Tropismes is a very good french-language bookshop in an arcade in the centre of Brussels.
What I want to find in such a place is a serious experimental work, between fiction and documentary, by an angry artist who wants to challenge the terms not just of his medium, but of his society. A book which – behind a deceptively restrained, classical and generic cover – gives me access to something pungent, sensual, puritanical, difficult, incandescent. Something impossible in the dingy, neo-liberal world of Anglo-Saxon publishing.
I found exactly that in Pasolini’s fragmentary docu-novel Pétrole, which no British or American publisher has seen fit to translate. [Correction: Petrolio, translated by Ann Goldstein.]
Here’s what Pasolini – who did indeed die soon after uttering these words, murdered by rough trade, or, some believe, the Italian state itself – said of this book: “When planning and starting to write my novel I really did more than just project and write my novel: I organised within myself the meaning and function of reality, and once they were organised I could try to get a grip on reality. It happened, perhaps, on the gentle and intellectual level of knowledge or expression, but essentially brutally and violently, like every act of possession, every conquest. At the same moment that I was planning and writing my novel, that is to say finding my sense of reality and taking possession of it precisely in the creative act that all this implied, I also wanted to free myself from myself, which is to say… die. Die in my creation: indeed die as one dies in childbirth: die, as indeed you die, by ejaculating into your mother’s womb.”
