In the collective imagination, Billy the Kid, was one of the most famous off-the-law of the American West. Yet he never did not attack a bank or a stagecoach. Caught in a conflict between farmers, it was almost despite himself he went back into the legend. "Quién es? " were the last words he uttered before being shot dead at the age of twenty-one years by Pat Garrett who was nevertheless his friend. If the title of this short novel evokes the end of Kid, it was early in its history that focuses Sebastian Dubinsky. Real quest of identity, Quién es? is the confession of Kid to a mysterious stranger whose identity is being withheld until the last page. Kid tries to explain how things started, how, on 18 August 1877, he became what he is.
The Kid struggles with words and if, in digression digression, it never ceases to tell this early, because he himself seeks to understand. Words are sometimes a very imperfect tool: they are too poor, too disembodied and this point to stop us from telling the truth. It then compares the words "old sheets so that you can not take them out and what remains is the form of words not their reality - I'm sure if we could remove the tarps we'd dazzled , amazed, frightened perhaps by what we would find [...]. " The word" justice ", for example, is " as empty a bottle of tequila the day after a big party. "This fight against language is used by the style of the author who, so thwarting Joycean rules of syntax, manages to bring coherence to the flow of thought hesitant Kid who preferred the freedom to happiness, even to death: "- it often seems that there will be a crime here - as there should just give up to do - maybe deep down inside himself, the man is afraid to exist, to be free and to protect itself. "
Quién es? book is a remarkably constructed, written and thought a book should read, a nugget that all miners plunged into muddy torrents of contemporary French literature must extract and place prominently in their libraries.
See our complete chronicle HERE.
Bartleby: Your interest in Billy the Kid is old and why did you write about it?
Sebastian Dubinsky: My interest is actually old Billy - I've always been attracted by the figures of law-breakers and hackers, especially those with original features and policies. I think it comes from my upbringing, with a Russian anarchist grandfather on one side and a grandfather of one historian - and both resistance during the Second World War. If I wanted, specifically, writing about Billy, because I decided, after Ghosts evening, which concludes in a way, my exploration / misuse of literary genres, I tackle the myths as iconic figures or events. Billy is perfect because it is both arch-famous and almost unknown. It is an enigma in motion, constantly reinvented, and therefore, in fact, a character literature.
Kid tries to explain to his mysterious interlocutor how things started, how he, this little skinny guy, became an outlaw legend. For that, the Kid distinguishes the beginning of the beginning. Can you tell us more about this distinction?
The beginning, in view of Billy is the natural cycle of things, the unshakable order of the time, the second after the previous one and so on. Begin by cons, is a crucial moment when consciousness makes the point of departure for his new condition and accepts it. It is "Revolt" Camus, somehow, when the time is more experienced, but deliberately chosen and accepted. It is the experience of freedom itself.
Ordinarily, it is estimated that freedom and destiny are mutually exclusive, the other. However, the Kid hesitated though he seem to have taken charge of its existence, it also evokes the fate of mala suerte , as if he finally had no choice. What is it really?
paradigms of existence are infinite. To be free is, paradoxically, we recognize is never entirely. An object is not perfect. There will always be a small crack, a tiny defect, a discolored spot somewhere. Fate (or whatever one chooses to call fate), are the imponderables, the external circumstances. If Billy is really "free" in my text, he is also aware that this freedom has a direction, and consequently limits. He acknowledges, but "recognize" this does not mean "yes", as being "free", it does absolutely not mean being "happy."
A meditation on the language of the monologue runs Kid. Lies, whose emptiness is a variety, is easy and permanent. As evidenced by the many digressions that delay the exposure of the facts, the truth is harder to say. Why? Your work on language, including syntax and punctuation, is it related to that?
paradigms of existence are infinite. To be free is, paradoxically, we recognize is never entirely. An object is not perfect. There will always be a small crack, a tiny defect, a discolored spot somewhere. Fate (or whatever one chooses to call fate), are the imponderables, the external circumstances. If Billy is really "free" in my text, he is also aware that this freedom has a direction, and consequently limits. He acknowledges, but "recognize" this does not mean "yes", as being "free", it does absolutely not mean being "happy."
A meditation on the language of the monologue runs Kid. Lies, whose emptiness is a variety, is easy and permanent. As evidenced by the many digressions that delay the exposure of the facts, the truth is harder to say. Why? Your work on language, including syntax and punctuation, is it related to that?
Beware of "truth" and "lie". Thus, in Quién es? , Billy tells his own story in his own words. But he says the truth? The peculiarity of the confession is not it precisely to lie to yourself ? The caller Billy, moreover, doubted his words. Here we come to own fiction, which is the voice, identity and message. Billy realized that it is becoming a myth and that it escapes itself. His words are intended to coincide with his own word pictures that are being built around him. But it is already the myth that speaks the statue. But this myth is reflected himself, and thinks critically. The style should marry the stream, sometimes contradictory, thoughts and memories. The original text was written in a block - monolithic. Illegible in a word. Then I constructed paragraphs, but without capitalization or punctuation, except hyphens. With my editor, we decided to relax a little narration that this will be just more readable. Hence the upper and endpoints. But we kept the system of paragraphs, because I really wanted people to understand that Billy talks segmented. This is not a continuous stream of words (he speaks also perhaps not), these are blocks, fragments of thoughts and memories which gradually make sense.
You describe a twilight world where the assertion embodied self is swallowed up by the Kid in favor of new values brought by Pat Garrett as order, safety and comfort. Is this how you look at modernity?
Modernity, for me, is precisely a question. That's what he has criticized the post-modernity, in its alternative work values (as she believes, often criticize. But we must never forget that the ancient Cynics called it the return of the tyrant ...). The notion of order is a historical constant, the disorder being agitated by the constant threat systems in place so that nothing does not move - in the wrong direction, at least. I am wary of any form of absolute power. Modernity also precisely. What I criticize (if I criticize something Quién es? ) is joining the order of things, as this order of things is deeply, morally (Camus, always) wrong. It is not materialism that is inherently dangerous - Bakunin himself considered that the desire to possess the same comfort as the upper classes was a fundamentally revolutionary desire - is to associate a scale of social values, political and moral (or religious). This is not because we can choose between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola that we live in a democracy. Pat Garrett in Quién es? is the instrument of this ideology in the name of "justice." Obviously, this word does not mean the same for Billy. On the contrary. And this is where Billy, to me, is a figure of modernity, one that interrogates and disturbs. Off-the-law "natural", it became off-the-law "rational" - a figure moving towards the restoration of meaning and whose appearance crypto-revolutionary was buried under a ton of shots . Again, language (or signs) used to mask what is actually said.
That's why Billy is using the language. It addresses itself, but it is not the real target, which is the language of others. There is nothing more dangerous than words, especially when you do not know where they go. As the bullets.
Modernity, for me, is precisely a question. That's what he has criticized the post-modernity, in its alternative work values (as she believes, often criticize. But we must never forget that the ancient Cynics called it the return of the tyrant ...). The notion of order is a historical constant, the disorder being agitated by the constant threat systems in place so that nothing does not move - in the wrong direction, at least. I am wary of any form of absolute power. Modernity also precisely. What I criticize (if I criticize something Quién es? ) is joining the order of things, as this order of things is deeply, morally (Camus, always) wrong. It is not materialism that is inherently dangerous - Bakunin himself considered that the desire to possess the same comfort as the upper classes was a fundamentally revolutionary desire - is to associate a scale of social values, political and moral (or religious). This is not because we can choose between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola that we live in a democracy. Pat Garrett in Quién es? is the instrument of this ideology in the name of "justice." Obviously, this word does not mean the same for Billy. On the contrary. And this is where Billy, to me, is a figure of modernity, one that interrogates and disturbs. Off-the-law "natural", it became off-the-law "rational" - a figure moving towards the restoration of meaning and whose appearance crypto-revolutionary was buried under a ton of shots . Again, language (or signs) used to mask what is actually said.
That's why Billy is using the language. It addresses itself, but it is not the real target, which is the language of others. There is nothing more dangerous than words, especially when you do not know where they go. As the bullets.
Besides your work as a teacher and writer, you run a literary magazine also free online the Zaporozhian . Can you tell us something about this?
The Zaporozhian is both a nano-publishing to non-profit (That is to say that nobody wins silver) and a biannual electronic backed the possibility of a print on demand. The goal is to make it a crossroads where different writers (I hate the term of copyright), poets and artists can showcase their work. It is no editorial board or editorial line - everything goes through me only. So it is absolutely biased, but I never believed in objectivity in literature or art. As said Rene Char, "The art world is not the world of forgiveness. "The system
publication is very simple: the writers whose work I accept myself "lend" their text, which I publish. If, fortunately for them, another publisher's note, so they recover their work and I take away from my catalog, as happened with Jerry Wilson , D. James Eldon and Sofiul Azam.
The only problem when working alone, and there is time, I am very, very late, with four titles on hold. But I'll get back soon. Promised.
(Interview published in books Magazine , July / August 2010)
Sebastian Dubinsky, Quién es? Editions Joëlle Losfeld.10, 50 euros.
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