The Complete Drafts of Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Draft 104: The Book

by Divya Victor

“This is it. This is The Book.”
To understand the artist-writers’ relationship to “The Book” in her 1996 essay “f-Words: The Essay on the Essay,” Rachel Blau DuPlessis studies Virginia Woolf’s diaries and the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers’ iterative tamperings with Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés. DuPlessis concludes that these artist-writers imagine the book both as an “institution of cultural accumulation” and also as a “space in which one wants to make one’s mark.” The book conjugates grand, collective ambition with personal desire—the quieter, even unacknowledged want to make marks. In DuPlessis”s characteristic (and characterizing) rhetoric, Broodthaers’ and Woolf’s books are sentient and animate, kinesthetic and sensate, muscular and truculent. They react with pulsating instinct and refract in intrepid directions. Their existence and apprehension demand a reckoning with how their being and doing are nested within each other. Their ontic and phenomenological animacy are as unpredictable as they are interdependent.

In the late 1990s, DuPlessis theorized the book as metaphoric and material netting for what we have since described as autotheory. It is a form capable of self-knowing that exceeds any of its “contents.” It self-propagates by enacting “methodical critiques of method” (‘f-words”, 16). It is most fecund when it reproduces beyond the binary of book and reader, text and interpreter. DuPlessis’ argument about the autotheoretical capability of the book imagines the author as a placeholder and conduit: Broodthaers effaces Mallarmé’s name with his own, Woolf smuggles her own into a copy of Isaac Watts’ Logick, or, the right use of Reason. Through acts of effacement, replacement, and fugitive finagling, every writer builds the “interstices” (a favorite DuPlessis shape!) to usher generative suspicion (a favorite DuPlessis blend of affects!) and imagines formations that “erode the notion of a center” to animate thinking from the margins (a favorite DuPlessis disposition!). “The Book” teaches us to “Act so that there is no use in a center” as one might in Rooms where fascism does not loom or hold sway, such as the ones in which we are rooming now in the United States (Stein, Tender Buttons). Rather, in Rachel’s revolutionary figuration, a writer uses the book to create the material conditions where one “write[s] what one will (what one wills).” Will and wills. In this nested aside and assertion, Rachel twins futurity with willfulness, action with desire. In other words, she imagines the book as the site of alchemical, even oracular, human transformation— which is always a conjuring of other political realities. The Book is society ab ovo.

I read DuPlessis’ 1996 essay as an early draft—a preliminary procedure— for her “Draft 104: The Book,” a poem-essay written thirteen years later, across four months from a North American summer to winter (skipping August and September). “Draft 104: The Book” is a vignette clipped from what could be a sprawling trellis made of essays on the essay on the book. It conveys a euphonic argument through the grapevine, as language often does, from ear to mouth to ear, in a rumbunctious ramble of pluri-referential, citational, gossipy arrangements that compose a blend between autotheory and poetic manifesto.

Pruned into 60 clippings, each grammatical strophe produces an inflorescence of claims about composition and poesis as emergent actions that come alive in the intertext between art-making and living. DuPlessis choreographs strophes and anti-strophes as a conversation between two speaking positions: One loquacious and steady at the left margin; the other indented inward, soft-spoken but pithy. It goes as conversations between good friends must go. It is witty, combative, sometimes wry and sometimes flirtatious, and stirringly insightful. It is a “drama,” if I may call back to her early argument, that is “well-suited to the essay” (“f-words,” 20). Within an ambitious and grand conversation, the speakers feast on the smaller buds. They discuss definite and indefinite articles, the numbers in ledgers, and the letters of the alphabet. The poem-essay solicits an attention to the smaller characters that play on the grand stage, recalling what George Oppen described as “the little words” in his famous interview with L.S. Dembo. There are many “small nouns / Crying faith” in this poem-essay that ripen on the bough of numbered “occurrences” in DuPlessis’ “infinite series,” collected now as Drafts (Of Being Numerous, 1-5).

The conversation— the back, the forth— in “Draft 104: The Book” enacts the verso-to-recto movement of a western codex, where reading advances not only through the saccade of the eyes from left to right and back to left, but from left to right across the gutter. The book of Draft 104 comes alive in the activity between these binaries, originating from the poem-essay’s opening gambit. We are born into a riddle— arriving first as a lone reader to whom a contradiction is presented: “There is no actual ‘the book,’ but it does exist.” Yet we quickly gather a caravan (“traveling backward, holding a smaller book”), through the poem-essay’s metaphors of journeying (“Another book shines in the distance) and building domiciles (“A real book is a stone room”), as we plant and harvest (“The season was fruitful. There was a book, ripening in the furrowed field”), encountering accidents and making mistakes (“Opening a book is like tripping over a threshold”), dreaming and entering alternative consciousness (“You have entered a dream; it seems to enter yours”), birthing (“A book is surely the birth of an enigma”), raising (“A is for aura, B is for book”), and dying ( “The page slowly turning black”) until we leave as the exodus—a mass, a people defined by a journey through and as the book.=

The Book, as draft and object, is the “dynamic autobiography” of that “group’s self-consciousness” (“f-words,” 20). The readership, a collective—like the tiny letter yod or the stylus used to read the Torah— traverses the grand “white rift open down the page” in an endless, intertextual nesting, moving in a caravan, never alone, eternally reading (if I evert DuPlessis’ syntax): “a library, Inside the alphabet.”

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Divya Victor is a Tamil American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of CURB (Nightboat), which won the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her next book, KIN, a collection of essays, is due out from Graywolf in 2027. She is the recipient of a 2025 Creative Capital Award for this work. She is an Associate Professor of English and Writing at Michigan State University, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program.