Permission (Canadian Literature) by S.D. Chrostowska

Permission (Canadian Literature) Reviews

• 
  Nathan "N.R." Gaddis

  Many readers believe that a novel serves as a node of relationship between an author and her reader ; that the rapport, not the novel, is the thing itself. This novel enacts that rapport ; but without leaving us novel=readers wanting. And one notices too, in the tradition of leaving=out (the anti- of putting=in), that a very important character is left out, pending his or her permission to be written into and among its extant lines. That permission granted only by you the reader=recipient. Recommended.
  
  
  
  ____________________________
  Jeff Bursey recommend'd. His review ::
  In which she is quoted as :: "I imagine that countless so-called postmodern novels draw attention to the limits of the novel and in that sense expand it. My book does not. Permission does borrow the trappings of the epistolary novel, but its aim is not to expand that genre. It’s to expand the art of letter-writing.
  "I wasn’t writing a novel."
  
  http://www.winnipegreview.com/wp/2014...
  
  Also, Dalkey! [thus, the 17 gr=ratings.]
  
  Also=also, she's got this new one called Matches ::
  
  http://punctumbooks.com/titles/matche...
  
  An excerpt from Matches ::
  "The Thinking Head"
  by S.D. Chrostowska
  
  http://bombmagazine.org/article/15747...
• 
  Paul Dembina

  Superficially this resembles works by WG Sebald in that the writer is a semi-fictional version of the author musing on various philosophical issues with the text peppered by a selection of found and author-owned images
  
  Not quite my cup of tea to be honest as I found much of the discussion a bit abstruse
• 
  Jeff Bursey

  More three and a half.
  
  For those interested in epistolary novels, this will be of interest. The narrator-writer is F.W., later Fearn Wren, a "false name," and there are no replies. The work is built around there not being any.
  
  Much is made of memory, creation, the life of the mind, and death (among other things). Perhaps too much is in the head. But the end result is well worth reading, thanks to a surprise that throws the reader back on him/herself.
• 
  Heronimo Gieronymus

  If one were to set out to begin in as reductive a manner as would seem possible, one might merely say of S.D. Chrostowska’s PERMISSION that it is an experimental novel written by a Canadian academic who was born and raised in Poland. This may not appear to tell you all that much, but it probably gives you a serviceable sense of what is in store—at the very least an inkling thereof. It is also an epistolary novel, though of the email rather than the postal variety, and it is fundamentally essayistic as well. A very nice, relatively lengthy synopsis-cum-blurb from Teju Cole on the back of the Dalkey Archive edition promises us that Chrostowska’s debut novel “will thrill readers of fearless stylists like Blanchot, Barthes, and Anne Carson.” Barthes and Anne Carson are both presented in this context as writers of essays and theoretical excursuses. (Anne Carson also happens to be among Canada’s very greatest writers, and her astounding book-length essay masterpiece EROS THE BITTERSWEET precedes PERMISSION in the Dalkey Archive Canadian Literature Series.) If we are going to speak of Maurice Blanchot in relation to PERMISSION—and we might well, as his words and his legacy play a key role in the text itself—we would be well-directed to ponder not those works which bare the influence of Kafka as much as those which were doing theory-by-other-means written in something not unlike provisional alliance with his poststructuralist contemporaries. S.D. Chrostowska has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. She has written extensively on the emergence of critical discourse in Germany, Poland, and Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries. She is currently a professor at York University, where she has held a post since 2011, three years before the publication of PERMISSION, her bio on the university’s website stating that her “work spans modern political and critical social theory, esp. Frankfurt School; history and theory of discursive and filmic genres; history of literary criticism; cultural memory and affect; and utopianism.” The emails that comprise PERMISSION are written by a woman named Fearn Wren (for her purposes here) who would appear to have a great deal in common with Chrostowska insofar as concerns interests and background; she herself addresses the “book-ward” writing she is engaging in by way of unidirectional correspondence as in large part precipitated by the demoralization of constantly having to produce standardized academic prose. So, yes, indeed: theory-by-other-means, new means and new theories and new forms. New language. If this is then an experimental essayistic novel giving space for an emergent voice in the process of being wrested from institutional sublation, it is struggling to establish a venue wherein some kind of foothold may or may not be available. I feel that it is at this point important to emphasize that what we end up with is not some dry intellectual exercise, but rather something far richer, both intimate and genuinely profound. PERMISSION is a momentous achievement and a book I love very, very much. The central conceptual conceit of the book is born of the way the email dispatches that comprise it are addressed as well as how this incorporates both the person who address them and the person to whom they are addressed. Fearn is writing the emails to a male artist at least part of whose work involves making films. It appears that he travels a lot for his art, so if he is purely a filmmaker, one would assume he is the festival circuit type, perhaps also a regular guest at academic institutions. Fearn addresses his filmmaking directly on multiple occasions. “P.S. By titling your last film RABBIT HUNT you gave yourself away (Renoir, Bresson…). As farfetched as it may sound, the rabbit hunt stands for the lunacy of cinema—as the moth’s dance does for the lunacy of writing.” My academic background is in Film. I know Robert Bresson’s MOUCHETTE and Jean Renoir’s LA RÈGLE DU JEU very well, having seen each multiple times, adoring each very much. Such references are hardly lost on me. Before the novel proper begins there is something of an abbreviated prologue, though it is not called that explicitly, it is not called anything, though it distinguishes itself by being written entirely in italics. It seems to be written in the voice of a detached observer, speaking of the male filmmaker and imagining how he may have responded to the emails we are about to read, merely conjecturing in curious detail (what his reactions “might” have been), because this distanced voice is evidently not privy to any germane intelligence. What we know for certain is that he never responded to any of the emails. Fearn has been in the same room as the man to whom she writes, but they have never spoken. After she has been sending these remarkable (and in some ways extremely revealing) messages for a considerable time, she tells him that she imagines that he knows her now well enough that he could probably recognize her on the street. The writing very much is an experiment. It is not trying to express what it means as much as it is searching for what to mean. The first messages are signed “F. W.” Subsequently they will come for a time to be signed “F. Wren.” It is not until late in the game that the author begins to sign her work “Fearn Wren.” If we are inclined to suspect that this revelation of the full name corresponds to some mounting quality of actualization, both for the voice and the project it mobilizes, this is undercut ironically by the full name appending a dispatch that deals in large part with masks, the author of the messages even going on to later declare the name she is using a “ludicrous moniker.” What’s in a name? I find it amusing that in trying to keep Chrostowska’s name etched in my memory I very quickly came upon a kind of mnemonic device whereby I reduced the first two syllables of her surname to “crossed out,” especially interesting when assessing a line late in the book which finds Fearn imagining the “the work clearing itself, erasing itself,” enabling a “clearing and erasing of meaning.” Behold the name. And strike it off. The final two emails, tellingly, are not signed at all. PERMISSION was published in 2013, a very decisive year in my life; I got clean and sober for the final time (one hopes), started getting treatment for mental illness in earnest, and slowly began to flourish. The email dispatches in the novel are sent between July of 2007 and April of 2008, another critical period in my own life, though an utterly hellacious one. During that period I was newly single, performing music publicly on a regular basis, and far gone into mania and addiction. For a while I was performing music as Catherine the Great, a telling touch of holy monster megalomania (perhaps especially indebted to Marlene Dietrich’s portrayal of the Empress). Provided the opportunity to play a concert in February of 2008 to be filmed as part of a series of concert DVDs, I was convinced by a local label honcho to use my real name, though in doing so I also decided to wear a literal mask, partially in homage to Charley Patton, the Delta Blues legend who in 1929 put out his third 78 record under the name The Masked Marvel, the promotional material for the record including images of a black man in a black mask. On stage in February of 2008 I wore an identical mask, the only difference being that it was white (as was I). I was referred to as “eternally mysterious” by a local arts rag. My actual name was part of a disguise, in something like the same way the name Fearn Wren appears in full for the first time at the bottom of an email in PERMISSION following a meditation on masks and disguises (“but it is the masks that draw one into the mythical worldview of their creators”) sent to her correspondent on November 22nd of 2007, thirteen days after my own twenty-eighth birthday and a little less than three months before that concert. Let me just drift a little farther afield for a moment before I return to a proper engagement with the text: I would like to mention the title of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1983 film masterpiece PRÉNOM CARMEN, which the director himself has said reflects the idea not only of a first name or given name, but rather the question of what epistemologically or even ontologically precedes the name. Behold the name, strike the name, cross it out (!), then behold the thing, the active industrious creative phenomena (created, creatural, creating). This all becomes extremely germane to PERMISSION. The name and the thing, the word and the thing. Perhaps the clearest thing that Fearn Wren says connects her to her correspondent, on account of his public statements, is a shared understanding of Blanchot's notion of the obscurity of language and the clarity of things. This focus on the clarity of things independent of various kinds of semiotic occlusion might well indeed be the province of the filmmaker, and it is clear that what the Fearn Wren voice is doing is attempting to find analogous clarity, as yet inchoate and not subject to the availability of simple formulations, by way of a creative process that would not be possible without the inspiration that is the compulsion to impose on this specific, unwitting, necessarily silent correspondent. She also knows that she is probably writing a book, repeatedly addressing this at length. We certainly know that somebody was writing a book based upon the evidence that we are reading it. The opening line of the first email addresses the recipient of the email as well as addressing the reader of the book: “Permit me to write to you today, beyond today.” I read those words nine days before the twelfth anniversary of that first dispatch. F.W. promises writing of “liquidity,” surging, with “no terra firma as far as the eye can see.” We search. We plan to venture far out in search of an adequate expressive mode, having established a context congenial theretofore. We are out to sea. In the second dispatch, F.W. promises a “book-ward” writing “incantatory because of certain repetition, repetition of a certain kind (rhapsodic? harrowing?). A repetition akin to fire that has much to do with fire. The fire within the moth is like the fire without, which burns it up: both are the same fire." F.W. goes on to meditate upon Deluez’s essay “To Have Done With Judgement,” rephrasing the philosopher’s basic conclusion that one ought to “obey only two forces: sympathy for things and antipathy towards things.” I might suggest that sympathy or antipathy reflects a relationship of thing with thing, whereas a judgment might more properly be understood to build rational systems on a foundation of language. There is a hint of dissatisfaction with her project and it will only be all the more dissatisfying if satisfaction is attained. If all of living is immutably creative, F.W. concludes that it might well be preferable if “creation were left to God.” In the third dispatch F.W. elaborates on the conception of the project as “an experiment in giving.” She considers at length practices related to giving, reflecting upon the legacy of Marcel Mauss, the founder of sociology, noting the archaic (but hardly merely archaic) ubiquity of “reciprocity, solidarity, authority,” though seeking with these book-ward correspondences to engage in a more radical giving, one that is in the process of being established and might not be achievable. An experiment in giving that lives through its self-propulsion and theoretically dies upon attaining the status of book (though you can hardly call on me to affirm any such death!). Let me attempt to breeze though some of the salient things F.W., F. Wren, and Fearn Wren alight upon in the subsequent disclosures, meditations, vertiginous et ceteras. A discussion of the dispassionate sun and the passionate moon leads to a remarkable series of riffs. Georges Bataille’s, Vincent van Gogh’s, and Judge Schreber’s relationship with the sun. The connection between lunacy and the lunar. Desire is the dark side of the moon. Double-blindness (the enabling condition of the one-sided interlocution at hand) does not equate with absence of light. All of this is positioned, naturally, in terms of an emergent philosophy of giving. Solitude becomes of major importance. The heaviness of solitude, the lightness of solitude. Solitude and creativity. The legacy of Montaigne. The legacy of so many others, from Kierkegaard’s fears and tremblings to more profitable retreats inward. (One could of course invoke Blanchot again in this context, though Fearn Wren does not.) There are recollections of a Polish childhood/adolescence, and return visits involving interactions with the failed painter Peter Vomela, whose story would appear to testify to the conundrums of genius. The cinephile academic make overtures to the filmmaker. Note this beautiful and beautifully inscrutable Stan Brakhage quotation: “Retention colors are the only true colors.” Memory, Locke, and the knowledge that out enterprises are “marred by oblivion.” “I relish the absurd challenges of work pursued in a sickbed.” Solitude, malaise, creativity, counterintuitive ecstasies. There is some dream analysis in the shadow of the Shoah done in counterpoint to one of the book’s many fascinating photographic images (shades of W. G. Sebald). Again and again the projection of the book-as-object is the projection of a death, the death above all of process. Process is messy but above all else vital nourishment. The book-as-object is reflected upon by way of consideration of a passage from Heidegger’s essay “Origin of the Work of Art.” Heidegger’s word ‘thingness,’ additionally employed, may cause one to stop and consider this book thing, this thing with all those words, a thing we might have occasion to ‘experience,’ with which we might ourselves enter into a ‘process.’ Reflection upon a youthful Polish mountain journey, “alpine remedy.” Out to sea, then up a mountain. Derrida: the peak that supersedes the summit “is higher than the height of the most high.” In recalling an aborted youthful attempt to both direct and star in a university production of HAMLET, Fearn arrives at the very funny and no doubt entirely credible determination that “As it seems to me now, in my vacillation to play Hamlet, I may have succeeded in playing him after all.” Academia may be stultifying, institutional, the work of those there ensconced a toil wholly instrumental, irrelevant, but it is also very much a sanctuary for a particular kind of lost soul in need of a little structure and direction, especially should such a person also be a high-volume vessel. Certainly, yes, I recall. “Once you have tasted the pleasures of knowledge, you are in it for the long haul. You find it hard to resist. Like a skier on the brow of a hill, propelled by the hill’s very incline, you let your runners carry you wherever they please. That blinding slope is not a disaster waiting to happen, but a destiny already happening. You fulfill this destiny willy-nilly, let come what may.” Upon completion of her dissertations and the sundry attendant whatnot, Fearn recalls returning to Poland, back up that mountain, and discovering there, far from Derrida’s peak and in the presence of a sick animal, that she has become the wrong kind of doctor. “Once upon a time philosophy doctors ranked in usefulness with animal doctors. But now it’s a different story.” A deadpan statement of mild amusement. The sort of amusement we might associate with air being slowly let out of a balloon (this metaphor mine). An ascent with its own built-in descent. Out to sea, up a mountain, and down a mountain into the dumb flat facts of the society. Pause for a breath, occupy a tenuous degree zero, aim your bow, and…dispatch. Mania and depression, the German word “augenblick.” In routinely writing about this writing, considering this experiment in giving that she very quickly seems to forget (and for quite some time) that she originally considered in just those terms, we might begin to think of PERMISSION as a perfect example of what Deleuze and Guattari called “minor literature.” Fearn never uses that specific term, but does finally come around to calling it the work of an “apprentice.” Page 179. Or more precisely pages 179 and 180. What can I say? Something of a true peak. It was on page 178 that Fearn suggested adorably that maybe her correspondent might now know her well enough to recognize her in the street. I feel the vulnerability of this lonely and hopeful statement (packaged protectively as it is in parentheses). Pages 179 and 180 are where the deep emotional investment of the work most forcefully confronts the termination-as-book (an ardent if almost timorous giving once again becoming central). Then considerations of monstrosity, genius, solitude. There is another German word. “Mißbildung”: “vocable” meaning “miscreant” or “physical malformation,” but also “miseducation,” which our no-longer-signing-any-name book-ward emailer sees as the “condition of possibility” for genius. A final passage to consider: “The older we become, the more we look back upon our younger selves as the intrepid heroes of classical mythology, and at our present selves as the weary chroniclers of their glorious or inglorious death, saved by no God.” Oh, dear, yes, very much yes. Myself as Masked Marvel, more desperately imperilled than the young man could possibly have then known. I am not a self. I am not a name. I am to an extent what I survived. Also some artifacts and baggage (scared, hurt child). Most of all I am the process(es) I mobilize as long as the blood and oxygen circulate. The distanced voice returns for a brief coda, situating us in the labyrinth, facing the prospect of unarmed combat (the most intimate kind). When we were young we were the “heroes of classical mythology” in the labyrinth. From where do we recount our mythologies? From the sea or the mountain? No. We are weary chroniclers but we are in that fucking labyrinth. The monster is imaginary and very real, a moving target. That title: PERMISSION. Okay. Why the filmmaker? Because of Blanchot, things and words? That’s not even half an answer. Is it arbitrary? Yes. And no. First of all just a thing-to-thing sympathy. “But for you, this book would have spilled into formlessness.” Well, yes, to be sure! Fearn has written these words. Right. The recipient is a kind of instrumental variable. The renunciation of the book-as-thing in terms of this self-consciously book-ward writing is not entirely disingenuous I don’t think, but it does speak to a dissonance that requires the work and stymies work generally. The work does require permission. It wants to happen and a door needs to be opened for it. Note that in looking at the origins of gift giving practices early in the text F.W. had mentioned the centrality of reciprocity, solidarity, and authority. The reciprocity here is not obvious. The filmmaker IS REQUIRED to do nothing. It is imperative that he not even confirm that he is reading the emails. Solidarity is equally outsourced into something like the imaginary. Is the authority exclusively in the hands of Fearn Wren, she of the “ludicrous moniker”? Well, no. An authority not acted upon might well assert itself as all the more authoritative. Of all the things that the filmmaker-artist-correspondent does not say two that come immediately to mind are “no” or “stop.” This strikes me as something far more than good manners. I have already spoken of this Fearn's stipulation that she requires a double-blindness in order to carry out her emergent work. I would like to conclude with this simple formula. Double-blindness + Double-authority = Double-permission.
• 
  Katrinka

  I thought this one would be right up my alley—but I had a hard time getting into it. This may have initially (and at the end) been due to the feeling that the author/narrator was attempting to reproduce Derrida's mannerisms in English. If it makes any sense, there was something very un-vulnerable about it; I couldn't get into it because I wasn't being invited/let in.
• 
  Scribble Orca

  See this excellent review by Jeff Bursey here:
  http://www.winnipegreview.com/wp/2014...
• 
  Jacob Wren

  Three sentences from Permission:
  
  
  
  Generally speaking, I am a calculating person - but know that terrific things can arise out of miscalculations.
  
  
  
  As it seems to me now, in my vacillation to play Hamlet, I may have succeeded at playing him after all.
  
  
  
  ...to secretly write about things anything but secret.