“Suicide or Dynamite”: Sophie Podolski’s le pays où tout est permis

gita farikha;

Most readers are likely to have come across the out-of-print and untranslated work of the Belgian author Sophie Podolski primarily through her brief appearances in pieces by Robert Bolaño and thus to perceive her as a gifted but tragic artist-victim, a poétesse maudite
whose associative flow, graphic style, and often tortured self-awareness is of a piece with her suicide at the age of twenty-one. Podolski becomes a martyr to the sexual and collective ideals of the 1960s’ counterculture, a version of Artaud’s Van Gogh, a woman suicided by society. Yet such a characterization does a disservice to her own writings, which anticipate the very process of mythification in which they also participate, not only in terms of the
writer-as-martyr ideal, but also in terms of the political limitations of a hippie “drop-out” lifestyle. This essay addresses, in particular, her questioning of the perversion or disguise of the free-love ideal as a kind of crude, misogynistic sexual “communism,” as epitomized by
the relation between Charles Manson and his “family”; of the limitations of nonviolence, in relation to the Living Theater; of the recuperation of the protest movements of May 1968; and of the seeking after of consciousness-altering modes of relation to the human collective and to the world in general through the taking of hallucinogenic drugs. It explores the ways in which such simultaneous desire and deflation, at once tortured and comic, place the political and sexual paradoxes faced by experimental women writers and experimental women’s writing in sharp relief.