Pièces d'eau ; suivi de Lisibilités de la trace dans The Obituary de Gail Scott
The creative work pièces d’eau is a collection of poetic prose texts that tease out fractures between the terms through which a place is made intelligible and the sensory information they seek to designate. The pieces each invoke forms of life constituting an externality to the architectural, patrimonial and economic development of place. Whether they proceed from a hagiographic impulse, a fractional knowledge, a struggle to form sentences, or a hysteric certainty, the pièces d’eau of the title are indisposed, involuntary documents of the progress of which they are the refuse. The essay, Lisibilité de la trace dans The Obituary de Gail Scott, addresses legibility as an epistemological, historiographic and aesthetic notion. Reading traces calls for a constantly renewed engagement with material at the edges of legibility. In The Obituary, the deployment of an aesthetic articulated around the paradigm of the trace mobilizes a deep ambivalence with regards to processes by which the past becomes legible in the present. Written across the aporias of historiographic thought, Scott’s poetic and narrative work in this novel beckons a reappraisal of the political imaginary of knowledge and of the literary modalities that define our sensate engagement with the past.
trace lisibilité prose poetry literary aesthetics historiography poetics legibility