Even if what we’re supposedly being given in Autoportrait is a self-portrait, the fragmented character of the text bathes the proceedings in a performative light. Instead, what remains is a cold combustion, an increase of shadows – which, admittedly, isn’t a bad thing. Occasionally, Ball’s sentences germinate, leafing out along singular boughs, though even when extended reflections form, they leave us stranded just shy of ‘the point of total explanation’ he claims to abhor. (According to the book’s acknowledgements, Ball wrote his Autoportrait in a single day.)
#Edouard leve windows
I thought of windows as doors for enterprising people and I wanted to be that way.’ If Levé’s razorish pensées can feel pristine, a virtuosic display of self-knowledge, a sense of freshness and wide-eyed discovery adds a puckish instability to Ball’s musings. In general, Levé’s Autoportrait is fleeter, more imagistic, whereas Ball’s text leans into cold wonder, flirting with a Francis Ponge-like poetry of the mundane and highlighting his predilection for the absurd, the diffuse, the simply odd: ‘I used to go out of windows onto roofs at every opportunity.
This seriocomic pendulum swing is central to Ball’s Autoportrait. Courtesy: Counterpoint Press photograph: Lin Woldendorp We learn that, in 1990, his brother was taken to hospital and left a quadriplegic, that his brother and father are now dead, and that, while he’s written about their influence on his thought and behaviour, he hasn’t yet written about his mother’s.
#Edouard leve series
In Ball’s Autoportrait, we learn, for instance, that he has a ‘slightly bent’ penis, that the only poet he reads anymore is Alice Oswald, that he suffers from migraines, that he has had six cats in his life, that he’s an avid though not a wildly creative g raphic artist and, if given a sheet of paper, will absentmindedly set down a series of foxes dressed in robes. This ad hoc method of mapping the self has a pleasant lightening effect, converting everything it touches into trivia. The pleasure, here, is in errancy and velocity.
One sentence might note a pure fact – say, the number of countries the author has visited, in the case of Levé, or the fact that the writer has never ridden a horse but has ridden an elephant, in Ball’s case – while the next sentence might offer up an intimate divulgence or plunge into a personal wound. The range of declaration is elastic, encompassing both trivialities and profundities. What that ends up feeling like on the page is a pointillism of sorts, a scatter plot of the psyche. Both Levé’s and Ball’s texts are serialist memoirs, proceeding via largely disconnected, declarative sentences that map the freefall of thought.
In other words, this is life uninflected, sans emphasis or order – though not without form. As a form of biography, Ball writes in a brief introductory note, Levé’s urtext posits ‘an approach that does not raise one fact above another, but lets the facts stand together in a fruitless clump, like a life’. Inspired by the French artist and writer Édouard Levé’s own Autoportrait (2005), Ball’s text revels in and co-opts its predecessor’s egalitarian spirit. Over the past two decade s, Ball has carved out a monkish niche for himself in contemporary letters, churning out nearly 20 books that have few formal allegiances and are defined – if they can be defined – by a dreamy absurdism. The associative riff is a recurrent device in Jesse Ball’s pseudo-memoir Autoportrait (2022). And, of course, a schoolboyish thumbing of the nose at autofiction is basically unavoidable. Autopilot helps to account for the trance-like aspects of the text, while even automat seems relevant – convenient, detached, stripped of the personal. There’s a hint of autopoiesis – that is, spontaneous generation – while the speed we associate with automobile also feels germane. P lay with it further, however, and you’ll note subtler readings. Blatantly, an autoportrait is a portrait of the self, an autobiography. Start with the title – a bit of a gas, let’s admit.
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