On Susan Taubes
Intertext Messenger with Lara Mimosa Montes
LARA MIMOSA MONTES is the author of THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020) and The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press, 2016). Her writing has appeared in Amant, BOMB, Fence, POETRY, The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of artist residencies and fellowships from MacDowell, Marble House Project, Jentel, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Her next book, The Time of the Novel, is forthcoming from Wendy’s Subway.
SUSAN TAUBES (1928–1969) was born Judit Zsuzsanna Feldmann in Budapest. She and her father emigrated to the United States in 1939, settling in Rochester, New York. In 1949 she married the rabbinically trained scholar Jacob Taubes. Taubes studied philosophy and religion in Jerusalem, at the Sorbonne, and at Radcliffe, where she wrote her dissertation on Simone Weil. During the 1960s, Taubes was a member of the experimental Open Theater ensemble; edited volumes of Native American and African folktales; published a dozen short stories; and wrote two novels, Divorcing and the now-published Lament for Julia. Her suicide came shortly after the publication of Divorcing, in November 1969.
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:04 PM
Hi!
I am eating a blood orange.
It is the supper hour.
You, 4:05 PM
Delicious, oh yeah that's right.
It's still early for me.
And it's been a very snowy, slow day here in Portland. I'm jazzed to talk to you about you and the supernatural Taubes...
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:06 PM
Me too. What makes you say supernatural?
You, 4:08 PM
I think her writing defies many things (time, selfhood, etc.) and in reading it my body goes somewhere else.
What do you sense (or how do you sense) when reading her?
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:09 PM
That's lovely. Yes, when you said supernatural I thought POLTERGEIST.
You, 4:11 PM
(I'm feeling Julia in the room!!!)
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:13 PM
In revisiting Lament for Julia, what I was noticing was how tonally bizarre the work is.
I like narrators who hover in the negative fringe of the relational spectrum.
Wait, how is Julia showing up in the room??
You, 4:16 PM
Well I think of Julia as a projection of the self outward.
In this way she's totally omniscient, and I guess I should also say she isn't a she. She is a she/it/he/them...
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:17 PM
I was wondering about the gender of the narrator.
Not in a conclusive way.
But more like... what is the relationship of that voice to Julia's femininity?
There's so much disdain.
You, 4:19 PM
Ah yes completely.
And I can't track if that's directed entirely at prescriptions of gender or at the narrator's (or even, dare I say, Taubes') personal afflictions otherwise with weird psychoanalytic fathers and children she's seemingly estranged from, on and on.
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:23 PM
Oh, interesting. As I was rereading, I was wondering about the kind of splitting one undergoes as a maker to divide oneself into this curious maneuver Taubes introduces that sets us up to be aligned with a voice/spirit/entity/narrator that despises the object of its obsession: Julia.
Other authors talk about having strong attachments to their characters.
I love that this is a FIERCE attachment... but also bedeviled in some way.
There's a moment early on about referring to Julia as a "puppet."
"There comes the moment of revulsion when I pounce on my puppet; and when I'm done stamping on it, kick it in the corner."
That's perverted and abject. There are many moments like this throughout.
How do you relate to that negativity?
You, 4:29 PM
Do you read Julia as a character? I know this is a strange question, but I'm not sure if I do and if that contributes to the relationship developed between the "I" and Julia. They seem to be one and again I have to admit that I believe Taubes is also a character, maybe also a puppeteer.
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:31 PM
It's a great question. I experience Julia as an object more than a character.
You, 4:31 PM
I remember that section you quoted vividly because it socked me in the stomach.
This negativity is something I'm attuned to personally—violence against the self—is what I'll say.
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:31 PM
Hard yes!
I think of Taubes mixed into this story.
The aggression, or what you have described as violence, is anti-social.
You, 4:36 PM
That's a very interesting way to define it and reminds me of the NYT review that said Divorce is: “Jewish exile meets female intellectualism.”
I've been thinking about how exile is written in Lament for Julia. What do you think?
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:37 PM
Wow. The NYT - so glib!
You, 4:37 PM
Ahahaha, truly.
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:38 PM
The version of exile I experience in this work is one that explores self-exile.
The structure of the story is contingent on this conceit that there is a core aspect of self that lives elsewhere.
The voice is so charismatic.
Julia, the facade, looks so dull in relation.
And yet the facade is what fascinates and provokes the narrator.
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:41 PM
When it comes to unreliable narrators, I love going along with the distorted worldview. Hbu?
You, 4:41 PM
What do you mean by going along with it? Just to make sure I'm understanding.
Do you mean the world or the reality the narrator is developing that is like farrrr stranger than how things really are?
"Really are."
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:43 PM
There's that, but I also mean side with the protagonist, or the story-teller. Especially if I like the way they tell the story ;)
Their version of events, and their worldview... I'm not one to ask too many questions.
Maybe I'm a bit like Julia in that way - naive!
You, 4:46 PM
I'm the same way, I think. Like you said there's so much charisma, so much inhibition that I immediately buy in and ultimately find myself defending them. I read a review of LFJ that made me so mad... the writer said:
“Lament for Julia, is a late-runner, not a fore-runner: a modernist experiment some decades after modernism, akin to—albeit much more skillful than—Sontag’s embarrassing first novel, The Benefactor (1963). Both texts, written at about the same time, read as if stiltedly translated from some European language. They are set in a vague, timeless continent, and narrated by icily, stultifying cerebral narrators removed from the world and discussing, mostly, their own thoughts. The novels are like quilts stitched together from bits of essays or short stories that should have been written instead; individual pages and passages are interesting, sometimes even incandescent in Taubes’ case, but no desire to read on is awakened in the reader by any stimulus of plot or character.”
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:47 PM
Lol.
Sorry: the dig at The Benefactor is funny to me.
I read that one a long time ago. It is not the Sontag of the essays. I feel she must have suffered for that.
What specifically did you take umbrage over?
You, 4:50 PM
It just seemed to me that the reviewer expected, or was hoping to enforce, a certain form or voice that's more reliant on characters or plot as if that was at all part of what Taubes was interested in doing; it’s not at all the style she has as a writer so the whole review I’m thinking: looks like you didn’t get it(!)
BUT I really need to make a correlation here between you and Taubes, if you'll let me...
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:51 PM
Go ahead!
You, 4:52 PM
Your piece Whale Tongue and your piece Same Sea: (Rose Horse)...
Which are first of all incredible.
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:52 PM
Thank you!
You, 4:53 PM
It was fascinating how you destroy the I/Thou dichotomy, which is perhaps another way to categorize the dynamism between Julia and the I or Julia and the superego or Julia and the Imago…
You, 4:54 PM
This might be crass (but I'm asking as someone who also writes in such a manner): Why do you switch between POV? Why do you NEED to do this?
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:56 PM
My instant response is: Do I, do you, does anyone NEED to do that?
I think I know what you're referring to, but I want to clarify, are you talking about the invitation of the 2nd person, the use of "you" in select moments?
You, 4:57 PM
I’m referencing this bit specifically:
“In my new tongue, I mew. How can a person survive, live on as a vacancy? I lick the rim of the cherry bowl and in my dreams, I envision myself existing somewhere between a rocking horse and a foal. My phobias vibrate around me, charged with a kind of unfeeling. I weep sensing the story of my flesh. No one has to know what happened to you. No one has to know where you went. But I feel compelled to explain I went somewhere, it was raining, and after that night “I” did not return. And maybe that shyness is something I don’t have to explain.” (via Whale Tongue)
You, 4:58 PM
The invitation of "you," yes, but also the impulse of it... and then the subsequent loss or death of the "I"... which here doesn't read as strategic or contrived but inevitable and I think that's why I asked about this as a "need."
Lara Mimosa Montes, 4:59 PM
That sounds so tragic: "inevitable"!
As much as one can try to be impulsive, I can confirm I was trying.
One reason I've been gravitating toward fiction these past few years is because I do wonder about "inevitability" and the role of chance and fate as they appear in narrative.
Lara Mimosa Montes, 5:02 PM
I've been wondering how language and writing makes things happen, or makes things appear as though they happened, as in a car rearview mirror, a certain way.
I'm looking for the way fiction happens in between sentences.
There's a sex scene in Lament for Julia that is so confounding, for the ghost, and the reader.
Lara Mimosa Montes, 5:04 PM
The narrative certainty - the "what happened/is happening" - seems secondary in that instance to all the linguistic and grammatical chaos that swirls around the uncertainty, arousal, and disgust.
For me, this feels like the literary element of literary fiction.
Which PARADOXICALLY is... wait for it....
POETRY :D
You, 5:09 PM
A word that came to mind a lot in reading your work and Taubes' was: suspension. This place between sentences, maybe.
My tendency is to think this mode of fiction which as you say is POETIC (for sure) pulls on the senses and has this guttural, generative, prowess to it. Your work does this for me, completely.
Lara Mimosa Montes, 5:11 PM
I love that. As a reader, I enjoy those moments; as a writer, those moments are very much like being on a high-wire.
(I say that having never been on a high-wire, hmm.)
I think verging into that suspended territory is like taking a risk.
You, 5:13 PM
It reminds me of what you wrote in THRESHOLES: "Do I need clarity of mind to speak of these forces, or should I regardless?"
Lara Mimosa Montes, 5:13 PM
Some readers don't like that experience: I think the equivalent in the visual arts would be describing something as "painterly," as in, the artist is overindulging in something, the act of painting, the sensual experience of their medium.
I think clarity of mind is good! Sanity is good!
But now your question about "need" makes more sense to me. I feel like you've got me in a funny trap!
You, 5:15 PM
I think what you're doing is engaging otherwise and regardless—venturing. This is how it reads!
Lara Mimosa Montes, 5:16 PM
Thank you. I want people to feel freaked out or displaced by what I have written.
Lara Mimosa Montes, 5:16 PM
Because I feel freaked out and displaced all the time, maybe this circles back to your thought about exile.
"Life goes on. I won't say if it's Julia's life, or mine, or ours."
I like writers that test those boundaries: it feels so taboo.
You, 5:21 PM
Let me ask you one last thing...
Lara Mimosa Montes, 5:21 PM
Shoot.
You, 5:24 PM
Sontag, a good friend of Taubes, writes of Julia as a cautionary tale for when intellectualism becomes madness.
Sontag survives. Taubes does not. She walks into a river and drowns herself.
I'm wondering in regards to sanity, in regard to high-wire writing, and self-inquiry... in your experience what does the writing generate for you, in your body, in your soul (and I mean soul) to test those boundaries?
Lara Mimosa Montes, 5:26 PM
Truth, beauty.
In taking those risks, I have to be clear for myself about why I am doing this, sacrificing even temporarily a coherent sense of self-sanity? On behalf of what.
That's why I say clarity is good.
You, 5:29 PM
A coherent sense of self is a sacrifice.
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Notes
Lament for Julia by Susan Taubes, New York Review of Books, 2023.
“The Afterlives of Susan Taubes” by Merve Emre via The New Yorker.
“Whale Tongue” by Lara Mimosa Montes via Amant.
“Same Sea: (Rose Horse)” by Lara Mimosa Montes via ISLAA.
THRESHOLES by Lara Mimosa Montes, Coffee House Press, 2020.
“Lament for Susan” by Black Smith via Tablet.
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