In the Beggarly Style of Imitation. Jean Marc Ah-Sen

      Nightwood Editions

      P.O. Box 1779

      Gibsons, BC V0N 1V0

      Canada

       www.nightwoodeditions.com

      Cover design: Charlotte Gray

      Cover photo: Ally Schmaling

      Cover model: Kitty Collins

      Typography: Carleton Wilson

      Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.

      This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

      Printed and bound in Canada.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Title: In the beggary style of imitation / Jean Marc Ah‑Sen.

      Names: Ah‑Sen, Jean Marc, 1987- author.

      Description: Short stories.

      Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190201355 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190201398 | ISBN 9780889713727 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889713734 (ebook)

      Classification: LCC PS8601.H2 I5 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

      for Hulot

      “What you want is buried in the present tense Blind alleyways allay the jewels”

      –Vic Godard

      An Introduction to: Adamant Deathward Aloofness

      Jean Marc Ah‑Sen was born in East York, Toronto in 1987 to two Mauritian emigrés: a gas station attendant and a secretary. He grew up in a multilingual home where French, English and kreol morisyen intermingled like bad weather. His upbringing was reportedly “odd” (he was discouraged from being left-handed for fear that using a North American gearshift with the weaker hand would cause difficulty), tinged with “poor moral hygiene” and the kind of insipid regrets that are part and parcel of an adolescence mired in itinerancy. He failed a fledgling career as a cartoonist, largely due to lack of application and an inability to overcome shortcomings in his linework. He transitioned into writing soon after reading a copy of Blaise Cendrars’ Planus that he had stolen from a schoolmate. Various lacklustre professions supported his early forays into writing, including time spent as a bartender, janitor, office clerk, furniture assembler and debt collector. The name “Ah‑Sen” was adopted a half-century earlier by his grandfather, a deserter in Mao’s People’s Liberation Army who arriving in Africa, secured papers to a new identity.

      Ah‑Sen has authored a total of ten novels, of which two have seen publication. He considers himself retired from writing. Publication of the eight remaining books, which include Parametrics of Purity, Kilworthy Tanner and Mystic Minder, remain a drawn-out “administrative formality.” The better part of his life has been spent rewriting these books, often under my supervision and endorsement. Describing his writing process as an exertion of “Translassitude,” or of a “speeding bullet of thought impacting against a wall of adamant, deathward aloofness,” encapsulated his lifelong struggle with recording the immediacy of his ideas with the nonchalance of changing out of wet clothes.

      Translassitude was the name given to the brief literary movement we founded together to solve this generic problem: how can writers cultivate a phenomenological sensitivity to the world, and turn that material data into works of cultural and artistic relevance? Was there a way to expedite this transmutative process and make it a less arduous task? Translassitude’s reason for being was to standardize the logistics of inspiration, which we attempted by marrying my obsessive practice of rewriting existing novels palimpsestically—a practice I called “kilworthying”—with Ah‑Sen’s theories that the most productive writing periods resulted from self-induced bouts of lassitude and physical exhaustion. It was our belief that the rigours of this literary science produced altered states of consciousness which had definable poetic corollaries.

      These states were given the designations of: omnilassitude, paralassitude, hyperlassitude and somnilassitude, the last of which purportedly allowed its bearer to write books in a state of advanced torpor (and in some exceptional instances, while asleep). Omnilassitude coincided with the dawning impulse to write Translassic literature; paralassitude with the establishment of its themes, images and subtextual possibilities; hyperlassitude with the emergence of a fixed style that systematically governed and enhanced the disparate narrative elements; and somnilassitude with the adoption of a metatextual awareness of this collective process known as Translassitude.

       The bad reputation Translassists endured did not end with accusations of the absurdity of these labours; we also became notorious for our employment of two techniques in particular: “draffsacking” and “tuyèring.” Draffsacking was a form of collaborative doctoring whereby a lead author composed topic and concluding sentences of all the paragraphs that comprised a text, while a “draffsacker” or secondary author filled in the necessary details under the administration of the lead. The most well-known books written using this technique were Ah‑Sen’s baroque pseudohistory of the Mauritian Sous Gang, the nouveau roman Grand Menteur, and my causerie-novel Sugarelly.

      Tuyèring was the Translassic method of organizing plots in such a manner that the text was permitted to breathe, expanding under the influence of the most ephemeral of structural substances. No outlines were ever used, but a “winch chapter” would be composed psychographically. This chapter could be placed anywhere in the text, so long as it became the primum movens of the work in question, the fulcrum along which the entire book would pivot, expand, contract. As successive chapters were written (always deferring to the preceptive logic of the winch chapter), a natural momentum and structure would emerge, allowing the novel to take shape and reveal itself. Ah‑Sen almost exclusively wrote winch chapters meant to be situated at the beginning of novels, and had a prodigious archive of over fifty undeveloped winches, some of which are published in this collection (“Underside of Love,” “The Slump,” “As to Birdlime,” “The Lost Norman”).

      In the Beggarly Style of Imitation (Below the Level of Consciousness) is perhaps the purest expression of this tottering and ultimately unsustainable model of creative behaviour. The conceit