“The Biblical narrator was obliged to write exactly what his belief in the truth of the tradition (or, from the rationalistic standpoint, his interest in the truth of it) demanded of him— in either case, his freedom in creative or representative imagination was severely limited; his activity was perforce reduced to composing an effective version of the pious tradition. What he produced, then, was not primarily oriented toward ‘realism’ (if he succeeded in being realistic, it was merely a means, not an end); it was oriented toward truth.”
—Erich Auerbach, Mimesis
“A work of art provides us with symbols whose meaning we shall never finish developing.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World
“Collage may be seen as the literary form of humility.”
—David Bellos, Georges Perec, A Life in Words
“My intent is to write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group...of artists...who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work,” says David Shields on the first page of Reality Hunger. Both exultantly praised and harshly tarred, the book was, if anything, read—read with a passion and a range that bests almost any work of art criticism in memory. Flawed and problematic as it is, Reality Hunger represents the closest thing we have to a mass-consumed literary manifesto for our times. It was reviewed almost everywhere, became an immediate bestseller and received ritual bows by several wizened heads. Jonathan Lethem loved it. James Wood gave it a grudging good review in The New Yorker. Zadie Smith famously wrestled with it in Changing My Mind. Wayne Koestenbaum called it “the book our sick-at-heart moment needs—like a sock in the jaw or an electric jolt in the solar plexus—to wake it up.” And Luc Sante wrote in the pages of The New York Times that “it urgently and succinctly addresses matters that have been in the air...[that] have relentlessly gathered momentum and have just been waiting for someone to link them together.”
The book got enough right, made enough of a splash and received enough attention at least to earn a place in the conver- sation alongside the great manifestos of bygone days, but it lacked much of the newness that manifestos are supposed to wear like a shiny suit. Shields claims that the group of artists whom his manifesto represents is “burgeoning,” but the great majority of the several hundred writers he proceeds to plagiarize in Reality Hunger come from past generations, most notably the middle decades of the twentieth century: Alain Robbe-Grillet, V. S. Naipaul, Bob Dylan, Anne Carson, Samuel Beckett, Woody Allen and Thomas Pynchon. While there’s nothing wrong with quoting past greats who predicted the artistic movement you claim is now occurring, the sheer number of culturally recog- nized masters ensures that Shields is more of a consolidator than an innovator. To really be predicting a burgeoning literary movement, something that most of us wouldn’t know about until maybe 20 years from now, wouldn’t Shields mostly be quoting writers none of us had heard of? In fact, the closer one examines his predictions, the more backward-looking they come to feel.
Look at his core descriptors: “a deliberate unartiness”; “‘raw’ material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored and unprofessional”; “openness to accident and serendipity”; “pointillism”; “self-reflexivity”; “self-ethnography”; “a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction.” Most of these were present at the beginnings of the Modernist movement at the start of the twentieth century, and by the 1960s all of these had become mainstays of innov- ative art. In fact, they are all salient aspects of at least one great writer Shields neglects to quote even once in his parade of plagiarism: Georges Perec.
Perec, who died much too young in 1982 of lung cancer, is probably the most widely recognized author from the Oulipo literary movement. In 1978 he published what is generally regarded as the greatest Oulipian book ever, Life A User’s Manual, a capstone to an extraordinary career. His first novel, Things, was published just 13 years earlier and is a somewhat satirical story of two part-bourgeois, part-bohemian young French adults who can’t decide what to do with their lives. When it was published, it won the Renaudot Prize and became an immediate sensation. In between those books Perec published an impressive amount of worthy works: A Man Asleep (1967), A Void (1969, a novel without the letter e), Species of Spaces (1974, essays), and W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975). He also wrote a palindrome of over 5,000 words, a novel called Les Revenentes that uses words that only have the letter “e” as a vowel (translated by Ian Monk as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex), radio plays, films, a curious short work called An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, and a novel that was left incom- plete at the time of his death, 53 Days.
Perec is without a doubt among the greatest avant-garde writers of the twentieth century, and his group, the Oulipo, is possibly that century’s most successful literary movement. It still exists and thrives today, over 50 years after its inception and has spawned numerous classics of world literature. Notably, the group is relentlessly experimental, excessively avant-garde. Just the kind of thing for a forward-looking guy like David Shields, yet, strangely, both Perec and the Oulipo are omitted from Shields’s seemingly boundless reading—among the polemicist’s honor roll of reality artists we find none of the writers who formed the French literary group Oulipo. Per Shields’s slipshod appendix of sources (which he has claimed was purposely slipshod and only included at his publisher ’s insistence) there is not a single Oulipian quoted in the book.
At a very superficial level it might appear to make sense that Shields excludes these writers from his book: the Oulipo, after all, are generally regarded as formalists par excellence, and Shields hungers for reality, not formal gimcrackery. As the story goes, the Oulipo ignore reality in favor of strange new forms that their writing can inhabit. Their very reason for existence is to use seemingly arbitrary rules to force themselves to imagine these forms. They push the very limits of what can be novelistic—not exactly a recipe for Netherland, is it? Their mentor and co- founder, Raymond Queneau, wrote novels that were anything but realist, and they followed in his stead by writing, among other things: an elusive book about Marco Polo telling fantastic stories of impossible cities; poetry written according to obscure mathematical principles; a book featuring 60-odd scenes of masturbation; a book dedicated to “the enterprise of destroying my memory” that its own publisher calls “exasperating” and “daunting.” In other words, the Oulipo is commonly perceived as a group that did not aspire to add a few flourishes to the massive edifice of mimesis but to erect their own cathedrals to new conceptions of what could be novelistic. It would seem that the one thing that this very ambitious bunch does not aspire to is to depict reality in fiction.
But then look deeper. Look to the largest, most ambitious Oulipian book out there: Life A User’s Manual. In its purposeful plagiarism it beats Shields to the punch by a good 30 years. It also anticipates Shields’s use of a very artificial formal structure to get at reality: although Perec surrounded himself with a barrage of constraints through which he had to maneuver in writing his book, Life’s key ambition is “to exhaust not the whole world...but a constituted fragment of the world.” The constraints were the path to this fragment, and over the course of the 500 pages that it takes to get there Perec brings in more of the external world than all but the most ambitious novels.
Perec was elusive as to just what fragment of the world he was attempting to exhaust, but there are at least two good answers: the 100-room Parisian apartment house in which Life A User’s Manual takes place, or the book’s key adventure: an absurd quest by Bartlebooth, the central character out of a cast of hundreds, to paint 500 watercolors, have them made into puzzles, complete the puzzles, and then return them back to blank paper at the place of their creation. Taken together, the apartment and the quest form the axes of a coordinate plane on which the full glory of Life A User’s Manual is situated. Perec’s biographer, David Bellos explains just what can be found spread across that plane:
Perec shows that he can tell fairy stories, that he can construct a novel in letters, an adventure narrative, a business saga, a dream sequence, a detective story, a family drama, a sporting history; he demonstrates that he has mastered comic techniques, the creation of pathos, historical reconstruction and many non-narrative forms of writing, from the table of contents to the kitchen recipe, the equipment catalogue and (of course!) the bibliography and index.
The book is omnivorous as only the novel can be, devouring all those forms, and our world along with it. Life’s index is over 60 pages in length, with entries for items as diverse as Mark Twain, the Indian chief White Horse, the Treaty of Versailles, Siberia, OPEC, the Goethe-Institut, Albert Einstein, Punch the puppet, Annals of Ear and Larynx Diseases, compositions by Alban Berg, the film How to Marry a Millionaire and hundreds more. As Bellos implies above, the book is also filled with the sorts of things not catalogued in indexes: love, heartbreak, sex, drama, revenge, fear, pity, seduction, crime...really, just about every part of life that one might imagine. Surely there will be some aspects of life that Life does not treat (it is, after all, not Borges’s Library of Babel), but they will be very hard to find.
There’s no doubt that Life A User’s Manual takes an approach to depicting reality that is very different from the standard realist novel, which we have been conditioned to believe is the best and most-preferred way of representing our world. It’s a belief that has been abetted by some of the biggest names in literary discourse and has given rise, over the past decade or so, to a particularly robust discussion of just what constitutes the depiction of the real world on the page and how that relates to “realist” and “experimental” writing. Though not without its enlightening aspects, this conversation has generally fallen into a simplistic dichotomy, where realist writing is described as giving us the real world of everyday life, and anything other than realist writing is seen as directing its energies toward a vague something that no one cares to define very well. Writing in Harper’s in 2005, the experimental author Ben Marcus offered a good summation of the debate and its exasperating stupidity:
Anyone who has not been invited into the realist camp is slurred as being merely experimental, whether or not his or her language is a gambit for producing reality on the page. Calling a writer experimental is now the equivalent of saying his work does not matter, is not readable, and is aggressively masturbatory. But why is it an experiment to attempt something artistic? A painter striving for originality is not called experimental. Whether or not originality is a large or small myth, an outsized form of folly or a quaint indulgence, a visual artist is expected at least to gun for it. Without risk you have paintings hanging in the lobby of a Holiday Inn. But a writer with ambition now is called “postmodern” or “experimental,” and not without condescension. Traverses away from the inscribed literary style—even when they amount to freefalls down the mountainside—are either looked at snidely or entirely ignored, unless the work is traditional at heart but with enough surface flourishes and stylistic tics to allow a false show of originality, so that critics can dispense phrases like “radically innovative” and “a bold new voice,” when the only thing new is the writer ’s DNA.
Marcus does an able job of making the dichotomy between realist and experimental books spearheaded by Jonathan Franzen (whom he argues with in the essay) look foolish, but the problem with this well-intentioned, enjoyable, and frequently insightful piece is that it never quite tells us what’s so good about “experimental” writing. Yes, writers should be gunning for it, like their painterly cousins, but why? To what end? On this Marcus is silent. It’s a pity. Toward the end of the piece he makes a gesture toward answers, briefly quoting everyone’s favorite “difficult” writer, Thomas Bernhard, and enthusing about how much he loves being exhausted by his “menacing” and “brutally controlling” novel Correction. (Challenging literature would surely get more readers if its erstwhile advocates stopped attempting to praise it by making it sound like a form of sadomasochism.) He only would have needed a few words more to make the case for the value of that gloriously grotesque work: Correction does what all good literature attempts, it embodies something “real” about the human experience. This, so far as I can tell, is what James Wood appreciates about good literature, no matter what form it takes, and is perhaps why he is frequently perceived as a defender of the conventional novel. I regard his 2008 book How Fiction Works as an attempt to promulgate this view, plus an attempt to “correct the record” in the public perception of his tastes. In correspondence he explained his preference for texts that have no aspirations to the kind of “realism” that was practiced by Emile Zola and George Eliot, his belief that these books are often much more capable of representing the real world as we experience it:
I see my task, then, as trying to explain how texts feel “real” (how they move us, stimulate us in the world, how they refer to the real, the human, what Henry James called “the present palpable-intimate”) without needing to be formally “realistic.” For instance, in “Endgame,” you will remember that the old parents, Nag and Nell, are on stage, buried in bins. There is a moving moment when Nag, having chatted earlier to his wife, raps on the lid of Nell’s bin. There is no reply. We infer from the silence that she is dead. There is nothing obviously “realistic” about this, and yet there is something real, even verisimilitudinous, about it. It is certainly the present palpable-intimate. We instantly feel a small loss: oh, she’s dead. It’s difficult to explain the human and aesthetic power of such moments, and, as I can tell, this desire to talk about “the real” or “the human” in my reviews constantly exposes one to the charge of being a fogeyish defender of “realism.” But I am no such defender of realism, and don’t wish to be.
Georges Perec pursued what Wood here calls “the human,” though only a few of his works of fiction could be construed as “realistic.” As such, he makes a perfect embodiment of the line drawn from Shields to Marcus to Wood. His early novel Things, for instance, has come to be regarded as a classic depiction of sixties counterculture in France, despite having little discernable plot and being written in the challenging first-person plural. Similarly, his novel W, or the Memory of Childhood is a bracing exploration of his loss of both parents to World War II, though it is made by way of elaborate descriptions of the sport rituals that occur on a fictitious island off the coast of Chile. What these novels remind us of is the commonplace and oft-forgot truth that all art—even so-called realist literature—rarely displays on its surface what it is actually about. Certainly Perec is “about” more than the elaborate word games and formal constraints that he has come to be associated with. His use of collage, plagiarism and non-literary genres to produce reality effects greatly antici- pates the kind of writing that David Shields claims is most inter- esting right now—writing that pursues reality by recycling cultural detritus. And, in fact, Perec informs the work of writers who are currently pushing far beyond the style and aspirations that Shields claims are new in Reality Hunger.
Appropriation and recycling are central to Perec’s impor- tance to us today because they are how Perec pursued Oulipo’s fundamental goal. Oulipo is best construed as an attempt to develop new forms that can withstand the strains of being made novelistic. Oulipo’s first manifesto, penned by co-founder François Le Lionnais makes this aspiration clear:
Should humanity lie back and be satisfied to watch new thoughts make ancient verses? We don’t believe that it should....
In the research which the Oulipo proposes to undertake, one may distinguish two principal tendencies, oriented respectively toward Analysis and Synthesis. The analytic tendency investigates works from the past in order to find possibilities that often exceed those their authors had antici- pated. This, for example, is the case of the cento, which might be reinvigorated, it seems to me, by a few considerations taken from Markov’s chain theory.
The synthetic tendency is more ambitious: it constitutes the essential vocation of the Oulipo. It’s a question of developing new possibilities unknown to our predecessors. This is the case, for example, of the Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes or the Boolian haikus.
In Life A User’s Manual Perec did both analysis and synthesis. His book devoured pre-existing forms, finding in, for instance, the lowly product brochure “possibilities that often exceed those their authors had anticipated.” Life also pioneered new forms; most notably the book itself takes on a shape unlike that of any novel before it. In doing so Perec followed the, perhaps prime, modernist commandment to create revolutionary art by making his world new. It is just this purpose that Walter Benjamin claimed a half-century before for photography, an art form that did more than any other to push the classic arts into their modern variants:
For if it is an economic function of photography to restore to mass consumption, by fashionable adaptation, subjects that had earlier withdrawn themselves from it...it is one of its political functions to renew from within—that is, fashionably—the world as it is....
What we require of the photographer is the ability to give his picture a caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary use value. But we will make this demand most emphatically when we—the writers—take up photography.
First note that final injunction toward writers: take up photog- raphy. Now note that there are at least two things Benjamin is asking writers to do beyond that. First, they must place new subjects before the public eye, particularly by thrusting hidden ones to the fore. That is precisely what Perec does with his unending attempts to “exhaust the subject,” to see never-before- described facets of everyday things. Secondly, Benjamin tells authors they must learn to appropriate as does a camera’s lens. A camera is a tool for taking things out of context: taking a photo is nothing more than selecting a rectangle of the world to be pulled up from its surroundings. Life A User’s Manual does exactly that with literary quotations and forms, among other things. Perec pulls well-worn subjects from their common surroundings, forcing us to look at them anew.
With this, we begin to see why Perec did not need realist fiction to depict truths that had heretofore never been depicted in a novel. These methods permitted Perec to, as Benjamin puts it, “renew from within.” He found ways to make the everyday seem not-so-everyday. This is just the kind of renewal that Shields hints at in Reality Hunger, that I believe Marcus wants his experimental writers to shoot for, that even Wood subtly encourages. Examining Perec, which none of these writers has to my knowledge done in print, can tell us things that these critics have not.
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes that “classical painting should be the metamorphosis of the perceived world into a precise and rational universe.” This insight is worth lingering over. Merleau-Ponty was a phenomenologist, a philosopher who sought to understand how we experience the world we live in. What exactly are we perceiving when we see sights and hear sounds? How are these sights and sounds formulated by our conscious minds? With these questions in mind, Merleau-Ponty argues that painting that adopts a classical view of things—that is, painting that attempts to portray the world “realistically”—is but one interpretation of our experience, one that makes our world precise and rational. But of course, I would not be alone in arguing that what we experience in day-to-day life more commonly conforms to Picasso’s Cubism or Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism than classical art. Perec would agree. Early in his career he wrote an article on the artist Paul Klee. Discussing it in his biography of Perec, Bellos reports that the author “came to the conclusion that Klee’s paintings had to be rethought as realist works. For what, in the end, was realism? An attempt not simply to represent reality but also to enrich and heighten it, an attempt to make reality denser, and to make it mean.”
As a writer, Perec too has his own method of assembling the world around him into a personal depiction of experience, his own brand of realistic writing. His is a way of looking that is governed by very precise rules, the most fundamental of which is exhaustion. Quite simply, exhaustion is inscribed in every- thing Georges Perec ever wrote. (An interesting choice for a writer working at the height of capitalist culture.) Bellos has called Life A User’s Manual a novel that exhausts all forms. Even in his first attempts at literature, Perec created complex formal systems which he then attempted to exhaust. As Bellos recounts, Perec’s first attempt at a novel (never published) was called Gaspard and was to consist of “4 parts, 16 chapters, 64 ‘subchapters,’ 256 paragraphs. It was this strict order that would allow the author to digress without losing his thread.” In addition to exhausting structures, Perec also sought to exhaust his own personal experiences: Perec wrote in a letter to his friend Jacques Lederer (quoted by Bellos) that Gaspard was to be “the novel of unsonliness: I have suffered so much from being the son that my first work can only be the total destruction of all that engendered me.” It was to be an exorcism of certain ghosts. And finally, Bellos points out that Gaspard was to be a “two-part text” in which one part “undoes” the other. In other words, the book would exhaust itself both in form and in content—that would be the very method and purpose of writing it.
This was far from the only time Perec would write a text that took itself apart, or that was exhausted in the process of creating it. For Perec, novels are written like recipes are followed by chefs. Once each ingredient has been used up, once the whole has been simmered until it has rendered its juices, you are left with nothing other than your book. Thus, for instance, in a work like An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, which is just what its title implies, Perec attempts to write about a single Parisian spot so exhaustively as to push it into the “infraordinary.” The principle is also embodied in Perec’s 5,000-word palindrome: the very form of it is of a story that arcs like a boomerang’s path, first flying out and then coming back to precisely where it started. Here’s how Perec described his plan for a project similar to An Attempt at Exhausting:
I begin these descriptions over again each year, taking care, thanks to an algorithm...first, to describe each of these places in a different month of the year, second, never to describe the same pair of places in the same month.
This undertaking, not so dissimilar in principle from a “time capsule,” will thus last for 12 years, until all the places have been described twelve times.... What I hope for from it, in effect, is nothing other than the record of a threefold experience of aging: of the places themselves, of my memories, and of my writing.
Notice how methodical it is—how each place will use up each of the 12 months of the year over the course of the 12 years, how Perec will make use of each of the 12 months in any given calendar year and so on. He will know that his project is complete because it will simply run out of space within the confines of its rules. The intent is to create a way of looking at these 12 places that will reveal things no one has ever seen in them before. Things that only someone with Perec’s history might see.
In exhausting the possibilities created by his constraints, Perec comes to see, and reveal to us, those things about the world that he deems important to represent in his literature. It is these things that he deems the “reality” to which his literature should aspire. Perec’s pursuit of exhaustion implies a bold idea: the removal from the author one of the most important decisions: to say when a work has reached its end. The story simply concludes when the method does. Similarly, this method forces Perec to create his plot and characters out of what circum- stances contrive to give him. This is a way of construing the world that is no less valid than the order and rationality of classical painting, or of realist literature. This is one of the beauties of Oulipo: it gives writers like Perec the tools to create methods that encompass reality as they understand it. Instead of attempting to fit their work into the realist mold, theirs can create its own principles. More than any other principle, exhaustion is Perec’s.
“I do not know whether I have anything to say, I know that I am saying nothing; I do not know if what I might have to say is unsaid because it is unsayable (the unsayable is not buried inside writing, it is what prompted it in the first place); I know that what I say is blank, is neutral, is a sign, once and for all, of a once-and-for-all annihilation.”
—Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood
If Reality Hunger represents one strand of literary prognosti- cation that Perec’s writing offers a fruitful response to, there is another strand that Perec answers just as well: those gleeful prophets of the novel’s death.
In order to tell this story we need to take a step back. Perec’s writing was in sync with its times in the sense that it partook in the epic process of cultural commodification occurring over the second half of the twentieth century. Products, beliefs and fashions that once existed on the boundaries of society were resolutely transformed into mass-consumable versions that were bought up by the middle classes. Things, Perec’s best- selling popularization of the bohemian lifestyle, is one example of how he was part of this process. Another would be Life A User’s Manual, which transmutes into literary gold hundreds of things that one would have never thought to put in a literary novel beforehand.
One important thing Perec helped commodify was negation. Negation was a huge thing in the 1960s, when Perec began to write. It informed and empowered the groups then fighting against capitalistic culture. In his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” David Foster Wallace put forth the argument that the second half of the twentieth century was a time of two great changes: first, the development of this “no” of resistance against capital- istic culture, and, second, the co-opting this “no” of resistance into a catchy sales pitch. Wallace identified the “no” of resis- tance with irony—long a potent weapon of the oppressed—and then he went on to argue that the appeal of this irony had been taken over by savvy advertisers, who use it to make their products hip. The fiction of irony and ridicule, which he identified with rebellious postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, had been taken over by TV culture. “I’m going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective,” he says, “and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in US culture, and that for aspiring fiction writers they pose especially terrible problems.”
Perec was one of those writers who, in part, made literature from the irony and ridicule of consumer society. One, for instance, thinks of his character Anne Breidel from Life A User’s Manual. Anne scrupulously details the caloric values of every- thing she eats, but she remains steadfastly overweight. We soon discover why: Perec concludes his description of Anne by having her add her calories with her right hand, while “with her left hand she is gnawing a chicken leg.” It is a fitting, if slightly mean-spirited description of the mindset required by fad dieting, as well as an indictment of a society that makes weight such an obsession. Such ironic negation of the middle-class lifestyle is a core value of Perec’s work. His best writing— including Things, A Man Asleep, A Void, W, or the Memory of Childhood, and Life A User’s Manual—all similarly ironize consumer society.
Yet there is much more to these books than a critique of mass culture. These are books built around missing pieces, feelings of emptiness, unsolvable quests. The same irony that ridicules Anne’s fad diet also gestures toward a heavy, existential sense of void. (Dieting is perhaps the single most widespread, obses- sively unsolvable, mass-produced quest of post-capitalist existence.) For instance, in Things the protagonists go to Africa to find a meaning to life that they can’t in France. In A Void the absence of the letter e comes to represent the absence of some essential quality in modern life that gives rise to malaise. Reading Perec, one senses an artist self-consciously working on a grand scale to generalize this quality of negation to as many forms as possible—an effort to exhaust negation. Such ambitions are of a piece with the Oulipo manifestos, despite the fact that the manifestos are written with a clear sense of optimism. Aware of the exhaustion of art’s old forms, Oulipo strove to find new paths for the novel. Perec’s optimism in the face of negation is due in large part to how he fought to make negation itself an engine for innovation.
This is a key difference from writers of our own era: negation has become so thoroughly commodified and distributed throughout society that it is no longer a question to be explored but a default stance, a foreboding and oppressive fact that confronts us at every turn. Negation now lacks the optimism of the striver; instead it finds conviviality with the resignation of the wizened. Let us, for instance, look at a piece of criticism published just last year and written in response to three of the great writers of negation of recent years, Roberto Bolaño, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Thomas Bernhard:
Literature is a corpse and cold at that. Intuitively we know this to be the case, we sense, suspect, fear, and acknowledge it. The dream has faded, our faith and awe have fled, our belief in Literature has collapsed. Sometime in the 1960s, the great river of Culture, the Literary Tradition, the Canon of Lofty works began to braid and break into a myriad distrib- utaries, turning sluggish on the plains of the cultural delta. In a culture without verticality, Literature survives as a reference primer on the reality effect, or as a minor degree in the newly privatised university....Literature has become a pantomime of itself, and cultural significance has undergone a hyperinflation, its infinitesimal units bought and sold like penny stocks.
The title of this essay is “Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss (A Literary Manifesto After the End of Literature and Manifestos)” and it was published in the literary journal The White Review. Its author is Lars Iyer, himself a successful novelist of the negation genre who has been linked to such great negation-ists as Beckett, Kafka and Thomas Bernhard. Iyer continues his ironically delivered lament for the death of liter- ature by telling us that “in the past, each great sentence contained a manifesto and every literary life proposed an unorthodoxy, but now all is Xerox, footnote, playacting. Even originality itself no longer has the ability to surprise us.”
We should be highly suspicious when any writer who has gained as much from the institutionalized negative, as Iyer has, tells us that literature has no future. Iyer is a fine writer—I have enjoyed his novels and his contributions to literary discourse— but, to put it plainly, with these statements he runs the risk, as one commenter to my blog put it, of merely projecting his own limitations.
In fact, it is strange to see a writer with Iyer ’s clearly thorough knowledge of the novel decrying its fragmentation as though this were a liability. In truth, fragmentation always has and always will be part of the novel, and this is to its great advantage. As far back as 1920, the cultural theorist Georg Lukács had declared in The Theory of the Novel that the genre’s defining characteristic is the very fragmentation that Iyer bemoans. What’s more, Lukács concluded that this was a very good thing. He compared the modern world to the ancient, contrasting the novel with the epic, and he concluded that Homer ’s epics were possible because of the unitary, fully formed world in which they were created. The novel, by contrast, is a product of a hopelessly fragmented world and can only deal with pieces of an incomplete reality. “In the story of the Illiad, which has no beginning and no end, a rounded universe blossoms into all-embracing life,” writes Lukács. “The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in totality.” The completeness of the Iliad excluded any further development of the epic as a form in Greek culture; the very incompleteness of the novel in our own culture is what ensures that it can contin- ually be rejuvenated by innovative new authors.
Among the modern novels that come closest to Lukács’ “rounded universe” with “no beginning and no end” we should count Finnegans Wake and Life A User’s Manual. Both books famously end by pushing us back toward their beginning, implying a circularity. Further, they are books that attempt, like Homer ’s epics, to account for the entire civilization in which they were created. In his Western Canon Harold Bloom sees Finnegans Wake as playing a central place in Western literature, that of an all-encompassing whole that might engender a new genre of writing. Referring to our own era as “The Chaotic Age,” characterized by insurmountable fragmentation, Bloom declares that “if aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon, the Wake, like Proust’s Search, would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante.” Later he recog- nizes the Wake as “a history of the world” and reflecting “a profound desire to play at replacing English with the dialect of the Wake.” Literary critic and author Gabriel Josipovici explicitly links Life A User’s Manual with Joyce, while also placing it into an entirely different category than other massive, encyclopedic works of the time, such as those of Pynchon and Mailer:
When English or American writers conceive of a Major Novel they can only think of it as an Ordinary Novel blown up (think of Burgess, Mailer, Pynchon). La Vie mode d’emploi is in quite a different category. It is encyclopaedic as Ulysses is encyclopaedic, though in its classic calm it is more reminiscent of earlier encyclopaedic works, such as Dante’s Commedia or Chaucer ’s Canterbury Tales. This is a large claim to make and I never thought to make it of any book written today.
Bloom, who links Joyce to Shakespeare, and Josipovici, who links Perec to Dante and Chaucer, follow Lukács in construing the forerunners of today’s totalizing novels as pre-modern works. Their writing is of a different kind from Pynchon, who writes enormous adventure stories designed to demonstrate the impossibility of narrative. Rather, Perec attempts to encase our fragmented world in forms that hearken back to the beginnings of the modern novel—the Decameron, the Canterbury Tales— when writers still conceived of simple yet powerful structures for projects that summed up their milieu. Complex as they are, Perec’s books lack Pynchon’s willful sense of anarchy, his deter- mination to overload our traditional understanding of narrative so much that it breaks. By contrast, Perec is like an ingenious technician discovering novel new molecules; his apparatuses supplement narrative, letting it hold structures far larger and far more labyrinthine that one thought possible.
In claiming that such projects are no longer possible, nor even aspired to, Iyer gives us a laundry list of symptoms that has two core issues: unification and innovation—unification is no longer possible, which means that innovation remains forever stifled. Perec responds to these notions quite handily. Recognizing that the modern world offers no formal unity on which to base a novel, Perec and his fellow Oulipians turned to writing constraints to give their novels unity. The case with Life is typical. It contains over 100 substories, dozens of major characters, and an immense array of quotations gleefully plagia- rized from the world’s great books. What draws it all together are the formal constraints. In its encyclopedic nature and its buttress of constraints, Life overcomes Iyer ’s complaint that liter- ature has become a myriad of competing tributaries with no discernable authority to make order of them—and it is worth noting here that the encyclopedia itself is a fragmentary work organized by a formal constraint, alphabetization.
Perhaps if Iyer accepted my appraisal of Life, he would respond by calling it a late masterpiece of a now-lost era. And perhaps he would not be so wrong in that judgment. Of all the massive works of our era, none come to mind that possess the totalizing scope of a Ulysses or a Life A User’s Manual. Perhaps the closest, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, does not strive to be encyclo- pedic; quite the opposite, it plunges into the void of the individual, of the author, of outright evil. (Bolaño’s shorter and much less single-minded The Savage Detectives has a far greater claim to being a total novel, yet even that book seems to exult too much in its purposeful marginalization to aspire to the world.) David Foster Wallace’s mammoth book Infinite Jest is much the same, choosing to hone its gifts on a few core questions, even if it does convey a rather robust sense of the times in which it was conceived.
But to search for a totalizing book in our own era is to miss a key question: Is such a book really necessary to literature? Cannot the sweep of an author ’s collected works serve a similar, and better, function, one more in tune with our distributed reality? And isn’t searching for a book that sums up our world to mistakenly long for something that was dismissed at the beginning of this essay, the realist novel, at the expense of the truthful novel? As much as Life A User’s Manual is a product of its time, Iyer ’s essay against the future of literature is a product of our time. We live in the era of the institutionalized negative, when the “no” of protest has become simply the “no” of identity. Iyer ’s “no” points not to the limitations of our own literature but rather to the limitations of the inquiry that he makes. To look for a single work that overcomes the fragmen- tation of our civilization is to miss the point entirely. It is to ignore the fundamental question, What function is literature to serve today?
The Oulipian who today most energetically rebuts the idea of one gigantic, career-girding mega-work is probably Jacques Jouet. Born in 1947 and a member of the Oulipo since 1983, he has reportedly written over 50 books in genres spanning novels, plays and poetry. They are mostly very short works, although some of them approach 1,000 pages in length. Jouet has also, by reports, written a poem a day since 1992; at the very least we can be certain that in 1998 he published a 1,000-page book of poetry, written in just four years, and has released many subsequent volumes.
Jouet is the originator of what he calls a “metro poem,” which is a poem written while riding the Paris subway. Per Jouet’s rules, a metro poem has as many lines as there are stops on the trip one makes; the would-be poet thinks up a line in between stops and then furiously scribbles while the train is waiting in the station. Jouet once spent 16 hours in the Paris metro on a route that took him through all 490 Parisian metro stops, creating the supreme maximalist iteration of the genre. Discussing these poems in Many Subtle Channels, the American Oulipian Daniel Levin Becker makes these poems sound like the least pleasurable kind of automatic writing: “the time strictures make it less like a Surrealist free-association exercise and more like a suicide-aerobics drill for the parts of your mind that usually make observations into ruminations and ruminations into language.” Later Levin Becker quotes Jouet himself on the harried composition of the metro poem: “There is no question of correcting one’s composition, beyond the time of composing the verse, which means that the time for premeditation is reduced to a minimum.”
Although Levin Becker is circumspect and quite fair-minded in his remarks on Jouet, he does level the criticism that the metro poem sounds somewhat “fishy” and that it breaks from tradi- tional Oulipian form by having the constraint be “unverifiable.” (One could just write the poem anywhere and claim that it’s a metro poem, which Levin Becker suspects of some of Jouet’s lines, arguing they are too long to be scribbled while the subway waits at a station.) Insofar as I have read them in translation, the metro poems appear of little literary value; the quality is so middling that I find it all too believable that Jouet hurriedly jotted them on the train. They have the mealy-mouthed quality of a first draft, the easy satisfaction and facile profundity that tends to characterize jottings.
These shortcomings are also present in the novels of Jouet’s that have been made available in English translation, which range from divertingly pleasant to downright awful. Jouet is the author of many, many short novels, and in this his graphomania recalls Belgian Georges Simenon, who lived much of his life in Paris and wrote in French. Simenon was the author of some 400 novels, some of them quite good, and I bring him up here because there is some evidence Jouet courts the comparison. As Levin Becker relates in Channels, Jouet once spent 8 hours writing a novel in public in a tent, allowing passersby to watch his progress on a screen. This brings to mind nothing so much as the apocryphal—yet utterly infamous—account of Simenon writing a novel in a week inside of a glass booth in full Parisian public view. This story so delighted French intellectuals that, years later, several offered eye-witness accounts of this event that never took place.
But if Jouet sees himself as a novelist in the tradition of the great novelists of French literature, the translations offer little textual evidence for it. Upstaged, probably the best of the trans- lated novels, is a fun little book of 87 pages about an assailant who incapacitates an actor just before a performance and takes his place on stage. The book is part of Jouet’s ongoing, multi- tudinous Republic series, which is his main claim to being the most “political” Oulipian currently writing; in the case of Upstaged, the political critique comes from a stand-in, who subtly changes certain lines of the play to make social points. As agitprop, Upstaged would stand somewhere in the vicinity of a dare-based social documentary like Super Size Me and Garrison Keilor ’s Prairie Home Companion—a fun knock at the ruling order, but hardly revelatory, or memorable. To go back to Simenon—the author of more than a few sharp political novels—his books offer the stiffness and density that make their points stick in one’s throat. Simenon could conjure characters that were pitiable, loathsome and truly despondent; by contrast, the individuals in Upstaged are scatterable abstractions.
For all its shortcomings, Upstaged is high art compared to Jouet’s My Beautiful Bus, which reads like the worst kind of self- indulgent nonsense. (It is so bad that one must wonder why the normally razor-sharp Dalkey Archive Press chose to publish it in translation; surely Jouet’s long backlist holds less offensive quantities.) Early on Jouet confides with seemingly boundless confidence that he “supplied the label ‘novel’ regretfully” to this book because he is “searching for a new form for narrative.” He had better keep looking. Loosely based around Jouet’s titular bus and its driver, a purposely flat character known as Basile, the book is full of digressions like the following:
Puss in Boots is not a cat. He would have four boots if he were a cat. Puss in Boots is the author of an adventure who may spend his entire life giving his language to the narrative cat.
Let’s sum it up.
Times are tough and the setting is a mill in the impover- ished countryside. The miller dies, leaving behind three children. The eldest and the middle child band together to secure inheritance of the means of production and trade—the mill, and the donkey. But the least fortunate of the three heirs, the youngest, is left to starve day in, day out.
As each day fails to fulfill his desire, he remembers the brewing hunger of the evening before; he’s still hungry for the following day, and the day after that, and so on until eternity. Even if he were to skin and eat the only inheritance left in his name, a cat, he would still be hungry. Puss in Boots swings a satchel over his shoulder, puts boots on his feet, and sets off on a hunt. He tricks a rabbit into his trap.
One imagines Jouet feeling pleased with his ingenuity for putting Puss in Boots into his novel as a character, but there is nothing innovative here. This tiresome exercise typifies the “experimentalism” going on in Bus, which feels more like a very willful attempt to force innovation than the actual thing. By the evidence of this novel Jouet hasn’t found anything good to replace the plot that he’s out to destroy.
Levin Becker notes that Jouet is the only working Oulipian to “make his living solely as an author,” and this seems right; not only does Jouet provide a steady stream of texts for his adherents to purchase, he also specializes in clever ideas that transport well. Above all, his conceits are simple, beguiling creations that enable his followers to believe that they too can create literature, just like he does. While such a democratization of the literary should be applauded for demystifying literature, opening it up to new audiences, this can be taken too far. One should never lose sight of the line, no matter how ill-defined, between true literature—which requires much dedication, persistence, and struggle—and the merely passable simulacra that any intelligent reader might create. Jouet destroys any semblance of this line. His work shows itself to be more about mechanically filling in the blanks of a clever conceit than about marshaling the necessary perseverance to push said conceit into interesting, new terrain. A more authentic poet might take a metro poem not as an endpoint but as a starting point, a brisk brainstorm that clears the way for the real work of the imagi- nation. Yet Jouet is off to the next poem before the last one has even had a chance to cool.
The only grounds on which the metro poems might be inter- esting as art is as conceptual art. Levin Becker gives probably the strongest possible reading of them as such: “This has...changed what it means to characterize something, whether a text or a gesture or a person, as oulipian... First came thinking about the constraint, then the actual production of texts reflecting that constraint, then the actual production of texts whose constraint is their production.” In other words, closing the distance between the text and the constraint has taken the thought out of Oulipo: instead of a constraint that forces you to wrack your brains for words without the letter e, the metro poem is more like a video game where you have to jot down line after line before the buzzer sounds. Levin Becker is right to call this a democratization of Oulipian procedure—certainly more people are inclined to try and write a metro poem than to write A Void—and he is also right that the poems suggest Oulipian production is just another part of everyday life. The observations, while valid and probably the most that can be wrung from the metro poems, are far from interesting. Such ideas have been in circulation for some time and have no need for Jouet to propagate them. By contrast, in Notes on Conceptualisms, Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman put forward a more interesting direction that Oulipo might take. They argue for a kind of conceptual writing that shuttles back between the micro of language and the macro of structure, creating a tension and instability in the text: “Conceptual writing mediates between the written object (which may or may not be a text) and the meaning of the object by framing the writing as a figural object to be narrated.” (Later, in conjunction with the writing of Jacques Roubaud and Christian Bök, we will see some of this promise fulfilled via Oulipian procedure.)
The experimental Argentine author César Aira offers an example of what the fulfillment of Jouet’s aspirations might look like. Like Jouet, Aira writes very brief novels and has published many of them. Aira even works within some constraints—he calls them “the continuum” and “the constant flight forward”— both dealing with the fact that he never goes back and revises, instead working within improvisation to keep his texts feeling light and perpetually under construction. This is how he once explained these concepts to me in an interview:
The continuum is an idea, or barely a pretention, a theory. An attempt to put in the story’s path, without interruptions, cuts, or jumps, those things that give literature its shape: fiction, the reality that inspires fiction, writing, reading, ideologies, effects, caprices, dreads, concepts; also, the struggle and the resultant work, the production and the product. The corre- sponding figure is the Möbius strip. I discovered this idea, and was seduced by it, while reading a book by [Gilles] Deleuze on film, where, for instance, talking about the film Cleopatra, he breaks in with an analysis of Shakespeare, the Hollywood studio system, montage, use of color, flashbacks, Roman history, Elizabeth Taylor ’s divorces, [ Joseph] Mankiewicz’s cinematography. It became my goal to do something like this in a literary story. But all of this, like all theories, falls under the rubric of intentions, and in literature intentions don’t count. More than this: I believe that liter- ature begins to be worthwhile when it exceeds the state of intentions.
The constant flight forward would be the mental attitude of whoever wants to mount the continuum. But I fear that it is less of a theory than an excuse to avoid the hard work of revision, self-critique, et cetera. Writing for me has always been the search for happiness, and so it must be done rapidly to cover the most distance possible and without worries of professional scruples.
Notice Aira’s words: “all of this, like all theories, falls under the rubric of intentions, and in literature intentions don’t count. More than this: I believe that literature begins to be worthwhile when it exceeds the state of intentions.” Notice also Aira’s justi- fication for his constant flight forward: “to cover the most distance possible.” True to these words, Aira relentlessly combines genres in a very postmodern frenzy of activity, but the books that emerge from this process feel remarkably whole, and they frequently partake in an original lyricism that pays due heed to the jouissance of fiction. Reading Aira’s novels Ghosts and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, it is difficult to believe that he did not go back and revise them, for they are so carefully layered, their central images so elaborately constructed over the course of the novel.
The yield from Aira’s experimentation is a distinct, idiosyn- cratic feeling of lightness that infuses his prose, as well as an openness to juxtaposition that creates unusual metaphors and novelistic structures. The ideas of spontaneity and improvisation are constant tropes in Aira’s literature; he has claimed that when he writes in cafes he regularly puts into his fiction whatever he happens to observe, no matter how incongruous to whatever he is writing at the moment. But this is far from the semi-automatic writing of Jouet: a day’s work for Aira will occasionally yield a page of writing, and he has stated that he throws away far more novels than he completes after being disappointed with his results. Aira relies on his eccentric method to spur his intellect and harness improvisation, but he does not subsume his creativity to it. Also in contrast to Jouet—fêted as a member of the Oulipo and published by France’s most presti- gious presses—Aira is constantly at odds with the market, viciously satirizing literary culture and artistic pretension while publishing his books with tiny micropresses on the margins of the Argentine scene. Aira has tipped the sacred cows of Latin American letters and argued passionately for new heroes; his authentically polemical spirit puts the lie to Jouet’s critiques from within the mainstream.
It is all but certain that Aira will never write a mega-novel like Ulysses or Life A User’s Manual, but one hardly sees the need for it in his case. The handful of Aira’s books to be translated so far range from the Argentine hyperinflation of the 1980s to satires of literary conferences, sci-fi horror movies, Carlos Fuentes, Adam and Eve, cloning, theatrical theory, extra dimen- sions, 19th-century landscape painters, the paranormal, coming- of-age stories, transgenderism, surrealist automatic writing, Latin American literary cliques, the grandeur of the pampas and the Andes, architectural theory and a real-life incident involving ice cream poisoned with cyanide. Despite the great range in material, all of the books at one point or another profoundly comment on spontaneity and its role in creation—their fixation on this theme is so strong that they can be seen as various points on one career-spanning arc that reveals Aira’s general theory of art. This could well be extended to the public image Aira crafts in interviews and his novels, the latter of which often feature him, or some Aira-like doppleganger. His literature is truly suited to our era of chaos and fragmentation, and his persona embodies the life of a writer who eschews mercantile gain and trend-chasing in favor of pursuing his textual vision. Through the redundancy, flexibility and sheer quantity of his messengers, Aira has succeeded in spreading his influence with the force of an avenging angel like Ulysses. It is a form of literary influence fit to an age which gave rise to The Matrix and flashmobs. What’s more, Aira’s influence, profound as it already is, continues to grow: just in the last two years he has begun to seriously invade the North American continent, and he has now been loudly praised by the United States’ leading organs of literary opinion. As they are often the last to get the news, this seems undeniable proof that he has arrived.
Aira’s multitudes bring to mind the “great fire of London” series by the Oulipian Jacques Roubaud. Seven books long, the series, or “project” as Roubaud frequently calls it, has seen three of its “branches” appear in English. It is, by a long shot, the most exciting and impressive work by an Oulipian author to be occurring in English at this time. As with Aira, the works are thematically connected but distinct, and they can be read in any order. Taken collectively, they might be imagined to constitute a meganovel similar to Ulysses or In Search of Lost Time, yet they are not a single novel. They are seven distinct books that Roubaud has grouped for personal and thematic reasons, and as such they once again point toward the fallacy of requiring unity in literature.
Roubaud was the very first writer to be “co-opted” by the Oulipo. In his early writings Roubaud combined math, poetry, and the rules for various games into a rigorous and satisfying form of writing that attracted the attention of Queneau. Levin Becker reports that it is now common for French critics to proclaim Roubaud the greatest living French poet, and he has for years been the unofficial leader of the Oulipo, playfully called the “Oulipope.” A professional mathematician who for years supported his literary habit by teaching math, his bio simply reads “Born in 1932. Mathematician.”
The “great fire” project has the feel of a mathematics textbook in possibly the only way that such a claim could be a statement of praise. The books are broken out into numbered sections, with arrows pointing the reader toward footnote-like “interpolations” and “bifurcations.” As with a math textbook, when reading the project one has the feeling that each section builds upon the previous ones in a logical, but subtle and elusive way. The books convey a body of knowledge bit by bit (in this case the “knowledge” is Roubaud’s memory), even as they quietly turn the gears of larger structural movements. Roubaud is greatly adept at “speaking” through the macro structures of his books, suggesting feelings and ideas through juxtaposition, narrative gambits that unfold over the course of chapters and an associative logic that plays on the formalism of math.
What most makes the “great fire” project rewarding is the sense of a search. Roubaud mysteriously embarked on the project after abandoning his novel The Great Fire of London (which itself was suggested to him in a dream), and reading the project conveys the distinct feeling that Roubaud is unsure why he feels compelled to resurrect his lost work. Although he has claimed that the “constraint” he imposed for the project was not to plan any of it in advance, it still feels very Oulipian in the sense that the vastness and unpredictability of memory are corralled by the rigors of a mathematical logic. The books exist within precisely that overlap of freedom and constraint on which the Oulipo has discovered its most worthwhile projects. In a very real sense they are Oulipo, just as they are Jacques Roubaud.
Late in his career, Perec wrote a short story called “The Winter Journey” which Bellos calls “the most haunting (and now most imitated) French short story of [Perec’s] era.” It involves a litter- ateur named Vincent who discovers a book called The Winter Journey. As he reads it he discovers that the author of this book has plagiarized all the great poets of the modern era—Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Verlaine; their great poems are all there, right inside the book. As he reads, Vincent decides to double-check the book’s publication date and is in for a shock: it was published in 1864. It is not the author of The Winter Journey who has plagia- rized France’s great poets but the opposite. Somehow they got their hands on a copy of this lost book and took credit for the author ’s brilliance. Vincent immediately realizes he must make this truth known, but before he can alert the proper authorities World War II breaks out. In fear for his life he flees, the book is lost, and despite strenuous searches he never finds another copy. He can accrue no evidence that the author ever lived, that another copy exists, or even that he did not imagine the whole thing. With his death the world loses any tangible evidence that the great French poets contained in the book are plagiarists and not geniuses.
Among other things, Perec’s haunting story is a sly reference to his own Life A User’s Manual: that book relentlessly plagia- rizes great authors, although Perec is so adept at weaving the plagiarized segments into his own stories that one hardly notices. Moreover, Perec’s Life, like Shields’ Reality Hunger, uses plagiarism to help break down the very notion of originality. Both Life and “Winter Journey” are reminders that originality is always a matter of cultural context, as well as that genius often consists in recognizing the importance of something previously thought of little value. Like the ocean, culture is always in flux; what was yesterday the insurmountable crest of a mighty fashion is today a placid patch of soft, forgotten style. Modes, themes and plots are lost and rediscovered; imagery is recycled, whether we know it or not. Even precise phrasing cannot be claimed to be wholly original, for who knows what words before ours were written and then lost. If one accepts this view of culture, then one must also accept that creation is not the fount of art. Rather, art, like Duchamp’s Fountain, lies in seeing the artistic potential of something that already exists and having the wherewithal to make something of it.
“The Winter Journey” reminds us that pulverizing authors who benumb the pens of one era are forgotten in the next, and even those monoliths who remain on the horizon come to be read and interpreted in different ways. As paralyzing an author as Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare—said by that critic to dominate every writer in the Western tradition—has inspired, by Bloom’s own admission, the supremely different works of Ulysses, “Endgame” and The Interpretation of Dreams. Surely if even Shakespeare can permit such variety, then the very fragmen- tation and lack of authority that writers like Iyer claim suffocate our great writers today leave much room for creativity. Even more—such fragmentation can be a source of dynamism, an aspect of our landscape that prevents ossification. Now we are free to make new forms from Homer—as Zachary Mason did in The Lost Books of the Odyssey—something even the Greeks could not do. Today our manifestos come in the form of strings of quotations—the newness is not in what is said but in how it is arranged.
So it is with Oulipo. True, that movement does have popular- izers like the Jacques Jouets and Hervé le Telliers of the world, clever, salable quantities that play in the sandbox made by Perec, Queneau and Calvino. But there are other writers, both of the movement and outside of it, who have internalized its lessons and created literature, even movements, of their own. Three writers working in the shadow of both Perec and Oulipo show us how that is being done right now.
“Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven’t looked at anything, you’ve merely picked out what you’ve long ago picked out.”
—Georges Perec, “The Street”
“We don’t want plot, depth or content: we want angles, arcs, and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content, geometry is everything.”
—Tom McCarthy, “Stabbing the Olive,” an essay on Jean-Philippe Toussaint
In Life A User’s Manual, Bartlebooth dies while clutching the last piece to his 439th puzzle, a W-shaped stub that does not fit the X-shaped space that remains. As Bellos notes in his biography of Perec, that puzzle piece is one of “375,000 odd-shaped slivers of experience,” that is, one piece out of Bartlebooth’s projected 500 puzzles, each made from 750 pieces.
One of the things Perec does continually throughout his career, and never with such supreme power as in Life, is codify existence into its constituent parts. Perec once said, “I detest what’s called psychology... I prefer books in which characters are described by their actions, their gestures and their surroundings.” Elsewhere he declares his ambition “to write every kind of thing that it is possible for a man to write nowadays.” These are writerly ambitions that are deeply enmeshed in the tangible; his writing pursues the concrete, the quantifiable. He has no taste for the slippery, nebulous apparatus of thoughts and emotions; for him is the solid stuff of genres, facts, things. Though Perec might have begun his career by wanting to write every last thing, these ambitions were eventually tailored down into the more “modest” (if such grand ambition can be called so) goal for Life “to exhaust not the whole world...but a constituted fragment of the world.” Perec realized that life will not be exhausted; even just a fragment will be a momentous effort. And so when Bartlebooth lies across his puzzle, dead, clutching that last, unplaceable piece, it is as Bellos claims: “The last chapter of Life A User’s Manual somehow trans- forms W into a one-letter summary of what remains when all is done.”
The unnamable is a concept of central importance to modernism—it very well may be the one commonality between all forms of existential thought—and in our own times we have seen Tom McCarthy take it up from Perec. He tells The Guardian that “the task for contemporary literature is to deal with the legacy of modernism,” and that is just what he tries to do. Described in brief, the plot of his novel Remainder sounds like something Perec might have loved: a man loses an unspecified part of his existence when something (we never learn what) falls from the sky and hits him on the head, throwing him into a brief coma. The compensation for this loss of experience is a monetary award of some several million British pounds, which the man then uses to obsessively recreate experiences he and others have had.
The question behind Remainder is the same as behind Life: what is left once we’ve exhausted all the life we have to live, and is it ever possible to grasp it and observe it? The W (which is actually the French double vé, VV) recurs throughout Perec’s works as a sort of occult symbol of the void. This void can in many instances mean something like existential absurdity, or isolation, it is also very closely linked to death and experience. In his strange novel W, or the Memory of Childhood, Perec uses W as the name of a fictitious, fascistic island off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, which he linked to both his experiences as a child in France during the Second World War (to which he lost both his parents) and to the absolute evil of the Nazi concentration camps. In A Void, it is not the letter W but the letter e that becomes an occult symbol possessed of great power. What we would call a lowercase e becomes a death warrant: a group of relatives who have the e scratched into their wrists (which of course nobody in the book recognizes as a letter e, because the letter e doesn’t exist in the universe of the book) are implacably hunted down as part of a family curse. It does not take too much imagination to see the e deriving in some way from the Star of David that Jews were made to wear so that they could be identified by the Nazis—a symbol of identity that could not be removed and that was one’s death warrant. From there it is but a small leap in imagination to making the e an emblem of cosmic absurdity, radical doubt, emptiness, the unintelligible.
The remainder in McCarthy’s Remainder is also very much about a conquest of the void that eventually drills down to death. Like much of Perec’s writing, Remainder is obsessed with creating and following programs of action. Where the two diverge is in Perec’s insistence that each cycle is played out once, grandly, and exhausted in the effort. The item that best repre- sents Perec’s work is a meal—it can only be cooked one time, because the ingredients are used up in the process of cooking. Similarly, Bartlebooth can only complete each of his puzzles once, because their value is exhausted in the act of piecing them together. Things are different in Remainder. Here the cycles are more akin to feedback loops. The book is about a man who obsessively stages re-creations of events from his life and others—he simply has his “actors” re-create the same events again and again, perpetually. These loops pull tighter and tighter around something he wants to inhabit but can’t quite name. Late in the book the incessant replaying of events causes the narrator to finally penetrate the surface of things. He muses, “the walls around her door, the mosaicked floor that emanated from its base, the ceiling—all these seemed to both expand and brighten. I felt myself beginning to drift into them, these surfaces—and to drift once more close to the edges of a trance.”
As the narrator makes his re-creations more and more perfect he asks his performers to move slower and slower; as the re- creations become increasingly slowed and extended, he finds himself drifting further into these “surfaces” and plunging into trances with increasing regularity. The trances are like the breakers that prevent circuits from overloading. Something is preventing the narrator from pushing entirely beneath these surfaces; every time he approaches this nirvana of perfectly inhabiting a situation, he short circuits and blacks out. That little sliver of W-shaped reality that Bartlebooth can’t fit into his puzzle becomes McCarthy’s narrator ’s tiny fragment of experience that escapes his re-creations. They are the excess, the remainders that cannot be reduced to quantification, the void that Žižek tells us “the series of objects in reality is structured around...if this void becomes visible ‘as such,’ reality disinte- grates.” And thus, Bartlebooth dies, McCarthy’s narrator passes out.
At one point in Remainder the protagonist is asked, “does he, perhaps, consider himself to be some kind of artist?” Surprised by the question, he quickly responds in the negative. It is a striking moment: precisely the same question could be asked of many of Perec’s creations (one imagines a blushing Bartlebooth giving the same shocked, somewhat ashamed response when asked if his watercolor puzzles are some kind of performance art). Of course, it is not hard to see the relationship of these endeavors to many kinds of art, and perhaps the only difference between artists and these characters is that the latter never imagine themselves as such. But they are after the same thing: an unmediated brush with reality, a push beyond the frame permitted by—take your pick: language, capitalistic society, the religious concept of God, the exploitation of labor, the Other. Such a brush with the real has long been a gloriously impossible goal of modernism, a pursuit at which it strives to fail.
In Perec and McCarthy, this failure is pursued through exhaustion—they will get to that last sliver of the real by using up everything. Organizing a book around exhaustion is a dramatic departure from ostensibly “realist” works, where the fundamental organizing unit is its protagonist’s life. Typically, the one quality in common across that all the various, incon- gruous things that populate novels is that the protagonist comes across them. But Life and Remainder are not organized in this way: their organization is the exhaustion of their conceit. This act of exhaustion is an attempt to implicate everything, including that last true shard of experience that cannot be touched. Life and Remainder intuitively understand that the point of life in a post-industrial society is to consume: they demonstrate that no amount of consumption will ever be enough, that there will always be a little bit of consumption forever remaining, synonymous with that chunk of experience that cannot be had. The question they wrestle with is precisely the conundrum that Bartlebooth faces when he holds the W-shaped piece that will not fit into the X-shaped hole: these regimens will always be blind-spotted by a piece that remains.
With startling regularity Perec’s and McCarthy’s fictions end in death. It is a fitting—perhaps the only—way to end their protagonists’ cycles of consumption that push helplessly toward that remainder. By definition, death is the endpoint of all experience of life as we know it; it is something that none of us can ever experience, much less make art about. Thus it is synonymous with those remainders that Perec’s and McCarthy’s protagonists obsess over, those shards of reality that can be intuited but never quite felt. Marcus Verhagen, a collaborator of McCarthy’s in his “International Necronautical Society,” which somewhat resembles Oulipo for how it has regularly issued manifestos and statements around the ideas in McCarthy’s books and the concept of a “necronaut,” characterizes death in precisely these terms: “[Death] generally stands as a cipher for the outer limit of description, for the point at which the code breaks down—a point that is often alive, as McCarthy points out, with secret desires.... It seems that this is what the INS stands for: a horror of finished truths and a compulsive probing of the possibilities and failures of language.” In the “Joint Statement on Inauthenticity” from McCarthy’s Necronautical Society, it says:
The Statement declares the death of tragedy in which the lonely hero, in death, is rewarded with authentic being. Instead it calls for the comic, the divided and the repetitive: instead of Oedipus, Wile E. Coyote who, like a true necronaut, “dies almost without noticing,” again and again, repeatedly.
The statement goes on to praise the “dividual” over the “individual” and then “the residual, ‘a remainder that remains: a shard, a leftover, a trace,’ and further to the risidual, a laughable doubling.” It ends quite forcefully by declaring, “All cults of authenticity...whether they celebrate it in the guise of transcendence, unity or totality, for aesthetic, religious or political ends, ‘should be abandoned.’”
What comes out of these statements is a very clear dichotomy between authenticity, that mundane stuff of life that always surrounds us, and the remainders, those deathly shards of the real that can never really be inhabited. We see McCarthy taking Perec’s understanding of the remainder to new places for our times, a fitting answer to his challenge that today’s authors must respond to modernism’s legacy.
“When I was young, I thought Life A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide A User’s Manual how to die.”
—Edouard Levé, Autoportrait
“I re-read the books I love and I love the books I re-read, and each time it is the same enjoyment, whether I re-read twenty pages, three chapters, or the whole book: an enjoyment of complicity, of collusion, or more especially, and in addition, of having in the end found kin again.”
—Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood
If there is one recent French author who most exemplifies Georges Perec’s philosophy of exhausting a subject, he might be Edouard Levé. The author of four books, as well as the creator of numerous collections of photography, Levé brought to all his projects a powerful exhaustive verve. He died in 2007, a suicide, but the four works of prose he left behind show a writer working powerfully to surpass the author of Life A User’s Manual.
Unlike Perec, who generally exhausted things he could observe, Levé chose to exhaust concepts. A good example of this tendency would be his short book Autoportrait, which consists of nothing other than sentences that denote facts about himself. It is, quite simply, an attempt to exhaust his idea of himself at a given point in time. Or one might consider his photography book Amérique, where he compulsively produces photographs of American cities that share their names with major world cities. In both books the project is clear: follow the idea exhaus- tively, trusting that what comes will be art. Somehow in this widest of embraces he will catch things that are new. We are not far from the Perec who admonished, “Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid.”
Autopotrait is just one paragraph, spread out over 100 pages. It recalls Perec’s Je me souviens, which, à la Joe Brainard, begins every sentence with the words “Je me souviens” (“I remember ”). A representative stretch from Autoportrait (which could be any stretch) reads thus:
Seeing Harlem from a train a sentence came into my head: “This is not the promised land.” I have neither a hunting permit nor a gun permit. Even though the food is bland and more expensive than at other places, I eat in museum cafeterias, their minimalist décor, their luminosity, and the memory of the art I have just seen make up for their lack of character. I am thirty-nine at the moment I write these words. I have seen a work by Damien Hirst entitled Armageddon, made up of millions of flies stuck to a canvas several meters square. I drink more beer abroad than in France. My fingers are thin but strong. I can snap my fingers, but also my toes. Since the age of fifteen I have been the same height but not the same weight.
As does Perec, Levé makes his home within the prosaic in order to show us thing we have never seen before. This tendency is related to his love of surfaces—another commonality with Perec—which is itself related to yet another overlap: both men have no interest in psychology, they simply give the details, leaving it to the reader to decide what lies beneath. And Levé shares with the Perec of Life A User’s Manual (and W, or the Memory of Childhood, among others) a disregard for overarching narratives. Suicide’s English-language translator, Jan Steyn, commented on these tendencies in an interview with me:
None of his books, not even Suicide, delivers a straight-up narrative with a beginning, middle and end. They are frequently compared to pointillist paintings, but perhaps it would be more useful to compare them to his own photo- graphic series: a sequence of similar but discrete elements that add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Autoportrait consists of a long list of facts about the author recounted in no apparent order; the narrator of Suicide remembers his friend “at random”; the works in Oeuvres [a numbered list of 533 projects, some of which Levé went on to undertake] could be described in any sequence; the stories in Journal are only arranged by which section of the newspaper they would appear in. Each fact, memory, work, or newspaper article is self-contained, but each also helps build a picture of the author, the dead friend, the artist, or the newspaper (and hence the current state of the world).
In Suicide Levé speaks of his “stochastic” method, “like picking marbles out of a bag,” something even more radically executed in Autoportrait. These books explode the most constant feature of the novel, the one thing E. M. Forester in Aspects of the Novel claimed all examples of the form must have: narrative. In doing so, they exchange a sense of space as it is lived for one occasionally ascribed to God, or painters. As we bear through these books it is as though we stand before a life in which each moment is depicted in a separate panel, all of which we can see simultaneously. The books’ only concession to the traditional novelistic understanding of space is that we must read each word and sentence sequentially, but once the experience has passed on into memory, it lingers more like a painting than a story.
It is as though Levé has absconded as far away from the work as possible, has given up his traditional right to suggest the meanings behind the things he depicts. But in giving up this proximity, Levé snatches the opportunity to push us into rarer sensations. We should not be surprised to see that these are the same things Perec nudges us toward. The place that both authors bring us to is one of continual departures, books and essays that in large part are made up of sentences that could be the origin of other books. As Perec writes in the essay “Space,” these origin places “don’t exist, and it’s because they don’t exist that space becomes a question.” Earlier in the essay he tells us to “play with space...have yourself photographed holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.” The idea is clear, and it transfers to his prose: look for new ways of relating things to one another. You should be playful, counterintuitive; that the relationships may rest on faulty logic does not blanch them of their poetic power, the image that they create can replace logic.
Levé’s photographs constantly dramatize this relationship to space. He shows young Parisians in chic attire and lush rooms standing in poses suggestive of a rugby match. What space are they inhabiting: rugby match or hip salon? What correspon- dence between the two that we should be drawing from the photo? Levé’s books make us ask similar questions about space: What is the space in which his books occur? What is the relationship between their parts—how does one “map” a book like Autoportrait? In reimagining how space may be used by a novelist, they expand the terrain of what may be considered novelistic. Certainly many of the thousands of thoughts that stream by in Autoportrait would be out of place in most novels. I can hardly imagine a differently formed novel that could contain them all and not be swallowed up in boredom, chaos or both. One may make the same observation of Life A User’s Manual: with what other conceit could a novelist have entwined so many lives so elegantly and so meaningfully? In being the first to strike upon that form Perec left us with a groundbreaking document, and clearly left Levé with inspiration.
It is not that their works lack organizing conceits; it is that said conceits are deep wells of darkness that absorb meaning rather than radiate it. What could it possibly mean that the one thing common to all parts of A Void’s enormously baroque plot is the absence of the letter e? Or, much less mechanically, what can we really know of suicide, the single thing common to all of the events in Suicide? The novels inhabit these conceits; they take up residence within their confines, explore the spaces, and reveal their topography. The spaces feel new to us because they are places few authors have gone before and also because Levé and Perec know them so intuitively.
In the work of the Canadian poet and conceptual artist Christian Bök we see another response to Perec. Bök is one of those writers whose work is so clearly Oulipian that one is amazed to learn that he is not actually a member of the group; that he should be seems like such a no-brainer that the fact that he has not yet been co-opted is perhaps evidence of the movement’s increasing irrelevance. Bök’s first collection of poetry, Crystallography, uses the properties of crystals as a basis for the forms of the poems therein. His second book of poetry, Eunoia, a winner of the Griffin Prize and a bestseller, is a conscious response to the Oulipo. The book’s main conceit is to make poetry from univocal words (words containing just one vowel) aggregating them in each of its five sections, one for each vowel. The book also has exhaustive ambitions: as Bök explains at the end of Eunoia, part of the book’s system of constraints was to use 98 percent of the available words for each vowel. It reportedly took Bök seven years to write and required five readings of the dictionary.
Reading Bök’s statements on innovation in art and literature, he sounds precisely like the kind of person who might join a revolutionary literary movement. In an interview with Stephen Voice, he describes how, as a young poet, he eventually came to the idea of forsaking literature that had already been written for the “potential” variant: “I realized then that, by trying to write emotional anecdotes, I was striving to become the kind of poet that I ‘should be’ rather than the kind of poet that I ‘could be.’” In the same interview Bök also strikes a polemic tone, forcefully declaring that artistic innovation has been co-opted by capitalism:
Postmodern life has utterly recoded the avant-garde demand for radical newness. Innovation in art no longer differs from the kind of manufactured obsolescence that has come to justify advertisements for “improved” products; never- theless, we have to find a new way to contribute by gener- ating a “surprise” (a term that almost conforms to the cyber- netic definition of “information”). The future of poetry may no longer reside in the standard lyricism of emotional anecdotes, but in other exploratory procedures, some of which may seem entirely unpoetic, because they work, not by expressing subjective thoughts, but by exploiting unthinking machines, by colonizing unfamiliar lexicons or by simulating unliterary art forms.
Alas, the manufactured sense of innovation that Bök decries here sounds like the work of an Oulipian writer like Jouet, whose sense of experimentalism only stays within the realm of that which has characterized the literary for years. By contrast, Bök consistently forces himself to push his work into new, uncom- fortable terrain—precisely one of the principles that the Oulipo was founded on.
Part of what makes Bök’s engagement with the English language feel so new is his ability to detach the very stuff of language—letters, phonemes, even the way text prints on a page—away from the sounds and meanings that we’ve become so accustomed to associating with them. This is clearly a result of Oulipian procedure. In Coach House’s “upgraded” 2009 edition of Eunoia, Bök appends to the original text various reworkings of Arthur Rimbaud’s famous poem “Voyelles” (“Vowels”), which begins “A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu.” In addition to a standard English translation of the poem, Bök offers “Phonemes,” “a homovocalic translation of ‘Voyelles,’ preserving the original sequence of the vowels.” Bök also gives us “Voyelles,” which preserves “the original voicing of the sounds,” “Vocables,” “a perfect anagram of the French sonnet,” and “AEIOU,” which “literalize[s] the title of ‘Voyelles’ by excising, from the poem, everything that is not a vowel.” These “translations” reveal Bök’s concept of language: words are not merely units of meaning; more fundamentally they are physical entities that can be picked up, taken apart, and placed back together in a different way. Bök has said that writing Eunoia made him see that each vowel has its own personality, that, to a certain extent, the letters that a word is comprised of determine that word’s capacity for meaning. Reading Eunoia, this does not sound like mere fancy. The book is one of the few convincing pieces evidence I have seen contrary to Saussure’s declaration that the relationship between words and their meaning is strictly random.
To take one example, here one can begin to see how, for Bök, the shape and sight of words are a component of their meaning. This is his poem “W,” written to Georges Perec:
It is the V you double, not the U, as if to use
Two valleys in a valise is to savvy the vacuum
Of a vowel at a powwow in between sawteeth.
In the first line Bök plays with the French spelling of the letter W—“double vé”—which is in fact more accurate of the letter’s derivation than the English “double-u.” From there, Bök purposely draws on words that contain “vv,” “uu,” and “ww,” even placing them in progression from v to u to w. Clearly, the appearance of these words and the fact that they contain these repeated letters are meant to convey meaning at a level different from the dictionary definition of the words. There is also Bök’s pointed (and pointy) use of valleys and sawteeth, each containing their own repeated letters. What emerges in these lines is a kind of communication through structure and form, even through spelling. Bök is revealing things that have been sitting there, implicit in the words, but obscured behind their preemptory use as units of sound, carriers of fixed meanings.
This approach to language is, if anything, clearer in Bök’s previous collection of poetry, 1994’s Crystallography. In addition to creating fractals from various letters, the book drawn poetic influence from physical processes involved in the creation of crystals and makes poems from the chemical structure of crystals like amethyst and ruby. Constantly present is a sense of Bök’s unceasing attempts to find new ways to derive meaning from the words, giving them an almost occult sense. For instance, from the poem “12”:
WORD
= 23 + 15 + 8 + 4
= 60
= 4 + 9 + 1 + 13 + 15 + 14 + 4
= DIAMOND
By giving each letter in word and diamond a numerical value equivalent to its place in the alphabet, Bök shows that they are “equal” in the sense that they both add up to 60. What makes such games interesting is how these equations fit into the rest of the poem. Bök juxtaposes these lines with the following:
THE REDUCTION OF ONE
TO
TWO TO
MAKE MILLIONS
The idea of getting two things from one plays off the idea of making “W” = 23, “O” = 15, and so forth. And the paradoxical idea of “reducing” one to two, and then going on to make millions from that parallels the strange transition from word to diamond via numbers. In these juxtapositions, Bök gives depth to what would otherwise be merely clever ideas. This, and not Jouet’s facile metro poems, is how poetry shifts into conceptual art.
Bök’s literature also extends to the realm of the conceptual, a practice in which the Oulipo once innovated but has been lacking for some time. In addition to poetry created from Rubik’s cubes (each face is stamped with one word) and a book built from Legos (a remarkable constraint in itself ), Bök has created something called The Xenotext Experiment in which a gene of his own construction both contains an English poem (“any style of life / is prim”) and has caused an E. coli bacterium to excrete, or “write,” its own poem, “the faery is rosy / of glow.” In a very real sense, The Xenotext Experiment may well constitute the end of Oulipo, or at least an end of Oulipo. It is a writing constraint so specific and so determined by the physical processes surrounding it that it can only have meaning as a process and not as something a bacterial consciousness is trying to say. (The only alternative would be that the E. coli bacterium in fact knew that it was writing something.) Yet the bacterium is still the author in a sense: a different bacterium would have necessitated different language, and the biological processes that arrived at this particular text can be called “intentions.”
This is the beauty of conceptual art. It needn’t have meaning in a traditional literary sense; it can convey information on more allegorical levels, and it is no coincidence that Bök frequently works on precisely these levels as a poet. Make no mistake: Bök is out to broaden the ways in which we conceive of communi- cation. He is adept at using structure, relationships and constraints to suggest meaning and convey messages, to dig past assumptions so implicit we can no longer see them. Even more, as The Xenotext Experiment demonstrates, Bök is inter- ested in finding new media for conveying language. (In inter- views he’s quite forthright with the assertion that in decades it will be commonplace to convey messages through genetic code. In fact, Bök has not ruled out the possibility that advanced civilizations have already discovered the benefits of doing so and have given us messages in creatures such as viruses.) As such, Bök harkens back to the early years of Oulipo: recall that the group was founded by mathematicians. Le Lionnais and Queneau were both accomplished in math and used mathe- matical theory in conjunction with literature, as does Jacques Roubaud. Bök’s Xenotext Experiment strikes most as exotic and bizarre, but this is exactly what the Oulipo should be encour- aging: in the group’s early days surely the idea of working on the intersection of math, Japanese Go, and poetry must have sounded as strange as combining DNA and English does to us now.
Moreover, Bök’s experiment is a milestone for constrained writing: it exhausts itself in the process of its own execution. Exhaustion, long a goal of the Oulipo, has become guaranteed in this piece of conceptual poetry. This exactly inverts Oulipo, taking it from a workshop of constraints that can give rise to a panoply of literatures to a steel vise that allows just one form to sit within it. From freedom through constraint to constraint through constraint. As such, The Xenotext Experiment forces a reconsideration of the very idea of Oulipo practice, to say nothing of what it asks us to consider about the form of language and the meaning of letters. Bök has called traditional poetry “opaque” for how it is concerned more with the transmission of a message that with examining how such messages functions. It is these “superficial” aspects of poetry that experiments like Xenotext work on. It’s very possible that the poems involved are meaningless, yet the questions raised about language and its structures are profound: In what sense is the “poem” written by the E. coli bacterium automatic writing? Can a writing technique that piggybacks on the processes of biological reproduction truly be said to be “writing”? Or, conversely, does Bök’s experiment demonstrate deeper affinities between all writing and biology? Just what are letters if they can be coded not in ink and paper (or ones and zeros) but in DNA? What comparisons can we draw between the English language and the language of genetic material? Regardless of where one comes down on these questions, the key thing is that The Xenotext Experiment forces us into new, often uncomfortable, relationships with the language that we thought we knew so well. It is precisely the kind of juice that today’s Oulipo—with its elaborate schemes for mediocre texts, its domesticated Thursday readings of crowd- pleasing stories and literary trivia and its endless excavation of its own archives—is in dire need of. It is, to put it baldly, the kind of energy that once could only have come from Oulipo. Sadly, the movement is now much too concerned with glorifying its past and refereeing its present to conceive of something with this audacity.
Finally, Bök has critiqued Oulipo on political lines, arguing that, for example, “we can easily imagine using a constraint to expose some of the ideological foundations of discourse itself.” Levin Becker is right to defend the group against Bök’s more stringent attacks with the argument that political inquiries “were never the terms that the Oulipo set for itself.” It is true that the Oulipo never set itself up as a political movement and has no obligation to question politics, but Bök’s critiques clearly do apply to Oulipians like Jouet who choose to engage political topics. Instead of using constraint to write pedestrian satires of political excess—the kind of disposable literature that will be written regardless of whether constraint is involved—the Oulipo must follow Bök’s example and envision books whose political revelations could only come through the use of constraint. This would be to return the Oulipo to its original, revolutionary roots. It is something this group—and any artistic group that attempts to impact a busy, distracted, product- obsessed culture—must keep close touch with if it hopes to be significant.
Like many writers before him, Perec left an unfinished manuscript at the time of his death. The book, titled 53 Days, is about a writer who disappears under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind an incomplete manuscript. The job posed to the unnamed narrator is twofold: figure out the ending of the book (which leaves off at a cliffhanger moment) and figure out what happened to the author, one Robert Serval.
The plot of 53 Days plays out with the narrator on a search, crashing through numerous false bottoms: the search for the missing conclusion to Serval’s book takes him through numerous texts, with illumination always just around the corner but endlessly delayed. All this takes place in 53 Days’ first half, which was mostly complete when Perec died. The book’s second half, which Perec left incomplete, begins again with the disap- pearance of Serval, but this time the unfinished manuscript is found in his car. Per the outline that Perec left for the novel, a series of clues would lead this search not toward Serval but rather in the opposite direction: outside the text, to the conclusion that the author of the book that we are reading is one “GP”—Georges Perec.
At one point, the Perec/narrator makes the realization that “the truth I am after is not in the book, but between the books.” It is a fitting capstone to the career of a writer who always based his literary pursuits in a finer perception of the world around him. Perec showed that books are a powerful way to apprehend aspects of the world that could not be seen otherwise, but the path through his literature would always pull readers toward the external world, as though life itself were that final, essential part of any successful literary creation. So often in Perec, the search that drives a protagonist ultimately leaves off at the boundary of the text, as though the book has been an elaborate prank designed to prepare one for that final glance past the frame of the book and into the real world.
The way that 53 Days drives through numerous sub-texts to get a reader to the margins of the page is very similar to the structure taken by The Conversions, the first novel of Perec’s good friend and fellow Oulipian, Harry Mathews. Mathews co-edited the manuscript for 53 Days with Jacques Roubaud, and one must assume that he felt a twinge of recognition when arranging this work that so closely resembles his own. The Conversions is a quest for the solution to a riddle, a kind of shaggy dog tale in which the protagonist is continually made to believe that the next little twist to his saga will reveal the solution. Each chapter of the book converts the riddle that the protagonist is trying to solve into yet another form, from a race between worms to novelistic narrative to letters to a science experiment and so on. Notably, each step of the quest becomes so immersive in its baroque complexity that one constantly loses sight of the overall shape of the pursuit: reading The Conversions is a bit like being led through a dark wooded path by a companion who is so chatty about the most esoteric subjects that you entirely lose track of all the forks you’ve taken, having only your memories of the chatty words to hold on to.
The book ends on one of the most startling images I can remember having been led, stumblingly, toward. In its majestic beauty and metaphorical directness it rises from the book’s thicket plot like an enormous, extinct volcano. The narrator, hoping to finally answer his riddle, is sent to a remote island where he discovers a sort of perpetual motion machine. A pendulum that tracks the phases of the moon is kept in motion by generations of fish (I do not think it is a coincidence that they are herring), who themselves are fed and disposed of by an elaborate mechanism. The fish, seemingly, are ignorant of a reality beyond their confines; to them the world in which they are trapped represents the whole of the universe. They are likewise unaware that the motion of their swimming powers a device whose purpose is utterly beyond their understanding.
They are well fed and apparently content enough to not have disrupted the workings of this very fragile system. As we read Mathews’ sparse description of this enigmatic construct, the knowledge that his narrator has been pushed toward throughout the novel is revealed: not an answer to a riddle but an awareness of how desires impose limits on our perception. Reading Mathews’ melancholy description of the mechanism, one cannot help but feel a little like the imprisoned fish, condemned to spend their lives as an unwilling, unwitting part of a tool constructed long ago by an unknown intelligence to an obscure end. It is perhaps also a metaphor for the lot of the writer, partic- ularly that of the Oulipo writer laboring within a machine of his own construction.
Writers of quality are similar to like Mathews’ futile riddler in that they are not content to work within their own boundaries, nor within our own boundaries as a species. They fight to extend perception. It is one of the most important fights a writer can wage, if not the most, for the ability to perceive what cannot be seen by others is what gives an author ’s work its unique quality. Perec’s continual drive through the frame of his creations baits his perception ever farther away from the commonplace. One sees a similar aspect in McCarthy, Levé and Bök, an ambition to take preferred literary enterprises of the twentieth century to places they have not yet been by pushing them through their long-established frames.
Oulipo’s most important legacy may very well be its way of imposing things beyond the text onto everything that occurs within it. Perec’s elaborate formal structures have the pleasing quality of mathematics; they are problems that can be solved, like geometric proofs, in ways that novelistic questions of plot and character will not admit solutions. Yet, reading Perec one feels an author constantly at pains to rupture these formal systems. His complex combinatorial schemes are metaphors for the needs that impel writers to fill up books with their imaginative creations. Perec simply makes these needs into concrete, fanciful equations that anyone might marvel at—a novel without the letter e! They are, like Mathews’ moon-tracker, devices for transforming our own inevitable actions into a consequence of mysterious intent. In the movements of the mechanical hands that track the phases of the moon we see but one form of human understanding for an object of limitless inquiry. The potentially infinite conversions that make up Mathews’ plot show us others. These devices permit any number of transformations of creative energy. It is in the process of conversion that perception is released, that we are pushed beyond the frame of the text and challenged to see something in our world that we have never before noticed.
So long as there are humans to make it, art will rejuvenate itself at the fountain of human perceptions. This ongoing task will continue to assume new forms as each epoch of human life rambles toward ever more distant horizons. What the Oulipo has given us—and what I believe McCarthy, Levé, Bök and others are taking up in its stead—are ways of contemplating those evanescent structures that lie within the mechanics of perception. Hence, they are tools for pushing perception toward the endpoint it will never reach. It is, ultimately, work that will keep that uniquely omnivorous form known as literature new.