By Terri Mullholland.
Emma Bolland, Instructions from Light (Joan, 2023)
I have started to write about Emma Bolland’s book Instructions from Light several times, most of it has been in my head as I procrastinate putting the words onto the page: ‘Cut to hands, paused above a keyboard, as if about to type, frozen’. Because how can I do justice to this text?
I had a dream while writing/not writing this review that I interviewed Emma. We sat facing each other in blue velvet armchairs on an empty stage. Emma was lit by a spotlight above and I was in darkness. The conversation was about reading and writing and translation. On waking, I tried to transcribe as much of what Emma had said as possible — but I’d forgotten it all. All Emma’s words had gone and I’d just written a bad translation of badly remembered lines: ‘where is the line between dreaming and remembering? he she, they remember(s) (which one am I?)’
The experience of reading Instructions from Light is like waking up from a dream. You’re left with the images of multiple scenes — a cinematic montage that has been cut up, spliced together, and diced apart — flickering in your mind’s eye like an old film. Bolland’s text is framed by a translation of the screenplay of Le Silence by Louis Delluc. The original film is presumed lost, so everything — the staging, the lighting, and the costumes — must be reimagined. Different fonts indicate the multiple voices/characters/texts: the original manuscript, the translation, and the commentary on the translation. Thoughts vacillate between translating the text (and the difficulty and the impossibility of translating) and how to stage the work, how to translate it visually: ‘I think about my eye behind the camera’.
Then there are other voices/characters/texts woven through, the notes left in notebooks, fragments from corrupted voice files, a personal ‘I/Eye’ account that splinters the self: ‘I gather my selves around a table — I wonder where I am I wonder how it is I got here’. The reader is both disorientated and captivated as characters slip between the named protagonists of the screenplay, between I/Eye, between she/they. Within the screenplay there are also sequences of letters lying on tables, being written, opened, and read. Translating Le Silence raises difficulties in establishing who is speaking, a confusion of pronouns that is reflected throughout the book: ‘I can’t seem to settle on a frequency, hovering in a space between she and they and unable to claim either as my own’.
We have establishing shots to the text as a whole, ‘this is a book about a sanity in flux’, that continue throughout, repeated, revised, so that nothing is ever established, everything is flux. The rug is pulled, and continues to be pulled, out from under our feet if we try to get too comfy: ‘This is a story — a story plural — about remembering. A story about memory-image, and a story about memory-image questioned’.
This is a work that refuses categorisation: ‘They have learned their lesson, which is that categorisation can be used against them’. Bolland uses the language of categorisation, of the medical establishment, of mental illness, of found texts from patient instruction and medication warning leaflets, to write new texts within texts. So the overall effect is like reading a palimpsest with all the layers visible. These multiple stories intrude, collide, and seep into each other. Reading them becomes an act of listening, of witnessing, rather than interpretation. These other voices present their own difficulties of filming: ‘what annoys me is that his text seems so filmable. But their text? The others? How do I film the things for which I cannot account?’
Being unable to film it, Bolland writes the unaccountable, and the difficulties of being unaccounted for and ‘trying to locate, to write a self that has been dislocated, a self that is fragmented’, and does so brilliantly. The fragments pieced together like kintsugi; the joins glistening with light.
This is a translation, it is also a meditation on the act of translating, of reading, of listening, of interpretation, and of not doing all these things. It is about the gaps in language, in narrative, and the silences created and imposed. It is about what happens when language and understanding break apart and you start to listen to the silences underneath.
It is poetic, it is beautiful, and it is utterly compelling.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terri Mullholland is a writer and researcher living in London. She has a PhD from the University of Oxford, where she has taught English Literature and Critical Theory. Her flash fiction has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Litro, Mercurious, and The Liminal Review, and her pamphlet of hybrid pieces Weather / Patterns was published by intergraphia books in October 2022.
