing does not move directly against an object but ratherindirectly, through an image [ . . . ]. He digs into clay to tear an image

apart.13

This is myth, and Flusser’s consideration of writing itself tends towards a mythologyof its own. Still, there is an undeniable and uneasy entanglement of writing anderasure. All writing always already is an erasure – of sense, of presence. Writing issacrifice. Yet, as we will see here, it is a very productive sacrifice, as the fleshing outof presence at once gives rise in Livres-livres to a material presence that is writing itself.For Flusser, the containment of erasure in writing is already evident in theetymology of writing. As he notes, ‘[t]he English “to write” (that in fact means“scratch” as does the Latin “scribere”) reminds us that scratching and tearing comefrom the same stem. The scratching stylus is an incisor, and one who writesinscriptions is an incising tiger: he tears images to pieces’.14 Flusser starts from thepopular assumption that writing emerged out of (and thus erased) pictures andpicture writing (logography). Writing, he writes, ‘really is a transcoding of thought,a translation from the two-dimensional surface of images into a one-dimensionallinear code’.15 Writing is about putting things in line, one after the other in ‘distinct,written codes’.16 This linear code and the gesture of writing is what, for Flusser, inthe end produced historical consciousness: ‘History is a function of writing’.17

Thinkers like Derrida have likewise stressed the violence of linearization in the longhistory of writing. Whatever resisted successivity or the ‘irreversible temporality ofsound’ (since writing represented sound in the linear, phonetic script) wasrepressed.18 The end of linear writing, Derrida speculates, ‘is indeed the end of thebook, even if, even today, it is within the form of a book that new writings – literary

or theoretical – allow themselves to be, for better or for worse, encased’.19 One couldcall this new writing an insidious writing, one that insinuates itself within the bookwhile undermining it at once. Louise Paille’s project Livres-livresmaterializes such an‘end’ to linear writing that is still encased within the book. She brings about this‘end’ by reverting to the anterior writing of the medieval scribe: the scribe whocopies texts. Yet this writing no longer serves the purpose of preserving anddisseminating texts, but rather to overwrite them as texts. She rewrites writing into apurely visual domain. If Flusser casts writing as a tearing apart of the image, Paillediffracts the linearity of writing back into the imaginary.

Let us now take a closer look at Livres-livres. I first stumbled upon this project in theNational Library of Quebec in Montreal in 2011. I saw one of Paille’s multicolourtranscriptions, entitled Printemps du merle bleu (2000).20 It contained Dino Buzatti’s Ildeserto dei Tartari (1940) and Barry Unsworth’s Pascali’s Island (1980), overwritten byhand in a second-hand copy of Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912) in goldand azure ink.21 For all works, she used a French translation. The texts she copiedby hand, that is to say: the Buzatti and Unsworth novels, she called the books to beremoved (livres-deportes). The book and the text into which she copied the novels, shecalled the carrier book (livre-porteur). In this case, Paille used a French book clubedition for Nobel Prize winners of La mort a Venise as livre-porteur. The livres-deportes

were overwritten on and in-between the lines of the printed text of Mann’stranslated novel. The overwriting was done horizontally, in line with linear writing.Still, this horizontal writing stretches linear writing beyond the make-up of the page.It is a writing that covers the margins traditionally reserved for comments andadditions.22 It is a writing that covers the frame of the page that traditionally marksthe distinction between fiction and reality. Moreover, it is a writing that diffractslinear writing as an illegible, visual pattern that foregrounds the logic of primaryentanglement; this is a work that visualizes the ways in which writing ‘itself’ isalways already a ‘matter’ of entwinement, of intra-activity.

Significantly, Paille diffracts the three texts materially. Place (Venice, the steppe,the island) and the way the lives of the respective protagonists relate to placematerialize visually in her intervention of Le desert des Tartares and L’ıle Pascali in La

mort. On the level of theme, motif and characterization there are a myriad threadsmapping the textual diffractions. Lenteur, slowness and delay, is one such motif: thetardiness of life in the desert in Le desert, the slowness of life on the island, or theslowness of observation in La mort. Paille’s time-consuming handwriting amplifiesthe threads illuminated in the novels. It renders them visible as such, coloured inazure and gold and the black of print. As an artist working with ink and focusing onthe patterns and rhythms of the written lines per se, she makes manifest how she hasread Le desert, L’ıle and La mort, and how these writings thus inform and transformeach other. She weaves the one through the others, creating a diffracted texture ofthreads that, of course, ‘text’ etymologically connotes. This web is an intraface as it isa surface on which different writings intra-act.

In ‘On Touching’ Barad relates the kind of threading through and interlacing thatI have been describing here to touching. Is interweaving and enfolding, she asks,‘not in the nature of touching? Is touching not by its very nature always already an

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involution, invitation, invisitation, wanted or unwanted, of the stranger within?’23

Handwriting is a mode of touching. Indeed, Sonja Neef observes, the idea of thetouch of the hand in writing, the ‘physical presence of the hand producing the tracein the ductus of the movement of writing’, has firmly attached handwriting toauthenticity and singularity in our culture.24 Handwriting, Neef continues, is‘autography’, unique self-imprint, as it ‘does not allow for repetition without beingconsidered a forgery’.25 The signature is testament to this indexical status ofhandwriting, and graphology its symptom. However, if Barad connects touching toenfolding, autography – in Paille’s project – is not the naive ‘sign’ of singularity, butof a singularity that is the effect of enfolding or interweaving.

Paille’s project, after all, disturbs the alignment of handwriting, singularity andauthenticity. Let us not forget that this is a project of repetition. On the one hand, wehave just seen, Paille’s handwriting figures a unique physical materiality that seems topreclude iteration. This writing creates an ‘original’. The fact that Paille’s workforegrounds the imageofwriting, its visual qualityas awriting that is almost illegible, onlyreinforces this alignment of writing with the singular. Graphologists, Neef observes,always turn a page upside-down as they investigate a manuscript ‘so that the textappears capo voltoand its alphanumericaldimensionas“legible”writing is replacedby its“perceptible” image’. Thus, they drawout the patterns of a ‘unique fingerprint’.26 SincePaille extracts from writing its signifying force, and foregrounds its loops, circles andstrokes as a ‘perceptible’ image she leaves nothing but autography to writing.

Yet, this somatic trace of the author’s hand and fingers is still a trace and tracessignal absence. Writing, especially handwriting, marks an absence within thewriter’s indexical presence; there is a cut. The work of writing goes on beyond thispresence. Its image quality can be scanned, copied, duplicated. Even the singularcan be repeated.

I stress this issue of repetition, as Paille’s work is a work of forgery. It is a forgery to theextent that it is an (illegal) copy of an existing work and that it physically changes anexisting work. Indeed, it is a copy once removed as Paille’s writing copies a Frenchtranslation of an Italian and English text. The Legal Dictionary defines forgery asfollows: ‘Forgery consists of filling in blanks on a document containing a genuinesignature, or materially altering or erasing an existing instrument’.27 Materially

altering or erasing an existing document by means of typing, handwriting orengraving: this is precisely what Paille’s project of overwriting revolves around. Ofcourse, as an artist she has no intention to defraud. Her ‘forgery’ is too obvious andcolourful. All she does is tease out the entanglement of fake and original, counterfeitand auratic, overwriting (in the sense of duplicating, a duplicitous writing) andhandwriting, in the material trace of writing. This trace cannot be decided asautographic since it is, at the same time, someone else’s. If an alterity is thus present withinthe ‘self’, the ‘auto’, Paille’s project shows that handwriting cannot be subtractedfrom Barad’s ‘stranger within’. Even in the signature, the ‘touchstone of identity’, asNeef puts it, there is the one naming and the one named, the one writing and writtendown, both an effect of an ongoing, creative entanglement.28 Paille’s work makes usaware that handwriting belongs to the category of the fold: an outside alwaysalready enfolded within the inside. It is a ‘self-reflexive touch’.29

The Black Work: Cross-Writing as Expenditure

When we look closely at the plan for the transcription of Le desert and L’ıle, we see linespresented as waves or currents. This is no accident. There is a historical differencebetween ‘written signs engraved in objects or written signs carried on the surface ofobjects’.30 The first is called inscription, the latter, Flusser proposes, is onscription: anengraving into, and a brushing onto, chiselling and painting or drawing. Bothinscription and onscription signal different writing technologies that, for Flusser,changed consciousness.31 Inscription was the writing technology of Babylon andMesopotamia, of the Egyptians, the Greek and theRomans. Onscription is the writingtechnology of the trace: of fluid writing, of ink, of handwriting – of the current. It is thewriting that we are still living in today, the writing that is called notation.

Flusser remarks that this current writing is a hasty, speedy writing. Everyinstrument ‘becomes structurally more complex to become functionally simpler’ andso, people ‘brushed rather than chiselled to be able to write faster and more easily’.32

If Fusser aligns onscription with painting, there is also a crucial difference. Thewriter, for him, is a designer. He ‘produces a contrast between the colour of the inkand that of the surface so that the signs become clear and distinct (black and white).The intention is not to be imaginative but rather to be unambiguous (legible in oneway only)’.33 The intention for a literary, or any, writer is not as straightforward asFlusser is suggesting here, and since Mallarme, Derrida, Cixous and others weperfectly know why. But for the typesetter, the printer, Flusser’s idea holds true: towrite is to render legibly, in a line.

If the work with Mann, Buzatti and Unsworth still answers to the design of notation(it is still legible as horizontal, linear writing), Paille’s later work complicates therestrictions of this design more and more. She transfigures notation more radicallyinto an image; the space of writing becomes an opaque space, closed off from areader as a blurred impression of notation.34 We see a lot of dense writing, yet it is awriting that can no longer be penetrated. As I show, Paille takes the current ofwriting and creates new patterns out of it, redirecting it both up and down the page.This is visible in one work in particular: Livre-livre: L’Œuvre au noir I (2002), the firstin a series dealing with Marguerite Yourcenar’s L’Œuvre au noir (1968). Here, Paillebends and interrupts linearity rather than just thickly over-layering it (as she did inthe earlier work) (fig. 1). How is reading transformed through these interruptionsinto an intra-medial activity?

L’Œuvre au noir I presents the reader-viewer (who or what is she precisely? We stillhave to find out) with a dense palimpsest. The carrier-book is a reproduction of anearly modern book of medicine – I will get back to this in detail below – and Paillehas overwritten it with Yourcenar’s novel. Her writing is mostly small, slanting tothe right, covering the entire page, and changing its appearance relative to thelayout of the print pages. The writing and the print are intra-active: Paille’shandwriting appears narrower or wider respectively as the pages of the medicinebook are more or less densely printed. Less agreeable than the azure and goldcurrents of the Buzatti transcript, the ink is black, echoing the black of Yourcenar’snovel. L’Œuvre au noir I strains the eye, because of its density and because the current

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of writing in this work has become multidirectional. As I have indicated above,

Paille writes horizontally and vertically, from left to right, and right to left, dividing

the page into a quadrangle with four different ‘currents’ of writing. Legibility is

obscured more dramatically in this quadrangle than in the four planes it connects

with, as if the force of intra-action were concentrated in the latter: all currents meet,

sometimes doubly overwritten, and interfering with the overwriting of the planes.

When I first saw L’Œuvre au noir I, I was struck by the similarities between its ink

patterns and the intensity pattern of diffraction given by a square aperture (the

square aperture here being the (printed) page). We could say that diffraction not

only ‘works’ here as an ongoing movement of entanglement, but also presents itself

figurally as the intensity pattern of diffraction. Where Printemps casts the written lines

as currents overflowing the boundaries of the page, L’Œuvre au noir I shows how this

current is obstructed (by the impenetrable quadrangles), how it bends and diffracts.

New patterns (here: writing currents in multiple directions) are then created. What

is writing trying to diffract and overwrite here? Is it a writing that can still be read?

For Paille, this may not be a pertinent question. She is precisely trying to make us

forget about reading, about reading in line. She still wants us to leaf through the

pages of a book, as readers do, but she wants us to become voyeurs, viewers, who

enjoy:

the colour and the arabesque of the forms. I ‘occupy’ [squatte ] the

bookish universe with the means of writing itself. Familiar landmarks

of reading and writing are transgressed in the invention of a

Figure 1. Louise Paille, Livre-livre: L’Œuvre au noir I (2002)

sculptural system of the book-book [livre-livre ] cadenced [rhythme ] by

the de-axialized and de-territorialized, handwritten transcription.

Hierarchies [of the page] are abolished in favour of a topological

network of interaction [as intra-action, KBW] and interrelation [as

intra-relation, KBW].35

Johanna Drucker, the visual and information theorist and book artist who hasbrought the concept of materiality to the study of books and texts, once said that sheaimed to unsettle the hierarchy of the page by transforming it into a relational field.In this field all elements – blank space, letters, images and punctuation marks –

would be present as ‘tensions in relation’ to each other.36 L’Œuvre au noir I createssuch a relational field as it cedes linearity to a network of multiple intersections andinterferences. Tellingly, ‘de-axialized’ here refers to transgression of the horizontalaxis, the baseline, of writing. Adding the vertical line, the warp, Paille can bring outthe texture or textile of writing as such. Her written lines become like the linenthreads of a web or network. The page thus transfigures into a cartography of tracks,the tracks that notation has diffracted in the wake of writing as an instrument ofsignification: the writing that has come to an end.

In itself, de-axialization, that is to say in this context the crisscrossing of horizontaland vertical writing, needs not be transgressive in the practice of writing. Indeed, ithas a very practical history in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century letter writing. Tothe nineteenth-century scholar, Paille’s handwriting will be instantly recognizableas cross-writing (fig. 2).37 Cross-writing was a mode of handwriting coveringanother writing in another direction to save on paper and postage. After two sides ofa page had been filled, the letter writer turned the page ninety degrees andcontinued writing over the first layer. This writing could still be read. It

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superimposed, but did not obscure. It looks artful and inventive, but served the verymundane purpose of economizing.

When Paille cross-writes, however, she is writing the remove of literature. Myreference to Nick Thurston’s Reading the Remove of Literature (2006) is deliberate here.Like Thurston, who presents a reading of Blanchot’s L’Espace litteraire (1955)without a word of that text remaining except for Thurston’s marginalia written intoit, Paille is interested in the diffraction of language as a signifying system. She doesnot effectively erase words, as Thurston does, yet she ‘occupies’ the page with wordsin such a way that they are removed from their function as signifiers. They areentangled in a topology of display. Her L’Œuvre au noir I thus becomes the inverse ofThurston’s emptied page-space: a ‘wall of words’, as Vincent de Luca would call it,that is just as hard to grasp.38

The opaque, after all, is but the other side of the purely transparent. In Reading the

Illegible, Craig Dworkin relates this writing-out of writing – full (full of words thathave become blurred impressions of notation) or empty – to Georges Bataille’sconcept of a general economy.39 Dworkin’s suggestion is helpful to us here as Paille’swriting is a writing of expenditure that is driven by ‘surplus and excess’, just asnineteenth-century cross-writing operated in a restricted economy conditioned byscarcity.40 Her writing is ‘useless’ in so far as it cannot be utilized in the way that weconsume writing for content. It spends the power of writing beyond its function ofexchange (an exchange of meaning in the service of communication). It thrives onan energy that propels the outgrowth of language in a relational field.41 This energyspends to exscribe sense, to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s term, as a given presence.42 Nancyuses the term exscription in relation to Bataille to refer to a writing out of language –a writing that refers to an experience (an excessive experience) outside of itself that isnevertheless constituted by writing.43 Language indicates its own outside. In Paillethis outside has become writing ‘itself’. Writing no longer leads through tomeanings, objects, things. It inscribes its own materiality. Yet it has not becomeinvisible – as it may appear to be invisible in texts we devour speedily – just as it hasnot become completely unreadable.44 Reading has just been redirected. It has beenredirected onto an intra-medial plane that entwines the verbal and the visual.

Reading Intra-Medially

It is time to consider what writing exscribes in L’Œuvre au noir I: the novel byYourcenar and the reproduction of an early modern, illustrated book of medicine.I will start with the first in this section. The novel has become part of the object thatPaille creates, but we can still make out its traces, not in the least in the way we cansee it being woven through the medicine book. Nothing prevents us from re-readingL’Œuvre au noir (especially not since it is present in the title of Paille’s work). This isprecisely what I have done, in a sense continuing Paille’s project that originatedfrom bouts of excessive reading. Between 1994 and 1997, she reports, ‘I readboulimically, greedily, in an anarchic manner and without method, a bit ofeverything and a number of classics’.45 Overwriting, writing the remove ofliterature, thus started with devouring literature.

Yourcenar’s L’Œuvre au noir is a novel set in sixteenth-century Europe (1510–1569),more specifically in Flanders and the city of Bruges. Its hero is Zeno, physician,alchemist and philosopher: uomo universale in search of knowledge, individuality,humanity and himself. We follow his life from his youth in Bruges, his travels inEurope and the Near East, his life as a court physician, his growing reputation as agenius, his life in hiding when he returns to Bruges, wanted for his ‘dangerous’knowledge and working as a physician to the poor, to his fate in prison when he willbe sentenced to death.

There is a curious dynamic between the transformation of writing into a densemateriality in Paille’s L’Œuvre au noir I, and the question of ‘matter’ – along with theloss of recognizable signs – in Yourcenar’s novel. Oddly prefiguring Barad’sreconceptualization of materiality, matter figures in the meditations of Zeno asmovement rather than substance that exceeds the rusty grids of understanding. Inthe chapter entitled ‘The Abyss’, Zeno imagines underneath the surface of knowinga ‘mass molded in calculable curves, streaked by currents which could be charted,and deeply furrowed [ plis ] by the pressure of winds and the heavy, inert weight ofthe water’.46 Thinking, Zeno suggests, is just as fluid and formless as matter itselfrushing by in a stream that carries with it the last vestiges of conceptual truths: eachconcept ‘collapses’ into the other.47

The ‘substance’ of thinking is always already diffracted; knowing emerges as anunfolding of material entanglements that Yourcenar dramatizes in topologicalterms. Paille’s overwriting of Yourcenar’s novel materializes this dynamic take onthe mass of thinking; a map with folds and streams, a topology. Thus, Paille’s pagesperform what Yourcenar describes. As we consider these pages, we are ‘processing’parts of the novel, perhaps without even recognizing them. We are ‘reading’visually, scanning the visual information of Paille’s work that encodes, as it were,dimensions of Yourcenar’s novel. Just as striking is Paille’s reworking of the title ofYourcenar’s L’Œuvre au noir into her topology of writing. The title of the novel refersto nigredo (literally: the black work): a phase in alchemy in which everything knownand familiar is decomposed, charred, putrefied. Paille’s black ink testifies to theblack work of putrefaction, but there is more to it than a mere colour. In the novel,Zeno goes through a process of mental shifts that parallel the transmutations ofnigredo. If nigredo revolves around decomposition, Zeno’s familiar outlook on life andthe world gradually crumbles. For him, in the face of time, the landmarks ofhumanity, its constructs and structures, no longer hold. Matter asserts itself andachieves agency, to use Barad’s term, in the shadow of time and death:

Objects [in Zeno’s room] no longer played their part merely as useful

accessories; like a mattress from which the hair stuffing protrudes,

they were beginning to reveal their substance. A forest was filling the

room: the stool, its height measured by the distance that separates a

seated man’s rump from the ground, this table which serves for eating

or writing, the door connecting one cube of air, surrounded by

partitions, with another, neighbouring cube of air, all were losing

those reasons for existing which an artisan had given them, to be

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again only trunks or branches stripped of their bark [ . . . ]. Everything

was actually something else [ . . . ]. The brick walls around him were

resolving into mud from which they came, and which they would

again become one day.48

Everything was something else. Every tool, every object demarcated in time andspace, continues to ‘work’ as matter and this matter creaks through the solidity offorms. This is what Zeno suddenly realizes. All forms and symbols thatcivilization tries to superimpose on a resistant matter begin to fall apart. Zenosees ‘without’ these forms, sees how they give way inevitably. We here recall thatin Paille’s work the signposts of reading have similarly collapsed, so that the‘matter’ of writing surfaces. This requires a perceptual shift from the reader, whoneeds to find a way to navigate Paille’s pages without the usual cognitivesignposts. Things have diffracted beyond resemblance. Let us say that Yourcenarand Paille here dramatize – through the character of Zeno and his focalization,on the one hand, and the dense overwriting of Paille, on the other – what Baradrefers to as the groundless movement of entanglement: being entangled is ‘notsimply to be intertwined with another [ . . . ] but to lack an independent, self-contained existence’.49 That is to say, entanglement revolves around the abyssand the disorientation the abyss effectuates as a resistance to form, toindividuation and to signification.

Experiencing this disorientation in reading, we may become aware affectively ofZeno’s perceptual change. He has nothing to fall back upon and realizes hisinsignificance against the persistence of matter. The novel and Paille’s writingcoalesce in this figuration of matter. Reading the latter through the former, that is tosay, re-enacting, with a difference, the intra-active work of Paille, we see how Paille’sblack writing participates in Yourcenar’s novel as the becoming visible of Zeno’s opusnigrum.

In the world of quantum physics, Barad teaches us, a single point can be a point ofintersection in parallel worlds. Paille’s work connects two such worlds: the world ofYourcenar’s novel and the world of the book of medicine into which the novel hasbeen overwritten. In the novel, in the middle of Zeno’s ruminations on the liquidityof forms and structures, he, the physician, looks up at the ceiling and detects a dateon one of the beams holding the ceiling. The date is 1491.50 It just so happens thatthe book of medicine Paille has used as a livre-porteur was originally published in1491. Yourcenar’s novel and the book of medicine were already connected, howeverminimally and coincidentally, before Paille even intervened. Barad’s notion of intra-activity here becomes a function of textuality ‘before’ and ‘outside’ the interventionof subjects; one text, as we have seen in the Introduction, has always already gonethrough the other.

I more or less accidentally detected the connection between Yourcenar’s novel andthe book of medicine that Paille overwrites. Reading between the lines, the textenlarged in a scan, I found that the livre-porteur is a reproduction of Johannes deKetham’s (von Kirchheim) illustrious Fasciculus medicinae of 1491, reprinted in

Italian in 1493, a book that marks a turning point in the history of anatomy.51

Paille’s copy of de Ketham’s book dates from the twentieth century, in a translationby Luke Demaitre and edited by Charles Singer. The Fasciculus contains variouslate-medieval writings on medicine – such as Mundinus’ Anatomy – that werecompiled by De Ketham, then a professor in Vienna. The first illustrated medicalbook in print, Fasciculus contains realistic plates, including a zodiac man, a pregnantwoman (fig. 3), a bloodletting man (fig. 4) and a dissection scene that is one of thefirst of such scenes to have appeared in print. Fasciculus was to be a source ofinspiration for Vesalius and Leonardo da Vinci.

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We can see the multiple entanglements between Yourcenar’s novel and Fasciculus:L’Œuvre au noir is about a man of medicine, a scientist of the body and anatomy aswell as a philosopher and transformer of matter. What is the effect of theseentanglements? How do they affect reading? Paille notes that in L’Œuvre au noir I

handwriting not only saturates print, but also the pictorial: the illustrations.52

I believe this double saturation creates the impression of an embodied writing. As wewatch the bodies of the pregnant woman and the man being impregnated with theblack of the ink, Paille’s writing takes on the appearance of tattooing; a ‘perforativewriting’, as Neef calls tattooing, that injects the skin. The tattoo is a ‘singular eventof which blood is the fluid’, although it is at once a repeatable event to the extent

that the tattoo is readable, and thus iterable in a different context (beyond the liveevent of perforation).53 As a metaphor, this hint of writing as tattooing foregroundsthe body of the book – as a second-hand book, ‘uniquely’ overwritten – but also thework of the body involved in Paille’s writing. As she notes, the entire body is at playin this work. Writing is a physical activity that requires careful coordinationbetween the eyes, the arm, the hand and the pen, the page and the matter of thebook.54 Thus, reading is reformed into an intra-medial, diffractive activity not onlyin a zone between the visual and verbal, but also between the medium of the bookand the medium of the body. The reading of Paille’s writing is the reading of atrace – the trace of writing as well as the trace of a body writing, touching thepage, merging other bodies with the ink that spills over the page, just as Zeno’sblood in the novel is spilled in the end as he cuts his wrists.55 This is the reading ofa trace of a body writing, and this body has read, memorized and interiorizedL’Œuvre au noir.

Conclusion

Nancy has remarked that ‘touching upon the body, touching the body, touching –happens in writing all the time’.56 Yet does writing have an inside? Paille preciselyshows that writing ‘takes place at the limit’: at the limit of signifying, at the limit ofsense, entangling the verbal and the visual, the bookish and the sculptural. WithPaille, writing is a surface and there is no within or underneath; the underneath is atonce the surface, part of its intensity pattern, as we have seen in L’Œuvre au noir I. It isthis surface that touches us. ‘I know of no writing that doesn’t touch’, Nancy observes, andhe does not mean ‘flowery prose’ or ‘some kind of improbable bodies to be woveninto letters’. He means the kind of touch that touches because nothing ‘getsthrough’.57 When we read L’Œuvre au noir I we are touched by a writing that is self-absorbed, indifferent. No meaning, no message ‘gets through’. Yet we have anability to respond. And that is finally the issue here: a response-ability(responsibility) towards something ‘insensible’, to recall Barad’s ‘quantumentanglements’, that remains indeterminate.58 It is the question of the response,open and undecided, that L’Œuvre au noir I ultimately raises.

I have used Barad’s methodology of diffraction to think through the remove ofliterature, and how this removal affects, touches, reading. Diffraction is aparticularly helpful tool to analyse hybrid works such as L’Œuvre au noir I whereentangling and reading through has, so to speak, already been done for us. We canmove ahead. Of course, entanglement is everywhere, but with Paille we can see ithappen before our eyes in the archaic writing in the second-hand books. Why, thequestion remains, this slow and archaic writing in the age of code, turbo-writing andspeed-writing? It is a question that we may not be able to answer. Is Paille’s self-absorbed writing, closed in on itself and with only the impression of a trace ofsignifying left, part of a writing on the wall that we are in an age of transit that willtake us into a universe of images? This is the transit that Flusser imagined in the1980s and 1990s; the future of writing was in question. Yet even he recognized thatwe cannot write or move past writing. Indeed, the Italian philosopher MaurizioFerraris has claimed not so long ago, the future is to the scribe. It is not that the

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future of writing is in question; in the age of the computer, writing has, precisely,exploded.59 It is everywhere.

AcknowledgementsThis article is dedicated to the memory of Sonja Neef, who died on April 6, 2013 at the age of 45. Her

wonderful work on (hand-)writing and technology has had a profound effect on my research.

1 Donna Haraway, How Like a Leaf. An Interview

with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (London andNewYork:

Routledge, 2000), p.85.2 Iris van der Tuin, ‘A Different Starting Point, a

Different Metaphysics: Reading Bergson and

Barad Diffractively’, Hypatia, 26:1 (2011), p.26.3 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway:

Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning and

Matter (Durham and London: Duke University

Press, 2007), p.30.4 Julia Kristeva, ‘Le mot, le dialogue et le roman’,

Semiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris: Seuil,

1969), pp.82–112.5 HenkOosterling, ‘Sens(a)ble Intermediality and

Interesse. Towards an Ontology of the In-Between’,

Intermedialites, 1 (2003), pp.29–46.6 HenkOosterling, ‘Sens(a)ble Intermediality and

Interesse’, p.45.7 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,Mille Plateaux

(Paris: Minuit, 1980).8 Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, ‘Multimediality,Intermediality, and. Medially Complex Digital

Poetry’, RiLUnE, 5 (2006), pp.1–18.9 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, for

instance p.170, p.393.10 Nick Thurston, Reading the Remove of Literature,ed. and intr. Craig Dworkin (York: Information as

Material, 2006).11 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The

Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of

Toronto Press, 1962).12 Vilem Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?,trans. Nancy Ann Roth, intr. Mark Poster

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

2011), p.14.13 Vilem Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?, p.14.14 Vilem Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?, p.14.15 Vilem Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?, p.15.16 Vilem Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?, p.15.17 Vilem Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?, p.8.18 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1976), p.85.19 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp.86–87.

20 This work is archived at the National Library of

Quebec at Montreal.21 See also Louise Paille, Livre-livre. La demarche de

creation (Trois Rivieres: Editions D’Art Le Sabord,

2005), pp.56–57.22 SeeThe Future of the Page, eds Peter Stoicheff and

Andrew Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 2004).23 Karen Barad, ‘On Touching – The Humanthat Therefore I Am’, Differences: A Journal of

Feminist Studies, 23:3 (2007), p.207.24 Sonja Neef, Imprint and Trace: Handwriting in the

Age of Technology, trans. Anthony Matthews

(London: Reaktion Books, 2011), p.239.25 Sonja Neef, Imprint and Trace, p.239.26 Sonja Neef, Imprint and Trace, p.205.27 ‘Forgery’ in The Free Online Law Dictionary,

,http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/

forgery. [02/02/2014].28 Sonja Neef, Imprint and Trace, p.263.29 Sonja Neef, Imprint and Trace, p.263. This

impossibility of self-touching nicely compares to

Barad’s idea of an irreducible alterity within

matter: ‘The infinite touch of nothingness is

threaded through all being/becoming, a tangible

indeterminacy that goes to the heart of matter.

Matter is not only iteratively reconstituted

through its various intra-actions, it is also infinitely

and infinitesimally shot through with alterity’.

(Karen Barad, ‘On Touching – The Human that

Therefore I Am’, p.215).30 Vilem Flusser,Does Writing Have a Future?, p.17.See also Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Sara Rosa Espi

and Inge van de Ven, ‘Visual Text and Media

Divergence: Analog Literary Writing in a Digital

Age’, European Journal of English studies, 17 (2013),

p.100.31 Vilem Flusser,Does Writing Have a Future?, p.17.32 Vilem Flusser,Does Writing Have a Future?, p.17.33 Vilem Flusser,Does Writing Have a Future?, p.18.34 Elsewhere, I have analyzed this visual turn of

writing in the work of Paille in terms of Jean-

Franc�ois Lyotard’s notion of the figural. See ‘Visual

Text and Media Divergence’, p.102.35 Louise Paille, Livre-livre, p.102.

36 Johanna Drucker, ‘Graphical Readings and theVisual Aesthetics of Textuality’, Text, 16 (2006),

pp.267–276, p.270. There is, of course, an entire

(modernist) history of the page as a relational field

(think of Dadaism or futurism), but I do not havethe space or time to elaborate on this prehistory

here.37 See ,http://x5r5jrt1k2f335t596t7w87fs6t5u

4d3e2n1t.unbsj.ca/, s6vai/Mail/letters.html.[02/02/2014]; ,http://writingtodistraction.blogsp

ot.nl/2010/10/cross-writing.html. [02/02/2014].38 Vincent de Luca, ‘A Wall of Words: TheSublime as Text’, in Unnam’d Forms: Blake and

Textuality, eds Nelson Hilton and Thomas Vogler

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986),

p.219. See also his Words of Eternity: William Blake

and the Poetics of the Sublime (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1991).39 Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible (Evanston,

Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2003),p.79. See also Craig Dworkin, No Medium (Cam-

bridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013).40 Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible, p.79.41 Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible, p.79.42 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Exscription’, in The Birth to

Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1993), pp.319–340.43 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Corpus’, in Corpus, trans.

Richard A. Rand (NewYork: FordhamUniversity

Press, 2008), pp.2–121.44 Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible, p.54.45 Louise Paille, Livre-livre, p.48.46 Marguerite Yourcenar, L’œuvre au noir (Paris:

Gallimard, 1968), translated as The Abyss [1976],

by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author

(New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1997),

p.169. All quotes in this article are from the

English translation.47 Marguerite Yourcenar, The Abyss, p.169.48 Marguerite Yourcenar, The Abyss, pp.186–187.49 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.ix.50 Marguerite Yourcenar, The Abyss, p.188. The

Engish translation here contains a mistake: it

reports the date ‘1941’, while the original French

version has ‘1491’ (p.193).51 For an illustration, see: ,http://www.quaritch.

com/book/2959/ketham-johannes-de-johannes-

von-kirchheim-fasciculus-medicinae. [02/02/

2014].52 Louise Paille, Livre-livre, p.62.53 Sonja Neef, Imprint and Trace, p.262.54 Louise Paille, Livre-livre, p.66.55 Marguerite Yourcenar, The Abyss, p.352.56 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Corpus’, p.11.57 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Corpus’, p.11.58 Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements andHauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/

continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-

to-Come’, Derrida Today, 3:2 (2010), pp.240–268,

esp. p.265.59 Maurizio Ferraris, Documentality. Why It Is

Necessary to Leave Traces, trans. Richard Davies

(New York: Fordham University Press, 2013),

p.183. Ferraris holds that we are living in an age

marked by the explosion of registration rather than

communication.

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth is associate professor of Literature and ComparativeMedia at the University of Utrecht and project leader of the VIDI-project Back tothe Book (2011–2016) funded by the Dutch Research Council. Kiene is the authorof Musically Sublime. Infinity, Indeterminacy, Irresolvability (Fordham University Press,2009), and (with Ann Rigney) of the textbook Het leven van teksten. Een Inleiding in de

literatuurwetenschap (Amsterdam University Press, 2006, 2008) used throughout theNetherlands. She is editor of Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through

Cinema and Cyberspace (Fordham and Oxford University Press, 2012) and, withSander van Maas, of Liminal Auralities (under contract with Fordham and OxfordUniversity Press). She has published widely in peer reviewed journals and volumeson music, literature, aesthetics, and new media. Email: C.A.W.BrillenburgWurth@uu.nl

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Diffraction, Handwriting and Intra- Mediality in Louise Paillé's Livres-livres

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