Gisele Prassinos 1920-?
biography
Of Greek parentage, Gisele Prassinos was born in Istanbul. Her family emigrated to France when she was two years old. A precocious writer, whom Andre Breton is credited with discovering, she was only fourteen when her first texts appeared in 1934. They were published in the French surrealist-oriented magazine Minotaure and in the Belgian periodical Documents 34. The following year, her first book came out under the title La Sauterelle arthritique (The Arthritic Grasshopper), prefaced by the surrealist poet Paul Eluard, who also wrote a postface for her subsequent collection, Le Feu maniaque, in 1939.
Noting that in La Sauterelle arthritique "enchantment beats its wings among the strange attractions of crepuscular naturalism," Eluard praised in Gisele Prassinos' work the spirit of "disassociation, suppression, negation, revolt," in which he saw "the ethics of children, of poets who refuse to improve, and who will remain freaks so long as they have not awakened in all men the wish to face squarely everything separating them from themselves." Later, Le Feu maniaque prompted Eluard to remark of its author, "She offers all comers a pure moment in exchange for centuries of boredom."
Breton, for his part, declared in the Anthologie de l'Humour noir, "Gisele Prassions' tone is unique: all poets are jealous of it." That tone marks the early story reproduced here: Journoir (Blackday) dating from 1934. This text is characteristic, in that it makes us witness to the operations of a child's imagination, as yet unrestrained by the adult's sense of the world as stable and limited by rational predictability. The narrator's attitude is consistently closer to curiosity than to horror, while no moral preoccupations color her account.
Bringing together a number of her early texts under the heading Les Mots endormis (Sleeping Words), Gisele Prassinos spoke of them in 1967 as "the result of a certain absence": "There is a pocket of darkness in us that, with the help of a drowsiness of consciousness, writing succeeds in penetrating. Once the first word has been set free, the wave breaks. Then comes them moment when the pen drops, discouraged by its own hesitation. Something has intervened; returning, consciousness reclaims its rights, wishing to put things in order. Consciousness is now surprised, sometimes filled with wonder by the word from the dark, often tempted to make a contribution of its own." Born of the absence brought about by the practice of automatic writing, the stories of Gisele Prassions lend support to Eluard's affirmation that automatism "ceaselessly opens new doors on the unconscious and, as it confronts the unconscious with the conscious, with the world, increases its treasures."
selected works in translation
selected stories in The Custom House of Desire translated by J.H. Matthews (University of California Press, 1975)
selected stories in The Myth of the Worldedited by Michael Richardson (Dedalus, 1994)
writing
blackday
One day, it was cold.
Over the river spread a white sheet, hiding the uniformly somber hues of that day.
When night fell, a man came up out of the water. He made for a hollow in the stone, where already a dog had taken refuge. In the light from a luminous corner of the sky, I could make the man out: he wore on his head an immense funnel of string, delicately worked and adorned with sharp pebbles, which he had had a tinker friend make, in exchange for a ball of red thread.
He seemed laden down with unrusted scrap iron for which no doubt he would go searching under the water, to sell it on the bank and take in sand.
When he became aware of the dog's presence - so far as I could tell in the dark - I think his mustache, which stuck out a long way, spread even further and took on a V shape. Terrified by this change, the dog turned its eyes to the wall and felt the end of its tail stick to the stone sides of the hole. But, seeing the stranger calm the irritability of his hair with a feverish start, it was reassured and went to curl up in a corner so as not to witness its bedfellow's prayers.
The man put down his load.
He thought this was the best thing to do and, kneeling on the wet paving stones, he invoked the solitude of the poet.
During this time, the dog, which was foraging as deep as it could in its external intestines, kept its eye half-closed, the better to watch over the silence. But, seeing by its side the still, cold bulk of the crouching man, it fell asleep, not able to put up with things any longer.
The water flowed on, its scrap iron at the bottom of its bed, awaiting only the man with his load in order to stop. There were only small waves, formed by the mechanical ebb and flow of the heavy clouds.
Day appeared with its light and its dark. The man got up, his hat on his waist and his soft mustache hardened by the night.
He went off, swept down upon the river bank and disappeared in the deep waters to look for new things.
But the dog, still young, stayed where it was.
the young persecuted girl
A young girl who was in bed was afraid lest a butterfly she saw that morning came to wake her. Before going to bed, she put on a necklace of fresh chervil and little dull glass ladybirds, striped with yellow wax cloth. She was very proud of it and thought the butterfly wouldn't dare touch here when it saw that she was not alone.
But it came anyway: on the windowpane you could see the reflection of a ball of lead, topped with two long horns of bronzed celluloid. Then the pane moved and you could not see anything. So the young girl went to sleep.
When she awakened (because one of her curls had come unrolled) the pane was back in its original place. This time she saw a little hollowed-out cube of glass, full of water, in which a number of balls of string soaked in gasoline were swimming. She wanted to get up in order to destroy this horrible vision, but the window closed violently in her face without making any noise.
Laughing uproariously, she went back to bed. She was happy because she thought the butterfly had been crushed between the two panels of the window. She pulled the bedcover over her with the soul of a pigeon to protect her.
After an hour, she awoke again because the pigeon's soul had fled. She followed it to the window but there she stopped because the wind was raising up her hair. She looked at the pane and saw a sickly little leek whose outer leaves were ragged and full of desiccated tips. Amazed, she slid on to the marble floor and closed her eyes.
She did not open them until three days later.
my sister
I know my sister smells of bananas. Her large hair, when it rubs my nose, has the ordinary smell of missed dessert. But when she turns toward me and her mouth opens to smile at me, I like the new smell so much I feel like biting her lips and tongue. Underneath there is something that cracks and carries you away.
Soon my sister will fall asleep. I take her pointed arms and cross them over her eyes so that the last light will close them altogether. But she keeps smiling triumphantly at me and the strong odor rises, so strong that suddenly I think of killing my sister in order to take it from her.
I sink my knife in, cutting through her pretty gown. Under the sheets her hands are cold and white. Mine, too alive, have no strength, but I see in her hand, a little puckered fruit made of shiny rose fragments that I melt between my fingers.
return to the library
return to kicking giants