STREFFEN, Isabella
Fabulae - How it begins

FABULAE is an experiment in close reading, responding to the question of beginning with a challenge to the philosophy of myth. With Roberto Calasso as her intimate companion, Isabella Streffen appropriates Calasso’s Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony, using his methods to counter his text by foregrounding re-reading, inserting the silent, absent voices of women, connecting the foundation of narrative to contemporary discussions of structural violence, gender, and consent. FABULAE interrogates semiotics, gambles with theology, questions beauty, necessity, mortality, consciousness, form, possession, truth, and art. It reframes mythic gesture, authority, ceremony, paradise, and the birth of language. The reader meets a complicated man, wanders through Ariadne’s fates, encounters the Pythia, the Atreidae, Persephone, the Gods of the Silent Pact, and the doubling of Athena and Helen. The telling of stories begins with a dispute over a girl, a slip of tense, a distraction, a switch. Its characters change and the exchange is the condition of narrative. The rest is slippery radiance.

[publisher's note]

Published by Ma Bibliothèque, 2022
Literature