Letter & Line

In a wide-ranging interview, Lynne Tillman and Harry Matthews discuss the creative act of reading, parallels, politics, and Perec:

LT I thought about religion in regard to Tlooth and then in relation to your work generally. I began to think you were saying that faith in language, as a way to communicate, is like faith in religion. That you have to believe in language, you have faith that you can communicate, even if you’re not really able to communicate, as you have in a religion.

HM I’m very moved by that. Did you know that was how Perec felt?

LT Really?

HM I’m glad to know that I ultimately agree with him, having had many arguments with him about the question of how communication actually works in language, of whether communication is possible at all. For Perec, writing was a kind of salvation. It was justification by works. You know that expression, much discussed during the Reformation? And Perec, I think that if he hadn’t felt that writing was a vocation in the absolute sense of the word, a calling, like a priest, he would have died even sooner that he did.

Well worth the read. They take a lunch break mid-interview.

Then again, it was horror and fear on the part of the publishers which kept this work, first written as the opening section of Leduc’s novel Ravages (1955), unpublished in its original form until 2000 – and in French, at that. Leduc, a friend of Simone de Beauvoir (who also had a crush on her), had spent three years writing Thérèse and Isabelle – and it shows, in a good way. So when Gallimard said, in effect, “no way” in 1954 (“impossible to publish openly,” said Raymond Queneau, of all people), Leduc nearly had a breakdown. (The Guardian)

I follow 3:AM’s Twitter feed where I saw a mention of Karl Whitney’s short remembrance of Perec on the thirtieth anniversary of his death. This is linkbait that I can get behind. Turns out Mr. Whitney is a Perec fan and has written about him on a number of occasions.

• Georges Perec the puzzler: “Fond of linguistic complexity, Perec also worked as a fiendishly-exacting crossword-setter for the weekly magazine, Le Point, and many of his crosswords have recently been published in book form in France.” (3:AM) Must investigate.
• A review of An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (3:AM)
• On rue Vilin: “The aspect of Perec’s investigations that most intrigued me was his focus on the rue Vilin, a street where he had spent the first few years of his life before his father, a soldier, was killed in the Second World War and his mother deported to Auschwitz, where she died. Rue Vilin is in the neighbourhood of Belleville, in north-eastern Paris, and stands on hills overlooking the city centre. Perec’s Jewish family lived in an area described by his biographer David Bellos as ‘a whole Yiddish town within sight of the Eiffel Tower.’” (extract, The White Review)
• And rue Vilin again: “In 1969, following the traumatic break-up of a relationship, Perec threw himself into an ambitious project which, he planned, would last for twelves years: the ongoing description of twelve places in Paris which were important to him. He utilised a 12 x 12 mathematical grid to structure the order in which he would visit each place. Every month, he would go to one of the twelve locations and note down what he saw there, and in addition, at a different location would write a memory of another place.” (p25-27, The Kakofonie)

 An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec and translated from the French by Mark Lowenthal (Wakefield Press 2010)

Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien was originally published by Christian Bourgois éditeur, 1975

Oulipo-mania is an ongoing series on Oulipian works, constraints, and more.

An Attempt At Exhausting a Place in Paris is, essentially, a list. Perec set out to catalog the infraordinary, “what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds”; or, those things that are oft ignored or unnoticed. Attempt is the result of this endeavor, which Perec carries out from various vantage points in the bustling Place Saint-Sulpice. Over a three-day period in October 1974, he infers–“A priest returning from a trip (there is an airline label hanging from his satchel)”; he sees friends and a possible doppelganger; he finds a man who shares the same idiosyncratic manner of holding his cigarettes: between his middle and ring fingers; and sees a dog that “looks like Snowy” (Tintinophiles will recognize the young reporter’s four-legged sidekick, also known as Milou).

Illustration by Badaude

What you’ll recognize in this slim book is Perec’s microscopic attention to detail that figures in A Void (reviewed here).

tens, hundreds of simultaneous actions, micro-events, each one of which necessitates postures, movements, specific expenditures of energy:

conversations between two people, conversations between three people, conversations between several people: the movement of lips, gestures, gesticulations

And his wry humor: “(high heels; bent ankles)”; “A full 96 (perhaps I have only today discovered my true calling: ticket collector for the Paris City Transit Authority)”

In his afterward, translator Mark Lowenthal mentions Perec’s aim to become an absolute writer; “Perec’s legacy lies more in the effort he made in seeing and taking note of everything.” But, as Lowenthal notes, there are limitations, specifically cultural and temporal, that make this a noble but futile endeavor.

Perec’s observations of the hustle and bustle of Place Saint-Sulpice would differ greatly from, say, those of an American. Or even a fellow Frenchman of a different generation. And time, even a mere three days, works against Perec:

What has changed here since yesterday? At first sight, it’s really the same. Is the sky perhaps cloudier? It would really be subjective to say that there are, for example, fewer people or fewer cars. There are no birds to be seen. There is a dog on the plaza. Over the hôtel Récamier (far behind it?) a crane stands out in the sky (it was there yesterday, but I don’t recall making note of it). I couldn’t say whether the people I’m seeing are the same ones as yesterday, whether the cars are the same ones as yesterday. On the other hand, if the birds (pigeons) came (and why wouldn’t they come) I’d feel sure they would be the same birds.

And later

Yesterday, there was a metro ticket on the sidewalk, right in front of my window; today there is, not exactly in the same spot, a candy wrapper (cellophane) and a piece of paper difficult to identify (a little bigger than a “Parisiennes” wrapper but a much lighter blue.

Perec also admits to another limitation: his position, literally where he is situated in the square, prevents him from seeing all. He can only take note of what is happening in his line of sight. “(Obvious limits to such an undertaking: even when my own goal is just to observe, I don’t see what takes place a few meters from me: I don’t notice, for example, that cars are parking)”

The illustrations throughout this post are by Badaude, who set out to exhaust Attempt by making an infographic complete with a key that is, as she describes, “more complicated than the words it represents.”

Illustration by Badaude

In a panel where she notes her “angoisses,” it’s clear that, despite Perec’s attention to detail, there are still unknowns:

Illustration by Badaude

On one hand, you can’t help but wonder why Perec bothered to do something that was impossible and why readers would be interested in this effort. At points, the list is exhaustive and unenlightening–do we really care which busses passed through the Place?; however, the number of pages that “nothing” fills is remarkable. While full of the mundane, Attempt does give us a sense of how much we miss when we are oblivious to the space around those things that we deem important. It offers us a glimpse of what we might see should we choose to observe the things that would go by unnoticed. Undoubtedly, this is a book for the Oulipian enthusiast (guilty) but other creative types could benefit from emulating Perec.

♦

Many thanks to Badaude for allowing me to share her infographic, which you can see in its entirety in The White Review‘s Issue 3. If you aren’t familiar with her work, check out her website, where she blogs about fashion, offers comical “how to’s,” and shares the wonders/horrors of French cookbooks from the 70s and 80s (Cuisine de Meuh!).

Badaude also introduced me to the Ouvroir de Bandes dessinée Potentielle (OuBaPo), which is one of several offshoots of the OuLiPo. I hope to explore this group in the future as I find the use of constraints in illustrations fascinating.

Gilbert Adair // Photo credit: Faber&Faber

Gilbert Adair passed away on December 8. I knew him (in the way any reader can know a writer) through his translation of Perec’s A Void but was completely unfamiliar with his fiction, namely The Evadne Mount Trilogy, a pastiche on Agatha Christie’s detective novels, his column in the The Guardian, nor his screenwriting, for which it seems he was best known. Who knew that the screenplay for Berlusconi’s disturbing film The Dreamers was adapted from Adair’s novel The Holy Innocents and was partly autobiographical? I did not.

It’s inevitable that the passing of a creative person leads to a renewed interest in his or her work. Time will tell whether this will help introduce US readers to Adair (and to Perec!). I, for one, will be hunting down Death of the Author, Alice Through the Needle’s Eye and, if I can locate a copy, The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice: Culture in the Nineties, which consists mostly of his Guardian column in the 90s.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have an audience in mind when you’re writing?

HARRY MATHEWS

I’ve always said that my ideal reader would be someone who after finishing one of my novels would throw it out the window, presumably from an upper floor of an apartment building in New York, and by the time it had landed would be taking the elevator down to retrieve it.

I suppose I must have had dreams of greater recognition, but I’ve always had the audience I wanted, and that was the audience that reads poetry. What I want is enthusiasm among friends and their friends, people who I know are serious readers.

From The Art of Fiction, No. 191, Henry Matthews interviewed by Susannah Hunnewell in The Paris Review

Zazie by Raymond Queneau and translated from the French by Barbara Wright (Harper & Brothers New York 1960)
Zazie dans le métro was originally published by Gallimard, 1959

Oulipo-mania is an ongoing series on Oulipian works, constraints, and more.

Considered Raymond Queneau’s first major work, Zazie is a novel populated by fast-talking odd characters and has a buzzing energy that alerts the reader to the zazic treats that she will find in the 200 odd pages to follow. While this novel was written before Queneau and François Le Lionnais formed Oulipo, it has the makings of an Oulipian work. Queneau plays with words, more often than not using colloquialisms and phonetic language, which lends an oddity to his characters as well as adding to the overall comic effect.

Zazie is a precocious, foul-mouthed pre-teen who visits her Uncle Gabriel in Paris for two days while her mother calls on a new lover. Zazie’s desire to ride the metro is thwarted due to a strike (la grève!), which is almost a national pastime in France. So Uncle Gabriel and Charlie, his cab-driver friend, take her on a rather interesting, if not inaccurate tour of Paris, much to Zazie’s annoyance.

From the first words that leave his mouth–”Howcanaystinksotho”–the reader knows that Gabriel is no ordinary man and this is no ordinary book. He’s a man who carries a scented handkerchief, uses lipstick, and we soon find out, whose main occupation is a crossdresser at a gay nightclub, which confuses Zazie, who asks, “Are you a homosessual?” although she doesn’t quite know what that means.
Zazie escapes from Uncle Gabriel’s neglectful care but is caught by his friend and landlord, Turandot. At which point, she cries out for help. “‘I don’t want to go with the meussieu, I don’t know the meussieu, I don’t want to go with the meussieu.’ Exetra.” What follows is a scene that will leave you in stitches: first, Zazie whispers to a concerned woman the nefarious things that “meussieu” wanted her to do to him. Another onlooker, a man, asks what the meussieu had asked for. “The good woman drops the zazic details in the man’s ear. ‘Oh!’ says the man. ‘I’d never thought of that one.’ Then he resays, somewhat pensively: ‘No, never.’” And as this game of telephone progresses, the reactions slowly turn from disgust, to curiosity, to a state of excitement. Turandot heads home while the somewhat sated mob considers the possibilities of what meussieu has proposed. What Queneau does in this scene is quite funny and thrilling and he leaves the reader wondering, what *did* she say?, by inserting “(details)” at the moment when one character is about to reveal what exactly has gotten everyone so excited.
I’m having a hard time describing Queneau’s style. He keeps the pacing fast, mainly through dialogue. He bends words phonetically, gramatically. They fit the people who speak them. But how about these cues that are in the dialogue. Cues for the reader. “Not a chance (gesture). Didn’t have time, with all that was going on (silence).” He compresses dialogue with exposition while drawing out simple descriptions: “one legally entitled to mount her” for “husband.” He’s rude, descriptive, overly descriptive. No, loquacious.
Going back to the pre-Oulipian tendencies that appear in this novel, it must be pointed out that there’s a certain circularity in the way the story pans out. There’s no doubt that the plot is simple and it might be that this simplicity lends itself to repetition. Monica points out that what Queneau does in Exercises in Style is an extension of what happens in Zazie: characters are constantly retelling stories–Zazie’s story about how her mother killed her father, Gabriel and Charlie’s shtick in which they misidentify Parisian landmarks, and so on. I read the Barbara Wright translation and am in awe. If this lexical guide to Zazie isn’t enough proof to the challenge of translating the bastardized/colloquial/punny French, then I don’t know what is.

This is a part of Oulipo-mania, an ongoing series on Oulipian works, constraints, and more.

Oulipo-mania is an ongoing series on Oulipian works, constraints, and more.

I have had McSweeney’s Issue 22 sitting on my shelf for a few years, not knowing what was contained in its pages. We’ll call it a happy accident, kismet even, that I opened it while working on this post. It is a three-volume “exercise in inspired restriction — of author, of content, and of form.” Part 1 shows poet-chains. Part 2, writers work off of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s list of story ideas. And Part 3 focuses on “The State of the Constraint.” Let’s call this Oulipo-lite. It’s the perfect introduction for the unsuspecting reader.

Harry Matthews models his “Thirty-Five Variations on a theme From Shakespeare” off of Perec’s “Thirty-Five Variations on a Theme From Proust.” Matthews applies Oulipian constraints to the line “To be or not to be” to “demonstrate the range of Oulipian methods in English.”

Among the thirty-five constraints are anagrams (“Note at his behest: bet on toot or quit.”), transposition, (W+7: To beckon or not to beckon: that is the quinsy.”), homophony (Two-beer naughty beat shutters equation.”), and of course, lipogram, a writing constraint in which one cannot employ a chosen letter or group of letters.

Lipogram in A

To be or not to be: that is the question

Lipogram in I

To be or not to be: that’s the problem

Lipogram in E

Almost nothing: or nothing:  but which?

The most famous (or infamous?) lipogram is Georges Perec’s A Void, which is a lipogram in E, which is a 300-page novel, which is a modern marvel. And so on.  My notes on A Void will follow this post but in the meantime, I challenge you to write a lipogram today–whether on Twitter, via SMS, email, or in the comments section below (see what I did there?).

A Void by George Perec and translated from the French by Gilbert Adair (Verba Mundi 2005)
La Disparition was originally published by Gallimard, 1969

This is a part of Oulipo-mania, an ongoing series on Oulipian works, constraints, and more.

How do you write coherently about a book that was equal parts frustrating and marvelous? It’s probably best to start with its author, Georges Perec, who started out as the bane of my existence but I’m happy to report is on my list of authors that I admire. Perec was a French writer and a member of Oulipo from 1969 to his death in 1982. Though I have yet to read his other works (novels, play, poetry, and opera librettos, even), it is easy to see why Perec is considered a “literary experimentalist.”

A Void is a literary feat: it is, in short, a novel written without a single E in its 300 pages. While Life a Users Manual is considered his magnum opus, A Void stands as a triumph in taking a constraint, the lipogram, and making it work in long form fiction. And beyond that, Perec found that the constraint provided a means to break free of our ideas of what could be done with fiction.

“My ambition, as Author, my point, I would go so far as to say my fixation, my constant fixation, was primarily to concoct an artifact as original as it was illuminating, an artifact that would, or just possibly might, act as a stimulant on notions of construction, of narration, of plotting, of action, a stimulant, in a word, on fiction-writing today.”

Anton Vowl is the subject of this novel; or, more accurately, his disappearance serves as a catalyst for this literary whodunit that leads his friends on a twisting and turning path, following half clues and false paths. In this essay on reading Perec, Warren Motte points to voids in Perec’s own life—namely, his parents:

On the other hand, the absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence, and the absence of the E in A Void announces a broader, cannily coded discourse on loss, catastrophe, and mourning. Perec cannot say the words père, mère, parents, famille in his novel, nor can he write the name Georges Perec. In short, each “void” in the novel is abundantly furnished with meaning, and each points toward the existential void that Perec grappled with throughout his youth and early adulthood. A strange and compelling parable of survival becomes apparent in the novel, too, if one is willing to reflect on the struggles of a Holocaust orphan trying to make sense out of absence, and those of a young writer who has chosen to do without the letter that is the beginning and end of écriture.

A Void is a marvel. An exercise in the absurd. A self-aware piece of fiction: “La Disparition? Or Adair’s translation of it?” At times, it feels like Perec is winking, nudging, and blowing raspberries at the reader (“nothing, nothing at all, but irritation at an opportunity knocking so loudly and so vainly, nothing but frustration at a truth so dormant and frail that, on his approach, it sinks into thin air.”) And let’s not overlook his underscoring the letter E’s absence throughout the novel: twenty five books on a shelf that once held twenty six (25 letters remain in the alphabet that’s missing an E), Anton Vowl’s absence (A. Vowl, get it?), and so on.

For me, the story and character development were secondary to the intricate, convoluted tangents that make this narrative unique. While some writers are satisfied by describing the landscape, Perec seems to delight in telling the reader each item or object’s history, it’s disappointments, absurdity, etc. At times, the narrative flagged for this reader but it was at those times that Perec was aware, pointing to the pointlessness of the many digressions from plot to subplot to who knows where.

How did he pull it off? And perhaps equally important, how did Adair manage to translate this beast of a book into English? Because he did.

A Void isn’t for every reader. Though it is set in Paris, it is not the Paris for lovers. It’s the 1960s and Paris is in shambles. Where total anarchy prevails. If you are up for a read that asks more of you than you’re accustomed to, if you are up for a challenge–a rewarding one at that–then give this a go. But don’t go throwing your book at me. I warned you, didn’t I?

♦

My reading partner, Gary, has written a great post on A Void over at his blog, Parrish Lantern. Not only has he provided visuals of Oulipian constraints, but he has also written a summary of the book as a lipogram in E. I know. I know!

FTC Disclosure: I checked this out from my local library. Vive La Bibliothèque!

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that Oulipo has taken over my feed. Reading about the group on Conversational Reading and Monica’s reviews at Salonica has definitely fueled this curiosity. So, what the hell is Oulipo? Short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop of potential literature, Oulipo is composed of a group of writers and mathematicians who create works written under certain constraints. Want to know more? What follows comes directly from the official Oulipo website by way of Google Translate¹:

What is Oulipo?

Jacques Roubaud & Marcel Bénabou

Does this make your head spin or do you want more? I want more.  So consider this the official launch of Oulipo-mania, a series where I will share my notes on Oulipian works, constraints, and more. If you have any suggestions, recommendations, questions or want to give me a quizzical look, shoot them at me in the comments section. On y va!

¹If this doesn’t underscore the necessity of a living, breathing translator, I don’t know what will. Google Translate works in a pinch but it’s clunky at best.

² Fraisident-Pondateur? Hehe.