Screen Tests

by Kate Zambreno

  UNHINGE NAME TURNS MEMBRANE, BODY TO COME

  When the question is raised of writing an introduction, one thinks that the books that need introductions are those that are opaque, and are thus impertinent to introduce. This is supposed to be an entrance or window. I wanted to have four cells on this page. Four cells would be a grid or window. The book is a dark room entitled New Essays. I wanted this writing to be all interior. The self must be more than what is inside and outside. What is not the self.

  When writing The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector was going through difficulties in her family life, but the work eludes the autobiographical. It is only of a faceless woman alone in the room. She is frustrated by this “room.” What can contain her. What is “narrative.” What is “I.” What is a “book.” Who is to say. The room is unstable and becomes the narrator. “Before I entered the room, what was I?” G.H. asks. “I was what others had always seen me be, and that was the way I knew myself.” When she enters her maid’s room, she observes that the room is the portrait of an empty stomach. She enters into a dialogue with a cockroach that she decapitates with a door, then ultimately ingests its oozing entrails. One must ideally stand up when reading this. A text must be vertical and should be ingested within the body.

  Over the period of hours during which I have written this introduction, I have lost my body, my human frame. Franz Kafka wrote his story “The Judgment” in one sitting from September 22 through September 23, 1912, from 10 PM to 6 AM. He writes in his diary that his leg grew so stiff from sitting over that eight-hour period that he had to physically pull them out from under the desk, like he had been cut in two. He felt, he wrote, such a fearful joy like the language came out of him so freely, like he was advancing over water, like he was not even a body. The story “The Judgment” takes place mostly in two separate rooms, the father is in bed, and the son is at his desk, and he goes back and forth, and they flow into each other.

  I go back to my book. The psychotic person has their boundaries collapsed, and cannot distinguish between outside and inside, self and other. I have read this quoted in another introduction, because it is not likely you have read it, as the book is out of print. When Shulamith Firestone was found dead in her fifth-floor walk-up in the East Village, the authorities thought she might have been dead for some time, but her family did not permit an autopsy. She was thought to have a version of Capgras delusion, where one fears that loved ones are actually doubles, wearing masks of the formers’ faces. When I first moved to New York City, I would walk to her apartment and stand outside, looking through the window, and would stay there for some time.

  HEAD, HOUSE, LIGHT

  Can a text be a house. Can a paragraph be a room. Can a sentence be a window. Wittgenstein’s sister Gretl thought helping to design her large city house in Vienna would be a good activity for her brother the philosopher. Wittgenstein was still recovering from the war, and, he thought, philosophy. He was working as an assistant gardener at a monastery outside the city, and was mulling one of two possibilities for the future: either becoming a monk or committing suicide. He was in a form of exile, owing to what has been referred to as the Haidbauer incident, when working as an elementary schoolteacher at a village school in rural Austria, he hit an eleven-year-old boy, one Josef Haidbauer, so hard on the head during class that the boy collapsed and fell unconscious. There was a hearing, in which the judge requested a psychiatric examination—Wittgenstein fled, although he returned a decade later to apologize to the students, who were now older. Except for hitting the slower students, Wittgenstein was a wonderful teacher: he designed buildings and steamships with them, dissected animals, took long treks in the woods and identified plants, took the train to Vienna and discussed the various architecture of the buildings there. Even though he was a steel heir, he had given his fortune away, and slept in the kitchen, eating only oatmeal out of a pot he never cleaned. Of course, his family was concerned. There is a letter from his brother Paul, the one-armed pianist, to one of Wittgenstein’s friends, worried that his brother was not eating correctly for his colitis. He was supposed to only assist the architect, a student of Adolf Loos, on the design of the house, one of those cold modernist constructions of three white cubes. He was put in charge of the interiors: windows, doors, doorknobs, and radiators. As befitting the fastidious philosopher who once studied aeronautical engineering, he became absorbed in the project and completely took over, even moving into the small architect’s office to live there full-time. He had to design the door handles himself, which took him a year. The heights for the door handles were minutely designed according to door type. It took another year to design the radiators. Each of the large vertical windows was covered with a metal screen, moved by a pulley system Wittgenstein designed. He insisted that everything be built according to exact proportions—including having the ceiling raised by thirty millimeters. He even wanted to make his own version of a head that he had disliked in one of the sculptures that were commissioned for the entranceway—his sister placed the plaster cast of the head he designed in the house. Of course, upon its completion, she didn’t want to live there, and eventually the house was sold to the Bulgarian embassy. After finishing the house three years later, he returned to Cambridge and philosophy, wanting to work now on visual space. In his later Philosophical Investigations, he imagined thought as taking place in a room. “A person caught in a philosophical confusion is like a man in a room who wants to get out but doesn’t know how.” Wittgenstein himself liked to think in spartan surroundings—sometimes a chair in a room was all that he needed.

  On the Puppet Theater

  For a long time I was interested in puppets. This is what I studied in graduate school for the one year, performance theory, with a specialty in puppets. There was a story or essay, whatever it was, I read from that time, Kleist’s “On the Puppet Theater,” that he published in a Berlin newspaper in 1810. In this piece of writing, which is a dialogue of sorts, the narrator converses with a friend who is a dancer, about why he’s so often in attendance at marionette performances in the town square. The dancer friend replies with a reverie about the gracefulness of puppets, because of their mechanical nature. It is a mysterious piece of writing, something like a speculative essay. The conversation feels stilted, like the speakers are puppets and the writer is pulling their strings, making them walk and talk. It’s always stayed with me. There was a time, after school, when I tried to apprentice with a local puppet theater. I didn’t last long. I realized that to be a puppeteer I had to be good with a hammer, with making things, and I instead wanted to dreamily play with dolls, as I played with dolls until a very late age. I imagined being a puppeteer like something out of The Double Life of Veronique. After my mother died, so around this same period, I actually fell in love with a puppeteer. He was a Buddhist who had studied critical theory at Berkeley, and worked out at the same gym as Kathy Acker in San Francisco, or so he said. We would take long walks together and debate secular death, whether there was a God or an afterlife. He was a good deal older than me, deeply handsome, and very close to his parents. We waited a long time to have sex, because of his enforced celibacy due to a sex addiction, and when we did, he was often impotent. His last love was from a decade ago and was now an actress on an HBO TV show. I have a memory of us lying together, sexless, while Godard’s Breathless played on a small TV screen at the foot of the bed, which even at the time I found somewhat ironic, or meaningful. He was a kind man who sat at my grandmother’s dining room table and talked about people in the old neighborhood. He broke up with me because he thought I was too mean, or too young. I wish we had stayed in touch. He must be much older now. When I first moved here and saw the exhibit of Greer Lankton’s puppets at Participant Inc, I thought of him. I had only known Greer Lankton before because of Peter Hujar’s black-and-white photographs of her, her graceful porcelain body, and also Nan Goldin’s vibrant punk wedding photos. Greer Lankton grew up in Flint, Michigan, and began making dolls as an e
scape from bullying as a child, tormented by her gender. She died in Chicago of an overdose. I took so many photographs of her puppets at the show, her beautiful and grotesque dolls, of her Diana Vreeland, Candy Darling, Jackie O., these heroine shrines of a stylized femininity. I felt so alive being there.

  Shorts

  There was the one who wore shorts every day, even in the winter. I wanted to know why. We hung out at the same bar. I found him charismatic, an intensity like he was from a different planet. He was tall with a bird face and sand-colored features. He had the same name as everyone else. I had heard, from his bandmate, that besides being a brilliant guitarist, he was also a writer, and had actually published a novel. It didn’t seem like that could be true—that someone could publish a novel. Or maybe it was just stories, that he had published stories, or maybe he had just written a novel or stories. Maybe it surprised me because he didn’t speak very much, but that’s probably because he was on heroin. Everyone in his band, which was revered in that city, was from the same dingy suburban kind of town that I was from. One night, he followed me into the bathroom of the bar and I let him, and we stood there, swaying at each other. After the bar closed, we talked like crazy people in the street. He would say something to me, quite close to my face, and then I would say something in response, and then he would say something, maybe grabbing my arm in protest, and I would say something, shaking my arm away, and it might seem like we were fighting or in some screwball comedy, but what he said did not correspond to what I replied. And so on. At one point he lunged at me and kissed me and our faces knocked together. Or did he cup my face with his large dry hands? We were standing by a stop sign. He took me home, to a tiny room with no bed in a larger apartment that at least one other girl occupied whom I remember meeting embarrassed around the kitchen island, which was right outside of his room, which was really a mostly empty room. Where do you sleep? I asked. He smiled again, in that eerie way. I think he just kind of collapsed on the floor and that’s where he slept. I found myself being seduced by him still, despite him not having a bed. He showed me a picture of his ex-girlfriend who had just broken up with him. In the photograph she was completely naked. He didn’t respond when I asked him things he didn’t want to answer. Then he showed me some anal beads that were on his floor. He was laughing when he picked them up and showed them to me. What I wish I had asked, then, was whether these were clean anal beads or anal beads that he had recently used and then, removing them, threw them on the floor, or whether these were anal beads he had used with his ex or someone else, or anal beads he used on himself. We spent the night together. I mean, I think we spent the night together, but I don’t know where we slept. We wrestled with our clothes on over his laundry for a while. He was a good kisser; his tongue was surprisingly agile and yet tender. For multiple reasons, penetration or removing our clothes seemed unlikely. By the end of our brief encounter, I still did not know why he wore shorts all the time, yet I felt sufficiently appeased in my curiosity. I began to dislike the way he and his friend, the lead singer, laughed at me. He would call me at home from the bar’s pay phone or wherever he was on tour with his band and say my full name in that weird laughing drawl, then hang up. Since then, the lead singer of his band has become a successful novelist, or at least a published novelist. He’s seen as a reclusive sort of underground artist in that city. The last time I was home was three years ago, and I went to a reading at a bar with S. The lead singer went up to me and began talking to me, as if he knew me, as if we were old friends or at least acquaintances. I wanted to say to him, You don’t know me, the published writer, you knew that waitress you talked down to fifteen years ago, but I didn’t say anything. I have tried to look up the boy in shorts to see what he’s up to. He’s still in the same band or set of bands. His Wikipedia page is only in German.

  Autofellatio

  The boy on the fire escape at the party told me of his manuscript that opened with an act of autofellatio. David loved it, he said to me, and even though I knew no real writers at the time, I still knew which David he meant. We made out a little, on the fire escape, even though he profoundly irritated me. I wonder if he wrote better than he kissed. I wonder if he ever published his novel.

  Replies to My Male Graduate Student

  No, I still have not seen that documentary on Susan Sontag.

  Thank you for noting the correct pronunciation of “Wittgenstein.”

  Andrea Dworkin!

  You hear that a renowned biographer of women writers, a man, is writing an essay on the question of “female beauty” and genius. You hear this from your friend, a renowned novelist. Your friend tells you the biographer’s working thesis is that women geniuses (writers and artists) are often described by their contemporaries as beautiful, even if we might think of their photographs as homely. So perhaps beauty is also the power or quality of mind, your friend writes you, or so this renowned biographer, a man, theorizes. You fire off a series of emails to your friend. You actively dislike, you write, the emphasis on a woman writer’s appearance in conversations about her work. You are tired of reading that quote that Clarice Lispector looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf. This is distinct from acknowledging that Lispector’s work is so much about vanity and the longing for beauty, ugly Macabea who wants to be Marilyn Monroe. And also, you write, about decreation, the desire to transcend beyond a face or the limits of a body. Sontag partially became Sontag because everyone took her photograph, yes, but the essays have nothing to do with her face. And are we talking about these writers’ youth? Or when some of them created their greatest works, once they were older, when their work can often be about exploring this gap? The narrator in Duras’s The Lover elegizing her face when young, how this face hasn’t collapsed, has kept its contours, but still it is a face laid waste. And what about, you write your friend, Carson McCullers! (That photograph of the hunched-over McCullers having lunch with her friend Marilyn Monroe.) No one considered Simone Weil beautiful! Flannery O’Connor! Edith Wharton! Gertrude Stein! Violette Leduc was famous for her ugliness! Later in the day, one email, all caps—ANDREA DWORKIN!

  Of course you realize later that this renowned biographer would most likely not think of Andrea Dworkin as a genius. Andrea Dworkin in her overalls. And yet the brilliance and intensity (even wrongness) of Intercourse. He wouldn’t see it.

  Burned

  “With my burnt hand I write about the nature of fire.” This is a line in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, often attributed to Bachmann, although Bachmann is repeating a line from a letter written by Gustave Flaubert. I am collecting the slender obituaries in fiction of “the most intelligent and famous female poet that our country has produced in the past century,” as writes her friend Thomas Bernhard. Ingeborg Bachmann died at the age of forty-seven in a hospital in Rome three weeks after being badly burned in her bathtub, by a fire started from a cigarette she didn’t extinguish, having fallen asleep after taking what had become a regular diet of pills. The circumstances remain mysterious. She was one of the only people who seemed to like Bernhard as a person. His grief spiky and clear in his brief story of her death in The Voice Imitator, a death that he sees as some form of suicide, a result of banishment, persecution, and exile, from not only her native Austria but also the jealousy of female rivals. A self-immolation. In Malina the narrator burns scraps of paper at night, as a way to light her cigarettes, the last cigarette, now another. This was the only novel that was finished in her Todesarten series, her Death Styles. Fleur Jaeggy mourns her friend in her brief story that recollects a memory of trying to speak with her of growing old together, but how old age seemed impossible for Ingeborg, a horror. The imaginary room of their old age furnished with blond Biedermeier. Jaeggy ends the story with years passing by in a sentence, then how she visited her friend every day in the burn unit at Sant’Eugenio. The story is entitled “The Aseptic Room.” How a memory can feel like that. But is it ever a room free from contamination? Seven years earlier, in 1966, Clarice
Lispector, another literary genius of the twentieth century, also famed for her glamour, almost died by taking a sleeping pill and falling asleep with an unextinguished cigarette, setting fire to her three-bedroom apartment in Rio de Janeiro. She was forty-six. Ingeborg was forty-seven. My friend M. who is that age, and a brilliant writer, writes to me today that she is reading a biography of Rainer Maria Rilke. She is getting to the part where he’s dying, at the age she is now. When she turned that age, she wrote me, I am now the age of Max Ernst when he met Leonora Carrington, I am creepy-old-man age! Also the age of female geniuses setting themselves on fire, I could add, but don’t. We are talking about other things. That night Clarice Lispector woke up to flames, and badly burned her entire body attempting to put out the fire with her own hands, in order to save her papers. Everything was lost. Her son Paulo dragged her out. Her nylon nightgown melted to her body. The bloody footprints across the carpeting. Her right hand, her writing hand, was completely disfigured. She spent the next three months in a hospital recovering, in terrible pain. She could eventually type with her hand again, although it resembled, her biographer writes, a blackened claw. Thankfully, her biographer writes, her face was not burned. Although this was the age her beauty left her entirely, he writes, the age of forty-six, her weight gain from her convalescence, although she was still striking, her famous beauty had now left her. She struggled with this, he writes. She had to remake herself completely; from this person who was Clarice Lispector, this name, she had to become someone else entirely. As I am writing this, I am thinking of how Susan Sontag’s young son would stand by her desk as she wrote, lighting cigarette after cigarette.