Interview: Tomoé Hill

Author of Songs For Olympia

In October of last year Sagging Meniscus Press published Tomoé Hill’s Songs For Olympia, a book-length response to Michel Leiris’s The Ribbon At Olympia’s Throat. Leiris’s book is a digressional tribute/lament to Edouard Manet’s Olympia, the elderly Leiris using the painting as a springboard for his alternatively caustic and mournful ruminations on the ravages of age. Hill’s Songs is equally inventive, at once a response to Leiris’s complex, exciting, yet deeply masculine objectification of Olympia as well as an examination of her lifelong relationship with the painting and how it has helped reveal the ribbon at her own throat.

Hill’s name should be familiar to readers of this little mag, her having contributed two excellent essays to this publication: on Mikhail Bulgakov’s Black Snow and on Barbara Molinard’s Panics.

I had the pleasure of talking with Hill about Leiris, Olympia, sexuality and the chaotic pleasures of narcissism in literature.

When did you first discover Leiris's book and what was your original response to it?

It was a bit of a shock when I saw the release information and the cover back when Semiotext(e) announced their edition in translation. I’d only just come to Leiris a few years before, and he’d captivated me — I hadn’t come across someone who seemed to align with my private thoughts and, in general, the way I internally interrogated myself in writing. Seeing Manet’s Olympia there, realising this was a book that continued his particular style of self-interrogation, then pairing that with my memories of Olympia and how she was an instigator of sorts, in terms of how I saw women, then myself in certain ways, and later, observing how women were seen, it felt like parallel streams of thought were about to converge. Though I am not at all the kind of person who reads literature for validation of any kind (despite some writing doing that unintentionally), there was a definite sense of personal anticipation. To be honest, it felt strange. It was a book, not a person! and yet I was already treating it as a conversation to be had.

I realize that the entire book is an argument about this, but one of the many things I found fascinating about the book is how I often couldn’t tell whether you were actually frustrated by Leiris’s ideas or instead provoked in a less clear way, so I was wondering what are some key parts of Leiris’s perception of Olympia that inspired you in a positive way (interpret this however you wish) and conversely what ways you rejected and were combating against?

There are multiple angles to this. First, I don’t think Leiris the writer frustrates me at all, in the sense that I see Olympia for him as a fetish and a phantom. She is an abstraction representative of everything from (male) desire, modernity, and language. Now, I’d recently discovered [Rene] Girard’s essays on Salome and violence, and it struck me that something I was clearly attempting to articulate in these oblique ways in the book came down to mimesis and resistance or rejection of it. When I say mimesis, I mean in terms of sexuality and gender, mostly. Girard argues that contrary to the romantic mythos of Salome being a woman later in culture, she is in fact a child, and so her request for the head of John the Baptist after her dance is mimetic: her mother’s (Herodias) violent desire is projected onto her and monstrously amplified. But at this point he says, she couldn’t have had this desire herself. In his essay on violence, he says that interactions are reciprocal and violence is as similar as love in that respect. They function along mimetic lines. I was thinking about this, and Flusser’s idea of resistance in writing, and it struck me that this conversation, I think you could call it, that I’m having with Leiris is very much about a reciprocity and resistance around Olympia.

If there are frustrations or if the book feels somewhat combative, it is because aside from the beauty of language and thought Leiris brings to Olympia as an unraveling of his life’s (so near to the end) memories, there is very much the man beneath, and so Olympia remains abstract. This is in no way an admonishment, because this is the point of her in his book. Opposition was simply a natural position for me in that the whole thing is gendered. Olympia is less abstract to me because she is me, in the sense that her flesh is my flesh, as a woman. For the book, I let myself occupy this space where I could argue—with myself as much as Leiris—about gender and expectation, the image of women. For context, the art books I’d looked at as a child were full of images of mythic women—so often involving them being raped, pursued against their will. Others, of women within specific structures, like Velázquez’s Infanta or Las Meninas, or all the paintings of the Virgin. Women like this continue male lines, whether formal, or informal, if you want to be particularly horrible about rape in myth. In seeing these, I was creating my own logic from the images and what little I understood in the text. And then, here is Olympia. I don’t fully know what she is meant to represent. I only know what I see. I see a woman, with only a female attendant and pet, on her own. The space she is in appears her own. And her look! It is the most detached, cool, indifferent look. It was so at odds with everything I’d seen up to that point, I mean from a woman that I could see was meant to represent something sexual, that it felt like utter self-possession. Of course I couldn’t articulate that, it was more like—she belongs to herself. But I know that there was some sort of mimesis from that—I wanted to see the way she did. I’m not sure finding out she is meant to be a prostitute changed a damn thing, either, because then it became about control. To have control is such an important concept to a woman. It represents a breaking away from reciprocity as social, sexual, even literary necessity. Control becomes resistance.

I can’t say Leiris the man, considering Olympia in terms of sexual desire, the spinoff of his desire from that, is negative. How can it be? My desires are just as ravenous and sometimes heedless of a particular sensitivity, towards men and women—that is one of the tenets of desire, or at least the subset of fantasy. In that, I can see Girard’s reciprocity and mimesis as well: how can we talk about the differences of gender and desire without acknowledging in many ways, they are similar? Or that mimesis in desire is this almost eternal thing, like mirrors reflecting mirrors: remove all gender and there is only hunger, only longing, only memory. Something that captures this beautifully is when Leiris writes a list of words (“glow, gleam, shimmer, resonate, radiate”) and then wonders if there is a word that captures all of them, which equals Olympia. And he can’t. If he comes to Olympia from abstraction and I from flesh, in the end, neither is “right”. We are both left with a handful of poor words which can never fully express a body and an experience. The longing and the beauty is in the attempt, and I immediately recognised the longing of Leiris in this.

Correct me if I’m remembering wrong, didn’t this book originate as an essay that you were going to submit to Uncontemporary Review of Literature (a now-dead publication I contributed to, RIP)? If I am remembering right: when you originally began writing that essay did you begin with what ultimately became the first fragments in the book, and when/how did you realize that this project needed to be a far more significant dialogue with Leiris?

That’s right. I just went and took a trip in the detritus of my sent (and mostly rejected) submissions to find what I’d originally written. I knew I hadn’t begun in the same way—the idea to start and end using my body and a condition I have as a “frame” came much later—and I was doing micro-segments rather than the slightly longer ones at the time. But I was pleased to see that I kept the first in the essay as (part of) the second in the book:

There is nothing left to shock but everything, in all that flesh. ‘Unable to tattoo everything he had in his head over the surface of his skin, he decided … to confide to paper …’ Now is a surfeit of both, M, but you would not be able to read anything in it. It is a post-coital haze for those who never have the pleasure of orgasm, a confusion that does not realise its riches while only recognising its flaws.

It was an incredibly small piece, just some vignettes. But even at the time there was a kind of mental itch: I remember I was displeased and pulled it, but it wasn’t because I didn’t like it, something about it wouldn’t leave me. I had those sections in my head all the time and what was the stray thought directed at Leiris and/or myself I realised was just the beginning of a conversation I was having. It was quite bare, in that I hadn’t yet started to really consider or arrange the frames. In the final, we decided to lay out the sections normally, but originally my idea had been to have each one occupy its own page, where they were less than a page long. I’d wanted them to be considered as if walking through a museum. I think you can still do this, because each has its own context apart from being thematically linked, but it felt like a natural choice at the time, considering it started with me looking at Olympia in a book all those years ago.

When I say frames, I mean how I saw the conversation in my head came out in different arrangements: some sections were strictly about talking to Leiris about what he’d written, others were about memory: childhood and development, sex and desire, scent/perfume, others were about how we view women in art (I include literature in this) and societal contexts. I appreciate it might be confusing in that there is a deliberate movement from the internal to the external, but I also don’t think we can deny that our experiences influence our observations, and vice versa. John Berger and Pascal Quignard do this chaotically and beautifully in writing about art. You are never simply looking at or reading something in a one-way manner. Observation and intake are in flux, not static. There is an idea, I think, in parts of culture now that it can be forced into the latter in order to validate one’s narrow worldview and impose it on others; not only is that folly, it renders art as nothing but a cheap mirror, pure vanity.

In Quignard’s The Sexual Night, writing on art, he says, “why do the dirtiest involuntary sexual images lead on to the most prestigious, most regal, most sentimental linguistic plots?” Now, applying “involuntary” to Olympia is an interesting idea: involuntary in the sense that the model is relatively without agency—how could she (Victorine, the model) ever predict or control how she/Olympia is perceived? But writing about her, about Leiris writing about and around her is likewise involuntary because it’s response, and so becomes an exercise in elevation: not egotistically speaking, though there tends to be an element of that in sexual desire/memory, but an enlightenment of one’s self-perception. It’s going through the mirror, so to speak.

I’m clearly commenting on my frustrations about shock and confession in that vignette, and there was definitely something in me even at that stage that wanted to, going back to the Girard and Flusser, write about these things while attempting to resist (being mired in the narcissistic aspects of them). Frames and conversation, to me, were a way of detaching myself while being able to write about the nuances: becoming a distant subject, an imaginary one; again, the museum.

Speaking of the narcissistic aspects, your book is full of great insights into the sort of narcissism that is such a core aspect of Leiris’s body of work. One part from your book that particularly struck me was from the thirteenth fragment: “...for it is always you—Michel, Georges [Duroy, protagonist of Maupassant’s Bel-Ami], and the rest, on or off the page—who wish to be our saviours, teachers, creators. And yet, like Georges, who cannot admit he owes his own transformation to women, what I see in Olympia is a woman who in her unreal form holds a mirror to you, in which you only see yourself.” Speaking of a Georges, I can’t help but ask about Georges Bataille, him also being a legendary weirdo and best friends with Leiris. I’m curious about the similarities you see in the work of Leiris, Bataille and yourself in terms of how you all analyze the self in a way that toys and experiments with narcissism but, in my opinion, transcends it and becomes so complex and exciting?

It’s funny you should mention Bataille, A constraint I had placed on myself in writing this was not to read any other Leiris during that period except Ribbon: I re-read it so many times in order to absorb it, be “in conversation” to the point where there wasn’t really a thought I had waking or in dreams that wasn’t permeated by it. But being only human, I did find myself picking up his letters with Bataille off the shelf at some point, and more recently, have been reading Bataille’s Eroticism. There are certainly many things in Bataille’s essays that strike that same slightly shadowed internal place where I’ve tried to analyse, both in writing and outside of it, my particular outlook and behaviour in terms of sex, desire, and human nature generally.

If we can’t talk about Ribbon without Olympia as representative of fetish, then obviously we can’t talk about sex—bringing Bataille into it—without the notions of taboo and religion. And it makes perfect sense to think about all of it as a (narcissistic) whole. Very broadly speaking, something like Catholicism requires the sacrifice, or pledge, if you prefer, of the individual I to an omniscient I—this is only a personal observation from a religious outsider, and also should not read as a negative (I come from a non-practicing Lutheran/Shinto background). That sacrifice also requires a relinquishing of aspects of human nature, or at the very least, the recasting of them to fit the latter I. What we have left is the human side as taboo, and the individual as someone to be cleansed, purified is probably the word Bataille would use. In that sense narcissism feels like something to—I don’t particularly like this word—reclaim. It’s more than that, though—it isn’t merely a (re)possession, but as you say, a transcendence. It has to be, otherwise we are doing nothing. Which is a point Bataille makes in writing about transgression, absolutism in regard to what I’m calling human nature, and he’d call being. But to me, he also appears to be speaking to/about men specifically, and yes, I do understand this as a cultural/gender generalisation, but I think it’s relevant. I’m not interested in shattering the past as much as I am retroactively placing myself in it in terms of reading and writing. After all, I (read “women” for “I”) was always there.

Take his writing on hunting, where he speaks of it as a quasi-religious parallel to sexual taboo. I don’t know that this is meant to apply to me as a woman, except perhaps as the metaphorical hunted. It requires me to transgress, to insinuate myself as both hunter and hunted, capable of both being the man and the animal. A few years ago, I’d written an essay about watching hunters on the property I was renting in Italy when I lived there briefly. The group had wild boar-hunting rights all over the area. They didn’t need to tell you in advance, just arrived with their guns and dogs to hunt (which, I’ll add, never bothered me—it was the custom). And I stood inside the house watching the men, primed, the dogs tracking scent, and the whole thing was unbearably infused with a sexual-religious aspect. I wanted to be all three things: the hunter, the dog, the boar. You say toying with narcissism but play in that sense is a necessity for a woman’s existence. How do I exist in these worlds (laying aside that to an extent, the world has changed, but not that much) of Leiris and Bataille, without taking on the mantle of omniscience myself? This shouldn’t be read as reduced to she’s got a God complex, but at the same time, man writes himself in that aspect all the time. What changes if I do? Ultimately, it puts me on equal footing and recognises me not as a passive subject, but as a transgressor and destroyer, able to move between reflective and aggressive states of being. Going back to Leiris, part of what I found in writing was precisely that, this desire to cast Olympia through myself in the same way.

I might be taking this wildly out of context, but there’s a letter from Bataille to Leiris where he’s talking about the College of Sociology and says “if it is true that we bring our personal experience into the researches that we have pursued, conclusions have to be drawn from this. The experience of the sacred is of such a kind that it can leave nothing indifferent.” Maybe there’s an arrogance (which can be read as narcissism) in saying I’m going to bestow Olympia and myself with this assumption that we, too, can observe—internally/externally—and infer things from the world that Leiris and Bataille did, but that arrogance is ultimately in service to knowledge. Is arrogance the right word? Sure, if you want to think of it as helping oneself to the apple rather than being seduced into taking it … knowledge is fetish, taboo, and transgression all at once.

This reminds me of a wonderful line of yours that I think captures the spirit of both your book and Leiris’s so perfectly: “You hold fast to the ribbon at her throat to keep you true while I clutch at the invisible one about my own, wondering what truths tighten around it so.” I’m curious about what truths tighten around the ribbon at your neck.  Is it in part knowing that knowledge is a fetish and a transgression, i.e., suspicious and intimidating to most people, while at the same time having the thirst for it be one of, if not the, defining feature of your life?

As much as one can know oneself, I think that’s exactly right. Due to illness as a child, I was pretty internal. Bad asthma meant that I was forced to learn to be quiet, not excite myself in order to not exacerbate it. So I read and thought a lot. I think there have been enough quotes or lines in books over time which say something to the effect of more knowledge or self-awareness isn’t always a grand thing, as it can have the effect of making one dissatisfied or miserable in the face of knowing that they in fact know nothing or can never be anything more than human. I haven’t been miserable, but I think self-awareness has certainly nagged at me constantly: if I know x, why can’t I shape myself into y—that kind of question. This is just existentialism. If you want to be really crude, maybe people, myself included, just get off on not being able to reconcile themselves. Quignard says in Abysses that “true desire isn’t out for its own extinction in satisfaction”, and while the context is really sexual desire, it applies just as well to (self) knowledge.

I spent a lot of my childhood disputing the rather ridiculous tag of “being smart”, firstly because I’m not, but also … compared to what? who? As humans, you’re always smarter than some, less than others, same with physical looks or just about anything else. Thankfully my parents instilled that in me and the realism of it meant that I don’t idolise others—I’d rather see the humanity than put someone on a pedestal and not see them for themselves at all. Ultimately the point of knowledge strictly in terms of self is … there isn’t one. We create narratives to make ourselves believe we’re doing it to be better people, realise ambitions, etc, which is perfectly normal, and gets you through life feeling you have a purpose in order to hedge that we don’t know if there’s anything after. But it’s a vanity like any other—maybe the ultimate. As you say, it can be suspicious or intimidating to others. The act of reading (and writing) is a curious thing, it’s as contentious as it ever was. I read because it was one of the things I could do when ill and I came from a family which read a lot and so encouraged it. I learned fast that reading was shorthand for pretension and superiority to people who were afraid of it—and I don’t really believe that the act of reading (more) makes you smarter. If anything, I think context and the ability to empathise make you smarter in terms of understanding people and the world. The idea you can just snap that up, have it bestowed upon you by reading a page is amazingly naive. But I couldn’t change the fact that I read a lot or was curious about the world any more than I could change my face, and people had a lot of assumptions about that, too.

When you realise you can’t control anyone’s perspective about you, I think people go in one of two directions: they either outsize their egos to create a caricature of themselves that they both present to the world and believe they are, or retreat into themselves. I did the latter, and that meant I automatically became two people. I’ve spent a good part of my life thinking I could one day reconcile them, which is of course a desire for validation: I can’t change people, but I still want the futility of wanting them in some cases to see the other me. Well, the other me is in writing. That was a bit of a shock, realising that was a truth. And when I say the invisible ribbon, I think I also mean that what Leiris was reflecting on, at the end of his life, I’m now understanding: I have entered a phase of my mine where all the experiences I’ve gathered consciously or not are starting to constrict me—that’s not necessarily bad. If you want to take it literally, a fetish aspect comes into play. What do I do when I feel the ribbon tighten? Do I say stop and deny my entire life? Or do I say more and accept it? There’s a pain and a pleasure to it, but there is rarely anything in life that doesn’t have aspects of both. Leiris writing Ribbon is watching a man who understood that.

Adam Moody is the founder and editor of The Hobbyhorse.