Being Cut in Half

 Posted by at 12:54 pm  Atelier
Dec 072009
 

… Or le dialogue in the original 1957 version.

 

I deeply don’t know if Beckett could have had access to those four essays by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, which form the collection of his work now given the title The Dialogic Imagination (…tr. Caryl Emerson, Michael Holquist, (1981) University of Texas Press), or what connection, if any, le dialogue has to Bakhtin’s discussion of ‘double-voicedness’ , mnogoyazychie (‘polyglossia’), or raznorechia (‘heteroglossia’), and the more recent phenomenon known as the “Bakhtin Industry”…

 

… But with as much of the call of the Franco-Americano (Latino) as the Anglophone versions in translation, and a very big book by Roberto Bolano, which we kept mistakenly talking about as 2066 (2666), at night time I took my knife and sliced through the cover (at page 444), the last big book I did this to being Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman (at page 426), East and West…

 

… The two halves fell apart, exposing a world inhabited by drug addicts, pornographic incidents of casual sex, criminal activity by the worst kind of liars and thugs, and the many voices of the poor.

In other words, it was not a conversation in the ordinary sense of the word.