Mad Translation in Leonard Cohen’s
Beautiful Losers and Douglas Glover’s Elle
Robert David Stacey
University of Ottawa
The lunatic, the lover and the poet.
Are of imagination all compact.
William Shakespeare
This essay discusses Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and Douglas Glover’s Elle, two postmodern Canadian novels whose subversions
and parodies of conventional realism, still the dominant mode of historical fiction in Canada and elsewhere, are intimately connected with their
exploration of the foundations and limits of modern historical consciousness. More specifically, my argument arises out of what I perceive to be
some crucial similarities between the two texts. Both address the early
stages of the European colonization of North America and the concomitant mutual exposure to the other of radically alien cosmologies: one oral,
polytheistic, and tribal; the other literate, monotheistic, and nationalist.
Both feature protagonists whose attempts to understand this otherness
in its own terms—or to inhabit the reality of the other—leads to a radical
destabilization of personal and cultural identity, resulting in a state akin to
ESC 40.2–3 (June/September 2014): 173–197
Robert David Stacey
is Associate Professor
of Canadian Literature
at the University of
Ottawa. He is the
editor of re: Reading
The Postmodern:
Canadian Literature
and Criticism After
Modernism (University
of Ottawa Press 2010)
and author of numerous
essays on modern
and contemporary
Canadian writing. His
current research project
is entitled Worker’s
Playground: Labour and
the Ludic in TwentiethCentury Canadian
Poetry.
divine madness, an ecstatic breakthrough that is nevertheless profoundly
isolating and destructive for the individual subject.
Crucially, both novels approach this paradox of breakdown and breakthrough in terms of translation, which functions as a master trope for any
manner of inter-experiential relations that have a transformative effect on
the subject and his or her way of being-in-the-world. Indeed, it is precisely
at the point where translation in the ordinary sense, derived from the Latin
“to carry across,” meets translation in the more archaic and specialized
usages of both “transport” (as in enraptured flight) and “metamorphosis”
(as in transmogrification) that these novels situate themselves, featuring,
as they do, characters who engage in acts of linguistic translation, get carried away, and undergo extreme transformations as a consequence.1 In the
pyrotechnical conclusion to Beautiful Losers, the folklorist narrator of the
novel’s first section and F., the signatory of the novel’s epistolary second
section, meld and famously turn into a movie of Ray Charles projected
against the Montreal skyline. In Elle, the eponymous heroine, based on
the historical personage of Marguerite de Roberval, who was abandoned
on an island in the Gulf of St Lawrence by her punitive uncle, “the General,” le Sieur de Roberval for acts of insubordination and sexual depravity,
absorbs and is absorbed by the shamanistic rituals of her Aboriginal hosts
and finds that she has turned into a bear.
My goal, first, is to try to make sense of the apparent connection
between magic, madness, otherness, and translation posited by these
novels. Secondly, I want to consider how translation, in turn, operates
as a trope in the novels’ assault on the psycho-social logic of modernity,
the emergence of which they locate historically in the period of colonial
contact. To this end I have been greatly assisted by the writings of R. D.
Laing, whom Glover has cited as an important influence (Notes Home
165–66; Dorsel 111; “Interview” np). Laing’s work on schizophrenia in the
1960s led him to explore the social and familial contexts of mental illness,
resulting in the development, in works like The Self and Others (1961) and
The Politics of Experience (1967), of a constructivist theory of ideology as
a shared “social phantasy.” Laing is perhaps best known today as an early
1 The oed provides fourteen distinct usages of the term, most of which share the
basic idea expressed in def. i 1a of movement across states or transferences between persons and/or objects, that is, “removal or conveyance from one person,
place, or condition to another.” But we note also some significant variants, as
in def. ii 3a which defines translation as “Transformation, alteration, change,”
in common use from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth, as well as the
term’s specialized use in Early Modern rhetoric as a term synonymous with
metaphor (def. ii 4).
174 | Stacey
advocate of the anti-psychiatry movement. I am well aware that Laing’s
radical politics and unorthodox treatments of mental illness, including
the experimental use of psychotropic drugs on both patient and doctor,
have earned him his current reputation as a bit of a crackpot. While this
has discouraged the use of his work in more serious academic contexts,
he, nevertheless, was serious and was tirelessly committed to exploring
the connections between madness and society, and without question his
writings helped transform the popular imagination with respect to the
meaningfulness and, indeed, oppositionality, of mad speech.
Fundamentally, for Laing, there is no reality as such but only constructions of reality, wholly dependent on history, language, culture, and the
relations of power. “Our perception of reality,” he writes, “is the perfectly
achieved accomplishment of our civilization” (The Self and Others 44). As
a consequence, there is no such thing either as madness, only unlawfulness—that is to say, invalid or invalidated modes of experience or what
we might call illegitimate realities. Such logic would seem to anticipate
the now popular theories of Jacques Rancière, who writes in the “The
Paradoxes of Political Art” that
There is no “real world.” [...] The real always is a matter of
construction, a matter of “fiction”[…]. What characterizes the
mainstream fiction of the police order is that it passes itself
off as the real, that it feigns to draw a clear-cut line between
what belongs to the self-evidence of the real and what belongs
to the field of appearances, representations, opinions and utopias. Consensus means precisely that the sensory is given as
univocal. (148–49)
Laing, who like Rancière stresses the affective and sensory connotations
of “common sense,” similarly argues that modern Western civilization’s
generalized intolerance of “different fundamental structures of experience”—whether these be of the psychotic or the native (he cites Franz
Fanon as authority in relation to the latter)—shows that “we seem to need
to share a communal meaning to human existence, to give with others a
common sense to the world, to maintain a consensus” (65).
But as Laing increasingly came to view that consensus, the “normal”
quotidian world, as desperately repressed and the individual person as
“torn, body, mind and spirit, by inner contradictions, pulled in different
directions […] cut off from his own mind, cut off equally from his own
body—a half-crazed creature in a mad world” (The Politics of Experience
47), his radical proposal was that schizophrenia could be regarded—at least
Mad Translation | 175
in some instances—not as a delusional, unreal state, a failure to come to
grips but, rather, as “a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo-social
realities” (The Politics of Experience 57). Translated into Rancière’s terms,
schizophrenia constitutes a moment of “dissensus” in the otherwise
smooth functioning of the social order, the manifestation of an alternative
“sensorium” disruptive of the “univocality” of the “police order.” Viewed
in this light, madness represents a psychological breakthrough, of sorts,
and an act, however desperate, of political defiance—provided there are
those willing to read it as such. Thus even in his fairly conservative first
book, The Divided Self (1960), Laing could write: “the cracked mind of a
schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of
many sane people whose minds are closed” (27).
Laing begins as a psychoanalyst but ends as a philosopher of experience much indebted to existentialism, particularly Sartre. His project
of integrating Freudian metapsychology with existentialism constitutes
perhaps the most consistent and significant attempt to date to understand
madness from the inside, to focus not on psychotic behaviour but on psychotic experience. I want to stress experience, which for Laing signifies the
particular texture—simultaneously psychic and somatic and governed by
a set a rules or operative assumptions about the world—of a person’s very
existence.2 I do so because it seems to me that experience marks translation’s ultimate horizon. Barbara Godard speaks of “the intertextual richness and everyday resonance of ‘natural’ languages which in their unique
ways of organizing and interpreting the world transmit cultural values in
excess of the rational” (95). These are the “thick” relations of culture that
bespeak unique “lifeworlds” (96). Similarly, George Steiner speaks of the
2 Based on his The Politics of Experience, we can isolate two principles that define
experience in Laing’s thought. First, experience is evidential, yet only indirectly
accessible to the other: “I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.” Yet, despite its “invisibility,” experience is not private: “I do not experience your experience. But I
experience you as experiencing. I experience myself as experienced by you.
And I experience you as experiencing yourself as experienced by me. And so
on” (16). Experience, therefore, should not be understood as merely subjective
or as the property of an individual. Thus, Laing’s second argument concerns
the location or site of experience: “[E]xperience is not ‘subjective’ rather than
‘objective,’ not ‘inner’ rather than ‘outer,’ not ‘process’ rather than ‘praxis,’ not
‘input’ rather than ‘output,’ not ‘psychic’ rather than ‘somatic,’ not some doubtful data dredged up from introspection rather than extrospection. Least of all
is experience ‘intra-psychic process’ ” (17). The upshot of this repositioning of
experience as in-the-world rather than in-your-head is a radical politicizing of
experience: “My experience and my action occur in a social field of reciprocal
influence and interaction” (21).
176 | Stacey
“incommensurability of semantic context[s]” so that translation “engage[s],
at the most immediate and charged level, the philosophic enquiry into
consciousness and into the meaning of meaning” (x). In Laingian terms,
particular acts of translation expose the essential untranslatability of experience, especially across different cultural paradigms. In view of the ultimate limits posed by particular structures of experience, the therapist must
act as a translator who employs his imagination so as “to transpose himself
into another strange and alien view of the world. In this act he draws on
his own psychotic possibilities” (34). Only by such a “transpos[ition]” can
he sufficiently dislocate himself so as to “arrive at an understanding of the
patient’s existential position” (34).
What I mean to suggest by setting Laingian psychoanalysis alongside translation theory is this: the closer translation comes to managing
a “transposition” between “lifeworlds,” the more it resembles the act of
going mad; the more we comprehend madness as the forfeiture of one
“structure of reality” and the acquisition of another in its stead, the more
we must rely on an idea of translation to fully appreciate the cognitive and
somatic barriers placed between the psychotic and the dominant society.
But because the “essence of politics resides in the modes of dissensual
subjectivation that reveal a society in its difference to itself ” (Rancière,
“Ten Theses on Politics” 42), an awareness of the structural homologies
between translation and madness also allows us to understand both as
equally capable of producing disruptive identities that expose the invisible
and unspoken logic of modern society.
Failure as translation: Beautiful Losers
Recalling his “Anthem,” that terrible song with the pretty good line, “There
is a crack in everything. / That’s how the light gets in” (Stranger Music 373),
we can, perhaps, already detect the congruence between Cohen’s thought
and Laing’s own. I do not know if we can attribute to Laing any sort of
direct influence, although he and Cohen were contemporaries and both
were associated with 1960s counterculture.3 It ought be pointed out that
the 1960s were, historically speaking, fixated on psychoanalysis and other
psychological theories in a way that may be hard to appreciate today, and
3 This is neither here nor there, perhaps, but they also had a common friend, the
novelist and poet Axel Jensen, who stole Cohen’s girlfriend in Greece, causing a
split with his wife Marianne, who then famously became involved with Cohen.
Laing subsequently treated Jensen for a depression occasioned by, among other
things, the loss of Marianne after which Jensen became a vocal proponent of
Laingian philosophy and a co-collaborator on a number of creative and intellectual projects.
Mad Translation | 177
A place to begin,
then, is with F.
so this sort of thing was very much in the air when Cohen wrote Beautiful
Losers in 1966. More to the point, though, is the following statement by
Laing: “In our ‘normal’ alienation from being, the person who has a perilous awareness of the non-being of what we take to be being (the pseudowants, pseudo-values, pseudo-realities of the endemic delusions of what
are taken to be life and death and so on) gives us in our present epoch the
acts of creation that we despise and crave” (37). This is an apt description
of Cohen and his “dissensual” novel, by turns reviled and lauded and still
largely misunderstood to this day.
A place to begin, then, is with F., the novel’s maniacal provocateur and
lover, teacher, and tormentor of the novel’s unnamed central narrator,4
and his proclamation: “To discover the truth in anything that is alien […]
first dispense with the indispensible in your vision” (88). This statement is
axiomatic for both Cohen and Glover’s novels, which trace their characters’
abandonment of one “fundamental structure of experience” for another
and find themselves on the other side, through the looking glass, as it
were. F. is an extremely limited character in many ways, arguably an evil
character, but he has achieved what Laing calls that “perilous awareness
of the non-being of what we take to be being”:
I seemed to wake up in the middle of a car accident, limbs
strewn everywhere, detached voices screaming for comfort,
severed fingers pointing homeward, all the debris withering
like sliced cheese out of Cellophane—all I had in the wrecked
world was a needle and thread, so I got down on my knees,
I pulled pieces out of the mess and I started to stitch them
together.[...] All I heard was pain, all I saw was mutilation. My
needle going madly, sometimes I found I’d run the thread right
through my own flesh and I was joined to one of my grotesque
creations—I’d rip us apart—and then I heard my own voice
howling with the others, and I knew that I was also truly part
of the disaster. (183)
I suspect that Laing would find in this passage a striking portrayal of the
therapist’s situation in his time. F. can quite easily be viewed as a figure
of the therapist or analyst with I, the narrator, as his analysand. And like
Laing himself, he finds that his highest calling may well be to assist his
patient to achieve a fuller madness than his own, to break through the
dominant social fantasy into other realms of experience. Hence his various
4 It has become customary to refer to this character as “I,” and I maintain that
convention in the rest of this article.
178 | Stacey
encouragements, “My dear friend, go beyond my style” (158); “I wanted
to be a magician.[…] [D]o not be a magician, be magic” (172); and his
self-identification as Oscotarach, “the head piercer” of Mohawk lore who
removes the brains of the dead before they can reach the place of the
afterlife: “Ask yourself. Was I your Oscotarach? I pray that I was” (192).
F. therefore labours to drive poor I mad, through what I calls his “crazy
education,” goading him toward a state of transcendence or of ecstasy the
possibility of which is socially repressed, unlawful, yet necessary. I himself
is nothing if not a supreme figure of repression and violent introjection,
symbolized by his dedication to the past and his chronic and painful constipation: “How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?”
(39); “I am the sealed, dead, impervious museum of my appetite” (41). His
eventual incontinence, symbolic and literal, is the sign of a breakthrough
concomitant with F.’s idea of futurity wherein “newness” and “difference”
coincide: “I want two hundred million to know that everything can be
different, any old different” (195). This political goal is coterminous with
an aesthetic vision whereby the poet’s “allegiance is to the notion that he
is not bound to the world as given, that he can escape from the painful
arrangement of things as they are” (57). The breakthrough, when it is
achieved, is by definition beyond the limits of expression, but it is suggested via several paradoxes such as “see[ing] the acropolis like the Indians
did who never even had one” (13).
Douglas Glover has written about this aspect of Beautiful Losers
(and the fact that he wrote this essay while he was working on Elle is significant). For Glover, Beautiful Losers is a postmodern “anti-novel” that
“dramatiz[es] the failure of the modern project, the faith or trust in progress, in the improvability of mankind by rational means” (131). Unable to
express its goal in positive terms, however, it can only “attempt to demolish
a structure (of meaning) from within” so as to point, by way of negation
and contradiction, to that which lies outside its own systems of meaning:
“the paradoxical and parodic nature of the discourse of Beautiful Losers is a
result of the stress language undergoes when it tries to refer to something
outside itself. It is akin to the religious paradoxes of other eras—the trinity,
Jesus, a saint” (138). Compare this to Godard’s claim that “[t]ranslation
poetics, approach[es] language(s) from the perspective of a relation with
an outside, pos[ing] the question of (in)finitude of limits, those of the self,
the other, the collectivity […] of modernity even, and of knowledge” (98).
It is precisely a relationship to the absolutely outside, the totally alien,
with which Beautiful Losers is engaged via its interest in translation; at
stake is a delineation of the constraints of modern consciousness itself.
Mad Translation | 179
This outside is the historically remote, the culturally alien, the divine, the
mad. It can only be accessed destructively, through rupture, a rip in the
fabric of the social fantasy that underpins the subject’s relation to both
community and self. In this context, the true significance of the motif of
ripping and tearing that runs through the novel begins to emerge, its most
notable instance being when F., hoping to produce in the masturbating
I a sublimely ero-thanatogenic climax, drives his speeding automobile
into what appears to be a brick wall, but is only a scrim of painted silk:
“Rrrrrriiiiippppp, went the wall” (97).
Later, on the verge of his breakdown—and his breakthrough—the
narrator cries, “I want to be consumed by unreason. I want to be swept
along […]. Oh god, please terrify me” (47). There are echoes here of the
Christian tradition of the via negativa, such as we see in John Donne’s
Holy Sonnets.5 Indeed, prayer is everywhere in Beautiful Losers and is
consistently aligned with translation. A deeply holy book, Beautiful Losers grapples with the mystical heart of religious experience, a struggle
that involves an idea of translation in the dual sense of displacement and
transcendence with which we began. Early in the novel, F. presses a book
into the narrator’s hands: “It’s a prayer book. Your need is greater than
mine.” I retorts: “You filthy liar […] It’s an English-Greek phrase book,
badly printed in Salonica,” to which F. responds: “Prayer is translation.
A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language
he has barely mastered. Study the book” (58). At the end of Book 1, having endured torments and humiliations too numerous to name here, the
narrator turns, finally, to the phrase book: “I did not know, in my coldest
terror, I did not know how much I needed. O God, I grow silent as I hear
myself begin to pray.” This is followed by a facsimile of one of the pages of
the phrase book subtitled “At the Drug-Shop” (149).
5 “Holy Sonnet xiv” will serve as an example:
Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new
[…] for I
Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish mee. (6)
180 | Stacey
How are we to understand this apparent link between prayer and
translation? On the one hand, following F., we can see that in prayer one
speaks a foreign language of sorts, the use of which necessarily requires or
entails the transformation of the self: one is translated into a “child” who
eschews any notions of mastery, of certainty, and accepts his state of lack.
One cannot pray with authority. Such a view is in keeping with the notion
of a “beautiful loser,” synonymous with the saint, personified in Cohen’s
novel by the self-abusive Catherine Tekakwitha whose own prayers are
Mad Translation | 181
translated by F. and recorded in the text alongside the “originals”: “—My
Jesus, I have to take chances with you. I love you but I have offended you.
I am here to fulfill your law. Let me, my God, take the burden of your
anger” (208). Certainly, the novel, like the Catholic Church, places great
value on Tekakwitha’s abasement as the necessary precondition for her
eventual ascension, which is why much of the novel takes place in a basement apartment (a/basement) before moving to a tree house in the final
section. “She did not know why she prayed and fasted. These mortifications she performed in a poverty of spirit” (203). To that extent, prayer is
like a translation insofar as its imperfection or inadequacy or “poverty” is
apiece with a surrender to a higher power. Furthermore, given the novel’s
thorough-going interest in the promise of failure and weakness, we might
also wish to stress the common association between translation and error.
The phrase book is badly printed in Salonica and contains a number of
mistakes, including the transposition of b and v so that in another section
of the phrase book, “tobacconists” is spelled tavacconists” (145). This is no
innocent error, it turns out. Not only does it slyly bring Hebrew6 into play
alongside Greek, ancient Greek, English, French, Latin, and several First
Nations’ languages—further underscoring Cohen’s continuing interest in
“comparing mythologies”7—it also sets up the most significant b/v switch
whereby the Ray Charles epigraph “somebody said lift that bale” (np) is
later re-echoed as “lift that veil” that I specifies as the root meaning of
“apocalypse” (105). Thus do typos—mistakes, failures, inadequacies—open
up a path to apocalyptic revelation.
But as the narrator suggests by enacting a series of English-Greek
translations in lieu of a more traditional kind of prayer, the act of prayer
is not simply a recognition or expression of a state of error or weakness
but a sincere attempt to translate oneself, to connect with an outside we
might as well call, as he does, God. To this end, translation can be understood as involving a kind of sacrifice. To return to Steiner, and to Godard’s
sense of “lifeworlds,” which, indeed, has a certain Laingian resonance, we
are encouraged to see in the act of translation a radically destabilizing
heterotopic movement, the abandonment or sacrifice of one “head space”
for another, the abandonment of one language understood as a mental
and social security system for another: a “dispensing of the indispensible”
6 In the Hebrew alphabet, bet and vet are effectively the same letter with different
pronunciations; the latter is sometimes represented with the bet’s dot or dagesh
absent, but in everyday written Hebrew the dagesh is not used.
7 Cohen’s first book was entitled Let Us Compare Mythologies (1954).
182 | Stacey
in the name of the other. If translation is to be understood, as Cohen
seems to intend, as a holy act, we are compelled to see in it the action of
an abandonment, a letting go. Such is Tekakwitha’s abandonment of her
native belief for that of the colonizer, not because Christianity is superior
or better but because it is alien (her hyperbolic inhabitation of its assumptions renders it mysterious, other, even to her Jesuit confessors). Similarly,
her relinquishing of her mortal, physical being can be understood as a
sacrifice enabling her transition to a more purely spiritual existence in
the afterlife—a process that, in theological studies, is notably called “a
translation.”
Our constipated narrator, too, must learn to let go, to jettison his baggage and launch himself toward an uncertain future. As the text makes
clear, this baggage is not only personal and psychological but cultural and
historical. I must “forget” history, which F. likens to a drug or “sleepy tune”
by whose pleasures we are enslaved:
The tune was called History and we loved it, Nazis, Jews, everybody.[…] History made us feel good so we played it over and
over, deep into the night.[…] History was our song, History
chose to make us History. We gave ourselves to it, caressed
by events. (170)
While F. will ultimately “let History back because [he] was lonely (171), I
hurls it out of himself and he out of it, seeking, instead, “possibility” (226).
Poised between the moment of his total disintegration and the beginning
of his translation into a movie of Ray Charles, the “old man” of the final section “allowed the spectators a vision of All Chances at Once” (253): “At that
point where he was most absent, that’s when the gasps started, because
the future streams through that point, going both ways” (253). Because
the future—simultaneously apocalyptic and redemptive of the failures
of the past8 (hence it is going “both ways”)—manifests itself precisely at
the point where the ego, the individuality, the person is most diminished,
Cohen reveals history and personhood to be mutually dependent systems
geared toward the repression of possibility.
Laing is not unhelpful in this context. He writes: “The ego is an instrument for living in this world. If the ‘ego’ is broken up, or destroyed […]
8 F. writes: “for we do not wish to destroy the past and its baggy failures, we only
wish the miracles to demonstrate that the past was joyously prophetic” (226).
I think this is what Walter Benjamin has in mind when he writes in the second
of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that “the past carries with it a
temporal index by which it is referred to redemption” (254).
Mad Translation | 183
then the person may be exposed to other worlds, ‘real’ in different ways
from the more familiar territory of dreams, imagination, perception or
phantasy” (115). “True sanity,” he continues, “entails in one way or another
the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self completely adjusted to our
alienated social reality” (119). Thus, the “differen[ce]” demanded by F. and
achieved by I can be measured, in part at least, by the extent to which I rids
himself of his ego, that “instrument” contrived for the world he comes to
disavow. In the interval between the abandonment of one system and the
inevitable taking up of another is a vision of pure beauty and freedom: it
is in the white space between the Greek and the English in the phrase book
where the novel locates its utopian desire, the space not of destination but
intention, the will to “carry over” into difference as such.
And yet, the dominant view of translation stresses neither error nor
difference, but identity. Coming at this question from the other direction,
we acknowledge that translation is customarily understood as the practice
of establishing semantic equivalences between languages. This position
too affords some purchase on the slippery link between translation and
prayer. Implicit in this view is the possibility that all “sublunary” languages
(to cite Donne again) are essentially equivalent and might equally (to cite
F. again) “serve the Tongue.” This is a model of “[t]ranslation as transmission, under the sign of Jeromian accuracy […]—the perfect transfer of a
stable meaning from one language to another” (Godard 87). In this view,
which stands in opposition to Steiner’s belief in the incommensurability of
semantic contexts, the essence of meaning remains “the same” regardless
of the language in which it is couched. Here, the materiality of language
plays body to language’s spirit, which remains intact even when that body
is broken down and reconstituted in another shape with its own physical
and sonic properties. Related thinking underpins the Catholic paradox
of transubstantiation and provides one context for understanding Catherine’s uncle’s prayer, “I change, I am the same. / I change, I am the same.
/ I change, I am the same” (136–37).
More generally, the formula for this theory of translation, a=b (“I love
you” equals “je t’aime”), provides a logic for several magical equivalences
in the novel, so that, for instance, the narrator’s wife Edith “is” Catherine
Tekakwitha who “is” Isis. Or how I, “is,” by the end of the novel, also F.
According to no less an authority than Northrop Frye, the formula for
metaphor, too, is “a=b” (Anatomy 123), and represents, in its highest form
(anagogy), a “statement of hypothetic identity” (366). Indeed, Goddard
reminds us that in the early modern period translation was a common
rhetorical term for metaphor, the Greek metaphorein, which shares a
184 | Stacey
similar etymological root, “to bear” or to carry over, and can mean both the
rendering of a statement in another language or the understanding of one
object in terms of another.9 Such usage further contributes to a blurring of
the boundary between translation, metaphor, and metamorphosis. (Hence,
we have Bottom’s transformation into an ass in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, followed by Quince’s exclamation “thou art translated” [3.1.105].)
Of course, such metaphorical transformations complicate identity as
such; “I”, the individual ego, no longer obtains in such a world, and so we
arrive back where we began, with the idea of ego-loss and transcendence.
But from the point of view of the individual subject, such transcendence,
such loss, can feel a lot like madness or death. Whatever it is that happens to the narrator, it is hardly a benign event. And like a schizophrenic
reordering of experience, neither can it be rationally explained nor even
communicated in ordinary language. Unlike F., who can only collect experiences and whose reality consequently remains governed by the twin logic
of consumerism and sexual predation,10 the narrator, I, actually adopts or
enters into a different “structure of experience” when he fulfills F.’s ambition and becomes “magic.” As an experience, becoming magic cannot be
shared, its “inside” cannot be represented; we are not privy to its particular
texture, but only its silhouette in the shape of outward behaviour. This
helps explain the sudden shift in the novel’s final section from the first to
the third person that has perplexed many readers—it keeps us out—but it
also helps to underscore the pacific desire of most to stay outside alternative realities, to refuse the burden and responsibility of the analyst or the
translator whose foray into other “lifeworlds” obliges him to accept the
merely consensual basis of this one. So it is that, confronted with the sight
of a man disintegrating before their very eyes and reassembling himself
into a movie of Ray Charles who “la[ys] out his piano keys across a shelf
of the sky,” all the assembled can say is “Just sit back and enjoy it, I guess”
and “Thank god it’s only a movie” (254).
9 See also note 1.
10 The commodification of experience is made explicit in the novel’s Argentina
episode, where F. and Edith have gone in the pursuit of the extremes of experience: it is here that Edith masturbates to F.’s reading of the accounts of Brébeuf
and Lalement’s torture at the hands of the Iroquois, where both subject themselves to the degradations of a self-directed Danish vibrator, and where, most
tellingly, they purchase a bar of human soap from Hitler with whom they bathe
and who later makes them “kiss the whip” (190). Thus do Edith and F. merely
fetishize history and technology, unlike I who transcends both.
Mad Translation | 185
Of course, such
metaphorical
transformations
complicate
identity as such.
Translation as failure: Elle
To turn now to Elle, arguably one of the most important historical novels
published in Canada in the last decade or so, largely because it is not
only incidentally concerned with history but takes historical process as
its primary theme. In various discussions of his influences, Glover has
explicitly mentioned Beautiful Losers alongside the work of R. D. Laing
(Dorsel 121, “Interview” np) and so the preceding discussion of Beautiful
Losers will have laid out many of the operating assumptions of Elle as well.
Similar to Beautiful Losers, the novel describes a breakdown in the normal
operating assumptions of the world of the main character, resulting in a
situation where the line between reality and illusion, sanity and madness
is redrawn: “This is the story of a girl who went to Canada, gave birth to
a fish, turned into a bear, and fell in love with a famous author (F.) Or did
she just go mad? In either case, from my point of view (the inside), they
look the same” (131).
Like Beautiful Losers, the novel is very much taken up with the question of translation, which emerges as the dominant metaphor for thinking
about cultural difference. Elle’s preceding comment (“from my point of
view [the inside]”) indicates that Glover likewise approaches translation
from within the context of experience. Like Laing and Cohen, he accepts
that the experience of another is fundamentally inaccessible, and, in the
context of historical narrative, unrecoverable. In “Before/After History
and the Novel,” Glover writes: “We can write things down, record ritual,
folklore and epic, and read about them later, but we cannot ever recall
how it felt to be a druid” (191, italics added). Given the ephemerality and
cultural specificity of experience (the “how it felt” of historical existence),
the consciousness of the central character was bound to be anachronistic
in any case, but Glover foregrounds what Fredric Jameson calls “the essential mystery of the cultural past” (The Political Unconscious 19) by way of
a wilfully and wildly contemporary central narrative consciousness, but
one embedded in an otherwise credible historical context. Elle, as droll
an ironist as one is likely to find in a Canadian novel, has the sensibilities
and prejudices of a third-wave feminist with an intuitive understanding of
poststructuralist and postcolonial theory. Recalling Georg Lukács’s fears
that the historical novel would be used to work out contemporary political
concerns by way of “topical” rather than “typical” events and characters
(The Historical Novel 19–63), we should stress that, while Elle is certainly
not typical, her story is resolutely focused on an understanding of the
186 | Stacey
historical forces that shaped the modern world at a key juncture in the
globalization of culture and the expansion of world capital.
As in Beautiful Losers, then, first contact and colonial settlement
delimit a context in which the need for translation is foregrounded, while
underscoring the almost insurmountable barriers to genuine intercultural
exchange and understanding: “Founding a colony in the New World is like
the act of love. You make camp in the heart of the other. Nothing is the way
you expected it. You have to learn to talk another language. Translation
fails” (108). The essential untranslatability of “Canada” and all it represents
is a recurring theme: Elle finds herself “At the threshold of another world,
where strangeness and confusion rule where all words are untranslatable”
(130). But if translation fails, it has less to do with linguistic competence
than with those more basic underlying structures of experience that determine and govern not only speech but consciousness itself. As Elle states,
“Since coming to Canada, all my conversations have been conducted anxiously in contending grammars, each describing a different world” (152).
Her insight, posed in the form of a question, recalls Laing’s own view on
the legitimacy and “reality” of alternative (and subaltern) structures of
experience: “What if all grammars are correct?” (153). Needless to say, the
colonial project with which she is reluctantly complicit is predicated on
the suppression of precisely this possibility. Thus, to the newly installed
intendant of New France, Roberval, intent as he is on imposing his grammar on the New World, the possible egality of competing world views is a
“hair raising” notion that never occurs to him “except in nightmares” (153).
Elle, then, is the story of an encounter between fundamentally untranslatable, that is to say mutually alien, structures of experience in a situation
that nevertheless demands their translation. On the one hand, this space
of contradiction and uncertainty invites abuse and misdirection at the
level of communication: “And I think how ripe the world of translation
is for lying, betrayal, misrepresentation and fraud. It is always thus when
one encounters another—child, father, friend, enemy, savage, astral being”
(78). On the other hand, the failure to achieve sincere discourse at this primary level of translation makes evident the chasm between what Elle calls
“worlds” and what Rancière would call “sensoria,” that is to say, experiential
spaces determined by a given “distribution of the sensible” (“Ten Theses”
36).11 To bridge this chasm, to “cross over” into that other sensorium
11 Rancière: “A partition of the sensible refers to the manner in which a relation
between a shared common (un commun partagé) and the distribution of exclusive parts is determined in sensory experience” (“Ten Theses on Politics”
36, italics added).
Mad Translation | 187
demands therefore a translation of a different order, a movement away
from and into something other: “There has been a definite drift towards
insanity or mystical experience, I [am] not sure which” (85); “I seem to be
drifting farther and farther from the world I used to know, farther from the
recognizably human and closer to difference, divinity, and madness” (144).
Thus, Elle, like the narrator of Beautiful Losers, experiences a radical form
of displacement, we might even say exile, as she eventually finds herself
in another realm, one for which no equivalent exists and no language but
its own can represent: “Canada is beginning to look like a sign that is just
a sign of itself ” (134).
Elle’s transposition or “drift” into this realm of “difference, divinity, and
madness” both results in and demands the renunciation of her world’s
“grammar.” Abandonment and loss are therefore central themes of the novel
and preconditions, as they were in Beautiful Losers, for a radical reordering
of the subject’s experiential base. The most harrowing and beautiful section of the novel concerns Elle’s labour. Alone in a makeshift hut, having
through death or flight lost her lover Richard, her nurse Bastienne, and
her Innu companion Itslk,12 Elle gives birth, traumatically, to a child she
has been carrying since her exile on the island. It is deformed, resembling
a fish, and shortly thereafter expires in his mother’s arms, but not before
she has an opportunity to fall deeply, tenderly, in love with him.
My impulse is to drop it and scramble away, but then something warm washes through me like a tide of blood, bringing
a sensation of peace. I think, I give up. Which is strange. I
don’t know what I am giving up. And then I think, yes, I am
giving up all my vanities, all my desires, designs and hopes,
along with the claims of family, race, and religion. […] In my
heart now, there is room for pity for the little fish-person, who
12 I should point out that there is a quasi-repressed sub-narrative in play that
suggests that Elle has actually eaten all these people. In his “A Writer’s Guide
to Douglas Glover’s Fiction,” Bruce Stone argues that Elle’s “subjective meltdown” produces a pattern of “imagistic slippage” at the level of her narration
whereby human bodies are recurrently treated as those of animals: “it becomes
clear that the narrator has developed a kind of culturally loaded psychosis
or epistemological blindness—her stressed apprehension substituting animal
forms for human bodies—that allows her to cannibalize the corpses of her
companions” (60). While the notion of “epistemological blindness” is entirely
apropos of our discussion here insofar as it speaks to the radical reordering
of Elle’s “lifeworld” and the metaphorical substitutions and transformations
impelled by such change, Stone’s analysis appears to present cannibalism as
the latent “truth” of the text rather than as a sub-textual option or supplement.
188 | Stacey
clearly will not survive, who will shortly gasp his last upon my
breast. Pity and love. (102)
Shorn of every social acquisition, Elle completes at this moment a process
that had begun soon after her arrival on the island, once she found that
she was “no longer beautiful, or French, or related to anyone, or learned”
(45). Like I, Elle (L?) must forget (her) history in the name of the future:
“What if I forget everything? Then I will be made anew” (131).
What remains when everything else is taken away or forgotten, Glover
optimistically suggests, is “love,” not a Platonic disposition but a sensuality
closely tied to the body’s corporality, to its blood, its warmth, its sheltering embrace. The embrace, like the “pity and love” it literally embodies, is
resolutely social, a being-for-others predicated on a kind of laying bare of
the essential self. In Cohen’s lexicon, Elle is finally “naked,” a concept that
finds its echo in a striking passage from Laing’s The Politics of Experience:
We are separated from and related to one another physically.
Persons as embodied beings relate to each other through the
medium of space. And we are separated and joined by our different perspectives, educations, backgrounds, organizations,
group loyalties, affiliations, ideologies, socio-economic class
interests, temperaments. These social “things” that unite us are
by the same token so many things, so many social figments that
come between us. But if we could strip away all the exigencies
and contingences, and reveal to each other our naked presence? If you take away everything […] —if we could meet, if
there were such a happening, a happy coincidence of human
beings, what would now separate us? (33)
Laing leaves the question for the most part unanswered, for it was for him
nearly impossible to imagine such a sincere “meeting” in practical terms,
although it remained the fundamental goal of his therapeutic practice and
of his social criticism.
It would be a mistake, then, to see Elle’s change in personal terms
only, or to overlook its salvational character: “We cannot be saved, I think,
unless we are willing to be changed” (55). Unlike Richard, her aristocratic
lover, who clings stubbornly to the paradigms of his Old World French
culture, quite literally attempting to inscribe its logic on Canada in the
form of a tennis court on the island’s beach (only to see it daily swept
away by the tide), and like the General, who savagely imposes his French
protestant norms on and through his colonial outpost in the New World
and produces only “a groaning wretched copy of what he left behind” (132),
Mad Translation | 189
Elle relinquishes these now preposterous “social figments” and achieves a
measure of indigenization that ensures her survival.13
Indeed, it is shortly after the birth and death of the child whom she
names Emmanuel (literally, “God is with us” but more broadly “saviour”
by way of its association with Christ) that Elle encounters the old “bear
woman,” a Montagnais shaman who more fully incorporates Elle into the
logic of a different cultural system whose particular “distribution of the
sensible” allows for, among other things, the real transformation of people
into animals. Her translation into this alternative sensorium is symbolized by her physical displacement, as she moves for the first time from
her island “fiefdom” to the Canadian mainland, a transition that is literally
enabled by her encounter with the shaman who plucks her from a watery
hole in the ice bridge that temporarily connects the two land masses. In
moving from The Island of Demons to the mainland, Elle leaves behind
her the ragged remains of a literate world and moves to a predominantly
oral one—a passage that is graphically anticipated by way of the recurrent eating of books, boiled and consumed on the island in lieu of more
nourishing sustenance. In the bear woman’s company, Elle undergoes a
series of rituals: she is chanted over, various foreign objects are removed
from her body, she is subjected to a sweat-lodge purification ceremony.
Consequently, she enters a world of translation and metamorphosis, where
reality takes on the structure of dreams and madness, states dominated
by the logic of metaphorical substitution. “My dreams are incontinent,”
says Elle (a pregnant word if you have read Beautiful Losers), “I do not
know where the dream begins or ends” (128). In her “dream” Elle “grow[s]
a snout, huge curved claws and extra teats, coarse hair covers [her] body,
and [she] shamble[s] alone through trackless forests, along ancient rivers,
ravenous, immensely strong, dim-eyed. (It could be worse, [she] think[s].
I might have been transformed into a slug or a mosquito)” (127).
When the bear woman dies, Elle finds that she has taken her place. The
native tribe that has gathered by the shore to await an expected British
ship place propitiatory offerings of salmon by the entrance to her tent.
She offends them by “turning into a bear before their eyes” (143), but they
13 It is difficult to speak of “indigenization” in Canadian writing without recalling
Terry Goldie’s seminal work on the subject. In Fear and Temptation: The Image
of The Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures, Goldie
writes that the presence of Aboriginal people in settler colonies such as Canada
and Australia creates anxieties for the non-Aboriginal settler insofar as Aboriginal people stand as reminders of his/her own interloper status, thereby causing
the settler (and later generations) to experience a “separation of belonging”
from his/her place. Goldie writes: “Canadians have, and long have had, a clear
190 | Stacey
tell her that if she stops turning into a bear they will let her accompany
them to the winter hunting grounds. Instead, however, Elle is “rescued”
by the English ship and returned to the Old World, where she eventually
pens the memoir we are reading. A retrospective narrative written in
the first person, Elle attempts what Beautiful Losers does not by describing the transition from one world to the other from the inside, albeit an
inside that has become remote and distanced through time and through
the narrator’s partial reabsorption into the structures of experience that
govern sixteenth century cosmopolitan France: “At this juncture: I am
not myself, but who am I? Even after the passage of years I cannot write
about this experience with my usual acerbic wit, the rhetorical device by
which I keep my distance from myself ” (131). “Did I really turn into a bear,
or was I but captive of a system of belief into which I had wandered all
unknowing?” (147).
Elle’s confused testimony points out one other important difference
between the novels: clearly, for the narrator of Beautiful Losers, his translation is a unidirectional process; there is no going back, and it is inherent
in the novel’s logic that no dénouement is imaginable for I and/or F. Elle,
on the other hand, goes in and back out of her transformed state, hence
the palindrome “Elle.” Her struggle to explain that other “place” which is
both Canada and the consciousness she had in Canada is therefore akin
the anyone’s struggle to explain one “modality of experience” (Laing, The
Politics of Experience 31) while situated in another: the re-equilibrated
psychotic describing his madness or the awake person describing a dream.
Her confusion is compounded when she shortly discovers that her ability
to turn into a bear has not entirely left her, even in France.
Confusion: where Cohen will emphasize the transcendent possibilities of translation understood as an abandonment of one’s language and
one’s accustomed “relations of ruling” (Goddard 89) in the name of identification with some absolute outside (translation as anagogic metaphor),
Glover will problematize such transcendence, presenting translation as
inevitably ironic, paradoxical, misplaced (translation as metaphor still, but
verging on catachresis, disjuncture): “I have become a metaphor or a joke,”
agenda to erase this separation of belonging” (12). There are only two possible
responses to this situation: “The white culture can attempt to incorporate the
Other [… or] the white culture may reject the indigene” (12–13). While the
General certainly represents the latter option, to read Elle as representing the
former seems to me uncharitable. On the whole, the novel seems rather more
invested in ironizing the binaristic thinking described by Goldie.
Mad Translation | 191
Elle opines, “a piece of language sliding from one state into another […].
What I have become is more like a garbled translation than a self. It is an
ironic position, being neither one thing nor the other” (137, 147). Caught
between structures of experience (the oral and the written, the indigenous
and the European), caught also between the past and the future, Elle herself may be read as an embodiment of the tensions and contradictions that
will come to define a modernity that would strive to erase or suppress them
and a postmodernity that can no longer afford to do so.
Elle’s F. is François Rabelais, who becomes Elle’s lover and co-conspirator upon her return to France. Not surprisingly, the novel is somewhat
Rabelaisian, but it would be more accurate to describe it as Bakhtinian,
Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World and The Dialogic Imagination
largely having become the lens through which Rabelais is predominantly
understood today. And it is Bakhtin who writes, with respect for the need
for translation wrought by modern exploration and territorial acquisition:
“Two myths perish simultaneously: the myth of a language that presumes
to be the only language and the myth of a language that presumes to
be completely unified” (cited in Godard 91). As avatars, respectively, of
the forces and events that would “dialogize” their hitherto autotelic and
unitary worlds, Elle and the bear woman share a uniquely modern fate.
Elle remarks:
She [the bear woman] would no longer fit into the world without an explanation, everything would have to be translated just
as in my Old Worldthe disruptions which are only beginning
will end by sweeping all the ancient hierarchies, courtesies and
protocols away. For it seems to me that their world is as much
a disproof of ours as ours is of theirs. (142)
Insofar as it foregrounds difference, translation must always operate under
the sign of doubt. Like the modern novel itself, which arises historically
within the same heteroglossic world, translation is therefore inseparable
from the historical transformations wrought by the printing press and
colonialism and might serve as an index of that radical reordering of the
distribution of the sensible that took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries and which remains in place, for the most part, to this day.
As such, translation functions as the novel’s primary vehicle for
addressing the modern condition itself. “This is the point in history,” writes
Elle, “where we are transformed. Before we had a word and an explanation for everything; henceforth, we shall only discover the necessity of
larger and larger explanations, which will always fall short. What we know
192 | Stacey
will become just another anxious symbol, a code, for what we do not
know” (98). In this instance, to “fall short” defines both translation and
the condition of modernity, which is characterized above all by a feeling
of loss and inauthenticity. Having befriended Comes Winter, an Aboriginal girl brought to France by Cartier following his second voyage (and
whose disease-ravaged body self-consciously recalls Cohen’s depictions
of Catherine Tekakwitha), Elle claims to be as “infected by savagery” as
the other is “infected by Christianity” (183). Together, they “embark upon
a mysterious project, something between a game and a prayer. […] In a
corner of forest attached to M. Cartier’s estate at Limoilou, the savage girl
Comes Winter and I begin to build a facsimile of a Canadian encampment” (182). Their attempt to recreate an authentic home for themselves is
doomed to failure, however: “Things are not right, not right, and this lonely
encampment seems like a poor translation of some other more meaningful place” (190). Although Elle had experienced a more authentic—that
is to say, a less willed and imitative—kind of translation via her initiation
into the Aboriginal practices and beliefs of her Canadian companions,
where she “was, briefly, next thing to god” (195), her prayerful attempt to
recreate those conditions “falls short” insofar as it is a self-conscious and
belated—and therefore inauthentic—counterfeit of that other world. The
“poor translation” of the camp is therefore structurally analogous to the
disjuncture or non-coincidence existing between Elle’s past and her present as well as the gap between her own interpretation of her experience
and that of her countrymen who perceive her to be “a liar, a madwoman,
and worst of all, a bore” (195).
However, the poverty of the simulacrum is not limited to the space of
Elle’s Limoilou hut; it comprehends the whole of the Old World which is
just beginning to realize the gap that New World encounter has opened in
its being. Translation here clearly begins to take on the meaning of “reproduction” or “copy,” a sense that removes it from the domain of metaphor
and places it more squarely in the camp of irony and parody, a figure and
a form of both doubling and distance from a prior (and prioritized) source.
Hence the common terminology of both “source text” and “original” for the
basis of a translation and the spectre of inauthenticity or duplicity (from
the French for “being double”) that very often haunts the so-called “target
text.” Irony likewise embodies a concept of “duplication” (212), argues Paul
de Man, that “divides the flow of temporal existence into a past that is
pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse
within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity, but it can never
overcome it” (222). Irony, for de Man, figures a Fall, a lapse from the totality
Mad Translation | 193
Glover, by
staging the lapse
of translationas-metaphor
(that is, as
identity and
equivalence)
into translationas-irony (that is,
doubleness and
non-identity),
provides a
rhetoric (or
grammar) for
the fall into
modern
historical
consciousness
itself.
and identity of metaphor. We might propose, then, that Glover, by staging
the lapse of translation-as-metaphor (that is, as identity and equivalence)
into translation-as-irony (that is, doubleness and non-identity), provides
a rhetoric (or grammar) for the fall into modern historical consciousness
itself.
Elle therefore presides over the birth of what Friedrich Schiller calls
“the sentimental,” a modern consciousness defined by a melancholy awareness of one’s belated, historical condition and separation from a mythical
origin. Elle herself suggests as much in her analysis of “The Three Ages
of Man”:
In ancient times, we saw ourselves engaged in a timeless
struggle—or dance—with the gods, in which men and gods
met and contended, and men died heroes and women slept
with immortals in the shape of farm animals. Currently at the
beginning of the age of literature, we see ourselves as actors
strutting upon a stage or as characters in a book. We are still
heroic, which makes us wistful. The gods have retreated—I
don’t know where and it is no longer appropriate to have sex
with animals. In the future, and this I must have dreamed, the
stage will shrink to a prison, we will see ourselves as inmates
separated from everyone else by bars, and heroism and love
will be impossible. (55)
Elle’s existential homelessness, her ironic condition, portends the historical
trajectory whose end-game of alienation and paralysis in our own time is
the focus of Beautiful Losers, which sought to transcend it, symbolically
at least, by way of a magical translation into the future. If, as Laing states,
the modern condition is predicated on an “abdication of ecstasy” (The
Divided Self 12), Cohen proposes a return to ecstatic experience as a way
out of the modern prison. Elle, too, experiences an ecstatic transformation
(loss) of self, but it is only a temporary foray into a structure of experience
that is already imperiled, the unity of which is already compromised by
her very presence, and whose eventual obliteration as a viable experiential possibility is the triumph of modern history. Unlike Beautiful Losers,
translation in Elle does not, finally, escape history but materializes it as
force acting upon the present. Its characters do not translate themselves
out of history or transform themselves into saints or myths unburdened
by historical constraint. Elle bears history’s mark, experientially, in the
form of a split consciousness, an alienation from both self and other: “you
194 | Stacey
find yourself frozen on the periphery, the place between places, in state of
being neither one thing nor the other” (167).14
If Elle’s history bespeaks the emergence of the “dialogic imagination,”
and its effect on Western consciousness, Itslk’s future comprehends far
more devastating change:
Though he has saved me, he cannot save himself from the swirl
of words, inventions, ideas and commerce that will one day
overwhelm him. At some point, he will face a choice: die in the
torrent clutching his beliefs like a twig in the storm, or persist
in a wan state beside the raw, surging, careless proliferation of
the new. […] There will come a time when time itself refuses
to turn back, when his magical powers will be insufficient to
start the universe exactly as it was. (87)
It may be true that that “we cannot be saved unless we are willing to be
changed,” but if we are unwilling and change comes nevertheless? However
traumatic Elle’s personal experience might be, from a colonial perspective the shocks of history appear unevenly distributed. In addition to the
technological superiority and bureaucratic efficiency that would prove
insurmountable to so many New World populations, Elle includes among
the “advantages” of her European compatriots their “ability to live and fight
and destroy while remaining in doubt” (142).
Elle narrates the birth of a modern consciousness produced in the
encounter with difference and a consequent loss of both unity and “unitarity” (what both Rancière and Laing call “consensus”). But the “modern project,” as Glover puts it in his essay on Cohen, is nothing if not
the systematic obliteration of difference and the suppression of doubt,
the production of “one world.” Ironically, the homogenization of culture
and the negation of other possible structures of experience on a world
scale—in other words, globalization under the aegis of world capital—is
concomitant with the end of history. But as Elle prognosticates, “the doubt
will gradually eat away at us” (142). Postmodernism, in turn, might be
14 It may not be irrelevant to the foregoing discussion that de Man sees in irony
the intrasubjective event of a splitting of a single consciousness into observer
and observed. Irony therefore designates a self-consciousness of an extreme
variety: “absolute irony is a consciousness of madness, itself the end of all
consciousness; it is a consciousness of a non-consciousness, a reflection from
the inside of madness itself ” (216). Elle’s recurrent experience of herself as
simultaneously subject and object is not only the effect of being the written
subject of her own written testimony but of the madness of her translation and
its ironic after-effects.
Mad Translation | 195
understood as the attempt, by artistic and other means, to revive doubt
and re-animate an historical dialectic that seems have to come to a halt.
It is perhaps no accident that translation has emerged in the context of
postmodernism as a dominant critical trope and site for literary creation,
insofar as it unavoidably puts totality and coherence in question. Whereas
Beautiful Losers proposes we forget history in the name of possibility, Elle
will ask us to remember doubt in the name of a possibility now seemingly
lost to history; ultimately, though, an attention to translation in each novel
serves the identical purpose of foregrounding the political value of “dissensual” experience and the importance of knowing “that everything can be
different, any old different” (Cohen, Beautiful Losers 195).
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