{"id":16225,"date":"2014-07-02T00:28:41","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T00:28:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/if-your-identity-is-inscribed-for-you-from-the\/"},"modified":"2014-07-02T00:28:41","modified_gmt":"2014-07-02T00:28:41","slug":"if-your-identity-is-inscribed-for-you-from-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/if-your-identity-is-inscribed-for-you-from-the\/","title":{"rendered":"“If your identity is inscribed for you from the outside, it\u2019s even more difficult to escape.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

believermag<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n

Stephanie LaCava talks to Kate Zambreno<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was skeptical when a friend told me to read Kate Zambreno\u2019s work of literary criticism about modernist wives entitled\u00a0Heroines, most likely out of self-preservation. I have my own heroines, they won\u2019t leave me alone, they show up again and again in essays and fantasies. From what I understood, this book would explore women of this sort, in particular Zelda Fitzgerald and Viv Eliot (T.S. Eliot\u2019s first wife) and how, perhaps, their own artistic voice was drowned in accusation of hysteria, their stories relegated to the fiction of their respective spouses. I was terrified. Then, I read it\u2014all the research and personal anecdotes. I fell in love with one girl in particular, the writer Zambreno. When I heard of her novel\u00a0<\/em>Green Girl, I didn\u2019t hesitate this time. Therein, I found evidence of the very processes Zambreno discussed in\u00a0<\/em>Heroines, which became a kind of magical notebook for deconstructing\u00a0<\/em>Green Girl. (If only all novels came with such a companion.)\u00a0<\/em>Green Girl\u00a0is the story of Ruth, a young American living abroad in London, pained and fascinated by beauty and loneliness. Her references include the likes of Catherine Deneuve in\u00a0Repulsion, Charlotte Rampling in\u00a0The Night Porter\u00a0and Nico\u2019s song, \u201cFemme Fatale.\u201d These are the women that inhabit my own pathetic scrapbook, and those of many contemporary girls. What was most striking, though, was Zambreno\u2019s scathing rendition of a girl fixated on aloof icons, desperately channeling their allure and mystery. This strange connection is, I am sad to say, one of countless others that reminded me of my own struggles and those of other women I knew, some unlike me altogether. Isn\u2019t that why we love a book, because it makes us a little mad with recognition?\u00a0<\/em>Green Girl\u00a0also made me want more of Zambreno\u2019s work and its ability to examine the perceived disconnect between beauty and intelligence, cipher and reality\u2014even, simply, a woman and her work.<\/em><\/p>\n

Last Wednesday, we met at a tea shop and began furiously discussing where our sensibilities intersect, the women\u2014and men\u2014of the French New Wave, struggling with embracing aesthetics in critical work, even an appreciation for Sir John Everett Millais\u2019 portrait of Ophelia. We then went across the street, up the elevator and into my writing office where we sat in a windowless room and continued our conversation.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Stephanie LaCava<\/em><\/p>\n

I. THE PUBLIC BECOMES A COLISEUM<\/strong><\/p>\n

STEPHANIE LACAVA:<\/strong>\u00a0It surprised me that you were a fan of Walter Benjamin\u2019s\u00a0Arcades Project<\/em>, and he was so influential in many parts of\u00a0Green Girl<\/em>. I found this fascinating because it\u2019s such a disparate reference from your stable of cinematic and female icons.<\/p>\n

KATE ZAMBRENO:<\/strong>\u00a0It continues to be an important reference point for my work, this collaged text born out of intense obsession, and especially his chapter on the\u00a0fl\u00e2neur<\/em>, the urban stroller.<\/p>\n

SL:<\/strong>\u00a0I saw it on two levels in\u00a0Green Girl<\/em>. Not only did you directly reference it with quotes before chapters and scenes surrounding the commerce and crowds of Oxford Circus, but also, I think, in the way\u00a0Heroines<\/em>\u00a0was formed and subsequently influenced\u00a0Green Girl<\/em>. It seemed all about the fragmented thought and then a natural cohesion of vision.<\/p>\n

KZ:<\/strong>\u00a0I was accumulating the notes for\u00a0Green Girl<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Heroines<\/em>\u00a0at the same time, and\u00a0Heroines\u00a0<\/em>especially, a book that came out of a decade-long notebooking process, was a slow accumulation, a gradual accretion. I think in some ways\u00a0Heroines<\/em>\u00a0was an apologia for the type of novel that\u00a0Green Girl\u00a0<\/em>was\u2014I was philosophizing and working through an existential novel of a shopgirl, a\u00a0fl\u00e2neuse<\/em>. Have you ever read Gail Scott\u2019s\u00a0My Paris<\/em>? It\u2019s very inspired by Benjamin. The female narrator, keeping this notebook while in Paris for a limited time, is voluptuously reading and engaging with the book, and I pulled from it, in\u00a0Green Girl<\/em>\u2014for an epigraph, \u201cWhy can\u2019t the\u00a0fl\u00e2neur<\/em>\u00a0be stoned?\u201d It\u2019s one of several \u00a0important contemporary novels that I talk about at the essay at the end, on walkers in literature [in the new Harper Perennial edition]\u2014these innovative and radical novels of women writers, often queer, engaging with the notion of the walker and the city and contemporary space. And these books aren\u2019t talked about as often in the mainstream, but they\u2019re really important to me. Works by Gail Scott, Renee Gladman, Amina Cain, Danielle Dutton, Pamela Lu. \u00a0<\/p>\n

SL:<\/strong>\u00a0Do you know Lauren Elkin? She\u2019s at work on a book about the\u00a0fl\u00e2neuse<\/em>.<\/p>\n

KZ:<\/strong>\u00a0She\u2019s writing about Bowen, Woolf and Rhys, right? I really wrangled\u2014in\u00a0Green Girl<\/em>\u2014with Benjamin\u2019s chapter on the walker\u2014and the ending scene of\u00a0Green Girl<\/em>\u00a0was also inspired by Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s story \u201cMan in the Crowd,\u201d the walker disappearing into a crowd in ecstasy, that Benjamin engages with as well.<\/p>\n

SL:<\/strong>\u00a0I love that scene when she\u2019s lost in the crowd and you\u2019re just listing the types of bodies before that.<\/p>\n

KZ:<\/strong>\u00a0So much of the book takes place in crowds\u2014on the street, working in the fragrance section at the department store, the holiday rush. I am interested in this idea of deconstruction and urban space, and whether that\u2019s possible for this girl who\u2019s so aware of her appearance and her identity, as it\u2019s formed from the outside, whether she could dissipate ecstatically. I\u2019m thinking of Anne Carson\u2019s reading of ecstasy from its origins of\u00a0ekstasis<\/em>\u00a0in her essay \u201cDecreation,<\/em>\u201dto escape outside, a sort of mysticism. I was really compelled, in Benjamin, to see how close the chapter on the prostitute is to the chapter on the walker.<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

believermag: Stephanie LaCava talks to Kate Zambreno I was skeptical when a friend told me to read Kate Zambreno\u2019s work of literary criticism about modernist wives entitled\u00a0Heroines, most likely out of self-preservation. I have my own heroines, they won\u2019t leave me alone, they show up again and again in essays and fantasies. From what I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-4dH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}