I’ll start this by saying that I, too, struggled with Dumas’ piece. It’s certainly not an easy read, though I found I liked it a bit more the second time around, having a sense of what to expect.
What I appreciated most about Dumas was that she really plays with sentence structure, which I think is part of what makes her piece so confusing, but also gives it such a unique flow. I feel like the phrases that resonated with me the most from this piece were the most unusually organized ones: “You have remained in the state of having left,” or “While I no longer love you I no longer love anything, nothing, except you, still.” By combining these convoluted statements with her short, bare-bones paragraphs, for instance “You do not know this” or “Look at the camera,” she drifts between being anchorless and certain through her structure as well as what she is saying. I think I noticed this in particular when reading it with Moore’s work, which seems almost journalistic in its style at times (don’t get me wrong though—I loved Moore). In Dumas’ essay, you drift and drift through convoluted thought bordering on philosophy (“You will think the miracle is not in the apparent similarity between each of the particles that make up those millions of men in their continuous hurling, but in the irreductible difference that separates them from each other, that separates men from dogs, dogs from film, sand from the sea…” on and on for another six lines, without a single period) and then are quickly brought back down to earth with a simple statement. I feel like I had these ups and downs a lot reading this, and it kept me reading even though it could also lose me sometimes in the drifting.
