Diffraction, Handwriting and Intra-Mediality in Louise Paillé's Livres-livres

Abstract

In this article, I focus on primary entanglements as the co-materialization of the verbal and visual in contemporary literary handwriting. As we will see, this is a special kind of writing. It is a writing meant to be seen and engaged with as matter. It tends to be non-linear and almost completely illegible. We find such literary handwriting in the work of the French-Canadian book artist Louise Paillé who copies or overwrites. Her artistic method is that she copies by hand complete literary works into second-hand books: textbooks, atlases, medical books, or books of literature. Once these literary works have been copied they are no longer (completely) legible, as are the books they have been written into. In this way, I show, by using the method of overwriting, Paillé makes literary texts present and absent at once. On the one hand, overwriting literary texts by hand, she makes them materially and visually present as patterns of handwriting; she creates these texts anew as visual patterns. Paillé forges a writing to be looked at rather than a writing to be read. Another way of putting this is to say that Paillé is creating texts anew as opaque webs, rather than as ‘see-through’ texts: she is weaving text, through a handwriting that cannot be read, as a visual surface that is ‘just’ a surface, rather than a medium for reading. So, on the other hand, this means that literary texts disappear as text in Paillé’s work: they appear as visual artwork to disappear as a matter for reading. How should we read this remove of literature? What does the illegible signal in Paillé’s project Livres-livres (1993-2004) – books handwritten and transfigured within books – that came into fruition in an age of digitization and information overload? Using Vilém Flusser’s philosophical work on writing alongside Paillé, I show how handwriting morphs into visual rhythms and intensity patterns in Livres-livres: rhythms of lines, ink, and colour, and patterns of interferences that record the interlacing of written and printed text. I then argue that these rhythms and patterns materialize as scores for a diffractive reading of a most radical kind. We are not simply reading one text through another, the one tangled in the other. We are reading this entwinement itself as an intra-medial event.