A Clean Slate:
On Estelle Hoy’s Pisti, 80 Rue De Belleville
Estelle Hoy’s Pisti, 80 Rue De Belleville (After 8 Books, 2019) is a novel about the future of the left in the present world; it is also about the way we negotiate between our private lives and the real world, between language and reality. Pierre Guyotat states the central issue at stake in politics in our time in this quote from Humans Par Hasard (Éditions Gallimard, 2016)
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We are entering into the very problem of politics: the clean slate and conservation. The century before us has been marked by this question. The clean slate. I lived it, with others of my generation. Hundreds of thousands have experienced it. It was a contradiction that was very harsh: should we keep things from the past by installing them as myths, to keep, for a fundamentally uncertain purpose? You have to keep it, but you also have to make a clean sweep of it and start on a new foot, while keeping what has been done.
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Elke is an academic who often battles with herself about the insular nature of her daily work, teaching elite children at a prestigious school, and the distance of this work from the actual events in the world and its people. Pisti goads her on, claiming that she is not a real revolutionary because of her indecisiveness and unwillingness to go along with her more radical agenda. Pisti is militant. Poet Amiri Baraka’s writes in his essay, “Why American Poetry is Boring, Again” that, in these times, “a poetry of ‘the outdoors,’ of the actual, is being eschewed. Instead there is a desire for belonging, safety, all the comforts of Homeland Security.” Pisti could have said something like this in criticizing Elke. Perhaps Elke could also have said this in her youth where her political idealism was stronger and carried meaning. She was closer to Franny at that time and they shared more in common. But the times have changed, and Elke is now the mother of a girl, and Franny has come under the influence of Pisti’s militant stance and plays at being militant herself. It is a novel about identity and how we come to believe in our ideas and putting them into practice in the real world.
When Elke first moved to Paris from the Lower East Side, she lived in a poor district. She befriends Kiki, a Chinese immigrant. She realizes that Kiki’s practical nature has something about it that is enviable as opposed to her own world of academia. Hoy quotes Eileen Myles: “Poor people tend to know what’s going on plus they are often good looking, at least when they are young and even later they are the cool interesting people the rich person once slept with, so the poor person always feathers the nests of the rich.” But Elke realizes she doesn’t love Kiki so much as she respects her. In her way, Elke respects Pisti as well. Pisti is firm in her radical belief system that involves meeting power with violence, but Elke’s sense of the political is more personal, and complicated by years of struggle and her now being a single mother. A conversation with Jean, midway through the book, tells us something important about how Elke sees herself:
When Elke first moved to Paris from the Lower East Side, she lived in a poor district. She befriends Kiki, a Chinese immigrant. She realizes that Kiki’s practical nature has something about it that is enviable as opposed to her own world of academia. Hoy quotes Eileen Myles: “Poor people tend to know what’s going on plus they are often good looking, at least when they are young and even later they are the cool interesting people the rich person once slept with, so the poor person always feathers the nests of the rich.” But Elke realizes she doesn’t love Kiki so much as she respects her. In her way, Elke respects Pisti as well. Pisti is firm in her radical belief system that involves meeting power with violence, but Elke’s sense of the political is more personal, and complicated by years of struggle and her now being a single mother. A conversation with Jean, midway through the book, tells us something important about how Elke sees herself:
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Elke: Having a child forces you to censor yourself.
Jean: You sacrifice yourself. Elke: I suspect so. Jean: Just not for the political ideal? Elke: [curtly] The personal is political. |
She is rudely brief because it is a statement that perhaps she believes is partly a justification for her life, her tendency to detach from a situation; the sense that her belief in actualizing a radical politics has dampened over the years. She has struggled with supporting herself, paying the rent, putting food on the table for her child.
Elke eventually believes that she can only be free, truly free, “if I had the courage to be honest. Both with myself and with others.” But she in conflict with herself since she views her teaching life as playing the role of “nurturing teacher and encouraged students to school themselves on class systems and activism, the fundamentals of critical thinking and writing techniques – just generally uphold the illusion of democracy so their comfort level could be maintained.” Ultimately, she claims, “I was a total hypocrite, a phony. The students knew it, my friends knew it, and worst of all, I knew it.” Didier Eribon writes in Returning to Reims (Semiotext(e), 2013):
Elke eventually believes that she can only be free, truly free, “if I had the courage to be honest. Both with myself and with others.” But she in conflict with herself since she views her teaching life as playing the role of “nurturing teacher and encouraged students to school themselves on class systems and activism, the fundamentals of critical thinking and writing techniques – just generally uphold the illusion of democracy so their comfort level could be maintained.” Ultimately, she claims, “I was a total hypocrite, a phony. The students knew it, my friends knew it, and worst of all, I knew it.” Didier Eribon writes in Returning to Reims (Semiotext(e), 2013):
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All those people who want things to be “regular,” or “meaningful,” or to correspond to “stable points of reference” know they can count on the way adherence to the norm is inculcated into the deepest levels of our consciousness from our earlier years. This happens by way of our ongoing experience of the social world and by way of the discomfort – the shame – we come to feel when the part of the world in which we live fails to follow those tidily organized political and legal rules. The surrounding culture offers us those rules both as the only way life can be lived and as an ideal we must strive for. This is the case even if any such version of a normative family or familial norm in fact corresponds to nothing we ever encounter in real life.
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In a sense, this is Elke’s conflict. The real world is not what she expected it to be and came in conflict with her youthful idealism. Pisti fires back at her in conversation things like: “No fascist careerist has ever altered the political landscape.” She insults he by calling her a fascist. It is unwarranted and cruel. Elke says, “I love pleasure and no longer have the ascetic tendencies.” The French writer Guillaume Dustan, wrote about the revolution of pleasure against cycles of totalitarianism in his novel, Genie Divin (Éditions Balland, 2001):
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Generally speaking, the freedom to do what you want to do with your self that boomed in the 60s lasted another round of 15 years, up into the mid-seventies. Because what happened then was what usually happens during the XXth century: 25 years of repression, with a global backlash against the liberation trends of the preceding period, and moral majorities taking over in the major leading countries of the world, whether it be with right-wing leaders such as Reagan and Thatcher, or socialist leaders such as Mitterrand or here, Felipe Gonzalez. I think they were more or less the same. Now, when there is repression, there is also resistance, and resistance took place through youth culture, namely through music, with forces such as rock and pop and then the house and techno cultures, all of them advocating sex and drugs, if not officially, at least in essence. I think that everybody will agree, for instance, that Madonna is the major political man of the late 80s and early 90s, and that she saved the western world. I’m stating the obvious.
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Pisti’s mixes sex and politics and this presents no conflict for her. Elke tells her “You enjoy politics and fucking in equal measure and it’s a mix even imbeciles would champion.” She says this to provoke her. But Pisti is nonplussed and counters with, “You want to fuck me, don’t you?” And she is right. Her heated exchanges with Pisti suggest that she has a certain admiration for her, not only intellectually but sexually. There is a sexual tension in the apartment that Pisti and Franny set out to alleviate, by engaging in sexual activities openly, but Elke, in contrast, is somewhat repressed, or at least indecisive; that’s how Pisti and Franny see her or want to see her. Elke can respond with: “I’ve been inspecting my degradation and it’s not looking pretty.” She can remember her lovers, he time as a dancer, the cheap motels she would got to in order to write. Her masochistic tendencies. Her guilty conscience. But now she is older and can conclude that
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Sex and politics, as far as I’m concerned, is a delicate, irrepressible thing, and I’m no longer demanding it unconditionally…there are conditions to everything…I’m starting a polemic coup against my own libidinal energy. It’s not a coup against debauched living; it’s a coup towards freedom. I’m capsizing myself.
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This is Elke’s realization about herself; but one way of coming to terms with the complex character of Pisti is to examine, for example, what happened in Italy in the 60s.
The experience of the revolutionary movement in Italy, from 1969 to 1979, was unquestionably the most meaningful for the Capitalist West. The wave of conflicts in 1968 at the universities and factories (such as the FIAT factory in Turin) eventually spread throughout the West. The protests culminated in the “troubled autumn” of 1969, eventually involving the entire Italian working class in strikes, demonstrations and acts of sabotage. An important phase in the movement occurred in the late 70s with the increase in unemployed workers that were educated in the universities. As Franco Berardi writes,
The experience of the revolutionary movement in Italy, from 1969 to 1979, was unquestionably the most meaningful for the Capitalist West. The wave of conflicts in 1968 at the universities and factories (such as the FIAT factory in Turin) eventually spread throughout the West. The protests culminated in the “troubled autumn” of 1969, eventually involving the entire Italian working class in strikes, demonstrations and acts of sabotage. An important phase in the movement occurred in the late 70s with the increase in unemployed workers that were educated in the universities. As Franco Berardi writes,
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The cultural revolution of 1968, which upset forms of behavior, values, human relationships, sexual relationships, the relationship to country and home, has ended by creating a social stratum that is recalcitrant before the notion of salaried work, fixed residence, and fixed position of work.
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The feminist movement emerged and there was an increase in gay collectives. Free Radio created an uninterrupted flow of music and words that could be accessed in homes. There were experiments with collective forms of living. Communes were set up by squatters in various neighborhoods. All this was an attempt to transform society at the cultural level. But the enormous creativity of the movement of 1977 could not succeed in finding a program or a way of actualizing its ideals in the positive sense.
On March 7, the movement took over Bologna (a stronghold of the PCI) and Rome. There was violent conflict in Rome. Five days later Rome became the stage of a six-hour battle including thousands of youths. During the following days, the movement invaded the city of Bologna. The PCI’s ability to maintain public order was undermined. The State resorted to brutal repression throughout Italy. Hundreds were arrested in Bologna and elsewhere as the wave of repression continued. Radio stations were closed, journals and magazines confiscated, bookstores shut down. Berardi writes,
On March 7, the movement took over Bologna (a stronghold of the PCI) and Rome. There was violent conflict in Rome. Five days later Rome became the stage of a six-hour battle including thousands of youths. During the following days, the movement invaded the city of Bologna. The PCI’s ability to maintain public order was undermined. The State resorted to brutal repression throughout Italy. Hundreds were arrested in Bologna and elsewhere as the wave of repression continued. Radio stations were closed, journals and magazines confiscated, bookstores shut down. Berardi writes,
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Now one began to discover that social democracy, even though introducing new elements into the communist worker movement tradition of the Third International, was not necessarily in contradiction with totalitarian, violent and Stalinist trends. In fact the two aspects were mixed in the PCI, which had become a component of bourgeoisie democracy by abandoning every type of violence against the existing order [while] at the same time [maintaining the] violent force of totalitarianism against the revolutionary movement.
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It was clear that the Movement was in crisis. As a collective, it could not reconcile its member’s ideals with the growing violence and State repression. Armed warfare had begun to take center stage, eventually engulfing the entire Movement.
Pisti and Franny are calling for a violent revolution. We have seen that the protests at the Fiat factories during the 60s eventually led to full out terrorist activity from the PCI. In this respect, Elke offers a different trajectory in the book, one of personal growth, and actualization of the self; she is concerned with the nature of freedom. At one point, Pisti calls her “an unreliable narrator.” Elke knows that if she is an unreliable writer its “because my self-respect doesn’t have an inheritance.” She’s not working with a script. She is venturing into the unknown. The book ends with Elke unable to find the seat assigned to her on a train. Her face has “been scratched out of the photo.” Earlier in the book she talked to Jean about the Bernadette Corporation: “They merged to make a film set on the Italian seaside city of Geneva about a radical conception of community, refusing political identity.” By the end of the novel she has shown herself actualizing this position, erasing herself from a political or a fixed sexual identity. She sleeps with both men and woman and feels that she can love not only one person but all of them in the group. She is more interested in the communal rather than a program mandated by an individual. She is a writer not an anarchist. As Robert Glück writes in Communal Nude (Semiotext(e), 2016) “Writing can’t will away power relations and commodity life; instead, writing must explore its relation to power and recognize that group practice resides inside the commodity.” Elke’s attempt to balance her writing life with the world of rents, bills, and a child to take care of, gives her a sense of purpose more centered than the platitudes about Marxism, revolution, and the worker’s struggle. And her position is not one of weakness; Hoy quotes Dodie Bellamy: “Writing is tough work, I don’t see how anyone can really write form a position of weakness. Sometimes I may start out in that position, but the act of commandeering words flips me into a position of power.” But this is not to say that Pisti is completely wrong about her own position. The recent riots that swept through America in protest to the murder of George Floyd should make us think about the nature of revolutionary activity. Black Lives Matter signs held during protests is more evidence that we cannot simply accept academic notions and concepts not grounded in reality. We cannot shut our eyes to this violence. Finally, Elke says about Pisti: “she felt familiar, but I was still not ready to acknowledge why.” Jean points something out to Elke in the following conversation about Pier Paolo Pasolini:
Pisti and Franny are calling for a violent revolution. We have seen that the protests at the Fiat factories during the 60s eventually led to full out terrorist activity from the PCI. In this respect, Elke offers a different trajectory in the book, one of personal growth, and actualization of the self; she is concerned with the nature of freedom. At one point, Pisti calls her “an unreliable narrator.” Elke knows that if she is an unreliable writer its “because my self-respect doesn’t have an inheritance.” She’s not working with a script. She is venturing into the unknown. The book ends with Elke unable to find the seat assigned to her on a train. Her face has “been scratched out of the photo.” Earlier in the book she talked to Jean about the Bernadette Corporation: “They merged to make a film set on the Italian seaside city of Geneva about a radical conception of community, refusing political identity.” By the end of the novel she has shown herself actualizing this position, erasing herself from a political or a fixed sexual identity. She sleeps with both men and woman and feels that she can love not only one person but all of them in the group. She is more interested in the communal rather than a program mandated by an individual. She is a writer not an anarchist. As Robert Glück writes in Communal Nude (Semiotext(e), 2016) “Writing can’t will away power relations and commodity life; instead, writing must explore its relation to power and recognize that group practice resides inside the commodity.” Elke’s attempt to balance her writing life with the world of rents, bills, and a child to take care of, gives her a sense of purpose more centered than the platitudes about Marxism, revolution, and the worker’s struggle. And her position is not one of weakness; Hoy quotes Dodie Bellamy: “Writing is tough work, I don’t see how anyone can really write form a position of weakness. Sometimes I may start out in that position, but the act of commandeering words flips me into a position of power.” But this is not to say that Pisti is completely wrong about her own position. The recent riots that swept through America in protest to the murder of George Floyd should make us think about the nature of revolutionary activity. Black Lives Matter signs held during protests is more evidence that we cannot simply accept academic notions and concepts not grounded in reality. We cannot shut our eyes to this violence. Finally, Elke says about Pisti: “she felt familiar, but I was still not ready to acknowledge why.” Jean points something out to Elke in the following conversation about Pier Paolo Pasolini:
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Jean: Pasolini silenced himself.
Elke: I never thought of it like that. Self-erasure. The ultimate gesture of alienation. Jean: Or the ultimate gesture of rage. Sometimes silence makes the other come undone all by themselves. |
It is an interesting observation. An open question, really. And we must continue to question things, to speak truth to power, in whatever way we can. Because any answer to the political question of freedom is complex.
Estelle Hoy’s Pisti, 80 Rue De Belleville is a provocative book that questions the nature of what it means to belong to the left during these times, when most people have little faith in the left and the right. The recent election of Joe Biden is evidence of this, because there are still millions of people who support Trump, and refuse to accept that he lost. So what does it mean to be free in such a world. The character of Pisti resides in all of us, tempered perhaps by a character such as Elke. In one respect, they mirror each other. This is a book to read over and over and to recommend to your friends. It is certainly one of the most brilliant books that I have read so far this year.
Estelle Hoy’s Pisti, 80 Rue De Belleville is a provocative book that questions the nature of what it means to belong to the left during these times, when most people have little faith in the left and the right. The recent election of Joe Biden is evidence of this, because there are still millions of people who support Trump, and refuse to accept that he lost. So what does it mean to be free in such a world. The character of Pisti resides in all of us, tempered perhaps by a character such as Elke. In one respect, they mirror each other. This is a book to read over and over and to recommend to your friends. It is certainly one of the most brilliant books that I have read so far this year.