Help! The new Written Art Object

à l’aide.1 1  - Pauline Klein, Alice Kahn (Paris: Éditions Allia, 2010). Written in a smaller font than the one used for the rest of the novel, this obscure dedication can easily be overlooked. To miss it — though it is seemingly addressed to the reader — would mean one had missed an important indicator of the overall tone of the book, as well as an important indication of how its content should be addressed. This cry for help is faintly shouted with the last breath of a slowly suffocating heroine.

Who is she? We might never really figure it out save for the fact that she is the first-person, omniscient, female narrator and quite a schizophrenic one at that. What we know though is that she is slowly transforming herself into Anna, one of those “gallery girls.” Who is Anna then? Anna is an invention, a fiction of a young woman constructed through the gaze of a desiring man, William. On a sunny afternoon, sitting at a café, William came to her and asked if she was Anna. She spontaneously answered “yes,” but this statement was only true in its becoming. So this is how it all started for Anna. “And me, I would be his work of art. He chose me on that terrasse to mould me to his ideas, to his delirium. To be his reality.”² 2 - Ibid., 86. Loosely translated from the original text: “Et moi, je serais son œuvre. Il m’a choisie sur cette terrasse pour me conformer à ses idées, à son délire. Pour être sa réalité.” The shell of a ghost is what Anna is.