Leaping from one sentence to the next: Stu Hatton reviews 'Endgame with No Ending' by Dominique Hecq

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Nov 25

Endgame with No Ending by Dominique Hecq, SurVision Books, 2023.

According to the late Charles Simic, 'The prose poem is the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does'. Simic was perhaps gesturing towards a tradition of prose poetry where other contradictions also come to the fore: the kind of contradictions that arise, for example, when we try to tease apart or combine dream and reality, fiction and nonfiction, self and other, beauty and horror, reason and the irrational.

One way of distinguishing the short prose poems of Dominique Hecq's Endgame with No Ending from, say, flash fiction, would be to argue that while flash fiction's centre of gravity is narrative, for these prose poems, the centre of gravity is language (or writing) itself. This is not to say that Hecq's poems are just 'writing about writing', but that they address or encompass the materialities of language, textuality, and the conditions of possibility for writing. And this is true of a tradition of prose poetry that can be traced from Baudelaire, Lautréamont and Rimbaud, through to Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, and Lyn Hejinian, and Australian poets such as Bella Li and Luke Beesley.

'Cursive', the second poem in Hecq's chapbook, meditates and improvises on the font, as in typeface ('I hate Times Roman. Love Chancery Cursive.'), but also in the sense of spring, source, or a receptacle for baptism. The poem designates and embodies residues swept up in the gust of writing, 'dream-begotten strokes'.

Hecq riffs on the 'Chancery Cursive' font, affirming a love of chance, and a writing that comes quickly, an ease and flow: 'how the hand runs across the page'. Yet in tracing the etymology of 'cursive', the poem notes 'what a curse a running hand is', whereby writing might be seen as pathological, as a symptom. Or as Thomas Mann put it, 'A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.'

But even words that 'come easily' have their difficulties, as with the 'slip of the pen': the words we write and immediately cross out in embarrassment or shock, or those we only later realise were not the words we consciously intended to write.

The reader might similarly find the unconscious at work in the gaps when Hecq leaps from one sentence to the next. For example, consider the first two sentences of 'Cross-swell Heisenberg': 'Sky shot with stars. A heartbeat.' Such leaps can be understood as parataxis, literally a 'placing side by side', where two consecutive sentences may have no apparent conjunction, or operate like a cinematic jump cut. I'd argue that for Hecq, the point of parataxis is not only 'to provoke … shock by causing the encounter of unrelated objects' ('Magritte's Gravestone'). The reader is invited to forge connections via sound, image, affect, narrative logic, etc, whereby 'A scenario begins to emerge' ('Travelogue Dali'). Nevertheless, Hecq's poems tend towards coherence in terms of narrative, voice and perspective; they are not fragmentary, as a rule.

Of all the poems in Hecq's chapbook, 'Whimsical' perhaps comes closest to flash fiction; it might be read as a short ghost story set in Hanging Rock and its forest surrounds. As in many ghost stories, an eeriness emerges where the whimsical and the sinister overlap. 'Whimsical' offers a perfect example of this in the form of garden gnomes: they are homely yet 'unhomely', unhiemlich (uncanny, unsettling). Upon encountering garden gnomes in the forest, along with a sign that says 'GNOME SWEET GNOME', the speaker of the poem says the gnomes seem 'sinister'. The whimsical has a sinister side in that it tends to paper over contradiction or antagonism. In Latin, sinister means 'left-hand side'. In a world where right-handedness dominates, the left hand is the unused, 'unloved' hand, the gauche, the 'left behind'. The poem calls to mind the sinister disappearances in Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock, and ends with the terrifying lines 'I'm an old friend, says the wind, softly. Then screams: Kill them.'

Hecq has described Endgame with No Ending as 'a chapbook of 25 surreal prose poems'. The majority of cultural references in the book (whether gnomes, Orpheus, Kubla Khan, or a Barbie doll), if not directly related to Surrealism, are shown to have some connection with the surreal.

In his first Surrealist Manifesto (1924), André Breton defined Surrealism as:

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express […] the actual functioning of thought […] in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

Hecq's poems are free-associative in the spirit of surrealist 'automatic writing', as outlined in Breton's definition above. For Breton, automatic writing is a kind of trance-state granting access to the 'font' of thought. But contra Breton's manifesto, while Hecq's poems may flirt with irrationality and immorality, ultimately they are neither irrational nor immoral (let alone amoral). And Hecq certainly has aesthetic concerns. Many of her poems probe art, music, and literature, including the work of the Surrealists Dali and Magritte, as well as forerunners and fellow travellers of the Surrealist movement such as Lautréamont and Artaud. However, that's not really what I mean by 'aesthetic concerns'.

Surrealism can be viewed as a theory and practice of aesthetics. As a branch of philosophy, aesthetics involves questioning our engagement with objects and environments, how these affect us (in the affective register), and how we might recast or 'unconceal' the objects and environments of our world. These lines of questioning very much inform Hecq's collection.

In his manifesto, Breton championed the non-separation of dream and waking life. Taking his lead from Freud, Breton saw dreams as in a way more 'real' than what normally passes for 'reality'. And Hecq's poems are concerned with this dialectic of reality and dream. 'How It Is' proposes that 'Just as one presumes that paradise exists, one assumes that reality exists', while the book's epigraph, from Jonathan Foer's Tree of Codes, claims, 'Reality is as thin as paper'.

Moreover, the speaker of 'Champagne Supernova, Taché' insists, 'No, Doctor, this is no hallucination. This is the real real.' 'Taché' can be translated as 'marked', 'stained' or 'traced'. The Oasis song 'Champagne Supernova' serves as a springboard for this poem, which traces a supernova as the climax to end all climaxes: 'Hundreds of billions of years in three little seconds, snuffed.' Not forgetting that we're all marked by, and in a way made from, previous supernovae: aren't animals (including human animals), plants, stars and nebulae 'just' different arrangements of chemical elements, particles at play, iterations in a dance of cosmic boom and bust? But the question falls on the 'just'. The poem's reference to 'bodymindsoul' suggests consciousness as the universe experiencing itself — and yet the death of a star or the birth of consciousness points towards a not-at-oneness, a 'stain' upon any notion of purity or unity.

André Breton and the Surrealist milieu that formed around him are the focus of 'Rrose Selavy', the title of this playful poem having been taken from Breton's famous pun on 'Eros, c'est la vie': 'eros, such is life'. There is a fluidity of identity and gender in 'Rrose Selavy', where the 'I' remains obscure; the poem very much accentuates the erotics of the surreal.

The poetry of the Surrealist movement tends to be very conscious of eros (desire) in its content. But from a psychoanalytic standpoint, in its form, Surrealist poetry tends to take on the repetition compulsion of the drive. Automatic writing contends with the entropy of self-sabotage associated with the drive, but this might be edited and smoothed over in order to reach a more aesthetically pleasing poem. Hecq's poems are dialectical, admitting both desire and drive; just as there are leaps of beauty and charges of frisson, there are also instances of undercutting, doubt, paradox, and a circularity or spiralling rather than a teleological narrative flow. There may be 'A procession of words' ('Travelogue Dali'), a phantasmogoric parade of images, but these aren't driving towards some predetermined outcome, or any specific moral lesson.

'Magritte's Gravestone' makes use of collage/bricolage, another technique associated with Surrealism and proximate movements such as Cubism and Dada. The poem includes textual fragments from Suzi Gablik's book Magritte (Thames & Hudson, 1976). Collage can be another way of messing with continuity (Cf. parataxis above), one that might be opposed to the 'cursivity' of automatic writing. However, the assembling of a textual collage may still involve a degree of free association, in so far as the collagist may 'conjure' linkages between fragments of text, arriving at unexpected connections or through-lines, giving a sense that 'Anything could happen' ('Π'). Nevertheless, as in the case of 'Magritte's Gravestone', collage also tends to involve the unmistakeable intervention of the text of the Other. But just as Lacan would say that one's desire is always the desire of the Other, by the same token, isn't one's text always the text of the Other? Indeed, Hecq's poem even proposes that 'we are made of letters', formed (at least in part) from a language that prededed our birth, and contines to precede us.

Each poem in the collection approaches 'A brinkness', to quote from 'Cross-swell Heisenberg'. This poem shows how electricity can be generated through what Lacan called a 'battery of signifiers', perhaps as a lightning flash of metonymy and/or metaphor: 'A cavernous ribbed ragged Schaumkrone leaf wave rises up to the white horse moon'. The German word 'Schaumkrone' can mean 'whitecap', 'white crest' or 'horse'. The merging of ocean, moon and the animal kingdom also arises in the sensuous line 'The sea is butterfly bones soaking in moon loom frizz.'

The following lines from 'Less is a Bore' could serve as an ars poetica and also as a thumbnail of the chapbook itself:

The house is like a poem. It conjures up the human need for stimulation, surprise, change. Its vocabulary is eclectic, inventive. Inside there are no curtains, no blinds blocking out the world.

Martha Kinney's characterisation of Rimbaud's Illuminations also seems apt for Hecq's poems: 'the prose poem as a lantern, an illuminated container, casting images and phrases needed but barely understood.' And when the speaker of 'Twinklewinkalling' remarks, 'I zero in on the white hole of the question mark,' this perhaps hints at Hecq's intent. Rather than avoiding contradiction or attempting to resolve it, the poems of Endgame with No Ending revel in what Hegel called the 'speculative proposition'. They might be characterised as fleeting stabs at the infinite or the impossible.

- Stu Hatton

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Stu Hatton is a writer/editor who lives on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung country near Castlemaine, Victoria, with his partner and their three kids. His work has appeared in The Age, Australian Poetry Journal, Best Australian Poems, Cordite, Overland, Rabbit, Southerly, and Westerly. He's currently running an online writers' workshop entitled 'Fail Better'..