Context N°22
The following interview took place via email in June 2008. It was conducted in French and translated by Aude Jeanson.
Aude Jeanson: Pigeon Post was written under the pseudonym Ed Pastenague. Could you explain the origins of this pen name, why it was necessary for you to use it, and what effects it had on the novel itself?
Dumitru Tsepeneag: Very early on, even when I was writing in Romania, I agreed with Jean Ricardou’s cleverly phrased idea that “the novel no longer implies writing about an adventure but recounts the adventure of writing.” This gave me more food for my old thoughts—the analogy or rather relationship between music—the mother of all arts—and literature. Subject matter, or melodies, are not the point in music; the same goes for literature . . .
I always led a quiet life in Paris. A modest and monotonous life. A life without Ceausescu and the uncertainties of a so-called communist regime. My only “adventure” up until now was my journey to Paris. Whatever I lived through back there, whatever my “political (ad)ventures” might have been—I trust the realist writers will write about them.
What gives birth to a text is when the first sentence is put down on paper. Nothing exists prior to that . . . Well, no, there is the author’s intention to write, that is the intention of the one whose name is spread out on the cover, dominating everything, at the very top . . .
The first two books I wrote directly in French (Le Mot sablier and Roman de gare) were written under my real Romanian name, Tepeneag, or, more precisely, Tsepeneag (“ts” depicts a sound which doesn’t exist in the French language). And then I told my French publisher: “Look, I’m going to use a pen name from now on. I’d like to . . . be born again. Thanks to the French language . . .” He laughed, because I was already fifty years old. He hesitated for quite some time, and then said yes. So as to avoid choosing a random name, I started playing with my own, in order to find an anagram that would be legible: Stepanege, Pangestene, etc. None of these were good. Pestange? Too pretentious. I ended up choosing pastenague, thereby getting rid of one frightening letter “e” which dominates the French language and which can be pronounced in all sorts of different ways, so much so that the unfortunate readers have no idea how to say my name when they read it in print; so they give up, on my name and the book altogether . . .
If you look up the word “pastenague,”—which translates as stingray in English—in the standard French dictionary, here’s what you can read: “Stingray n. <Provencal: pastenago> Large ray found on European coasts, having a long, whiplike tail with one or more usually poisonous stings.” What a coincidence! The word sting is actually contained in my Romanian name (tsepe = stings).
This word therefore became a mould. Through a series of homonyms, synonyms and related words (in French: pastenague > raie > rai > craie > raide > raideur, etc.) and also thanks to the pigeon that I could see when looking out of my window, I started writing one page of text, then two, and a text was born. Before then, only the author’s name existed; now, step by step, the narrator took possession of the text, described what he could see out of his window—for instance a female character walking her dog—gave names to those characters and imagined their lives. And as that was not enough, he called upon imaginary school friends, who came into being precisely because of the narrator’s name, Ed (Edouard, Edmond, Edgar are the names of the said school friends). And I said to myself, proud of my textual ingenuity: “Here are my assistants!” That was followed by an epistolary exchange, by a series of questions, phone calls, criticism, meetings, even insults. So this novel could be described as a creative writing workshop.
AJ: Why did you write this novel in French?
DT: I started writing in French towards the end of the 1970s. I first wrote Le Mot sablier, which was first written in Romanian and then in French. This book was published only in 1984. Then I wrote a second text which initially was going to be a film script (Roman de gare), and some time later came Pigeon Post (Pigeon vole, 1989). Why did I start writing in French? Well, to be perfectly honest, I switched to French to please my French publisher, who told me that my books did not sell well and translations were very costly. He said: “Why don’t you write in French?” He was right, all the more so since what worried me in the process of translation was that my Romanian words were serving the only purpose of finding French equivalents for them—my translator’s words, the only ones that would be visible in the end. My words were mere passageways, humble and ephemeral ones, condemned to complete anonymity, buried at the bottom of a drawer. In any event, I couldn’t publish my books in Romania, they were forbidden there because I was an opponent of the communist regime. In such conditions, writing had become a sort of mortal execution: my words had to die so that I, the writer, could survive as an author.
Even before I started writing in French, I published an article in which I attempted to describe my discomfort, my unhappiness with translation, which concretely kills the text and claims to be a sham, leaving only the author’s name on the cover. A translated author is left powerless, because he has no presence in the text itself. What better way of having a presence than through words! The cover holds the promise of an author, but “as soon as one opens the book, a coffin lid is being closed down.”
Those are very harsh words that I no longer think are very fair or accurate. There always remains something from a text someone wrote. Does the author become a ghost? Probably . . . But if we look at Shakespeare and many other writers too, we can see that a ghost is convincing, sometimes even more than a human being who can lie, exaggerate, and of whom people are defiant.
And a literary text is more than just words. The formal structure and construction of a novel is just as important as the words. The structure . . .
AJ: Why did you start writing in Romanian again after 1990?
DT: During my last years of exile, I had abandoned any hope of experiencing a change of political regime in the East. I became more or less resigned. I had been writing in French for about ten years, and even though it’s impossible to be perfectly bilingual, I was getting by all right. Le Mot sablier and Pigeon Post were fairly successful. I wasn’t isolated any longer, as I had been during many years when all I did was play chess: I was a small master, nothing much . . .
And then, in the year of grace 1989 (two hundred years after the storming of the Bastille), the political scene in Europe underwent terrible upheavals and the famous Berlin Wall fell down. Ceausescu’s regime held out until the end of that year. When Christmas came, the dictator was executed after a summary trial and I couldn’t fight the general euphoria and went to Bucharest, sitting in a truck full of medicines and food, and I arrived there on the last day of the year.
So why did I start writing in Romanian again?
I was chased away not only from my country, from Romania, but also from Romanian literature. I lost my citizenship and my books were forbidden—they were nowhere to be found, not even in libraries. Although I had been seen as one of the great hopes of literature by a few Romanian literary critics, I was almost forgotten twenty years later. So yes, I started writing in Romanian again as a sort of revenge. One of my books, which was published some years later, was entitled Le Retour du fils au sein de sa mère [A son goes back to his mother’s breast]. I didn’t think of myself as a prodigal son. I didn’t lose my way. Well . . . I managed to stay away from politics, although I could have used it to avenge myself: I refused to take on political causes, which would have been a real catastrophe in a now-free country that was otherwise completely disorientated. I resisted any political temptation and stuck to literature. I wrote twice as much as I ever had before. I wrote a 1200-page trilogy, the first volume of which was Hotel Europa, which was then translated into several languages. And I wrote several other books, essays, polemical articles, and so on.
However, I did not abandon the language of my adoptive country altogether. I still wrote in French, especially criticism. I’m thinking of using my pen name again, this Pastenague which I kept on the sidelines for so long . . .
AJ: In a previous interview you gave for CONTEXT magazine, you compared your book Vain Art of the Fugue, published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2007, to a musical fugue, to a canon for two voices, and by doing so you were referring to a musical structure that always influences the formal structure of your novels. In Pigeon Post, the narrator claims that “music and chess are the lifeblood of [his] literature.” Could you first explain the difference of the influence of music in Vain Art of the Fugue and in Pigeon Post, and then explain your specific double-sided interest for music and chess? How are they related to each other?
DT: In the French text, the word used for lifeblood is “breast,” as in: “music and chess are the two nourishing breasts of my literature.” Breasts are linked to their owner—or to the author, as in the already conventional metaphor used by Tiresias—by the rest of the body, mostly by the head. One of the breasts usually is larger than the other—or in this case, more important than the other. For instance, music—the mother of all arts, the origin of European art. Music is important because it creates pure structure. The tune, or melody, is but a pretext.
Chess is all about structures too: the winner of the game is the one who finds the best structure on the chessboard. To checkmate one’s opponent is to impose one final structure to them. A resigned death
. . . You lay your king down on the board, accept its defeat, but the king does not die. The defeated player can play another chess game.
The player is indeed not king. He is, just as an author, but the puppeteer who pulls the strings behind the scenes. He thinks he is immortal, which is of course the height of irony . . .
The overall model or structure for music and chess all the same is still the act of dreaming. Nighttime dreaming, which is quickly forgotten about. When one wakes up, the memory of the dream slowly fades away. It’s just like listening to music. In order to make sense out of a dream, it’s necessary to piece things back together, to interpret. This is the case for music too, of course.
What about chess? When you think about it, chess can be compared to dreaming too. If you want to win a chess game, you must decipher your opponent’s every move, his secret, malicious, lethal intentions. It’s a lot of work! Beyond mere appearances, the “latent content” is very significant, even though it was subjected to a certain abstraction.
One can write down every move in a chess game, but the result would only be the outlines of the subject matter and would exclude what went on in the players’ minds during the game.
Vain Art of the Fugue is more obviously structured by music: a canon for two voices, as you would say. Or more precisely, rectus and inversus: the theme takes one step ahead and then one step back and so on. The theme is impeded by pitfalls and traps that account for the movement.
Pigeon Post’s case is slightly more complex. At first sight, one is reminded of Flaubert’s project of a “book about nothing.” But Pigeon Post deals more with the rejection of a preconceived subject matter, and with the submission to music, seen as a nutrient, as lifeblood. It’s not a submission to classical music, but to atonal music, which bears the seeds of the end: the end of music, of art in general.
What else to say?
The fragmented structure of my text plays a great role. One can speak of “thematic cells,” which correspond in literature to what I call, somewhere else, “the shadow of a theme, ectoplasms of things and beings.” I also refer to Boulez there. But I’m also referring to the wizard in this fragment, Webern. But please don’t lure me into pedantry—that is, analyzing my own texts.
I would like to add one last thing. There isn’t such a thing as a subject matter that exists before the text is being written; however, after a few pages, a quantity of subjects are being suggested, one by one, and several different stories and anecdotes intermingle and mix like a pigeon in flight; among those pigeons are carrier pigeons that carry not just one but several messages; once put together, those ill-assorted messages claim the death of a certain kind of literature: the literature that still harbors the illusion that it can endlessly replenish itself.
