[Transit Books; 2024]
Tr. from the French by Sophie Lewis
Consisting of two separate but interrelated texts, Noémi Lefebvre’s Speak/Stop, translated by Sophie Lewis, is a meditation on the world, language, and the ways we make meaning of our lives, literature, and culture, all in relation to the world at large. Speak/Stop is a hybrid text, composed of a work of fiction that is narrated entirely by a chorus of voices, followed by a work of literary criticism by Lefebvre in which she theorizes genre in relation to Speak. This volume brings into more direct conversation two texts originally published separately, their presence here sharpening the ways they each allow us to more generously read the other. In propulsive and incisive language, Lefebvre first examines how we understand genre itself, in the fictional Speak, and then in Stop herself becomes a critic of that work, offering a sharp and clear assessment of its place in the literary landscape at large. Formally innovative and experimental, Speak/Stop is a hybrid model of the convergence of creative and critical work. As a dialogue between creative writing and criticism, Speak/Stop documents the contemporary world, its essence distilled into this work of experimental fiction and criticism, a meditation on the limits of genre and how we inscribe frameworks of literary value upon the formal possibilities of language. At the heart of how Lefebvre gets to this tension of literary categorization is also how we understand nationhood in the contemporary world—in the references to canonical French writers and theorists, discussions about complicity on a global scale, and examinations of capitalism and political structures of government, Speak/Stop is a meditation on the interrelationship between nation and literature—what categorizations of literature, both on a language and spatial level, and on the formal level of genre too, obscure about how language itself works, how language allows us to read ourselves anew, with a clarity and sharpness only possible through ambiguity, through fluidity foreclosed by the limiting frameworks of genre, national literatures, and nation-state.
Speak, the first section of the books, is an assemblage of fragmented voices; in pieces of dialogue, there is a sense of contradiction everywhere, as it remains impossible to find a singular self, a singular voice, in these sentences. The text opens disorientingly; Lefebvre writes: “—May I begin? / —Yes, but do remember we are delicate / —That’s why you can’t address us in just any tone[.]” This first line is the only one in the entirely of Speak where a singular voice speaks; beyond this point, Lefebvre moves into a collective articulation of self, using only the ‘we.’ Here, there’s an ambiguity to who is speaking, at any given moment; Speak is not a text that lends itself to a coherent reading experience, to linear meaning making. In its opening, it is impossible to mark what Speak is about, in any sense, but the collective voice compellingly moves us forward, indicative here of potential breakings among the individuals contained in this ‘we.’ The propulsiveness of the ‘we’ is the nation-state’s promise of collectivity, subsuming the individual into the collective, but there are breakages in idea and thought as we move through the piece.
Early in Speak, Lefebvre writes: “—We dreamed of becoming free people but it didn’t happen[;]” later, on the same page, she continues: “—But we’ve given up on that / —Because our phones have been hacked[.]” In these lines, we see collectivity in relation to nation at work in Lefebvre’s project; here, the larger sociopolitical tension of reading nationhood and the borders and frameworks that come with it. These lines also draw our attention to the tense juxtaposition of the phones in contrast to nation—the promise of the internet and technology to cross borders, but Lefebvre sharply here points us to the collusion of technology with the project of nation-making; the early speculative possibilities of the internet become subsumed, in the present day, into the service of the nation-state and global borders, no longer an expansive space of mobility.
Lefebvre writes in one section: “—And we are outraged by the inhumanity to which we bear witness / —And may be complicit / —We are all guilty / —Morally complicit, in any case [.]” These lines, in their choppy, disorienting nature, as they move from bearing witness to possible complicity to certain guilt and then back to moral complicity, highlight the fractures inherent to the kind of collective community of something as large as the nation, as we see hints of varying perspectives come to the fore in this articulation. Further in Speak, Lefebvre writes too that “—Human resources is an oxymoron the vast fallout of which we prefer not to engage with / —It would be distressing / —We prefer to believe it’s just a figure of speech / —But figures of speech can often be the trees that are hiding the forest[.]” This idea is at the heart of what Lefebvre examines here—what is elided in service of the nation-state, and how language both obscures and makes visible even as it is constrained by category. The framing of a “prefer[ence] to believe” also gets at the heart of the material and affective tensions that shape Speak—how the figures of speech are made real in Lefebvre’s comparison of them to trees, something both materially grounded and shifting as we grapple with the climate crisis.
Speak rarely utilizes the singular personal pronoun “I,” instead largely shifting between “we” and “you” as these speakers conceive of themselves. Speak, in its usage of this perspective, becomes a disorientating refraction of the pillars of the current world, its limits and constraints, in the age of the Internet and of late capitalism and the climate crisis and the contemporary nation-state, sharply drawing our attention to the collusions between these framing structures of the present with a formal fracture that is propulsive even as it perpetually disorients. Lefebvre writes: “—We are at the mercy of the powerful effects money exerts through the hope of having it and the fear of its lack.” Lefebvre here documents a collective sense of the material conditions of the world in the contemporary moment; in this cacophony of voices, what remains central is the complicity that the pronouns of “we” and “you” take on, becoming a way to pull the reader into the world as it exists here. Literature is not a space of abstraction, but a way to articulate the possibilities for the world beyond genre, beyond national literatures, beyond the nation-state.
Stop, the second section of the book, takes as its point of departure the nature of Speak as a literary project, attempting to theorize genre, literature, and the relationship between artist and art. Lefebvre writes as the opening: “All right, I admit it, I’m making a mistake. I want to point out that this mistake will send no one to prison…” A marked departure from Speak/Stop takes on a literal sense here, orienting us as we move into the second section—as we exit the cacophonous world of Speak, Lefebvre invites us to sit with the self momentarily, to linger in it, the repetitive personal pronoun “I” here, thrice in immediate succession in this sentence. Away from the conversational space of Speak, Lefebvre’s voice is central to Stop, her self coming to the fore; she writes of the nature of commentary on one’s work: “Why should I stoop to commentate on my art as if it were my style?” And even as she here dismisses the nature of self-commentary, through the course of the essay, there is a productive thinking at work here, an awareness of the work in the world, and a generous, careful, and always sharp sense of what it means for a work to circulate in the world, and how the author too thereby circulates in the world. Lefebvre is finely attuned to how Speak will be categorized in the world, both in relation to genre as well as to nation, and in this attunement, this devotion to considering form, invites us to move beyond this limiting means of circulation. Literature, as Lefebvre reads it, cannot be reduced to language, or genre, or nation—fluidity is more productive, more generous, more expansive. Lefebvre says of Speak that it is a “madhouse of earthworm sentences,” a framing in which Speak takes on a living quality, a sense of being sentences housed in a larger work, a collective made by being in a shared space, a kind of formal quality that mirrors the two objects she theorizes, literature and nation.
Here Lefebvre’s work, functioning in a more tradition essayistic form, takes on the work of thinking through the role of art in relation to nation, the way we understand the role of the artist in relation to the political structures of nation and nation-making, how the circulation of literature contributes, in turn to how a nation mythologizes itself. Lefebvre, in the majority of this section, thinks through conventions of genre, attempting to arrive at a definition of sorts for the place of Speak in literature by going through a list of what genres it is not—here, Speak is made by exclusion from conventions of genre, rather than ways of being in genre. In successive sections titled in the format of “Speak is not….”, Lefebvre takes us through why Speak is not a novel or a poem or a play or a radio play or a film, drawing our attention to the way Speak only uses dialogue—no other sections, no full paragraphs. Formally, Speak and Stop are drastically different, which is productive in reading them as thematically linked; in Stop, the long chunks of prose, and footnotes, allow us to read Speak expansively, making us read and think anew the possibilities of the hybrid and fragmentary and the reading experiences they allow us, necessarily at the peripheries of coherence, as a central means of articulating a world beyond the constraints of nation and genre.
Speak/Stop, initially disorienting in its framing, becomes, by the end of the two books, a deeply considered reflection of intersections and convergences of nation and literature—how language mediates the relationship between both, how in some senses, literature makes nation through its desires to categorize. Lefebvre and Lewis offer us a careful, sharp look into the limits of genre, the building blocks of literature and nation and the structures and systems we live within, and open up the possibilities of the hybrid form in literature; what it might offer us to situate and take literature to more experimental ways, and how these new frameworks allow us to negotiate new understandings of the self in relation to place and nation.
Vika Mujumdar was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. Her work has appeared in Public Books, the Cleveland Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.
This post may contain affiliate links.
