A Remarkable Document: Leslie Kaplan's Excess—The Factory

Commune Editions is publishing the much-anticipated translation of American-born, French-raised writer, playwright, and poet Leslie Kaplan's Excess—The Factory, originally written in 1982; the new edition, translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap, has received a glowing Publishers Weekly review: "Kaplan renders a remarkable document of her search for alternate forms of liberation from a system in which 'You live, you die, each instant.'" More:

Kaplan bases the work on the factory employment she began in January 1968 as a member of the League of Young Communists. “When you arrive at a new factory, you are always very afraid,” she writes (the translators employ the depersonalized “you” form throughout). The book’s division into nine “circles” calls to mind Dante’s Inferno. Kaplan’s descriptions are simple, direct, and generalized; different factories are almost indistinguishable despite their varied output. “Parts and scraps, the factory. The places are formless, there are many corners,” Kaplan writes. Scenes of shopping only reinforce the worker’s alienation from the products of her labor: “You go in. Colors. The objects are spread out in their boxes, detached.// You pass through the aisles. You touch a little./ You see yourself in the glass, the mirrors.” Kaplan’s focus on women reflects factory segregation and gendered exploitation, though the women find ways to cope... 

Read the full review here. An interview between Kaplan and translators Carr and Pap took place last October at Jacket2. An excerpt:

Pap: In the interview with Marguerite Duras about L’excès-l’usine, you repeat the word enlever as you talk about how much you had to take away to get to the truth of L’excès-l’usine. So how do you find the words that give the sense of truth that you are after?

Kaplan: Well that comes back to the whole process of how when you’re writing … it changes you. You could begin by writing enormously: this, that, and how she was here and he was there, but then you realize that when you are doing that, you are not really creating the sensation, the feeling, the sensual feeling, the material feeling.

When I wrote L’excès-l’usine I came little by little to think about the difference between anecdote and detail. A real detail is the condensation of many different levels, an infinity of levels. This detail opens up an enormous quantity of worlds. An anecdote, in contrast, just keeps you there.