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BOOKFORUM, SUMMER 2018
Anomie of the People
A fiction of the French revolts
JASON E. SMITH
LESLIE KAPLAN IS a French writer born in Brooklyn (1943), or an American
author who lives in Paris and writes in French. The daughter of a US
“information officer” busy with anti–Communist Party propaganda in the
post-Yalta culture wars on the Continent, Kaplan moved to Paris as a
child and stayed when her parents left. As a student, she was
radicalized in the movement against the Algerian War. By 1968, she had
joined a small Maoist organization that had recently begun its “settling
down” campaign, sending personnel into large factories across France to
make contact with the most militant workers. Kaplan had settled in a
Lyon washing-machine factory when the strike wave of May and early June
1968 intervened; she would remain within the libertarian-communist left
afterward, into the next decade. She began publishing in the early ’80s,
and her first book, L’excès—l’usine (1982), distilled in an outwardly
poetic form her experience of “the factory.” Now being published in
translation (by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap) for the first time, by
Oakland-based Commune Editions, Excess—The Factory resurfaces in English
at a moment when the factory, for the workers of much of Europe and
North America, seems almost an anachronism: replaced by the big-box
store, the warehouse, and the logistics cluster, when not by prisons
blooming upstate.
The topos of the factory and the mine belongs to an estimable if minor
tradition of the French novel: Zola’s Germinal, Céline’s Journey, Robert
Linhart’s The Assembly Line. Kaplan’s writing here is distinguished from
these models by its emphatic purging of the telling anecdote, the
instructive story, in favor of the deployed detail that (as Kaplan
elsewhere puts it) “is the condensation of many different levels, an
infinity of levels.” Drawn out into nine “circles,” her anti-epic is
superficially modeled on Dante’s poem. We might be descending into
Blake’s satanic mills, but the arrangement is stripped of the Inferno’s
theological trappings, allegorical mechanics, or cosmological order
(instead: “the great factory, the universe”). As we pass from circle to
circle, we seem to move from factory to factory, or from workshop to
workshop. We—or rather the plural, faceless “you” called into being by
the narrator—-operate in a continuous present: We make boxes, cables,
crackers, rubber parts, headlights, ultimately just “things.” The sense
of time is as uncertain as the identity of the narrator or the narrated
“you”: “You are outside of time, under the sky of the factory”; “You
move indefinitely, outside of time”; “Time is elsewhere: only space
exists, infinite, in your mind”; “Time stays there, like a box”; “Time
is outside, in things.” Like time, features commonly attributed to the
subject are, in the factory, made things, rendered pastelike, viscous:
“Thought is sticky”; “The gaze sticks to everything like a fly” (echoes,
here of Sartre’s Nausea). There is little sense, as in the Inferno, of
descent, or of a preparation for elevation. We are at rock bottom. But
the concentricity proposed by the book’s structure suggests our
uncertain movements are zeroing in on something. Violence seems around
every bend. If most of what we do is making (boxes, cables, etc.), the
place itself, its vastness, threatens, acts: “Space, space kills.” By
the book’s end, this verb is given a palpable agency. We see, in a city
square, a little girl playing with a “grey” baby: “At one point the
woman who might be the mother says to the little girl: Come on, you’re
going to kill the baby. The little girl lifts up the baby and asks: Do
you think I’m going to kill you?” Fin.
There are no men in the factory. The workshops, the assembly lines, are
as segregated as an Orthodox synagogue. The factory is vaster than the
plant itself: It is the surrounding neighborhood, the city, and beyond
(“the great factory, the universe”). Everywhere the gaze alights, there
is no world, only waste: “All space is occupied: all has become waste.
The skin, the teeth, the gaze.” The shadow cast by the factory is
terrifying; on its outskirts, “you see torn off mouths, lost hair,
burned bodies,” and “piled up barrels, shovels and skins.” Among these
wastes, there are women, only women: beautiful, freshly made-up,
Yugoslavian, black, hunchbacked, reading books, missing teeth, “used,”
“damaged.” One of these women—perhaps all of them—is “there, infinite.”
A flash of desire, a current of solidarity, runs between you and this
“infinite”: “You love her, you love her so much.”
Throughout Excess—The Factory, not least in that final scene in which
the mother chides her child not to kill that “grey” baby, we hear Mary
Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days” playing over and over again on the café
jukebox. The song was the number-one hit single in France in October
1968, just months after the general strike of May and June. “We’d live
the life we choose / We’d fight and never lose / Those were the days /
Oh yes those were the days.”The “universe” of the factory is, in
Kaplan’s demanding little book, shot through with a crepuscular light.
Because the factory had already begun to recede as a privileged site in
the political, social, and historical imagination of the West by the
time Kaplan wrote Excess—The Factory, its hulking presence might feel
remote to a contemporary reader. The worldlessness and waste, the sheer
terror of the place, remains, and will nevertheless ring a resonant bell.
Jason E. Smith is currently writing a book on automation to be published
by Reaktion in 2019, and is Chair of the Graduate Art MFA program at
ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena.
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