Leave to Remain (American Literature) - Softcover

Field, Thalia; Lang, Abigail

 
9781628972849: Leave to Remain (American Literature)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 162897284X ISBN 13: 9781628972849
Verlag: Dalkey Archive Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Leave to Remain is a faux spy-novel possessed by the spirit of Janus: doubleness, duplicity, double-entendres, two-facedness, bridges and doorways―as is only appropriate for a work composed by two writers: one French, one American.

Two-faced Janus resurrects into a time-traveling adventure, a tour of double-agents, double-speak, and double-dealings. In their earlier hybrid essay, A Prank of Georges (2010), Thalia Field and Abigail Lang returned us to "the primal force of language: naming" (Susan Howe). In Leave to Remain, a weathered Janus pursues an elusive quest, responding to a world of war, traitors, translations, and the slippery personal and political terrain between friends and enemies.

This silly and deadly serious fiction-essay aims at nothing less than a full inquiry into how monstrous we are when we define loyalties and defend definitions, and how we are all double-agents seeking meaning and intelligence. Unafraid of being both timeless and timely, Leave to Remain challenges the reader to play in the world of folded imagery and language.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Thalia Field is the author of Point and Line, Incarnate: Story Material, ULULU, Bird Loves, Backyard, and, with Abigail Lang, A Prank of Georges. She teaches in the Literary Arts department of Brown University and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Abigail Lang is the author of Le monde compte rendu: Lectures de Louis Zukofsky and the co-editor of Double Change, A Film Archive of Poetry, 1 and 2. She also translates American poetry into French and teaches at the University of Paris–Diderot.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Janus at a Chinese Restaurant in Paris
Did a doorway allow us to hold up despite desire?
Or were we already in the gap?
Consider Janus: two faces, one brain. Of a mind? Think twice.
How does it at the gate?
Which way does your beard point tonight?
Do omens attend upon beginnings?
Later may we break the cookie in two and split our fortune? Later
will the waiter come to take our order and, disobeying it, reveal
a scene playing on many fronts?
If luck is the past, will fortune show the future? Or is it the other
way, and the next thing will only return us to the past thing?
Later may we deadlock.
But that’s ahead of ourselves.
First we must decide what kind of translation to pursue.
We’ve come here for a traditional meal in an unfamiliar
place. Or have we never met before now?
Did someone say we did?
Two trains going in opposite directions leave the station at the same time . . .
(On the witness stand:) “Doorkeeper of the heavenly court /
I look towards both east and west at once.”
Will I speak in your turn, and you speak in mine?
(On the witness stand:) “The ancients called me Chaos,
and even now, a sign of my once confused state, my front
and back appear the same.”
We want to, we really try to, but looking as we do, we can
never look away. Yet do we see eye to eye?
Trusting the translator has never been easy; they know the
enemy language, we take their word for everything.
Show who you really are!
Easy for you to say. The waiters wait on our dropped
hints, gestures of readiness, menus in hand, names not
requested, eyes not met, stares not stared (“follow me” as
to a reader, not a hungry customer, or both?)
And our bumper sticker: “Don’t fuck with me I have eyes
in the rear.”
Generations sanction movement.
Time begins to end at a standstill.
First, Charlemagne couldn’t tell dead pagans from his
own dead men, so he asked for a sign split in two: thorns
and briars grew up around the bodies of the pagans.
(Janus on the witness stand:) “My unbarred gate stands
open wide, so that when the people go to war the return
path’s open too.”
But why hide in peace, and open your gates in war?
Bar it in peacetime so peace cannot depart:
How can we understand the cult of “lookboth-
ways-before-leaping”? Can we know the
instant the men became “bearded men”?
(A translation provides the first fiction, a double-invented
character, a metamorphosis.)
Hoist the flag, call men to arms.
Or recruit the vulnerable when they’re wanting.
Trick or trap them into vote or veto, just a slip of a sound
between tongue and brain.
I think you’re making a face at me, but I can never tell.
Disfigured, we are shown to a booth
(arranged for our particular handicap)
faces out, translated for our different tongues,
meaning is not at face value.
When the Romans wanted to declare formal war on Pyrrhus,
they captured an enemy soldier and sold him a lot of
Roman ground on which the pater patratus cast his javelin.
Hard pits strike us. Deep pits strike us out.
We flip the famous two-faced two faced coin.
Chinese restaurant, Paris between wars.
Can we agree to disagree? Let’s admit the opposite, it will be
yesterday soon enough, and time is always extinction’s game
plan, since we can’t send it back.
Janus Quirinis (“god of the community of Quirites (citizens)”)
vs. Mars (“god of the mass of milites”)―their temples symmetrically
bound―in other words, the need for fighting ourselves
was already set into stone across the pomerium―
If I nod down, you nod up, and I nod up, you nod down.
We try to agree: an international crime will be told.
Intelligence is simply privileged information.
What is the role of intelligence countering itself?
Are we just walk-ins making an entreaty?
Could our very form be treason? treachery? ambiguity?
Decisions must be made. Words are not currency, there is no
perfect translation, and someone always has a beard.
Reader, wherewith the faith? The hungry asses?
Wherefore mutant snakes and babies?
Whereof the two-faced cat?
In this establishment, the meal is expected to be edible
and remembered as inedible (or vice versa).
Double agents fill two mouths at once, carrying on.
(The gate, in Janus-speak, in new technologies,
passes the information through.)
Intelligence is mostly unverifiable because it is not public.
To be good, intelligence must lead to a decision.
For years I’ve been trying to get you to cross the line,
and you’ve been recruiting me back.
How have we remained such good friends
while staying on opposite sides?
Where would we break if we are told to break it off?
“You don’t know me,” says our T-shirt, in a foreign script.
“My name is X, I’ll be your waiter.”
Etruscans adopted a grid plan so spirits would cross the
city and leave more swiftly. The N–S axis (cardo) was beneficial,
but the E–W axis (decumanus) unfavorable―Here,
Janus guarded the northern entrance: one face turned
east, the other watching the west.
plot: sun rises in the east / puts out clouds / sets in the west
Aligned, the triumphant marched along the via sacra, the
General waiting for the Senate to relieve him from the
imperium (right to kill) before they filed through an archway
like a stream, spanned―
Could the menu be more self-negating?
We peruse it.
Identical, twinned, hyphenated, banished, welcomed―
Are we such oxymorons, alone together?
We have intelligence on identities. One may be a rat. One
may be some sort of White Devil. Liberties spread and
die off like diseases. Insects become us. Fortune cookies
follow, hidden in enemy camps, there is always a convenient
shape and color.
But reader, the truth is we share internal organs in any language.
We adopt phonetics to distinguish us, but really it’s
one gut feeling. Gates overlooking possibilities show the
view we are born to. We could’ve learned anything from
our blank beginnings / the portrait above us displays only a
model of a portrait: a thing not quite itself standing for itself.
God of draughts, get the lazy Suzy to spin!
That we might share one empty stomach.
That we might not mention it.
Little dumpling, don’t be happy/sad.
Janus, make these children into soldiers on their way out,
and change them back into good citizens when they return.
But how to screen the inner linings of the soul antagonist?
How to be sure the bilingual bride has no veiled intention?
Is a captured slave faithful to his listener?
How can we animate what is already spirit,
a living dead? Seeking leave to remain, can we
refrain at the peak of the march?
A good soldier pauses, waiting.
Heads or tails?
Flip a coin minted to commemorate the closing
of the gates of war. Not to buckle easily,
but to garnish the prize.
Janus, twinned outward from his brain, it was said, the very
temples cracked. A traitor comfortably straddles gaps.
How can we choose which bale to eat?
How can we choose to eat or drink?
(Buridan’s Ass starves in our midst,
due to the gap in the waiter’s attention.)
X reappears and marvels at the word choice.
He mentions a rabbit. But we don’t eat our rabbits.
(his look: What do you do with them?)
One of us has translated badly.
Culturally we have different tastes.
You might say one defendant, spliced at the seam,
knew more about Santa Claus and yet―real and
not-real―he’s moot, a model of a man...

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Verlag
Dalkey Archive Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
162897284X
ISBN 13 
9781628972849
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
160
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