Aseroë Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  Aseroë

  “[An] enigmatic and radiant book.”

  —Maurice Blanchot

  “This over-the-top, extraordinary novel, in its no less stupendous translation, begins with a mycological intimacy that brings to mind the great mushroom scenes of the film Phantom Thread. How not to be aroused by this whopping treat of verbal virtuosity?”

  —Mary Ann Caws, author of The Modern Art Cookbook and Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism

  “A singular novel. Aseroë’s storyteller speaks from within the grasp of mysterious and urgent preoccupations. Yet his confident narration, rich in colorful, familiar detail, and sensitively and gracefully rendered into English by master translator Richard Sieburth, assures us of his obsessions’ importance to him and, within his brilliant and bizarrely convincing world, increasingly to us.”

  —Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t and Essays One

  “An immensely pleasurable read.”

  —Pascal Quignard, Prix Goncourt award–winning author of The Roving Shadows

  “What a wonderful piece of writing! What an exhilarating adventure! What a madcap exploration of mushrooms, paintings, Rimbaud, the legend of Orpheus, and the mazes of a poet’s mind, in a jigsaw puzzle of a book that ultimately (like Alice’s Wonderland) makes absolute sense!”

  —Alberto Manguel, author of The Library at Night and Fabulous Monsters: Dracula, Alice, Superman, and Other Literary Friends

  “In this book oblivion is daylight.”

  —Éric Vuillard, Prix Goncourt award-winning author of The Order of the Day

  “Full of wonder…. Aseroë is a lyrical contemplation of how words affect reality.”

  —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews

  “A book filled to the gills with a veritable feast of literary ingredients. To read Aseroë is to experience a kind of inebriation as we drink in the intelligence and the talent of its author.”

  —Marie Étienne, La Quinzaine Littéraire

  “Ranging from the mysterious mushroom known by the name of Aseroë to Giorgione’s painting The Tempest, while meditating on the millions made off the work of Rimbaud, [Aseroë] offers a series of astonishing and detailed variations on the theme of the figures of forgetfulness.”

  —Claire Devarieux, Libération

  Aseroë

  François Dominique

  TRANSLATED BY

  Richard Sieburth

  AND

  Howard Limoli

  Bellevue Literary Press

  NEW YORK

  First published in the United States in 2020

  by Bellevue Literary Press, New York

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  90 Broad Street

  Suite 2100

  New York, NY 10004

  www.blpress.org

  Aseroë was originally published in French in 1992 as Aséroé by POL éditeur

  Text © 1992 by François Dominique

  © POL éditeur

  Translation © 2020 by Richard Sieburth and Howard Limoli

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places

  (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Dominique, François, 1943- author. | Sieburth, Richard, translator. | Limoli, Howard, translator.

  Title: Aseroë / François Dominique ; translated by Richard Sieburth and Howard Limoli.

  Other titles: Aséroé. English

  Description: First edition. | New York : Bellevue Literary Press, 2020. | Aseroë was originally published in French in 1992 as Aséroé by POL éditeur

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020002388 (print) | LCCN 2020002389 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942658788 (paperback) | ISBN 9781942658795 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PQ3949.2.D57 A913 2021 (print) | LCC PQ3949.2.D57 (ebook) | DDC 843/.914--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002388

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002389

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now

  known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher,

  except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection

  with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals

  and foundations—for their support.

  This publication is made possible by the New York State

  Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew

  M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This project is supported in part by an award from

  the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  Bellevue Literary Press is committed to ecological stewardship in our book

  production practices, working to reduce our impact on the natural environment.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  paperback ISBN: 978-1-942658-78-8

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-79-5

  To Suzanne Limoli and Richard Sieburth

  Contents

  1 Aseroë

  2 Aseroë

  3 Aseroë

  4 Aseroë

  5 Aseroë

  6 Aseroë

  7 Aseroë

  8 Aseroë

  9 Aseroë

  10 Aseroë

  11 Aseroë

  12 Aseroë

  1

  Aseroë

  SHE HAS ALWAYS AROUSED special feelings in me. Every year, at the outset of summer or sometimes as late as mid-autumn, I never fail to pay her a visit. It doesn’t take me long. While others might pass within a few feet of her, I see her from a distance, I recognize her, I approach her and bend down over her and in a soft voice speak the words that suit her, the name she bears. She immediately starts to blush. Her slender, elegant foot—as with all her kind—is attractively flushed.

  I have no illusions: I know this slight flush is not a response to any affectionate words I might address to her, but a reaction to the properties of the ambient air, to the amount of carbon dioxide that the natural respiration of plants (or just my tainted breath) is likely to increase.

  Once picked, she takes on a more vivid coloring, as though indisposed. She’ll be just as sweet to the taste, crisp and scented, so long as you don’t spoil her aroma with garlic and spices or smother her in common meadow mushrooms.

  Amanita rubescens is the only apparently sentient mushroom I can name.

  People are right to avoid that very ancient but very foolish tendency to project human attributes onto nature. I stroll through the woods, overwhelmed by the scenery—the dawn’s light, the lofty peaks, the crystal springs—and my mind is stupefied by the flood of metaphors that invade me.

  Determined not to dabble in tawdry imagery, I wondered whether a state of mind might exist—or rather, a state of matter—in which words and things were not separate. If so, this discovery would open up a radically new field to all the forms of creation. As I idly posed to myself this curious question, I couldn’t begin to suspect the inhuman character of the artificial reality that would inevitably ensue.

  I think the moment has come to explain my experiment. Let me first point out t
hat mushrooms make up a very vast and almost infinite collection. When experts suggest the figure of 120,000 species of mushrooms, they know this figure has to be increased over the course of years: the multiplication of varieties, the abrupt mutations, the disclosure of new forms whose spores have been lying dormant for centuries force us to add endlessly to the matrix of a rigorous classification system already encumbered with unclassifiable types as well as with strange subspecies and their offspring. Besides, certain of these mycological abortions are so odd that you wonder whether the classification system itself, so patiently worked out by Quélet, Kühner, Pilát, Romagnesi and so many others, shouldn’t be reopened for examination.

  What animal or vegetable species would be capable of evolving to the point of rendering obsolete the great divisions between vertebrates and invertebrates, cryptogams and phanerogams? Not a single one. That doesn’t prevent the animal or vegetable kingdom from creating new species (the innumerable varieties of orchids provide a good example), but in these cases the main lines of the classification system have reached a sufficient level of certainty to embrace all species, including those whose lives—yet to come—cannot be named.

  As for mushrooms, it’s another matter altogether. They don’t belong to a defined kingdom. In a number of ways, they are animals, protozoans or protophytes; in other ways, they’re vegetables whose growth is geotropic, like certain algae. Since their appearance on Earth seems to have preceded both the vegetable and animal kingdoms, people simply say that they share properties with both. Consequently, it will take, among all the subspecies yet to come, only a single mushroom whose properties clearly belong both to the animal and vegetable worlds for the great division between Basidiomycota and Ascomycota to collapse on the spot.

  I would have preferred my experiment to deal with the family of mushrooms called Amanitaceae fungi. They are elegant, finely colored, and always display—except for the fly agaric, or muscaria—a certain propensity toward solitude, which appeals to me. In addition, Amanita seem to want to behave as if they provide the most significant illustration of those problems that the life of silence and the power of naming share: gentleness and violence, good and evil, edible and nonedible, fertile and murderous. In this they resemble that “good/bad” thing that Plato submits to the hasty judgment of the young Alcibi-ades. Yet from the point of view of beauty, they escape contradiction: they are all splendid, without exception. The most beautiful and finest of them all (preferable to the morel and the truffle) is the Amanita of the Caesars, or True Orange, whose color evokes the fiery opal (first comparison), the sun’s disk at twilight (second comparison), or the mineral arsenic (number three). At the opposite extreme (but no less beautiful, all white and nacreous) is the Amanita phalloides (or death cap mushroom)—poison to the core. Horrible abdominal pains, profuse sweating, a burning thirst, shivering, cramps, progressive cooling of the extremities accompanied by terrible anxiety: such are the harbingers of the death, one to three weeks later, of any enemy who might eat it.

  Thus, two varieties of the same genus—the Amanita—offer the best and the worst. The mind is the only thing I can name that shares in such extremes.

  But I needed to find a different species, less fixed, more capable of abrupt mutations, which might simultaneously modify the order of things and the system of naming them.

  There is another type of mushroom, almost bastardized, an ill-defined member of the family of Phallaceae, which the experts have named Anthurus archeri and which occurs in the form of Aseroë.

  Having originated in Tasmania and South Africa, it appeared in France very suddenly in the fall of 1920, in the environs of La Petite-Raon, to the south of Saint-Dié on the western slope of the Vosges Mountains. One finds in the press of that period reports of a superstitious nature and accusations of witchcraft leading to investigations by the police. These new forms of Anthurus, which appeared so abruptly in the underbrush of the Vosges Mountains, were a definite cause for alarm. One doctor in Saint-Dié, named Lucas, went so far as to declare that this unknown fungus was a carrier of infectious germs introduced into French territory by German patriot extremists seeking their postwar revenge. An epidemic of flu over the course of the winter came just in time to back up his claim and to furnish a few certified lunatics with the basis for a legal action to be taken against the military authorities (Journal des Vosges, October 26, 1920, p. 3).

  Today the Anthurus has become common in Burgundy (near Cîteaux Abbey), in the Jura Mountains, and in Savoy. It should take only one or two generations for it to reach all the forests in Europe.

  The Anthurus archeri initially assumes the form of a round, firm, membranous egg. If one cuts it open, one observes in either half, embedded in its translucid and cartilaginous flesh, two ruddy structures whose curvature and folds evoke a twinned fetus in its first stage of gestation, before any part of it has acquired the contours allowing for more precise identification. After several days, the cuticle cracks, allowing for the emergence of between five and seven thinly drawn triangular lashes, which rapidly sprout from the earth and rise up to six or eight inches above the surface of the soil, then curve backward like iris petals. These lashes have a scarlet surface, covered with a coarse gleba. Several days later, the gleba becomes covered with a network of damp black pustules.

  From the beginning of this strange flowering, the fungus emits an odor so unbearable and so persistent that even the most distracted passerby cannot fail to notice it.

  Arrived at their full maturity, the most beautiful of these specimens resemble fingers or, rather, the talons of a raptor curled earthward. I know of no other animal that has a skin so obscene. The thing looks like a flayed cadaver, immobile, anchored to the earth.

  Having just written all this, I stand back to assess the negative effects of my experiment. In order to report on a new form of life, I wanted to avoid the weight of metaphor, but far removed from the realm of living things, I realize I have given in to mere imagery. I had thought that this most singular of all mushrooms, given its unique character, might have allowed me to avoid the pitfalls of figurative language, yet it relentlessly confounded my thinking and propelled me into the improper use of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic imagery—that is, “egg,” “flesh,” “members,” “skin,” “fingers,” not to mention the unavoidable “flayed cadaver” of the dissection table.

  For me, this business is more serious than it seems. It has taught me, at considerable cost, that one has to submit to the unruliness of metaphorical description in order to gain access to another level of perception and of language, to another form of life.

  To make myself clear, let me point out that the vocabulary of mycology (in whatever language) insidiously invites organic, libidinous metaphorization. There is no perversion, even the most morbid and the most criminal, that remains unsuggested by even the most learned and objective of mycological descriptions. I have now come to realize that this particularity, which is without any example in the other natural sciences, does not depend on the native language or on the prurient turn of mind of the specialist; it stems from the thing itself, from the fundamental character of all types of mushrooms.

  I could prove this assertion by a detailed analysis of the Latin binomials that form the basis of the terminology of mycology, but a list of common names, better known to the reader, should be clear enough. Here they are in French:

  Unguline marginée, vulvaire gluante, vesse-de-loup, trompette-des-morts, tricholome malpropre, tremellodon gélatineux, tête de Méduse, sulfurin puant, satyre puant, striée hirsute, entolome livide, pied de griffon, phallus impudique, oeuf du diable, oignon de loup, nymphe des montagnes, nonnette voilée, mucidule visqueuse, marasme brûlant, lépiote déguenillée, langue de chat, lactaire languissant, grosse queue, gorge noire, flammule pénétrante, exidie glanduleuse, drosophile larmoyante, doigt de gant, cul rouge, cul vert, bise de curé, amanites étranglées, engainées, phalloïdes, vaginées, vraies et fausses panthères, agaric meurtrier.

&nb
sp; And here, in English translation:

  Marginated claw, sticky vulva, wolf’s fart, trump of the dead, filthy gland, tremulous jelly, Medusa’s head, stinky sulfur, stinky satyr, hairy groove, livid embryo, griffon’s foot, shameless phallus, devil’s egg, wolf’s onion, mountain nymph, veiled novice, slimy milkcap, burning marasmus, unspooled scurf, cat’s tongue, languid lacteal, lewd tail, black breast, penetrating flamelet, glandular surge, teary flycatcher, glove finger, red butt, green butt, priest’s kiss, strangulated, sheathed amanta, phalloids, vaginateds, true and false panthers, deadly agaric.

  I have, unfortunately, every reason to believe in the reifying power of certain words that have no other use in ordinary life than to arouse the senses and thus merely lead the flesh to orgasm or disgust.

  Sed occurrit quiddam de nihilo. Nam ex quocumque fit aliquid, id causa est ejus quod ex se fit, et omnis causa necesse est aliquod ad essentiam effecti praebat adjumentum. (Anselm of Canterbury, Monologion, 8, 1). It goes without saying: no sooner said than done.

  Whoever has made their way through the underbrush in the fall can observe, without, however, being able to explain the fact, that mushrooms exert a power of attraction over language. Indeed, whether picked or not, they have this strange capacity of transmitting a little of their indeterminate substance into the words that everyone adorns them with; so that one must wonder, long after one has left them behind, whether they don’t leave some trace of their existence upon our actions as we tend to our daily lives, far from the woods.

  Could it be that this oldest kingdom of nature among living things has transmitted to succeeding kingdoms (vegetable, animal, and human) the privilege of here and there arousing a muted organic presence, a substantial manifestation of the passage from the inert to the living—of which the mind, a latecomer, has retained only an unconscious trace and about which it can say nothing?