The TLS this week brings us the following description of Australian author Xavier Herbert’s last novel, Poor Fellow My Country:
Published in 1975, it is considerably longer than War and Peace, and quickly became known in Australian literary circles as “Poor Fellow My Reader” or “Poor Bugger My Book.”
In the same kind of Spinal Tap sweepstakes, there’s the review (I don’t know the authorship) of the Clash’s Cut the Crap: “Cut the ‘Cut the’.”
I was always surprised that there wasn’t more overlap between the Oulipo and science fiction, since both fields were among the most ready to dispose of character and meaning in search of advances in their respective fields. Calvino had Cosmicomics and T-Zero, but those are more fantasies than anything resembling generic exercises. There have been a few sf authors over the years who have tried Oulipo experiments, and probably more recently that I don’t know about: the latest I know of is Geoff Ryman’s 253, which also happens to be one of the more successful hypertexts out there. I believe it succeeds on its own terms, but it does come off as a bit of an exercise, a left-brained excursion in assembling fragments that’s closer to computer programming than to writing a novel–which is not a criticism. It is also, of course, not science fiction. Why Ryman chose ordinary reality for his experiment is not for me to answer, but perhaps, as with Harry Mathews’ Tlooth, it’s more coherent to maintain the physical rules of common reality if you’re going to play havoc with the metaphysics of coincidence, symbolism, and structure.
(There is an old EC Comics story, I think from Weird Science, in which a man mows his double down with his car shortly before finding a time machine, and, well, you know the rest, but the best part of the story is the appendix, in which the entire loop is graphically represented and explained for teenagers who hadn’t yet read “By His Bootstraps.” This type of structure, in its simplest form in this story, requires as much contrivance as some of the Oulipo techniques, and may offer a similar form of getting-out-of-a-jam.)
I suspected that 253 was inspired by Thomas Disch’s 334, a fix-up collection of linked stories laid out in appropriately Perecesque fashion. But Disch seems to be toying with the device with less than full passion; it’s his friend, the late John Sladek, who always read as the most influenced by the Oulipo metaphysics. (If you aren’t convinced, Sladek references Mathews and people like Robert Coover and John Barth in this nice interview.)
Nearly all of Sladek’s books are set up like Rube Goldberg machines with the strings in plain sight, as he maneuvers all his pieces into place for a final conflagration. Sometimes, as with his massive 800-page Roderick, about a robot Candide, he lets the chain of events go slack to focus more on episodes of straight satire (which is always there to the degree that it’s not being steamrolled by the plot). Other times, as with The Muller-Fokker Effect, whose protagonist disappears very early on after his mind is transferred onto computer, the overwhelming drive is action, action, action towards that blowout at the end. Consequently, he doesn’t have time to develop most characters beyond caricatured monsters–corrupt professors, foolish hicks, parochial megalomaniacs–which happen to be exactly what the stories require.
The exception is Bugs. Whether it’s because of a slightly less complicated plot or a focus on one particular character, Bugs feels more rooted in several specific places and their corresponding emotions, the most striking being the dreary gray computer company. It’s working on nutty cybernetics, but in the spaces between plot points there’s a melancholy that seems more identifiable with a technical writing job in Minnesota (Sladek’s other profession) than anything else he wrote.
Fred Jones is an English writer who, possessed of little character except for literate decency, gets caught up in the usual antics, but Jones is sympathetic enough that Sladek sticks by him even more than he did with Roderick. There are scenes that don’t figure at all in the plot, as when he applies to a newspaper to write book reviews (“I’m Fred, and literate” is how he introduces himself) and is led into a backroom teeming with shelves of undifferentiated rack-sized fantasy books. “See, about ten years ago somebody made the mistake of reviewing one of these and the word got out. I mean, Christ, they print fifty of these fuckers a month!” says the editor, then the shelves collapse and bury him.
The robot soon goes berserk after Fred has it read Frankenstein and the pace picks up, but there is still a similarity between Sladek’s games of satire and the Oulipo’s reductionistic approach to character. It’s more noticeable in Bugs than it is in Sladek’s other work, or even, for example, The Day of the Locust, because the setting is intensely realistic and very contemporary. Fred remains the only real everyman character Sladek used, and his placement in the book amidst architected madness suggests an attempted escape from the specifics of his personality through a sort of super-detailed cartography of plot. Other characters get completely sucked into the machinery, but Fred remains psychologically present, and his own experiences, though carefully contrived, are more bitter.
The conclusion? That the structural, mathematical antics used by the Oulipo-ians are inspired by the same spirit that drives Sladek’s Rube Goldberg plot machines: it’s not an inherently avoidant technique, but it is one that moves away from what characters like Fred are supposed to represent. Bugs doesn’t resolve that tension, but neither does it fall apart.
(That same architectonic spirit is also what makes chapter 10 of Ulysses a diversion rather than a sequential component of the book. To me, the book holds unexplored answers to all these dilemmas.)
Sladek suggests in the article above that he was going to go further in his never-finished project Maps, where the novelistic structures would extend, Oulipo-style, into the metaphysics of the novel. It sounds like it might have been too fanciful and too arid for Sladek to manage, because his application of structure did not encourage perfect structure as much as it did satire.
Playing Derrida to our Hegel, Ray Davis writes:
Earnestness and fooling around aren’t always so easily contrasted, however…If the Oulipo Program readies the exerciser for anything, it’s in an improved ability to apply oneself seriously to transparently arbitrary make-work.
Actually, playing nominalist to our realist might be a better analogy. I respond that self-indulgence, as implied, is not always the spur to producing indulgent work. I’m willing to use this escape hatch to drive my dichotomy down a little further.
Roubaud is a gnarly case and my issues with him are probably best dealt with elsewhere. I’d recommend comparing him to Claude Simon, but that’s all I can really say at the moment. Instead:
The most notable betrayal of Oulipo principles that I’m familiar with is Italo Calvino in The Castle of Crossed Destinies, where after fifty pages of constructing stories based on rows and columns in a single rectangular layout of tarot cards, the river runs dry and Calvino starts designating “areas” of cards to generate stories from, which allow him considerably more leeway. It’s instructive to read it in tandem with his collection of Italian Folktales, which ironically turn out to be more architectonically constructed than the stories in Castle. (They seem to have been plotted Chinese menu style.) Whether Calvino (in Castle) was trying to invert the construction of stories by creating a generator, Lull- and Leibniz-style, or placing restrictions on himself to force his creativity in new directions, he ends up bending the rules so that he can return to his sources.
This is one of the main directions of the more serious Oulipo-style work–backwards. Underneath The Castle of Crossed Destinies is The Baron in the Trees. Underneath Life: A User’s Manual are Things and A Man Asleep. Underneath 334 is The Genocides.
What happens when, as in Ray’s examples, the writer cracks and seeks refuge in exercises not dissimilar from those logic puzzles where you have to figure out where at the table everyone’s sitting? There is an upheaval, but one that can be incidental to the techniques.
More to come…
Raymond Radiguet died at age 20, having completed two novels and some poetry, encouraged by his mentor Jean Cocteau. Count D’Orgel (actually Le Bal de Comte d’Orgel in French) is the second, written when he was 18 and 19 and published in 1924, a year after he died. Since the main impact of Stig Dagerman’s A Burnt Child is in its clear immaturity, I kept that in mind when reading what Cocteau called a book “that cannot be written at that age.” And in its appearance and its demeanor, that very nearly seems true: there is a calm maturity to the basic devices of the book. But underneath it, in the emotional and psychological content, the plot is very ingenuous, almost adolescent. Yet even beneath that…well, read on.
I. Maturity
The name d’Orgel sounded grotesque to me, and on first hearing it I expected a chamber of horrors close to Cocteau’s more intense work (Les Enfants Terribles). Maybe it was only because it reminded me of Daniel Pinkwater‘s Borgel and Yobgorgle. But stylistically and developmentally, there’s nothing grotesque here. Radiguet’s writing, particularly when describing the aristocratic background of Anne d’Orgel and his sedate romance with his wife Mahaut, is so proper and so enmeshed in the mores of upper-class society that it takes over the novel for a while. Radiguet’s style is terse, but he is so careful in laying the social and decorative groundwork for the plot that the book seems slower and longer than it actually is.
When young Francois de Seryeuse, with a middle-class background and more impetuousness than everyone else in the book combined, meets up with the Orgels and falls for Mahaut, Radiguet keeps his distance. Francois is clearly closer to Radiguet’s demographic than anyone else, but Radiguet is careful not to shift the focus entirely on to him. Radiguet gives a fair amount of time to his skeptical mother, who Radiguet gives motivations that would seem too sophisticated if given to Francois. It’s a keen device.
There is also nearly a worshipful attitude towards the focus on class and place, and almost total ignorance of the Great War, which puts the area of the novel’s exploration closer to later Flaubert and Balzac than Proust, since Radiguet doesn’t seem to have a lot to say about class or place; he only wishes to describe them. Jean Renoir would describe the destruction of this world less than a decade later, but here it seems immortal. The fixed world and the comfort with which Radiguet describes do make the book like a much older writer. His vision is much more grounded and fixed than Cocteau’s, which makes their relationship something of the opposite of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s.
II. Immaturity
All the background and scenic parties drop away for a large part of the book, however, as Francois falls for Mahaut and Orgel does his best to ignore what is happening. The love triangle that Radiguet constructs is simple but nicely etched, yet it’s something that is based more in the vague constructs of gentility than it is in French society of any particular time. Orgel’s balls could be parties anywhere, any time, that only require some kind of upper class. The details in the early part of the book fade away as Radiguet brings Francois’s barely consummated affections for Mahaut (he grasps her arm at one point) and her torn reactions to the fore.
It’s not that the book skews towards Francois, but by the halfway point, the main chracters are in such stark relief from the faded background that the focus shifts to archetypal psychology rather than the particulars of the characters:
The Count liked to find his own prodigality in others. To him it was a true sign of nobility. He always accepted the smallest invitation or the most insignificant present with outward signs of pleasure. It was not the right thing for a noble nature to think that everything was his due, or at least to show that he thought so. Francois’ behaviour won the Count’s heart more than any calculated act could have done.
As such, the book comes to read as more modern as it goes on, but also more dated. The sophistication of the early sections seems less close to Radiguet’s heart and more like the immaculate dressing done up in imitation of his forebears.
III. Some Kind of Advance
Radiguet was aware that, as he said, “The background does not count” in Count d’Orgel. The advance in the book is not noticeable until close to the end, but it’s derivable from the title. Orgel himself is the least important of the three main characters; even Francois’s mother makes a stronger impression in her greater wisdom. Orgel mainly sits around enjoying Francois’s company and ignoring what’s going on until he can’t any longer. This is not just carelessness on Radiguet’s part; at the end, it’s finally revealed that Orgel’s actions stem not from coarseness or stupidity, but an internal paralysis arising from the role he is playing. When Orgel does lose it and acts mad at his ball, it’s through his inability to process matters internally:
It was, as we know, in Orgel’s character to perceive reality only through what takes place in public. Orgel now admitted that he might perhaps suffer. He was less afraid of the suffering than of the behaviour it would impose on him.
Radiguet, in spite of everything, manages to tie the background and the foreground together. The setting doesn’t count, but it functions as the web in which Orgel has been working quietly for the entire book, and what has fallen apart from him. The refraction of his breakdown such that he doesn’t take his problems out on Francois or Mahaut but on himself, in the public display of his society, marks him as someone with considerably less ego than characters in this sort of book ought to have.
So while Mahaut and Francois are fairly ordinary types of a past era, Orgel is something else entirely, a public self wondering about its private self, which has been disemboweled. It’s the sort of figure for for whom sincerity is ambiguous, whom Lionel Trilling said was the invention of modernity. Radiguet’s emphasis on the absence of (Orgel’s) self in the context of high society is a theme similar to Cocteau’s and, more loosely, to the surrealists, but Radiguet’s excavation of it is both freer and far more careful than his contemporaries. He is impudent enough to paint a history of the upper class in detail only to throw it away, but he maintains a tight grip on his materials and works them into his new shape. The message has adolescence in it–he is dealing with questions of sincerity and phoniness–but the technique is, at the end of it, subtly mature.
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