Kate Zambreno talks to ghosts; she writes in dialogue with the authors who haunt her. She makes this clear repeatedly. In Book of Mutter (2017), the spirit of Roland Barthes’ fragments guided her semiotic exploration of mother-loss, memory, and mourning. Her latest book, To Write As If Already Dead, is a wunderkammer of ghosts, friendships, and ailments that engages the discourse around fictional appropriation by formally inhabiting the dialogic relationships that arise when writers read other writers … and discover themselves in the text.
The author acknowledges its presiding ghost as Hervé Guibert (1955-91), a French author and photographer whose novels and photographs revealed intimate details about fellow writers, lovers, and friends in the gay community. Although it reads like memoir or a critical text, To Write is a novel, and the novel’s relationship to veracity is part of what some might call “the plot.”
I read this book alongside Guibert’s formidable The Mausoleum of Lovers , a posthumously published creation which brings together Guibert’s notebooks from 1976 until his death. In what he intended to organize as a novel, Guibert lays out the things he aims to write as he begins losing friends and lovers to AIDS in the late 1980’s. It is an un-glossable, haunting text.
2.
How does the writer allow themself to treat the dead? What is the difference between tribute and trashing? Which silences and secrets should remain inviolate? Are these ethical questions or aesthetic ones?
With Zambreno in one hand, I watched literary Twitter debate issues of privacy and appropriation, as raised by Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person.” I name the ghost of a story (and its discourse) because it is present in the questions provoked by Zambreno’s text.
Zambreno’s book has two parts (“Disappearance” and “To Write As If Already Dead”), and it is the doubleness, the two-facedness, that creates tension. The first part chronicles an epistolary, online friendship between the speaker and another female writer named Alex Suzuki. In emails, the friends probe the ghosts of personhood in the divide between the writing persona and the person. When the friendship disappears (due in part to Suzuki’s withdrawal from internet spaces), Zambreno’s speaker finds herself bothered by the urge “to elegize this friendship” in writing, which the friend might take as a betrayal of intimacy
I marvel over how Zambreno’s unstable attributions reveal the two sides of a friendship’s story.
A friend tells Zambreno that the best way to cope with the challenges of over-exposure in a community of (hyper-competitive) writers is to pretend, like Marguerite Duras, “that you are already a dead writer.” The title of the second section (as well as the novel’s title) comes from the friend’s citation and qualification: “Maybe writers should write as if they were already dead.”
But what if the friend’s statement is fictional, an invention? Zambreno sets up this possibility through inconsistent use of dialogue tags and quotation marks, blurring the line between the speaker’s voice and the friends. Was the speaker speaking for the friend or quoting her directly? Is remembering what a friend said (and then writing) a form of erasure?
Like Guibert, Zambreno takes writing as a means of resurrecting the dead, continuing unfinished conversations with them, bringing the ghosts back as company. As Guibert explained in The Mausoleum:
“All these encountered, unknown faces, that I have described, I have forgotten them, I don’t see them anymore, but in typing these passages that describe them, all of a sudden they return from afar, a detail makes them reappear, an ensemble reconstitutes them, the typewriter key is like the acid of the bath that develops the portrait from the proof.”
It is the elegy’s refusal to let the dead rest in peace that makes it so provocative. And it is Guibert’s eternal unburying of the dead in text that makes him so threatening to privacy advocates.
4.
Critics disagree on the uses and abuses of the novel. In 1990, Guibert used a novel to reveal his own HIV-positive status. To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life included intimate details about his close friend, Michel Foucault, and his death from AIDS. Prominent critics argued on French television screens: had Guibert betrayed Foucault by exposing him posthumously in fiction, particularly in describing the details of his demise?
To answer inquiries of whether Guibert violated Foucault’s privacy requires us to acknowledge that the tomb-like space of the memorial is complicated by how we remember each other. Foucault, for example, has no sacred cows: his irreverent deconstructions matched his public persona’s disinterest in the literary cognoscenti. As Zambreno observes, “Barthes wants to kill the author, Foucault wants the author to take on the appearance of a dead man.” Foucault prefers to stay effaced, erased, and this maps onto Guibert’s decision to name To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life‘s protagonist Muzil, with a nod towards Robert Musil’s novel, The Man Without Qualities. A man without qualities may be a hard man to know.
5.
In The Mausoleum, Guibert explains what he writes, and why. He scaffolds his works-in-progress, including films, novels, journalism, fiction, and art. Here is the description of an ailing Foucault, characterized by tenderness:
“Michel at the hospital. The beauty of his thin body, his golden skin strewn with beauty marks. He is sitting against the window, in the sun. … I want to leave, he keeps me a while longer, with kindness. The smile exchanged by our eyes remains intact in them.”
And Zambreno, on To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life :
“It was his to witness. It was his then to write. The story is of a friendship, the time period the length of the incubation of the mysterious illness he suspects he has carried along with him all of this time, like a secret narrative.”
6.
Guibert regards books as guides for living: they teach us how to see, feel, write, live, and die. They offer permission to imagine ourselves in different bodies. In The Mausoleum, literature replaces religion as “an apprenticeship to death.” He reads for distraction and inspiration: “To live with characters so as not to live solely with oneself; relief or illusion.”
Like Zambreno, Guibert writes from his reading and his life. He doesn’t make a clear delineation between characters and friends — which is to say, he writes in dialogue with both. He casts friends and lovers as protagonists in his novels. If he loves a novel, he often goes in search of the author’s diaries, memoirs, or notebooks. He does this with Robert Musil and Thomas Bernhard, among others. Sometimes the authors, themselves, become additional characters.
Towards the end of his life, he tries to do this with himself by creating a guide on how to live with dying. “That manual of savoir-vivre,” Guibert says of the book he could write, with “savoir mourir at the same time, the two intermixed,” the instructional on how to live being part of the same text as how to die. Even the title he gives this unwritten book — Savoir-vivre, savoir-mourir — locates zest for life right next to dying, an expositive theme in his work.
After Robert Musil died, his wife tore out the final pages from his notebooks and stitched them inside the sleeve of a coat she bequeathed to a costume museum, where museum officials later found the note hidden. I learned this from Guibert’s diaries. Martha Musil’s gesture was protective and provocative: it iconized an object by locating the sacred within it. Did finding this note expose a secret or reveal an assemblage created by Musil’s wife in dialogue with her husband’s memory?
Guibert: “Must the artist not have a left a foot in his childhood, and projected another into his grave?)”
Zambreno: “I’m interested in work which is ephemeral because time is ephemeral. So how can we actually make time and the body the subject?”
9.
Questions of appropriation hinge on visibility. Death renders us invisible — to be dead is to be invulnerable to the degradations of dying. Because truth takes place inside time, all conventions of fidelity, commitment, and promising are temporal practices which lean on the expectation of a future. It is the future which forges duty between humans; it is the future which deepens friendship. The end of a friendship doesn’t erase the past — it moves traces of the past onto present experience. If we didn’t assume friendships would endure, we wouldn’t invest in them. This idea of duration across time is implicit to social constructions of loyalty and fidelity in friendship, and Guibert offers this duration to his lovers in the mausoleum. Again, what endures isn’t the secrecy but tenderness, as in the portrait of Michel Foucault’s eyes softening — “How this morning, altogether secretly, cheerfully, Michel accompanies me in my work, not by pressing on my hand but by breathing on it” — Foucault is present as Guibert writes. The presence of this ghost extends duration, creating an intimacy that renders us vulnerable — not as victims but as fellow humans, as icons to those who loved us.
10.
In the early days of seropositivity (being HIV-positive), homophobia merged with the punishment healthcare systems inflicted on vulnerable populations. This occurs when a system is presented with novelty: a new disease or virus destabilizes the known, and Zambreno details the chaos of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Where Foucault elucidated the harm of such systems, it is Guibert who takes the stigma and reveals it as a stigmata. It is Guibert who reveals the incessant twitching of the left eye, the rapid pulse, various markers taken for evidence of progression may also be symptoms of medical trauma. Guibert can do this because, like Zambreno, he writes from the particular soma of individual bodies. He lights a candle to illume the vulnerability of human flesh.
Illness becomes a form of communion between vulnerable bodies. Between books, dreams, encounters, arguments with lovers and family members, the Mausoleum inventories Guiber’s symptoms as they intersect with daily life — fainting, anemia, exhaustion, neuropathy, fogged vision, “absence of sexuality, nausea, loss of muscle, diarrhea, sensitivity to cold, low-grade fever, painful swollen lymph glands, rashes, “insurmountable pain,” continuous trembling, and finally, “cytomegalovirus!” He compares his symptoms to those of his lovers. Vincent, for example, shares the same “white fungus under his tongue, but his are little white stars, which must have escaped from the luminous globe.”
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What Foucault hides, Guibert fondles. Contempt for his own suffering body leads Guibert to exposure; his flesh becomes the site of the text, an iconography that enacts fidelity and reverence (3). Given a Catholic childhood that aestheticized suffering, the writer brings this mingling of shame, guilt, and fascination to the mausoleum:
“… catechism is what best perverts a child: the Gospel is a sort of formidable tale, that offers a background of terrible erotic images, exalts martyrdom, suggests the taste of blood, and through divine transmutation, miracles, metaphorical absorption, transmits the system of images, of delirium, of poetry; finally, it impresses a fantasy of postures which range from flagellation and crucifixion to the footbath and the pieta.”
This kinship between the sacred and the secret undergirds Guibert’s aesthetic. The closet and the confessional booth resemble one another in a structural enclosure: the secretive darkness of the space (nothing said in the closet comes out). The closet serves as a storage of private things and release of confessions; the priest promises not to reveal what you’ve told in the wooden booth, with that screen between you. By aestheticizing the confessional booth, Guibert queers the tension between sanctity and secrecy. Where Foucault’s paranoid eye of the surveillance apparatus focuses on the power of stigmatization (a closed closet protects the theorist from being discredited by a homophobic, stigma-savoring public), Guibert’s reparative eye acknowledges there is no protection, no salvation, only beauty, eros, and longing.
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By reparative, I mean Zambreno is right to invoke Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay on paranoid and reparative reading. And she is right to poke at the cultural present, a time when we “privilege identity and boundaries and protecting the self from exposure above all else.” Since obsession with privacy mirrors our own fear of being exposed, Zambreno likens this fear of infection to a fear of intimacy with strangeness. But reading also infects us with intimate strangeness, as ableism infects public spaces and medical decisions during pandemic.
By reparative, I mean chronic illness is complicated by wanting to be seen by those who don’t see you as worthless.
By reparative, I mean Zambreno says: “It soothes me to remember that Sedgwick wrote mainly of a community of gay men. When she argues that the depressive position is one of repair and love.”
By reparative, I mean that in Guibert’s mausoleum, solidarity replaces disgust and fear: The people he feared to look at, the blind, the maimed, the disabled, the ill, are now “incredibly beautiful … incredibly dignified,” and Guibert says he is “proud to belong to their group,” to feel himself among them in “warm fraternity.”
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The noun hypochondria came to 17th century English from Greek and late Latin; it was used to denote a melancholy which arose from the liver and the spleen located under the sternal cartilage. Currently, hypochondria is defined as “abnormal anxiety about one’s health, especially with an unwarranted fear that one has a serious disease.” The 21st century hypochondriac suffers from illness anxiety. But the diagnosis of anxiety overlooks the reality of death. Perhaps the hypochondriac is someone who is trying to escape a death they have witnessed or imagined.
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Maybe the problem is knowing our time is limited, and so we measure the ticks and trickling sand. The American cultural obsession with wellness has its own tribes, charts, and metrics: we assess the value of our days by whether we’ve accumulated the magic number of steps which keep us fit, healthy, and able. But the epistemological commitments of the Wellness Industrial Complex rub against the frantic meaninglessness of the present, a point so narrow in time that it could fit on a pinhead. Only in writing does that pinhead become a meeting-point, as where Zambreno brings Rainer Maria Rilke’s dread of the Parisian hospital into his first novel, allowing Rilke’s hypochondria to communicate with Guibert’s navigation of homophobia and AIDS-ignorance in France.
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Joining the confessional-booth aesthetic to illness anxiety, Zambreno maps “the borderless state of worry” through the “confessions of a hypochondriac.” Whether speaking of herself or others, she references hypochondria again and again. Zambreno’s relationship to life has been altered by her mother’s early death from a genetic cancer: the speaker knows she will die, and this brackets her assessment of life. Death is not abstracted or compartmentalized in Zambreno’s writing: death sits at the table in the rashes and symptomatology of the living.
As she unpacks the visceral discomforts of the pregnant body, inventorying symptoms, profiling her prior medical conditions, outlining the shape of the fetus-bearing body, Zambreno alternates between hope and dread (“going through the waves of suffering again”). Here, the writer’s pregnancy is not an Earth-Mother rubbing herself with oil in a meadow: it is a time-bind characterized by clinical experiences. To be pregnant is to put life on hold, to be occupied and preoccupied by the needs of another life. The physical labor of pregnancy and mothering sucks time away from writing. The body’s chronic exhaustion and depletion consume the mind. The endless exhaustion of nurture-regimes intersect with the possibility of perimenopause, the DNA of her own mother’s death from a BRCA-related cancer, many of which appear in middle-age.
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By labor, I mean, in a recent interview with Elle Nash, Zambreno compares the romanticized labor of mothering with writing. “Being a mother is so romanticized, and so its labor, the maintenance labor, is made invisible,” Zambreno says, noting that we do the same thing when we romanticize writing: we “make it not labor so they don’t have to view writers as workers.”
By time, I mean, Zambreno (like Guibert) feels pressure to write, to meet the deadline for this novel, and it is the consuming clinical time and alienation from the body which complicate the writer’s ability to work. She connects the need to write fast with the knowledge of death that shifts the mind into an ongoing hindsight, a locale which is oracular, self-abnegating, and prophetic.
Superstition is recurrent in Guibert’s late mausoleum. He reads his own thoughts like tea leaves (because his test results were good when he felt “weak” while going to pick them up, the fact that he feels “strong” today means the test results will be bad). Feeling good is what happens “on the eve of disasters.” He worries about damning or cursing others by proximity.
I wonder about the link between superstition and hypochondria. Chronic-illness communities include lots of self-described hypochondriacs. We drop self-diagnoses of hypochondria as prophylactics, as ptuie-ptuie-ptuie which serves as a protective gesture, a talismanic invocation, a wry take on the self-help gurus who promise that healing is a matter of saying the right things to the sky or social media. Because many hypochondriacs have experienced health trauma, the memory of trauma is burned in the body. One might theorize that hypochondria, too, is a ghost. A shaded presentiment based on past knowledge.
Behind hypochondria lies a history of Freudian psychoanalysis that makes it seem as if humans can decide where to hurt, or how to localize pain, among boutiques of competing discourses. The valetudinarianism of the chronically ill, the hypochondria of the multiple-misdiagnosed, the creeping fears of the dying – what a lovely dream to imagine that one’s illness is merely anxiety, a symptom of the writer’s hyperactive imagination. More than anything, I wish those doctors were right: if only strokes, cancer, broken legs and organ failure could be cured with benzos, therapy, and meditation.
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When Guibert is diagnosed with AIDS, Zambreno describes his response as “the calm of the hypochondriac who has been preparing for calamity his whole life,” but perhaps one could also read it as the punishment a queer artist raised in heteronormative Catholicism had come to expect in return for venal sin. One senses the surprise wasn’t in the diagnosis but in the amount of time he had managed to escape it. He is astonished to be alive, “to be thirty-one years old” persists as a surprise.
Describing AIDS as “being devoured by one’s internal beast,” he invokes the monstrosity, the illness inseparable from his sexuality, treated by the Church as spiritual sickness or demon possession, Guibert marvels in terror at the dread of slowly losing his hair, his physical strength, his sexual prowess. He felt marked; the diagnosis confirmed what he knew. The crime is that any queer person should carry this cross for a public that craves crucifixion.
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Zambreno: “The shock of Guibert’s beautiful face. The contrast: he is unafraid to be ugly in his writing voice.”
Guibert: “The beginning of a story? One day I decided to become the filth people already figured I was, me the angel.”
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There are shadows within shadows and citations. When Zambreno mentions the vaccine-hunger of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, one recalls that mRNA vaccine technology was first pursued as a hope for an HIV-vaccine, and it took a virus that the media classed as heteronormative to get the federal funding and research infrastructure required to make mRNA vaccines a possibility.
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Ultimately, Guibert’s fear of death is a fear of not-writing. One cannot understand Guibert without grasping this. When the physician tells him that he has “one summer left,” Guibert immediately thinks about which book to finish, and what he can write. This is his first thought. It is his only allegiance. It is his obsession, his ecstasy, his life.
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To know how you will die is to know how your death will be read and interpreted by others. Guibert’s commitment to his marginality requires him, in his words, to face his own death “in an extraordinary way.” He charges the work-in-progress with “a responsibility in the face of death.” It is a self-portrait, an icon or object to burn in effigy. He captions himself: “Died of AIDS: a superb indication for a biography.”
25.
As he begins filming his sickness, hallowing the iconography to accompany the text, Guibert leaves a trail of quotations and references that invoke pietas and the pain of saints. After noting that Chekhov alludes to the “plastic, pictorial beauty of human suffering,” Guibert evokes the “fantastical suffering” of seeing a young boy in a restaurant, realizing that he, himself, will never have a son, and now, at the age when his father waited for Hervé’s birth, he “has only death to wait for.” The mood is baroque, slow as a Passion Play passing through Catholic Stations of the Cross, preserving icons of suffering that promise redemption through a ghastly spectated death, namely the crucifixion of Christ, where time becomes that which is measured by “the deprivation of distance” from death.
Guibert is filming his own death as he writes, but he is also considering how he wants the story to end. As a final rebuff to Catholic dogma, Guibert saves the drops that will stop his heart, the magic potion of suicide, set apart from the 15 pills he takes daily, a secret he keeps so as not to disgust others with his “corpse.” His corpus. The corrupted. He vows to be, for T. and C., “the most discrete and tender of ghosts.” Makes a note to cut off the heat before killing himself. Describes Glenn Gould’s GoldbergVariations, with the humming and stamping, as a book that “would be pierced in places by the voice of its author.” “It will be necessary to choose: between suicide and the book,” Guibert warns himself, adding “Handke said agony is the only possible epic.”
26.
Returning to his hotel room in Rome after a day of nude jouissance at the beach, Guibert pauses before the mirror, addressing the reflected self: “Thus did I only betray myself in passing, and when retrieving with joy the consciousness of my monstrosity, it is at the same time my writing that I recover.” It is in writing that Guibert sacralized the heresy of his existence: “Unspeakable spaces, exquisite pain.”
27.
Towards the end, Guibert’s writing focuses on his preferences, on the beautiful details of ordinary life; details which evoke the pleasure of life-wind in branches — a lizard on an apple, books, the waiting for his lovers — never include the presence of people, only the reverie of them.
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Guibert: “But I feel everything with too much violence: deformities, wounds, twisted or shortened legs, gouged eyes, stains on clothes, I see them immediately, I see only them, I am beset with them.”
Zambreno: “I keep going back to Guibert saying that it felt more like betrayal when he photographed his friends than when he wrote about them.”
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Living and dying are only separable for those in denial. The pandemic present has turned denial into a partisanship of performative invulnerability which is harmful to the vulnerable as well as aesthetically uninteresting. I am interested, however, in the coterminous temporalities of writing life in dread of death. The word coterminous comes from the Latin meaning “bordering upon, having a common boundary,” but terminus also invokes an end-point, the terminal. Coterminous time enables a more voluminous self-reckoning.
With Zambreno, I glimpse in Guibert’s project “a refusal to disappear while showing the deterioration of his body, his energy.” With Zambreno, I take this refusal as a form of “courage” (one she matches in her painstaking attributions). It’s a harrowing pleasure to read Zambreno, and this is a pleasure she can’t experience: she can’t meet the marvel of To Write As IF Already Dead without having written it. She can’t know how it feels to be this particular reader. If we are the books we consume, we are bound by the ways we’ve been touched by them.
And, if literature is the guide to dying, on the last page of the mausoleum, it is the books that Guibert is writing, the works in progress, that provide “a pretext not to kill myself.” In the mausoleum, one buries the beloved ahead of time. But one also rests in the knowledge that one will be buried with them forever. This is the work of the novel. Critics have no bearing on it.
ADDENDA
Auto-fiction feels too glib a word to carry Zambreno’s effort in this novel. For me, what she is doing stands closer to Sara Fredman’s fascinating essay on non-patriarchal critique, which I highly recommend. To The Friend was written in tandem with Guibert’s reading of Thomas Bernhard, whose lifelong battle with tuberculosis and chronic illness ended in his 1989 death by suicide (five years after Foucault’s death and two years before Guibert’s). Zambreno takes Bernhard to be the ghost guiding this book, but I’m inclined to wonder if Guibert didn’t name Foucault after Robert Musil, the author, rather than the main character ofThe Man Without Qualities. Guibert references Musil’s published notebooks repeatedly in The Mausoleum, where he describes The Man Without Qualities as “the dream of the great work;” he brings this associative tension to Muzil’s character in the novel. Defining a ghost as “a projected shadow on the text,” Guibert’s novels seem to invoke multiple shadows and shades. Like Musil himself, Foucault didn’t want to be visible, vulnerable, subject to intimacy and friendship. Zambreno illuminates the relationship between Musil and Foucault in Guibert’s writings on pp. 89-91. Of lover Thierry Jouno (whom he calls “T.”), Guibert asks: “why must I insist on believing that he is my salvation – in the manner of a crucifix fixed to a bedroom wall”. There are several places in the mausoleum where Guibert comments on sex with T. as related to his own “erasure” or to violence and physical suffering. Zambreno describes the “panicked hypochondria” of Guibert’s writing, citing his simultaneous “fear and longing” towards death, in tandem with her own. Again, as with the friend whose words titled the book, it is hard to gauge the distance between the ghost and the speaker.
Kate Zambreno. To Write As If Already Dead. Columbia University Press, 2021. 176 pp.
Hervé Guibert, The Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991. Nightboat Books, 2014. 584 pp. Translated by Nathanaël.