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Jean Marc Ah‑Sen was born in East York, Toronto in 1987 to two Mauritian emigrés: a gas station attendant and a secretary. He grew up in a multilingual home where French, English and kreol morisyen intermingled like bad weather. His upbringing was reportedly “odd” (he was discouraged from being left-handed for fear that using a North American gearshift with the weaker hand would cause difficulty), tinged with “poor moral hygiene” and the kind of insipid regrets that are part and parcel of an adolescence mired in itinerancy. He failed a fledgling career as a cartoonist, largely due to lack of application and an inability to overcome shortcomings in his linework. He transitioned into writing soon after reading a copy of Blaise Cendrars’ Planus that he had stolen from a schoolmate. Various lacklustre professions supported his early forays into writing, including time spent as a bartender, janitor, office clerk, furniture assembler and debt collector. The name “Ah‑Sen” was adopted a half-century earlier by his grandfather, a deserter in Mao’s People’s Liberation Army who arriving in Africa, secured papers to a new identity.

Ah‑Sen has authored a total of ten novels, of which two have seen publication. He considers himself retired from writing. Publication of the eight remaining books, which include Parametrics of Purity, Kilworthy Tanner and Mystic Minder, remain a drawn-out “administrative formality.” The better part of his life has been spent rewriting these books, often under my supervision and endorsement. Describing his writing process as an exertion of “Translassitude,” or of a “speeding bullet of thought impacting against a wall of adamant, deathward aloofness,” encapsulated his lifelong struggle with recording the immediacy of his ideas with the nonchalance of changing out of wet clothes.

Translassitude was the name given to the brief literary movement we founded together to solve this generic problem: how can writers cultivate a phenomenological sensitivity to the world, and turn that material data into works of cultural and artistic relevance? Was there a way to expedite this transmutative process and make it a less arduous task? Translassitude’s reason for being was to standardize the logistics of inspiration, which we attempted by marrying my obsessive practice of rewriting existing novels palimpsestically—a practice I called “kilworthying”—with Ah‑Sen’s theories that the most productive writing periods resulted from self-induced bouts of lassitude and physical exhaustion. It was our belief that the rigours of this literary science produced altered states of consciousness which had definable poetic corollaries.

These states were given the designations of: omnilassitude, paralassitude, hyperlassitude and somnilassitude, the last of which purportedly allowed its bearer to write books in a state of advanced torpor (and in some exceptional instances, while asleep). Omnilassitude coincided with the dawning impulse to write Translassic literature; paralassitude with the establishment of its themes, images and subtextual possibilities; hyperlassitude with the emergence of a fixed style that systematically governed and enhanced the disparate narrative elements; and somnilassitude with the adoption of a metatextual awareness of this collective process known as Translassitude.

The bad reputation Translassists endured did not end with accusations of the absurdity of these labours; we also became notorious for our employment of two techniques in particular: “draffsacking” and “tuyèring.” Draffsacking was a form of collaborative doctoring whereby a lead author composed topic and concluding sentences of all the paragraphs that comprised a text, while a “draffsacker” or secondary author filled in the necessary details under the administration of the lead. The most well-known books written using this technique were Ah‑Sen’s baroque pseudohistory of the Mauritian Sous Gang, the nouveau roman Grand Menteur, and my causerie-novel Sugarelly.

Tuyèring was the Translassic method of organizing plots in such a manner that the text was permitted to breathe, expanding under the influence of the most ephemeral of structural substances. No outlines were ever used, but a “winch chapter” would be composed psychographically. This chapter could be placed anywhere in the text, so long as it became the primum movens of the work in question, the fulcrum along which the entire book would pivot, expand, contract. As successive chapters were written (always deferring to the preceptive logic of the winch chapter), a natural momentum and structure would emerge, allowing the novel to take shape and reveal itself. Ah‑Sen almost exclusively wrote winch chapters meant to be situated at the beginning of novels, and had a prodigious archive of over fifty undeveloped winches, some of which are published in this collection (“Underside of Love,” “The Slump,” “As to Birdlime,” “The Lost Norman”).

In the Beggarly Style of Imitation (Below the Level of Consciousness) is perhaps the purest expression of this tottering and ultimately unsustainable model of creative behaviour. The conceit was simple, but no less hubristic: a miscellany that would reflect the storied genesis and formalization of elements that would become recognized as the modern novel. It was meant to be a celebration of the grand project of writing in its myriad forms—a modern day feuilleton. Unfortunately, the book luxuriates in its failure of this gargantuan task, in the inability of the project ever reaching completion. Quite noticeably, Gothic romances, parables, travelogues and the various forms of bucolic narratives, to name but a few formative examples, are all absent from it (there was some talk of stopping these obvious lacunae by publishing future collections of recitative imitation, but indolence, or I should say retirement, proved too attractive). Participating in the musical tradition of the contrafactum, in substituting new lyrical content over historical melodies in deliberate acts of textual erasure, however partial and given to reflecting its chronological record, Imitation uses familiarity with narrative forms as the basis to produce startling and at other times inefficacious results. The stories on offer are “exercises of stylistic decadence,” experiments in bald or disruptive imitation known as the “parametrics of purity.”

Imitation had an exploratory mandate, and was perhaps never meant for publication. It was an apprenticeship in writercraft and tropology; or to continue the musical analogy, many of these stories were attempts to “detune” and perform the pieces in an altered key. From a practical standpoint, Ah‑Sen and I were simply attempting to understand what artistic results came about from the “hermeneutic square,” the four states of Translassic consciousness. But I see now that the project took on new dimensions when Ah‑Sen and I decided to dissolve our romantic and professional relationship: not content to rest on its laurels, it appears the text morphed violently into a meditation on eros and its accompanying agonies and delusions, and perhaps even more unfalteringly, must now also satisfy a tertiary objective of being an experimental sequel to Grand Menteur.

Planned as a trilogy of metaobject codex-novels, Grand Menteur, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation and the unreleased third Menteur book were, in an act of vicious paradox, conceived as diegetic artefacts of dubious authorship ostensibly written by the subjects of these books themselves, loosed onto the supra-fictional, real world. These codices were effectively Walserian microscripts that Sous gang members created to keep their alibis consistent in the event of capture. The third novel dealt primarily with the daughters of the Grand Menteur and Grand Piqûre being asked to record a soundtrack for a stalled film about the Sous Gang, a kind of gonzo, demon-laden Day for Night directed by Claude Ste. Croix VII and Aldegonde Ste. Croix VI (a prelude to these events occurs in “Sous Spectacle Cinema Research Consultation with Bart Testa,” while the Ste. Croix family history is touched on in “As to Birdlime”).

A short survey through the stories that follow might not be inopportune, given Ah‑Sen’s refusal to go into illustrative detail about process or organizational reasoning to anyone but members of the Translassic Society (besides being a fanatically devoted believer in the intentional fallacy, when pressed publicly on professional ambitions, he would usually offer nothing more than boffolas about having obscenity laws brought back on his account).

“Underside of Love” takes place shortly after the events of Grand Menteur, and prominently features Cherelle Darwish, the self-effacing, pigeon-hearted daughter of the Grand Piqûre, the Black Derwish. Readers will recall that Cherelle excelled at receding in the background of the pages of that novel, except when it came to the critical moment of palming off psychotropic mushrooms to Rhonda “Roundelay” Mayacou, the Menteur’s daughter. In “Underside,” Cherelle is given agency not hitherto afforded by penurious attempts at her characterization, the hysterical nimieties of the preceding novel reduced to the emotional rubble of a melodrama (or perhaps a Semprún novel).

This winch chapter was commissioned by Ah‑Sen’s friend, the writer Paul Barrett, for a magazine celebrating the career of Barbadian author Austin Clarke. It was a work of parallel fiction that mirrored “Give Us This Day: And Forgive Us” from Clarke’s story collection When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks, borrowing its basic plot elements of a doomed romantic couple, an eviction (and the psychological effects deriving therefrom), and a character uninterested in political activity and metamotivation because their basic needs had yet to be realized. Imitation here served a generative purpose, and was an early incursion into the possibility of two texts operating diachronically as sister stories.

The experiments with overwriting continued with the Borges-inspired “Ah‑Sen and I,” a palimpsest of “Borges and I” (down to the word count) that even incorporated Ah‑Sen’s first negative book review. The miming of Henry Fielding’s picaresques in “As to Birdlime,” which borrows its title from a passage in Jonathan Wild, is perhaps the most unabashedly imitative story in the collection, bordering on being a derivative copy; but notwithstanding the most waspish aesthete’s chop-logic about the pre-eminence of “authentic” literature, surely Ah‑Sen cannot be at fault for taking the counsel to walk before running under advisement. These exercises arose at my behest, after all; Ah‑Sen’s technical fluency with kilworthying was nil, and I believed that rewriting existing passages from writers we admired would eliminate more lame misadventures in composition. Kilworthying was as close to a scientific measure of “sinking into the mind” of an author possible, of becoming intimately familiar with the syntax, grammar and styling that governed their minds. In this fashion, we would be able to trace inspiration to a homologous source, and in so doing, perpetually have ideas at one’s elbow.

“Sentiments and Directions from an Unappreciated Contrarian Writer’s Widow” and “Swiddenworld: Selected Correspondence with Tabitha Gotlieb-Ryder” are notable not only for working with established forms of the aphoristic and epistolary modes made well-known by writers like La Rochefoucauld, Lichtenberg, Tobias Smollett and Mary Hays, but for furthering the connective nodes with the world of Mauritian Menteurism the most aggressively out of all the installments in Imitation after “Underside.” “Swiddenworld,” taking its cues from James Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacle, accounts for the Menteur’s disappearance from his daughter’s life, perhaps the greatest unanswered question from Grand Menteur, while “Sentiments and Directions” contains Cherelle’s meditations on love and loss which resulted from the glossed-over dissolution of her marriage in “Underside.”

The lyrics to three of the Black Derwish’s Mauritian singles (“Mahebourg,” Triolet,” and “Baie-du-Tombeau”) panegyrizes and further cements Cherelle’s unflinching allegiance to her father’s criminal enterprises, while the excerpt from “The Lost Norman” represents the briefest of rapprochements between the Menteur and the Piqûre, who penned the Norman Wisdom–inspired story together about their favourite English film star’s lost picture. In actuality, this winch chapter existed briefly as one of the ten novels Ah‑Sen had completed, but the majority of the manuscript had been lost in a house fire where it had been improperly stored. The novel attempted to integrate all the Norman Wisdom films in an irresolute act of intertextuality, presenting the filmic Normans as fifteen brothers masquerading as one man for tax evasion purposes. The book was a damning condemnation of housing worries, landholdings fraud and cantillating landlords who liked to hide their wealth behind Rupert Rigsby-esque self-flagellation. The book was not particularly known for its subtlety among those privy to early drafts—if I am remembering correctly, the book histrionically opened with the line, “Beneficed scum-legion of the world, thy name is Landlord!” The Lost Norman was subsequently abandoned, and the segment here is all that remains of the project.

“The Slump” poses a much more difficult case of accounting. I had not read this story until I was given proofs of this collection in preparation for writing these introductory remarks. It is a legitimate piece of juvenilia dating back to a decade ago when Ah‑Sen began writing in earnest. All I can venture here is a vague recollection of plans for Cherelle to become a failed novelist, so it would not be incongruous to suppose that the story exists, along with “Sentiments and Directions,” as one of Cherelle’s earliest literary offerings, and a middling specimen of vanity at that (Imitation is her codex, after all).

The greatest artistic liberty on offer is undoubtedly the inclusion of “A Defence of Misanthropy,” which was published originally in a Translassic encyclical and drafted by my own hand after kilworthying a William Hazlitt essay. It is also attributed to Cherelle Darwish and perhaps accounts in greater detail for the psychological frame of mind she was in after divorcing her husband and separating from Roderick Borgloon. As anyone can well imagine, all these years onwards the piece appalls me, though I cannot help but marvel at Ah‑Sen’s complete abandonment of any kind of ethical framework for sourcing found, borrowed and stolen writing to cadge a publishing deal.

It would be a monumental oversight not to mention the fact that Imitation had two paramount objectives unrelated to Ah‑Sen’s literary career: it was meant to publicly lend attention to the Translassic system, but it had to at the same time delegitimize the Sudimentarist school of writing, which encouraged writers to assume the lives of their fictional characters. Sudimentarism was the chief rival to all of the Translassic Society’s efforts for validation among writers. These impediments took the form of legal challenges, infiltration of the Society by intelligencers, and in two confirmed instances, the threat of physical violence towards high-ranking Translassic associates using bound Sudimentarist hardbacks, all under the direction of my father, Artepo Lepoitevin, the founder of Sudimentarism. The war of words between the two camps escalated well past acceptable laws of decorum, which undoubtedly contributed to the droves of disaffiliations on both sides. Ah‑Sen may have thrown the first stone and deserves his fair share of responsibility for characterizing my father as a participant in the “bourgeois diffidence that forbade extramarital affairs unless it concerned making love with run-on sentences.”

An air of ill-starred futility suffuses my memories of these engagements. It is difficult to feel indignant when the source of your woes has left the surface of the earth. When my father died, the way was clear for Transmentarism—a bizarre amalgam of the two systems forged by Ah‑Sen’s hand—to take the place previously occupied by its primogenitors. Seemingly having cast off the two main stumbling blocks in his life, Ah‑Sen was free to pursue his sesquipedalian campaigns in the “literary underground” unencumbered by such inconsiderable factors as friendship, incorruptibility or sincerity of intention.

If there is any justice in this world, Ah‑Sen will read this introduction and be mortified by the unlicensed look behind the iron curtain of his mind in the exact degree I was mortified to see no mention of my name in this windowless tome (unless you count “Tabitha Gotlieb-Ryder,” the most unflattering of tributes I could conceive for myself), my sizeable contributions to these pieces annulled by some cack-handed legerdemain. Mortification, as the saying goes, is good for the soul.

Ah‑Sen can one day write on these issues and cease his parade of false attributions he has publicly advanced behind a monolithic selfdom of staged worry and mock principles. It made perfect sense when Translassitude was a going concern, and I would likewise take full credit for the novels Ah‑Sen draffsacked on my behalf, but those days are long behind us, and I derive no commercial benefit from doltish associations with the past; I see no need why he should either.

I suppose Ah‑Sen will have the last laugh, though, a laugh partaking in what Jack London called the “grimness of infallibility.” He possesses confirmation that the final “sentiment and direction” I delivered unto him all those years ago in our studio on Ludlow Street was in fact a visionary diagnostic of our times; and while it was meant to be in the spirit of an exhortation, I now see that the suggestion that “there are no new ideas, only unusual ways of forgetting” has become little more than a dispensation to “write” with ungrudging impunity.

–K. Tanner,

NYC, 2020