Cancelled Confessions by Claude Cahun

CANCELLED CONFESSIONS

or

DISAVOWALS

Susan de Muth

Published by Thin Man Press

Distributed by Smashwords

Copyright © 2022 Susan de Muth

Table of Contents

Translator’s Notes

Original Preface by Pierre Mac Orlan (1930)

Aveux non Avenus

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Translators often report that the process of translation is the deepest form of reading. Of all the texts I have worked with, Aveux non Avenus is the one that most rewards such close study. Edited and re-edited by the author, Claude Cahun, over a ten-year period, the text is a web of tightly woven, well-resolved short pieces of writing that elude general categorisation.

Making a translation of such work is particularly challenging. The reader will note that two titles are proposed in this edition, the original Aveux non Avenus presenting an abundance of possible meaning, allusions, associations etc. that neither Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions fully conveys. The former perhaps more accurately represents both the sense of the original title and the work in its entirety. While the latter can claim some historical authenticity in that Cahun’s publisher, Adrienne Monnier, had commissioned ‘la confession’ which Cahun enigmatically claimed to have denied her, cancelling, as it were, her hopes: ‘N’ayez pas grand espoir,’ she wrote to her publisher shortly before she submitted her final manuscript.

As a writer, Cahun combines the concentrated economy of the poet with great originality of thought and style. Her sentences, as well as the ideas they express, often demand a great deal of application if their meaning and value are to be fully understood and appreciated. Having unwrapped Cahun’s thoughts, anecdotes, dreams, proverbs, observations etc, from their complex packaging of words, images, references (often obscure and oblique), puns, colloquialisms, aphorisms and word-play, the translator aspires to rewrap them in a similar fashion but in another language altogether.

Essentially libertarian, Cahun rejected all forms of constraint, including those imposed by ‘truth’ and grammar! Her ‘confessions’ are often briskly retracted at the last moment, long passages of evocative (and provocative) angst undercut by a facetious postscript which is itself unreliable.

Cahun often rejects the gender specificity of the French language, frequently shifting from the confessional (and non-gender specific) first person, ‘I’, to the third person, ‘he’ or ‘she’, at the same time shifting, or obscuring, gender in ways which are not always translatable into English (for example when it is indicated only by the masculine and feminine form of the adjective). This double, or non-specific, gender identification obviously has political as well as personal and artistic significance. Cahun often ironizes the ‘feminine’ and, of course, her choice of name (Claude, instead of her birth name, Lucy) obscured her own gender identity.

Cahun uses these and other linguistic devices – for example, abrupt, inexplicable changes in tense – to release grammatical shocks that are at once unsettling and stimulating, adding to the overall effect of a Rimbaudian ‘derangement of the senses’.

Cahun’s style presents its own dilemmas for the translator. There is a constant drive towards role-playing so that one is never sure which of these myriad characters (if any) is Cahun herself. As a result, there are many voices – gung-ho swagger, breath-taking blasphemy, psychedelic inner adventurer, love-struck helplessness, etc – all of which one endeavours to reproduce. Furthermore, she deliberately undermines our linguistic expectations, producing a conscious awkwardness, whether through subversion of grammar, logic, gender, value, or simply the everyday association of words and phrases. Again, the translator must decide whether to retain this awkwardness - which jolts the reader, making them go beyond the usual boundaries of thought and language – or present them in a more ‘readable’ manner. I have opted for the former.

I do not want to give the reader the impression that these are turgid, ‘difficult’ writings. On the contrary, when not engaged in ‘confessions’, experiments, or political and philosophical discourse, Cahun is an adept entertainer (she enjoyed several theatrical collaborations with Pierre Albert-Birot). Her style of writing changes abruptly when she delves into her ‘mental theatre’ to recount bizarrely comical conversations or events, hyperbolic mythologies of her own invention, dark perversions of traditional fairy tales and hilariously subversive re-workings of stories from the Bible.

Unlike much ‘subversive’ writing, which loses its ability to shock as time progresses, Cahun’s texts avoid this fate by the sheer originality of her inventiveness and imagination. While the notion of a ‘gamey host’ will undoubtedly offend a Catholic more than an atheist, the image remains extremely perturbing and rich in sub-textual allusions (to transubstantiation, for example). Likewise, much of Cahun’s imagery contains, or leads to, a rich web of associated meaning or thematic reference in the manner of a metaphysical conceit, and which I have endeavoured to reproduce.

Certain characters reappear (often in different guises) throughout the book, but there is no narrative cohesion in what is, essentially, a collection of written fragments. A collage of writings to complement the photographic montages that Cahun is perhaps better-known for. A sense of unity is provided (in both art forms) by Cahun’s recurrent themes, such as disgust with the physical body (Cahun was probably anorexic), mirrors (she was also narcissistic!), duality, masks and so on.

Cahun described her photographic compositions (often made in collaboration with Suzanne Malherbe – aka Marcel Moore – her lifelong companion) as ‘visual poems’, and the close relationship between her writing and visual art is worthy of further exploration by the reader... to whom I commend this remarkable work.

Susan de Muth

(Revised) October 2022

PREFACE by Pierre Mac Orlan (1930)

Introducing these pages is not an easy task. Where the aim of literature is to set itself free, it eludes most criticism, particularly that of professional critics.

Mademoiselle Claude Cahun, niece of Marcel Schwob (the author of Vies Imaginaires), has inherited a state of torment so richly productive that one should not wish her rid of it.

This book is almost entirely dedicated to ‘adventure’. Perhaps one should consider exactly how the author would define this word.

I think that the adventure here is, by its very nature, interior, but it is presented to us in a series of cinematic glimpses which emphasize the cerebral, rather than plastic, nature of the enterprise.

This rather cruel poetic work is infused with a very peculiar light, emanating from emotional ingredients of perfectly human origin.

The undeniably fantastic beauty of these images has at its heart a series of feelings perfectly common to all, such as love when it hasn’t quite shaken off melancholy.

It is love that gives the street its deep melancholy; the extraordinary mutability of love imbues the art of photography with infinite mystery.

The great emotional valets of our age are the camera and the gramophone.

Both have appropriated for themselves a little of the celestial fire so many men have sought with an often infantile sensuality.

The emotional life that Claude Cahun brings into her domain - the adventure - can be contained in a dozen records known only to herself.

The gramophone is a instrument of poetic control. A poetic mirror. It cannot be put into just any hands.

I sometimes see aspects of Isabelle Eberhart in Claude Cahun; I know that this impression is not totally correct, but this literary resemblance is a cerebral creation, born of the association of the gramophone and the camera.

If the talking machine did not recreate the world more or less daily, it would have no greater function than to replace an ensemble of instruments. Its poetic import would be no greater than that of a bandstand between five and seven.

We know that this is not the case.

The sum total of poem-essays and essay-poems contained in this publication - which is not a slim volume - is the equivalent of the more or less regulation 300 pages of an adventure novel conceived to conform to public taste. Ideas trace elegant parabolas to end in a tragic unfolding, exploding without a sound.

I believe that each idea this author launches forms a trajectory parallel to that of her own life. To comment too precisely on this book would be almost indiscreet.

The characters that evolve in this funeral procession are not exactly phantoms. More exactly, these are apparitions whose weight, nonetheless, can be calculated, who cannot evade the touch of a hand.

Claude Cahun is a wandering writer. She progresses irresistibly through the night - a night full of lights to which she gives the names of men, the names of plants, the names of shell fish.

This night broods over a strange congress of sometimes tender, sometimes furious forms and ideas. A philosophical orchestra plays discreetly.

At dawn, all of this disappears. And on the unadorned shoreline, a shoreline more naked than an operating table, all that will remain is a female corpse polished like a marble statue and near it, as if escaped from a breast for which it has no further use, a firm and mobile heart, obviously living, with all its complicated machinery clear to see.

AVEUX NON AVENUS

CANCELLED CONFESSIONS

1919 - 1925

The invisible adventure.

The lens tracks the eyes, the mouth, the wrinkles skin deep ... the expression on the face is fierce, sometimes tragic. And then calm - a knowing calm, worked on, flashy. A professional smile - and voilà!

The hand-held mirror reappears, and the rouge and eye shadow. A beat. Full stop.

New paragraph.

I’ll start again.

To those who know nothing of the steps, obstacles and enormous chasms I’ve leapt over - and I’ve revealed none of it - this all must seem the most ludicrous merry-go-round.

Should I then burden myself with all the paraphernalia of facts, stones, cords

delicately cut, precipices... it doesn’t interest me at all. Guess, recover. Vertigo is implied, ascension or the fall.

To please them, would you have to follow the unknown, step by step, illuminating it up to the ankle? Heels worn down, mud, feet bleeding - these humble and truthful testaments - they would surely touch somebody's heart. Whereas...

No. I’ll trace the wake of vessels in the air, the pathway over the waters, the pupils’ mirage.

No point in making myself comfortable. The abstraction, the dream, are as limited for me as the concrete and the real. What to do? Show a part of it only, in a narrow mirror, as if it were the whole? Mix up a halo with spatters? Refusing to bump into walls, bump into windows instead? In the black of night.

Until I see everything clearly, I want to hunt myself down, struggle with myself. Who, feeling armed against her own self, be that with the vainest of words, would not do her very best if only to hit the void bang in the middle.

It’s false. It’s very little. But it trains the eye.

*

Only with the very tip would I wish to sew, sting, kill. The rest of the body, what comes after, what a waste of time! Only ever travel in the prow of myself.

I

R.C.S

At just seven years old, without realizing it, I was already looking for sentimental adventure, driven - as I am now - by impotence, and with all the strategic impudence that characterises me still.

Time change

He: So what!

Me: So what!

The other: What a life...

Indiscreet and brutal, I enjoy looking at what’s underneath the crossed out bits of my soul. Ill-advised intentions have been revised there, become dormant; others have materialized in their place.

I love whisky: it’s bad - you don’t feel as though you’re committing a sin; and it’s

strong - it makes you drunk. This evening I got myself about a litre of the stuff. I got into bed; the lights are low and my little debauchery within easy reach. I’m drinking and smoking and writing to kill all my feelings. The slovenliness of my race.

I’m thinking about Bob of course, Bob at the bar. My cheeks produce dimples -

they’re fake yet a competent imitation. - Bob... this is a truly intellectual love. Who’d believe it? - Who? Who would I want to fool into believing it? You know all about it: I explain everything to you, exaggerate. Your absence is an illusion. Fifteen years of intimacy aren’t shaken off with a bit of tobacco, some alcohol and a few words. In vain do I refuse to give you a name, my familiar witness. The mind will never get out of the rut it’s in, memory will never burst its hinges, its grave, nor will my heart come out of its shell.

I can only read about others between your lines... - Icarus? O memory still-born. - Saccard? I envied him, admired his energy to such an extent that I forgot he does not actually use it for anything superhuman. I would have given my soul away easily, too easily (clearly it doesn’t weigh much), and thrown my body in for good measure - a free gift. However chastely, however humbly this was done they wanted nothing to do with either. My only excuse - your forgiveness - lies in this unexpected outcome (O desires without repentance! Will you ever end, O scornful fatalism of the sage despite himself?): a death, a will, a sincere life, all spurned... O dried up sensualities, sensualities of the summer! - Am I not twenty six years old? - No! Already! - in this Indian summer? A heat unique in the annals of astronomy.

- Ah! What am I saying? What was I saying? Memories in madness. (O unrepentant regrets - and how you whine! Why