750 S. Spaulding Ave., Suite 112
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

Sens-Plastique

Malcolm de Chazal

Translated from the French, with an Introduction by Irving Weiss
and a Foreword by W. H. Auden

Out of Stock

The Mauritian writer Malcolm de Chazal's great masterwork, Sens-Plastique, was published in France in 1948, with a preface by Jean Paulhan, a year after its publication in Mauritius. Since that time, the work has attained a near-legendary status and readers have discovered in de Chazal's brilliant aphorisms what the author himself described as a synthesizing of a "new view of life" requiring a unique title. "I finally settled on Sens-Plastique because apart from the fact that it seems to say that everything on earth is sensuously connected to everything else and that we all belonged to the same mold, 'plastic' suggests art in all its forms. I liked that because I consider my whole enterprise to be more of a picture than a book."

Although two previous selections of Weiss's remarkable translations of this major work have previously been published (first by Herder and Herder in 1971 and then by Sun in 1979), no complete edition of the translation has been available until now.

As W. H. Auden, writes in the Foreword to the 1971 edition, "Sens-Plastique has now been a companion of mine for nearly twenty years, and so far as I am concerned, Malcolm de Chazal (1902-1981) is much the most original and interesting French writer to emerge since the war." Now all English-language readers can share the joys of the aphoristic writing which Auden calls poetry written in prose.

Book Review(s)

OYSTER BOY REVIEW, Summer 2012

by Jeffery Beam

"Malcolm de Chazal's Sens-Piastique"

This work, published in 1948 in France by Mauritian writer Malcolm de Chazal, consists of over two thousand aphorisms and pensées collected from smaller collections published during his life. This is the first complete English translation. Translator Irving Weiss quotes Chazal elsewhere regarding the creation of this work:

My philosophical position in this work derives from the principle that man and nature are entirely continuous, and that all parts of the human body and all expressions of the human face, including their feelings, can actually be discerned in plants, flowers, and fruits, and to an even greater extent in our other selves, animals. And although minerals are usually considered inanimate, death-like rather than life-like, I would have them also tend towards that supreme synthesis, the human form, especially when they are in motion. "Man was made in the image of God," but beyond that I declare that "Nature was made in the image of man."

But I could never have done this by reasoning. I had to rely on subconscious thinking, the only intuitive resource available to humans -- which few of us ever use in an entire lifetime... I should add that I could never have learned to think subconsciously without years of ascetic withdrawal. Depriving my body, isolating myself, concentrating my mind and spirit... until by stages I had perfected what I consider to be a totally new method of writing.

Words not too surprising from a visionary who can claim a Swedenborgian uncle; whose work was immediately championed by writers such as Auden, Breton, Ponge, and Bataille; and who has been compared to Lautréamont, Rudolf Steiner, and Goethe. Diving into this massive Green Integer "pocket" edition is like diving into a dream, or an Irish healing well. Unlike many aphorists de Chazal's works swims with metaphors and images and vibrant leaping associations. Antonio Porchia's work comes to mind -- leaving behind bon mots for sensual epiphanies, crystalline visions, and surrealist revelations. My copy is bejeweled by post-its and slips of torn paper. How does one remember these fantastical insights into a personal, but seductively and generously offered world? De Chazal's is perhaps the most original literary voice I know, beyond Pessoa, beyond Michaux, beyond Blake, beyond Beckett. A taste and I'll just grab from within the first 100 pages:

Our fingers see the night like cats, but we never know it. In order to learn visual information from our fingertips we would have to shut our physical eyes into a psychic gaze as the blind do.

Sexual enjoyment is a greyhound race in which the pursuer collapses in front of the finish line always short of the prey.

Pride tingles the nape of the neck, vanity tingles the loins.

Some day dresses will be woven of glass crystals, shaped into multicolored garments responding to every angle of light. And since color affects form, the hips and breasts of women will become elastic in the sun, heightening man's desire to make him even more passion's slave.

It would be impossible to feel a caress in the round: the axes of perception would cancel each other. Proof a priori is the relatively imperceptible caress of the eyelid on the globe of the eye.

To see absolute black the eye would need a sun in it and an absolute moon to see pure white.

Taste is a one-room house -- the mouth. Hearing has the boudoir of the ear, the eyes have the parlor of the cornea, and smell has the long hall of the nose. But the poorest lodged is touch, who lives on the naked plains of the skin like a vagabond in the streets.

We learn most about ourselves only in the school of others. We learn m

---