Threadworms, From the Archives: Estelle Hoy
REJECTING CONTEXT WITH ESTELLE HOY
An interview with the Berlin based writer Estelle Hoy on her novella Pisti 80 Rue De Belleville by Caitlin McLoughlin
Photos by Valentina Von Klencke
(AS SEEN IN WORMS 5)
Pisti appears as a character on the first page of Chris Kraus’ novel Aliens & Anorexia and then disappears almost as quickly, only to reappear 20 years later as the focus of Estelle Hoy’s novella Pisti, 80 Rue De Belleville. The Pisti of Rue De Belleville is combative, hyperbolic, passionate and often cruel; a Hungarian anarchist intent on intellectually terrorising the book’s narrator, Elke, as she passes through Paris on her way to an artist residency in Treignac.
“Sprawled across soiled mattresses and white splintered floorboards, they feast on shoplifted antipasti and cheap muscadet wine.”
Pisti, 80 Rue De Belleville, published by After 8 Books, fits in your pocket and charts the corkscrew conversations between a group of artist-activists through Elke’s weary and long-suffering gaze. Reunited with her long-time friend and collaborator Frančiska, Elke is introduced to the cast of eccentric characters with Pisti at the helm. The group congregate on a summer evening in the newly, romantically involved (‘their fucking was loud and howling’) Pisti and Frančiska’s flat. Sprawled across soiled mattresses and white splintered floorboards, they feast on shoplifted antipasti and cheap muscadet wine. As discussions on art and politics turn to arguments, group sex is initiated and the evening heats up in more ways than one. Vermouth flows, stolen olives and anchovies are tossed around like penny sweets, and Deren even finds time to ‘powder some oyster mushrooms in triple 0 flour and egg yolks’. It's at once lavish and grotesque. The group covers topics from Jenny Holzer to Lacan, Marx to Hannah Arendt, but their discourse never amounts to anything more than name-dropping and blatant plagiarism. Pisti, 80 Rue De Belleville is Hoy’s challenge to an artworld that aligns itself with leftist politics but struggles to mobilise beyond twitter threads and dinner parties.
Hoy’s novella is sharp and funny, much like Hoy herself, and the seduction of trope and cliché are not lost on her. She inconspicuously weaves lines and phrases lifted from other texts into Pisti without citation, a method which is in part influenced by Dusty Pink, a 1960s novella by French writer Jean-Jacques Schuhl. Dusty Pink is collaged entirely from newspaper clippings, adverts, films scripts, song lyrics and pharmaceutical leaflets, in a William Burroughs style cut-up that ‘captures a subjective stroll through an underground, glamorous Paris’.This covert means of appropriation is one that holds a mirror up to where we see ourselves in the mass of cultural references and intellectual innuendos that characterise art and literary circles. The effect is dizzying. Like something caught on the tip of your tongue, that you can’t get out of your head for days. I spoke with Estelle, an Australian living in Berlin, about the influence of Kraus and Schuhl on her work and her thoughts on appropriation in literature.
You’ve previously said that your character Pisti was ‘stolen’ from Chris Kraus’s book Aliens & Anorexia. Can you tell me how you imagine Pisti from Rue de Belleville in relation to the Pisti in Aliens & Anorexia? What sparked this fascination with Pisti and what led you to base your book around this character?
Pisti is such an asshole of a character, truly, it’s exhausting, but everything exhausting is worth a double-take, I’ve found. When I saw her name in Aliens and Anorexia I halted a little because I recognised the name as being Hungarian and meaning ‘Victorious.’ The idea of being victorious over anything is foreign to me, truly, anyone who can afford to pay their rent and keep on friendly terms with an electricity provider is a total success. Believing in victory is a real menace.
“Hanging out with Pisti is a goddam Russian roulette; it’s fabulous. Shifting boundaries like a borderline, she keeps you wondering if you’re making things up about yourself, like hypochondria for the soul.”
Obsessing over one, tiny, irrelevant (more often than not) detail is kind of an extremely time-consuming modus operandi I’ve got going. I blame my mother, obsession is something of a sport for her, a sport at the absolute low end of high art. Not to get all psychoanalytic here, it's hardly the point, but ‘Pisti’– there’s just that little bit of phallic in there, non? In the very least a pistol, which is about the same as her personality. Hanging out with Pisti is a goddam Russian roulette; it’s fabulous. Shifting boundaries like a borderline, she keeps you wondering if you’re making things up about yourself, like hypochondria for the soul. Paying lavish attention to Pisti is possibly a reverse of Proust’s petit Madeleine: a sentimentality for a future-past that may or may not exist? Had I not accepted hush money, I’d tell you how hard-going I find Proust, and how many fake dog ears I jammed in my copy. Maybe the reason the character of Pisti disappears so quickly is that she never truly appears in the first place.
You’ve cited Jean-Jacques Schuhl’s Dusty Pink as an influence for Pisti, 80 Rue de Belleville. Can you talk a little bit about this and about your process of writing Pisti?
Jean-Jacques Schuhl’s Dusty Pink is a book on my shelves that definitely has no dust or faux dog ears; what a goddamn genius. His involvement in detachment was a whole other thing–detachment is too disparaging a word, let's call it reattribution. What I’m completely inspired by with JJ, is the way he was able to cultivate an emotional impulse that was utterly disorienting, creeping in and out of states of inertia in literary metastasis. What a coup. Dusty Pink is pretty much a self-induced aneurysm and my artistic amulet, the meta meaning—it’s hyper-aware of the world and anything but neutral. With Pisti, I wanted to command, or demand, an artistic space that was equally off-course, speaking to (I hoped) the truly convoluted world of politics in a left-leaning art scene. And like a Nietzschean asshole, I say yes to everything. Each instalment (like a telenovela?) commences with a central quote from varying sources, from Kathy Acker, Simone Weil, and Eileen Myles to the titles of a specific song from a band, Velvet Underground, Laurie Anderson, or Kate Bush running up that phony, everlasting hill.
Time is perversely multiplied or negated in Pisti, poker-shuffling the cities, time frames, political stance, language, self-articulation, and even style, like a deliberately unconvincing thesis. All of Jean-Jacques dazzling cut-ups and portraits, even pharmaceutical leaflets, achieves fantastic disorientation, and it's this same experience I wanted for the reader. It’s really hard! (laughing) It accelerates and accelerates, dreaming it becomes reversibility… the reader physically assumes the cadence of the text. Or maybe it just speaks to the attention economy in the art world.
“Instruments of propaganda had given way to sex and food, vermouth and marzipan”
I’ve been thinking about other art forms where taking and reusing or recycling from other works is more celebrated: sampling in music, or collage in the visual-arts. How do you understand appropriation, or ‘stealing’ from other works in literature?
I think for me it’s that it has to serve a purpose. (Whether or not I believe this changes from day to day). Beyond turtlenecks, sex, and cultural playlists, the book is an ironic lampooning of the art world, Pisti and its blasphemy against the left and art world isn’t apostasy, but rather a stepping away from a teleological view of politics and instead, a radical reimagining of the role of incompatibilities, partial identities, cliché and perhaps ultimately, the unresolvedness of hypocrisy. Which is to say, not taking things too seriously, in order to take them seriously.
This is why the referencing was important for this work, the way we as artists often have the same cultural playlist, at least to my mind, and a whack-a-mole one at that. This attack on the pieties of the liberal lifestyle isn’t homiletic though. It’s probably more a reflection of the general sense of ennui I sometimes always have.
“…why does it take artists that pride themselves on criticality and vanguardism so long to confront its direct complicity in gainful conditions that have been evident for decades?”
You reference heavily throughout the book— Simone Weil, Jenny Holzer, Lacan— though it often feels somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Can you talk a little more about the way you’ve used referencing in Pisti?
The lack of context with some of the references is an attempt to signal that absence is not what depletes and saps the system of representation, but rather makes it possible. And maybe a signifier of the cognitive dissonance in artland, and for sure, as you say tongue-in-cheek…and truly precocious come to think of it. I’m always trying to jam my two cents in somewhere it’s spiritedly unwanted; you can count on my intercession, that should be clear by now. Maybe it’s like what I wrote in the book: “If there’s one genuine characteristic of all avant-garde movements, it’s that in one way or another they stage rejection. Rejection of recognition, rejection of ownership, rejection of authority. Rejection of rejection.” Maybe what I’m ultimately rejecting is context.
Pisti, 80 Rue de Belleville reveals the dangers of the tropes and clichés that can come to define the social life of art and politics (‘Instruments of propaganda had given way to sex and food, vermouth and marzipan’). But it’s also incredibly funny. You’ve said the book is an exercise in ‘not taking things too seriously, in order to take them seriously.’ Can you talk a little more about that?
Satire, I suppose, is my way of shining an unwelcomed light on our continued complicity…why does it take artists that pride themselves on criticality and vanguardism so long to confront its direct complicity in gainful conditions that have been evident for decades? We’re always arriving five or ten minutes late to the realisation that we ourselves abet the exclusivity mechanisms so off-handedly, it could hardly be less spectacular. So for me ‘not taking things too seriously’ is a vehicle for creating humorous iterations that compel us to ask ourselves, very seriously, who benefits from this alter-ego. My jokes can fall flat. My epitet: très hit-or-miss.
Did your desire to write this book come from your own, personal weariness with leftist arts and political circles? How much of the character of Elke is based on yourself?
I find it fascinating that in all my reviews and interviews people cast me in auto-theory, which is brilliant company, mind you. But I suppose for me I think of myself more as a ficto-critic. This is not to say there aren’t elements of me in the character of Elke, there are several commonalities, especially the very blue-collar upbringing… what did I say in the book, something like ‘popping morning-after pills like lollies’? Something like that. But what people do with my work is, quite frankly, none of my business…most of the time. I guess it's better to be misunderstood than understood too well.
