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Oulipo Tangent: John Sladek

6 March 2003 / / 0 Comments

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.

Indulgence: Joyce, Beckett, Oulipo

25 February 2003 / / 1 Comment

Via correspondence to Bellona Times, Paul Kerschen tells of a story of Joyce dictating Finnegans Wake to Beckett:

There was a knock at the door which Beckett didn’t hear. Joyce said, “Come in,” and Beckett wrote it down. Afterwards he read back what he had written and Joyce said, “What’s that ‘Come in’?” “Yes, you said that,” said Beckett. Joyce thought for a moment, then said, “Let it stand.” He was quite willing to accept coincidence as his collaborator. Beckett was fascinated and thwarted by Joyce’s singular method. (Ellmann, 649)

In other words, Beckett was pissed off. There are so many who worry about slaving away in the darkness to an audience of one, only seen as cranks by the rest of the world, and there are impudent jokers like Joyce who implicitly ridicule them. For those of us who still wonder about the point of chapter 14 of Ulysses next to its massive show-off, the sight can be wearying.

I haven’t read enough of the Wake to comment on how dastardly the intrusion actually is–I’ve looked at the passage and it seems obtrusive and isolated enough to be disregarded–but it is this ethic that, intuitively to me, seems to reflect itself in the act of exhibitionism to young girls that figures early on in Finnegans Wake. But Joyce’s own private use (private even, I believe, from Stuart Gilbert) of the sigla does seem to mitigate against the charge of pure japery, and it’s that somewhat submerged ethic that keeps even non-obsessives wondering if the thing holds the meaning of the universe. On the other hand, it could just be a joke on the third item in Ray’s taxonomy of desperation, a tinge of regret that he gave up the five or six schema variations too quickly. But Joyce wasn’t that much of a joker.

(And Beckett had his own preoccupations as well.)

What later became a proving ground for indulgence vs. earnestness was the Oulipo, whose trickeries have overshadowed the vast differences between the efforts of its authors. Harry Mathews has more in common with B. S. Johnson than with Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec, and even Perec and Queneau, the most famous of the French set, are atypical next to, say, Jacques Roubaud, a seemingly more archetypal Oulipo writer who bears more of a resemblance to Donald Barthelme than he does to any of the aforementioned. That the rubric doesn’t include Robbe-Grillet or Claude Simon, who can be considered defiantly post-surrealist and viably experimental, makes the affiliation seem rather superficial: these authors were brought together by their love of palindromes, of games, of metafictional tour-de-forces.

And I think this is the reason that, with the possible exception of Perec, these authors’ most significant work was done outside of their association with the Oulipo, and their work inside of it was their most playful. (With Mathews, I see the difference as almost polar, particularly in his later work like Cigarettes and The Journalist.) The indulgence was a consequence of the context, of the avowed project.

The name-dropping in the last two paragraphs isn’t so important. The point is that the oil and water of logorrheic brinksmanship and the drive towards hidden universals (e.g., the sigla) can coexist. Some authors, like Beckett and Barthelme but also, for example, Lawrence Sterne, mostly reject one or the other. Many of the Oulipo authors worked with both at different times. In Ulysses, Joyce worked with both simultaneously. I suspect the same is true of Finnegans Wake.

A Burnt Child, Stig Dagerman

1 February 2003 / / 0 Comments

It wasn’t until two-thirds of the way through A Burnt Child that I remembered that Dagerman committed suicide at age 31 and therefore, this book had been written at a very young age: 24, exactly. The odd shifts in the book make far more sense if you think of the author as barely out of his schooling, and I wonder what I would have made of it had I continued to think of him, incorrectly, as a mature, staid adult. The book’s demeanor and its flaws are very particular, and it’s not a stretch to think of them as endemic to a specific period in one’s biological life and its respective mental organization.

It begins with a mother’s death, and places three, then four characters, into the aftermath in a clean, Ibsen-like family schema. There is the father, Knut, who has little but contempt for his monstrous, dead wife, and the son Bengt, who venerates her to the point of swearing revenge against his father, and Bengt’s girlfriend Berit, who is mostly a passive observer. Knut quickly begins to date the elderly but feisty Gun, whom Bengt loathes.

Apart from Bengt’s infrequent histrionics, the early part of the book alternates between a processional of grief and slow, well-observed descriptions of the shaken world of the characters. It’s very proper, and very “mature,” since it’s closer in tone to work from the early 1900’s rather than 1948, when it was published. (There is no mention whatsoever of the war.) But soon, Bengt’s psychosis takes over, with impressionistic dreams and threats of violence. The psychology is typical, but delivered in such an unself-conscious manner that you can almost think he hadn’t read Freud. Unavoidably, Bengt has an affair with Gun, and the book shifts again. The writing becomes lost in reverie and Dagerman reveals a newfound weakness for romantic philosophical generalization:

We cannot comprehend our own death, nor the fact that someone should deceive us. That someone else should sleep naked with the one we love is something beyond our power of imagination. If we were to see it even our reason would not believe it, our feelings alone would know it.

This may read better in Swedish, but it probably doesn’t improve the ideas. By the time of Bengt’s exhibitionistic suicide attempt at the very end, the narrative is so involved with Bengt’s self-obsession that the surgical distance and description at the beginning has completely vanished, replaced by portentous imagery and clipped, melodramatic dialogue.

It’s not the self-obsession that marks A Burnt Child as having been written by a 24-year-old. His writing is not immature in the way that Marguerite Duras’s writing is immature, though they share a passionate narcissism. It’s the way he moves in many directions without committing to one, and the way he treasures the extremities of feelings to which teenagers and young adults are prone. Dagerman thought highly of himself and his writing, but he thought even more highly of his self five years earlier, who makes the basis for Bengt. Compare him with Salinger, who deals with hyperarticulate children with overdeveloped neuroses. Bengt is remarkably simple and remarkably passionate, and he makes his forebear, Goethe’s Werther, looks measured in comparison. It is a portrayal of an immature mental state by someone who has picked up enough writing ability before he’s forgotten the firsthand experience of the feeling altogether. (Compare him to Thomas Mann, who in Buddenbrooks is rushing away from firsthand mental experience as fast as possible.) It seems like less of a recreation than a contemporaneous document. The verisimilitude is startling, but the drastic shifts in tone and style yield a book that is not cohesive. It is too close to Dagerman’s own experience, and his own shifting perception as he aged at 20. Dagerman’s apparent lack of awareness of any of this damages the novel, but as a record of a period of a person’s life that has rarely produced any worthy writing, it is at least comprehensive and deeply felt, in many contradictory directions.

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