Le plaisir de la côte / The Pleasure of the Coast

by J. R. Carpenter

Pamenar Press

Paperback, 2023

100 pages

Le plaisir de la côte / The Pleasure of the Coast revels in the sketchy subjectivities lurking beneath the smooth surface of the science of imperial measurement, blurring colonial boundaries by calling attention to the messy moments and methods in which they were drawn. The title and much of the text borrows from Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (1973). The word ‘text’ has been replaced with the word ‘coast’ throughout. This détourned philosophy infuses excerpts of scientific writing by the late-eighteenth century French hydrographer Charles François Beautemps-Beaupré with desire. These libidinally-charged phrases intermingle with passages from Suzanne et le Pacific (1921), a symbolist novel by Jean Giraudoux, in which a young French woman wins a trip around the world and becomes shipwrecked on a Pacific island in roughly the same region surveyed by Beautemps-Beaupré 1791-1793. This tripartite language system unfolds in fragments, offering an inchoate yet insistent opposition to the mechanistic view of science based on the assumption of an objective reality. The Pleasure of the Coast is imperfectly bilingual. Both the original French and the English translations have been appropriated, exaggerated, détourned, corrected, and corrupted. Who, then, is the author of this work? The author is not dead. The author is multiple: multimedia, multilingual, polyvocal. "Which body?" Barthes asks, "We have several.

J. R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, and researcher working across performance, print, and digital media. Questions of place, displacement, migration, colonialism, and climate pervade her work. Her digital poem The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. Her print collection An Ocean of Static was highly commended for the Forward Prize 2019. Her collection This is a Picture of Wind was listed in The Guardian’s best poetry books of 2020 and included in the Digital Storytelling exhibition at The British Library 2023.