Not a Clue

by Chloé Delaume

  Translation © 2018 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska Originally published as Certainement Pas © 2004 Éditions Verticales

  “Take This Waltz.” Words and music by Leonard Cohen and Federico Garcia Lorca, © 1985, 1990 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and EMI Songs Espana S.R.L., All rights administered by Sony/atv Music Publishing llc, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville tn 37219. International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  “Chlo-E, Song of the Swamp.” Words by Gus Kahn, music by Neil Moret. Copyright © 1927 (renewed) Chappell & Co., Inc., and Gilbert Keyes Music Company. All rights on behalf of Gilbert Keyes Music Company administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

  All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

  Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut français.

  Library of Congress

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Delaume, Chloé, 1973– author.

  | Cornelio, Dawn M. translator.

  Title: Not a clue = Certainement

  pas: a novel / Chloé Delaume;

  translated by Dawn M. Cornelio.

  Other titles: Certainement pas.

  English | Certainement pas

  Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018.

  Identifiers:

  LCCN 2018009204

  ISBN 9781496200891 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN 9781496212962 (epub)

  ISBN 9781496212979 (mobi)

  ISBN 9781496212986 (pdf)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction

  Classification:

  LCC PQ2704.E346 c4713 2018

  DDC 843/.92—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009204

  Set and designed in Questa by N. Putens.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  For Tom.

  Thank you for your love, your encouragement, your patience. Je t’aime, mon cœur. For Chloé.

  #resist, matrimoine et sororisation 4ever

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Dawn M. Cornelio

  Studio

  First Officer

  Miss Scarlet

  Miss Scarlet in the Kitchen

  Miss Scarlet in the Kitchen with the Monkey Wrench

  Study (Reload)

  Professor Plum

  Professor Plum in the Ballroom

  Professor Plum in the Ballroom with the Candlestick

  Second Officer

  Gardens

  Mrs. White

  Mrs. White in the Lounge

  Mrs. White in the Lounge with the Lead Pipe

  Hall

  Third Officer

  Dining Room

  Fourth Officer

  Colonel Mustard

  Colonel Mustard in the Billiard Room

  Colonel Mustard in the Billiard Room with the Revolver

  Passageway(s)

  Fifth Officer

  Mrs. Peacock

  Mrs. Peacock in the Library

  Mrs. Peacock in the Library with the Rope

  Swamp

  Sixth Officer

  Mr. Green

  Mr. Green in the Conservatory

  Endgame

  INTRODUCTION

  DAWN M. CORNELIO

  After first reading Certainement pas, I wrote an article that started something like this: “How can you juggle an omniscient narrator, a murder victim boiling over with accusations, at least six possible murderers—each with their own entourages and psychiatrists at Paris’s Hôpital Sainte-Anne—a blog that speaks in the first person, and an author whose intervention is limited to refusing to intervene?”1 Today, as reader and translator, I would rephrase the question and ask, “How do you translate a novel with all of these elements and also do justice to a unique literary voice and style that uses language both as a tool and as a weapon and is actually teeming with cultural references that range from the classics of French literature and cinema to pop music from throughout the twentieth century?” The answer to the revised and expanded version of the question is found in a word I learned back when I read the novel for the first time. That word is clinamen.

  What is a “clinamen”? Just in case it’s new to you too, according to Lucretius, expounding on Epicurus’s atomistic doctrine, a clinamen— derived from the Latin clinare, “to incline”—occurs when there is an unpredictable swerve of atoms. While in current, common usage a clinamen is defined as a bias or inclination, in philosophy and literature the term continues to convey the notion of an unexpected deviation that is responsible for a change in the order of things. Indeed, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Harold Bloom, Gilles Deleuze, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, Michel Serres, and perhaps James Joyce, among others, have all reflected on, developed, applied, or even refused the viability of the concept. The influence of the clinamen comes to Chloé Delaume through her profound and long-lasting interest in the writings of Alfred Jarry, the College of ’Pataphysics, and the Oulipo writers, such as Georges Perec and Boris Vian.2 In Delaume’s writing in general, and in Not a Clue in particular, clinamen should be taken as a watchword, for there is no level of the text that is not marked by the phenomena of unexpected swerves. Juxtapositions of “high” and “low” culture are abundant, punctuation often used selectively and idiosyncratically, syntax and grammar are so stretched to the absolute limits of their flexibility that reading becomes a roller coaster ride, as the sudden swerving of the text takes the reader in unforeseen directions, time and time again. Bringing Certainement pas into English here means embedding within it a certain number of new clinamens as unexpected cultural and linguistic twists become part of the novel and extend its spiraling out into unanticipated territory.

  Certainement pas, published in France in 2004, is Chloé Delaume’s seventh novel, one of over twenty titles she has written since 2000. All of these have the stated purpose of expanding the reader’s idea of what literature is, of making reading a participatory activity, of refusing to be cultural entertainment, of disrupting literature, and of trying to overthrow the “Banana Republic of Letters” the author feels most contemporary, commercialized literature contributes to, with its pleasant and easily consumable and digestible stories. Moreover, the majority of Delaume’s writing falls into the sometimes controversial category of autofiction, a wide-ranging style of writing in contemporary France, among other places. The neologism was first coined by the writer and critic Serge Doubrovsky, who described his 1977 novel Fils as having “confié le langage d’une aventure à l’aventure d’un langage en liberté” (confided the language of an adventure to the adventure of a language in liberty),3 thereby emphasizing the importance of language and means of expression in this new combination of lived experience and fiction. Underpinning Delaume’s own extensive auto-fiction is the death by murder-suicide of her parents: in 1983, in the family apartment and in the presence of the then nine-year-old girl, her father, Sylvain Dalain, shot and killed her mother, Soazick, before killing himself. Nonetheless, it would be an inaccurate reading of her literature to consider it as any kind of therapy, a plea for sympathy, navel-gazing, or anything other than a Doubrovskian adventure in literature, living, and self-creation. In fact, Delaume’s efforts to be her own creation, rather than being the result of her parents’ death, go beyond her writing to her life, her name itself an example of this. Born in 1973, Delaume’s birth name was Nathalie Abdallah, but after moving to France, the family decided to try to minimize its Lebanese origins and legally changed its surname to Dalain. However, the writer refuses the first and last names given
by her parents and has lived and worked under the name Chloé Delaume almost exclusively. Except for a small number of early career articles and short texts published under the name Nathalie Dalain, all of the writer’s work is signed with her self-chosen name: Chloé, from the lead female protagonist of Boris Vian’s Froth on the Daydream (L’Écume des jours, 1947); and Delaume, from Antonin Artaud’s L’Arve et l’aume (1947), his “translation” of a chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. For many years the author described Chloé Delaume as a fictional character who was the writer, narrator, and main protagonist of her texts; more recently, however, the statements “Je m’appelle Chloé Delaume. Je suis un personnage de fiction” (My name is Chloé Delaume. I am a fictional character) have diminished in appearance, and Chloé Delaume is not present within the pages of in the author’s most recent novel, the feminist and political Les Sorcières de la République (2016).

  Beyond her names taken from literary works, intertextuality— references to other writers’ works and other texts of her own—plays an important role in Delaume’s work. In the chapter entitled “Sixth Officer,” the writer makes reference to two of her other novels. The chapter itself is written as a letter from Chloé Delaume the author to the narratrix of Not a Clue, is dated Simsial 34, 2004, and includes the names of two fictitious towns, SimCity and Somnambulie. SimCity and Simsial are not only references to the Sims series of video games; they are also a reference to a project focusing on the life of her Sim and her life as a Sim. It was composed of a blog written by Delaume as a resident of the video game SimCity and a series of public performances centered on readings and demonstrations of the Delaume-Sims in action and culminated in the 2003 work Corpus Simsi. Additionally, the town of Somnambulie is a reference to another work published in the same year, La Vanité des Somnambules, one of whose key points is Chloé Delaume’s failed struggle to take control of the body of Nathalie Dalain. Elsewhere the mention of the novel Le Vagissement du minuteur (The Wailing of the Timer) by Clotilde Mélisse is a double reference to Delaume’s own work: Mélisse is the fictional double of Delaume who, according to the author, can say things she herself cannot; and the title is nothing but synonyms for Delaume’s most well-known novel, Le Cri du sablier (The Cry of the Hourglass).

  The references Delaume makes to other authors and works outside her own are much more extensive than those to her own work and often much more understated. One of the main characters in Not a Clue is a young writer by the name of Mathias Rouault—many people will recognize in that rather uncommon name a wink at Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, since Rouault was Emma’s maiden name. Beyond this reference, namely in the chapters concentrating on the amnesiac character Aline, several lines from Madame Bovary, specifically a song sung by a blind man as Emma dies, appear a number of times. Likewise, the subtitle “Conversation sans Loir ni chair” in the chapter “Professor Plum in the Ballroom” refers to a work published in 1935 by the dramatist, poet, essayist, and statesman Paul Claudel, although the chapter follows up with quotes from Balzac’s more celebrated Illusions perdues, relating to the publishing industry. Here the example of Claudel brings us back to the notion of clinamen because in Not a Clue I chose to retain the reference to Balzac, but for reasons both of recognizability and the retention of a bucolic contemplative meaning, I replaced the Claudel text with a reference to Thoreau’s Walden, thereby incorporating, I imagine, an unexpected swerve out of French into American culture. Therefore, the subtitle “Conversation sans loir ni chair,” a reworking of Conversations dans le Loir-et-Cher (a département in central France), becomes “I went to the Castle because I wished to live deliberately,” an adaptation of “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” Among other writers quoted or alluded to through intertextuality are Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Lewis Carroll, Valérie Solanas, Samuel Beckett, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Vercors (the pen name of Jean Bruller), Margaret Atwood (in particular her scarlet cloak–wearing handmaid), Dante, and Victor Hugo, whose famous line “un ver de terre amoureux d’une étoile” (an earthworm in love with a star) occupies a particularly interesting space in the novel.

  However, these examples from the classics of French and world literature do not exclude the possibility of sometimes playful but also meaningful allusions to popular culture, ranging from the TV cartoon series Minus et Cortex (Pinky and the Brain) to Disney’s version of Jiminy Cricket to Harry Potter and from the white slippers in Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight to a 2001 French romantic comedy, Se souvenir de belles choses. While it goes without saying Jiminy needed no modification to be brought (back) into English and that it was easy enough to revert to Pinky and the Brain’s English names, such was not the case for the two films mentioned here, whose adaptations in this translation can be read as examples of clinamens that result in the translation taking just a few more unexpected turns than the source text. Although Limelight is obviously an American film, it is also well-known internationally, and Delaume includes in her novel a mention of “deux chaussons blancs” (two white satin slippers), the theme associated with the ballerina character Terry and whose lyrics summarize the plot of the film. However, in the English version of the film, the same song is simply called “Eternally” and is a rather unimpressive, unoriginal love song. In this case, in order to keep the narrative related by the lyrics, I substituted the “red shoes” for the “white slippers,” thereby bringing in not only Andersen’s fairy tale but also the cinematographic adaptation by the same name, which was released just four years before Chaplin’s Limelight, thus making a temporal connection between the two movies. In the case of Se souvenir de belles choses, although the film was released under the title Beautiful Memories in the United States, I was afraid the film wouldn’t be known widely enough to create any resonance. I have replaced the French movie with the Goldie Hawn–Kurt Russell romantic comedy Overboard since the tone is similar and the basic premise of memory loss is shared by both movies.

  Beyond the white slippers, Delaume includes a number of song titles and lyrics throughout the novel, most of which I opted to change to English-language songs. For example, the snippet from “Harper Valley pta,” “Mrs. Johnson you’re wearing your dresses way too high,” offers the same kind of innuendo as that found in “Sidonie,” originally sung by Brigitte Bardot: “Sidonie a plus d’un amant” (Sidonie has more than one lover). A more difficult decision was what to do with the Charles Trenet song “(Le Menuet c’est) la polka du roi” that Delaume intertwined with the narrative throughout chapter 9, since the story told by the song advances the unfolding of the character’s delirious dance with his psychiatrist. In translating, it certainly would have been possible to translate the song literally or even leave the lyrics in French, as I did with the titles of the books the character Mathias wrote. Although there would be advantages and disadvantages to either of these options, I chose a completely different set of pros and cons, by deciding to change the Trenet song to a Leonard Cohen song, “Take This Waltz.” The pros of the decision are the shared focus on dance and the tragic tone of both songs, but the cons can be seen in the looser link between the song and the novel and the replacement of the source culture with the target culture.

  As with all translations, nearly every word in Not a Clue is the result of a decision: to be direct or indirect, to create something that feels surprising or familiar, to displace the reader or the text. I will admit to being proud of some decisions and the discoveries that led to them, although for some I will always wish I’d thought of something better. Without a doubt there are instances in which I had a decision to make and wasn’t even aware of it. However, a translation is in many ways as personal a creation as a novel. As William H. Gass wrote, “In a translation, one language, and one particular user of that language reads another”; and “What we get when we’re done [translating] is a reading, a reading enriched by the process of arriving at it, and therefore, really only the farewells to a long conversation.”4 Since Chloé Delaume’s Certain
ement pas is as much—if not more—about literature itself than it is about the characters found in its pages, I will also admit that I hope that Not a Clue is not only about the characters and about literature but also, at least a little bit, about translation and that it includes a few clinamens of my very own invention.

  NOTES

  1. Dawn M. Cornelio, “Les Limites de la narration minée,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 13, no. 4 (September 2009): 423–30 (my trans.).

  2. Indeed, their influence is evident in Delaume’s use of the board game Clue, with its characters, rooms, and weapons, to structure her novel, which is something of a Oulipian constraint in itself.

  3. Serge Doubrovsky, Fils (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1977), back cover (my trans.).

  4. William H. Gass, Reflections on the Problems of Translation (New York: Knopf, 2000), 47, 53.

  Studio

  There are six of you in the room. A dark room, with a single window clouded by bars. You’ve gotten used to these anemic shadows, so used to them that your eyes don’t even bleed anymore when your gaze crashes into the menacing rust. There are six of you, you’re tired, slouching opposite each other toy soldiers lined up three by three, solitary residue after a scavenger feast. Through your fabric you should feel the steel frame splitting the imitation leather. Of course you don’t. Of course, obviously. Your eye sockets uncoil, your pupils happily dart off toward the big ashtray. Always filled to overflowing, that big ashtray. Cigarette butts, gobs of spit, cookies, papers still spotted with minced-eyelid grease, little barrel plump with the detritus of the daughters of Danaus. It’s the only one, the chosen one, the big brown many-dented ashtray. The point of convergence of your three outstretched fingers, second knuckle pointer middle finger like a buttercup, feverish catapult thumb, sharp tremor, revolting nail, it depends. It remains the epicenter of this room, where, on this day, there are six of you.

  The linoleum is old green, once celadon bordering on turquoise, formerly reassuring. It’s a reasonable supposition at least. Indelible marks, so many scars, carbonic craters: not everyone here has been a follower, not everyone submitted to the harsh reign of the tyrannically big ashtray. Seats and floor match, an insistent hue. The achromatic rings under your eyes protect you, so you think. All this green will slip away, won’t splash onto anyone, all this green will refute itself, be neutralized before it kidnaps your hearts as they flutter at your lips, before you’re nauseous from the wait. It’s because of the place itself. Your quixotic struggles stir up the bad-weather air, nutshell blindness infiltrates your eyes, ivory-tower cozy every day you’re a step closer to the sisters of Anne with their canonization-faded pupils. White-hot silence, simply devoted roped-party leader, internal speleology, solitary descent to the very center, bumping into salty petrified tear stalactites, on your secret pains grazing in echo.