In my forties, I’ve become increasingly preoccupied with the ways that books are like the minds of the people who write them. The TV show Hoarders has recently drawn widespread attention to what happens when the human instinct to accumulate runs unchecked, and it’s clear that the problem doesn’t go away when we move from a real world to a virtual one: MP3s, digital books and pictures, movies and emails can also accrete to the point of impeding their owner’s ability to get anything done. Only a fine line separates being prolific from experiencing a clinically diagnosable hypergraphia (Alice Flaherty’s 2004 book, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block and the Creative Brain, offers the best account I know of this disorder); I think often of the famous experiment demonstrating how spiders’ webs become distorted based on which psychotropic drugs they have consumed: amphetamines lead to high-speed web production but with alarming gaps in the weave; LSD produces beautifully symmetrical nets with extremely poor functionality. A processing disorder like dyslexia or a compulsive tendency can contribute to extraordinary acts of creation: the excesses of Clarissa are intrinsic to the novel’s virtues, and I think of something like Andrew Solomon’s books on depression and childrearing, The Noonday Demon and Far from the Tree, as excellent examples of how one type of dyslexia, combined with a remarkable roving exploratory intelligence, can produce what is almost its own distinctive literary form. Certainly Solomon’s writing gives the sense (as in the case studies of Oliver Sacks) of the most miraculous achievements coming out of the need to compensate for what would commonly be considered deficits.
A moment that has stayed with me was when the British historian Boyd Hilton described himself, in a talk that involved retrospection about the shape of his career, as a “sad hedgehog and a happy lumper,” alluding to the contrast between his gift for generalization and the narrowness of his focus on the British evangelical movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. I had never thought of combining Isaiah Berlin’s fox–hedgehog paradigm (“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”) on a single pair of axes with Darwin’s lumper–hairsplitter opposition, but it was clear to me at once, as it will be clear to the reader of this book, that I am a happy fox and a resigned splitter.1 As writers, we have to work thoughtfully and realistically with our weaknesses as well as our strengths. If a humanities dissertation comes in at six hundred pages rather than two hundred, it doesn’t speak to a simple desire to exceed expectations so much as to something disordered—perhaps wonderfully disordered, but the logic of accumulation can become overwhelming (Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls manuscript is the sort of case I have in mind). At the end of the fourth installment of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice, the author’s afterword reveals that his characters and plot strands have so extremely proliferated that Martin has had to split his draft into two volumes, with the subsequent installment going back to the chronological starting point of this one and following a different set of characters over the same time span (“all the story for half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters”), and reading this, I saw something of why this particular large-scale project has been so beleaguered with delays and difficulties: when everything tends to grow more complex, or where each plot point is recursively connected to everything else in the work by way of complex patterning, it can become virtually impossible to lay down the entire story in anything like a final form. This is one way of thinking about Samuel Richardson’s inability to leave Clarissa alone, or about the difficulties James Boswell had deciding what to exclude from the Life of Johnson—the sheer mass of paper in the Boswell collections at the Beinecke Library in New Haven provides a vivid demonstration of how hard Boswell found it to let things go.
This language of diagnosis may sound dismissive or even disparaging, but it shouldn’t. For certain writers, a condition approaching the clinically diagnosable (a language processing disorder, an obsessive-compulsive streak, a hoarding impulse) can enable the creation of something transcendent, magical, with formal properties both defined and liberated by precisely those constraints. I think of what Roman Jakobson says about metaphor and metonymy in his essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances”: he considers the relationship between contiguity and connection on the one hand and selection or substitution on the other, the former aligned with metonymy and the latter with metaphor, suggesting that almost as clearly as these two poles can be discerned in aphasic language, so they structure literary language, with symbolist poetry standing with metaphor and realist fiction tending to align with the trope of metonymy.2 In these cases, a new dimension of meaning emerges by way of a formal choice that can be thought of in terms of disorder or constraint. In a canon that includes Austen and James, Flaubert and Proust, the name Georges Perec might have the air of an anomaly. He is much less widely read than those great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prose writers, and the novel for which he is probably best known in English is famous less for the elegance or craft of its sentences than for eschewing altogether any word that includes the letter e. Perec’s writings are strongly and idiosyncratically his own, but he is also associated with a Paris-based group called the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo, the Workshop for Potential Literature) whose members were interested in exploring the possibilities of formal constraints in literature, pursuing a playful and yet stringently monastic goal of freedom in constraint.
One thing Perec’s work shows with special clarity is the way in which list-making and voluntary constraints, once they take the place of character or plot, may also assume some of the emotional intensity and resonance associated with those components of realist fiction. Here are the opening sentences of Perec’s e-less novel La disparition (1969, translated by Gilbert Adair in 1995 as A Void):
Anton Voyl n’arrivait pas à dormir. Il alluma. Son Jaz marquait minuit vingt. Il poussa un profond soupir, s’assit dans son lit, s’appuyant sur son polochon. Il prit un roman, il l’ouvrit, il lut; mais il n’y saisissait qu’un imbroglio confus, il butait à tout instant sur un mot dont il ignorait la signification.
Incurably insomniac, Anton Vowl turns on a light. According to his watch it’s only 12.20. With a loud and languorous sigh Vowl sits up, stuffs a pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his chin, picks up his whodunit and idly scans a paragraph or two; but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his condition, its vocabulary too whimsically multisyllabic for comfort, throws it away in disgust.3
The name the Oulipo writers coined for a text written under a constraint involving the omission of one or more letters was lipogram, and perhaps the most distinctive thing about these sentences, on first view, is the oddity of diction brought about by the word choices impelled by the missing vowel. I wrote earlier about “mouthy” sentences, those sequences of words produced by writers like Gary Lutz and Lydia Davis that we roll over on our tongues, but Perec’s mode of arresting the reader’s attention derives in the first stance from a visual rather than an oral hyperacuity: “mouthy” sentences feel strange when we speak them, but setting up an arbitrary set of constraints to do with letters or representations on the page snags the attention differently, even if the result in both cases is to prevent us from taking the language of the fiction to be fluid or otherwise “natural.”
The translation is necessarily quite different from the original; where the French text reads “Son Jaz marquait minuit vingt” (the slangy proper name “Jaz” is necessitated by the fact that the French word for watch is montre—horloge [clock] is also obviously banned—and the phrase “minuit vingt” feels truncated, abbreviated, absent the word “l’heure”), the English translator can use the more conventional “watch” (because a name brand specific to France, Jaz, wouldn’t communicate much to American readers), and he also falls back on transcribing the time in numerals due to the impossibility of writing “twelve twenty” in English without contravening the fundamental rule. Adair has also chosen to narrate in the present tense—the French language has a slightly unusual past tense called the passé simple, used only in formal or highly literary writing, that Perec chooses because of the spelling constraint, though it sits oddly with his otherwise highly colloquial style: the passé composée, which would be the more colloquial choice, unavoidably relies on the letter e.
Both the French and the English sentences remain fully comprehensible—odd but not unrecognizably distorted. Without being warned, one might not at first glance notice the absence of e, though I think that the diction alerts the reader to something strange. (Aside from the protagonist’s peculiar name, in the French text it is perhaps that sentence about the watch that first flags the reader’s attention, while in the English translation, the opening words themselves already invite curiosity—why the curious alliteration, elevated diction and “mouthy” density of “Incurably insomniac”?) Far more extreme is the “complementary” or “reciprocal” text Perec subsequently composed, a novella (it is almost impossible to imagine writing a full-length novel under this constraint) composed of words that use none of the vowels except e.4 This is a much stranger production, ably translated here by Ian Monk (I will in this case give just the English text). The work’s French title was Les Revenentes, a necessary misspelling (it is the novel of e’s retern!), and it was published in English as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in a collection called Three By Perec:
Hélène dwelt chez Estelle, where New Helmstedt Street meets Regents Street, then the Belvedere. The tenement’s erne-eyed keeper defended the entrée. Yet, when seven pence’d been well spent, she let me enter, serene.
Hélène greeted me, then served me Schweppes. Cheers! Refreshments were needed. When she’d devested me, she herd me eject:
“Phew! The wether!”
“Thirtee-seven degrees!”
“September swelters here.”
She lent me her Kleenexes. They stemmed the cheeks’ fervent wetness.
“Well, feel better then?”
Hélène seemed pleesed, yet reserved; expectent re the recent news. En effet she then begged me:
“Bérengère’s entered the See yet?”
“Yes.”
“Perfect! Events present themselves well.”
These eyes begged her tell me the deserts she expected. Free jewels?
“Heck, Bérengère’s gems ‘n’ bezels tempt me!” she yelled.
Her extreme effervescence needed relentment, meseemed:
“Yet the gems’ theft’d be reckless! The See’s screened. Endless tent’re there, where expert peelers ‘n’ shrewd ’tecs dwell. We’d be demented…”
“We’ll never be checked! We’ll detect the defences’ breech, then enter. The rest’ll ensew.”
Next, she let me redeter her, then tell her the excerpted speeches the breeze’d sent between the deserted streets: meseemed rebel men eke lechered Bérengère’s jewels. We regretted the news. Hélène set her teeth. Her deep verblessness lengthened. The news’d depressed her? Never, she reneged, then sed she’d persevere, ne temere. Where led her secret, fervent reverees? (60–61)
This is style with a vengeance. At moments Perec has created what amounts almost to a new language; although the fluid in question is sweat rather than tears, there is even a certain poignancy to the Kleenex that “stemmed the cheeks’ fervent wetness.” The fantasy that motivates such literary productions is not a dream of conventional beauty. It is a more cerebral, almost a scientific aesthetic, at times spare but equally capable of playfulness or the sort of baroque bizarrerie seen in the language of The Exeter Text.
Perec always displays a keen sense of language as a system of notation or a means of record-keeping—Perec’s “day job” involved working as archivist in a scientific laboratory—though there is often, too, a sense of the inevitable failure of language to capture every iota of reality. (Jorge Luis Borges was preoccupied in his stories with the same sorts of representational problem, though those stories differ markedly in feel from Perec’s writing.) Here is a paean to miniaturization and precision in “The Page,” published in Perec’s 1974 collection Espèces d’espaces (Species of Spaces):
Space begins with that model map in the old editions of the Petit Larousse Illustré, which used to represent something like 65 geographical terms in 60 sq. cm., miraculously brought together, deliberately abstract. Here is the desert, with its oasis, its wadi and its salt lake, here are the spring and the stream, the mountain torrent, the canal, the confluence, the river, the estuary, the river-mouth and the delta, here is the sea with its islands, its archipelago, its islets, its reefs, its shoals, its rocks, its offshore bar, and here are the strait, the isthmus and the peninsula, the bight and the narrows, and the gulf and the bay, and the cape and the inlet, and the head, and the promontory, here are the lagoon and the cliff, here are the dunes, here are the beach, and the saltwater lakes, and the marshes, here is the lake, and here are the mountains, the peak, the glacier, the volcano, the spur, the slope, the col, the gorge, here are the plain and the plateau, and the hillside and the hill, here is the town and its anchorage, and its harbour and its lighthouse…5
The wonderful concreteness of the phrase “something like 65 geographical terms in 60 sq. cm.” brings the page vividly to us, with its densely realized geographical features—it is, as Perec goes on to observe, a “pretext for a nomenclature,” the list feeling verbal rather than spatial in its conjurations, although the “dictionary space” of the words will be transfigured in the subsequent paragraph into a moving scene (“a long goods train drawn by a steam locomotive passes over a viaduct; barges laden with gravel ply the canals; small sailing boats manoeuvre on the lake”), albeit a scene that still has something of the dollhouse feel of tilt-shift photography.
The epigraph to “The Bed,” which follows “The Page” in Species of Spaces, offers a distorted version of the famous first line of Proust’s novel (“For a long time I went to bed early”): “For a long time I went to bed in writing,” attributed to “Parcel Mroust” (16). The piece opens as follows:
We generally utilize the page in the larger of its two dimensions. The same goes for the bed. The bed (or, if you prefer, the page) is a rectangular space, longer than it is wide, in which, or on which, we normally lie longways. “Italian” beds are only to be found in fairy tales (Tom Thumb and his brothers, or the seven daughters of the Ogre, for example) or in altogether abnormal and usually serious circumstances (mass exodus, aftermath of a bombing raid, etc.). Even when we utilize the bed the more usual way round, it’s almost always a sign of catastrophe if several people have to sleep in it. The bed is an instrument conceived for the nocturnal repose of one or two persons, but no more.
This is deadpan, playful, ingenious; the mock-pedantic aspect of the commentator’s voice is less striking, perhaps, than his unusual clear-eyed insightfulness, which lends poignancy to the discussion. (The effect is almost as destabilizing as Gulliver’s disorienting shifts of scale in Lilliput and Brobdingnag.)
The passage is also rendered moving, I think, by the sense of catastrophe being always just round the corner, with that futile “etc.” after the two itemized types of catastrophe, one of them a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon, the other as old as recorded history. Perec was born in 1936 to parents who were Polish Jews but had moved to France in the 1920s. His father died in the French Army in 1940 and his mother died in Auschwitz; Perec himself was sent to live with an aunt and uncle and escaped his mother’s end. The fate of the European Jews in the twentieth century shadows much of Perec’s work, even when his topic is seemingly unrelated, as in “An Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four” (first published in Action Poétique in 1976, and reprinted in the collection L’Infraordinaire, which was published posthumously in 1989). The text is encompassed in just over five pages of the English-language edition Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, and it is my single favorite piece of Perec’s. It consists, quite simply, of a list of all of the things eaten by Perec over the course of that calendar year, loosely organized according to the order in which the items might feature on a menu or as components of a conventional meal at a corner bistro or restaurant, arranged within each subcategory in a fashion that is loosely though not restrictively alphabetical: the first entry reads “Nine beef consommés, one iced cucumber soup, one mussel soup” (244), and the list continues through various forms of seafood and vegetable, meat (“One milk-fed lamb, three lamb cutlets, two curried lambs, twelve gigots, one saddle of lamb”), wines, liqueurs and so forth, including a helpless gesture to “N coffees.” His biographer, David Bellos, has described Perec as “a man always puzzled by memory and sometimes obsessed with the fear of forgetting,” and calls this strange piece an “insane and brilliant inventory-poem” (Perec transcribed the details of what he ate over the course of the year and subsequently organized it into this format): “But even this madly meticulous listing is incomplete,” Bellos continues, “for it omits an otherwise unforgettable bottle of 1961 Clos Saint-Denis, drunk with Harry Mathews, out of huge Baccarat glasses.”6 The compulsion to record, Bellos adds, was linked to a sort of breakdown Perec had recently experienced and that drove him to pursue psychoanalysis, a self-described “memory breakdown” which involved the feeling that “unless I made a note of everything, I would be unable to hold on to any part of passing life”: “Every evening, with great scrupulousness, with obsessive conscientiousness, I made entries in a kind of log,” Perec wrote. “It was an absolutely compulsive procedure! the fear of forgetting!” Lists can perform many functions (canonformation, self-aggrandizement, celebration), but they also often represent the basic human impulse to hold on to things, to fend off loss by compulsive acts of recording.
The abundance and variety of a Parisian littérateur’s eating habits in the 1970s stand in particularly stark contrast to the era of wartime austerity in which Perec spent the earliest parts of his childhood, not to mention to the virtual absence of nourishment that characterized life in the concentration camps. (Is it making too much of an insignificant detail to observe that the very last item on the list reads “three Vichy waters”?) Perec’s own history of loss and displacement is marked, among other places, in his surname itself, as he observes in a short prose proposal called “Ellis Island: Description of a Project” (all these pieces are included in the Penguin Species of Spaces and Other Pieces):
I was born in France, I am French, I bear a French first name, Georges, and a French surname, or almost, Perec. The difference is minuscule: there’s no acute accent on the first e of my name because Perec is the way the Poles write Peretz. If I had been born in Poland, I would have been called, let’s say, Mordecai Perec, and everyone would have known I was a Jew. But I wasn’t born in Poland, luckily for me, and I have an almost Breton name which everyone spells as Pérec or Perrec—my name isn’t written exactly as it is pronounced.
To this insignificant contradiction there attaches the tenuous but insistent, insidious, unavoidable feeling of being somewhere alien in relation to some part of myself, of being “different,” different not so much from “others” as from “my own kin.” I don’t speak the language that my parents spoke, I don’t share any of the memories they may have had. Something that was theirs, which made them who they were, their history, their culture, their creed, their hope, was not handed down to me. (136–37)
The writing-together of the linguistic and the emotional or psychological is characteristic of Perec’s approach; he has a keen ear for nuance. But his choices are often those of a writer resistant to emotion. To my eyes, a painful sense of loss hangs over the items in “Attempt at an Inventory,” but none of this is said, simply created (like certain optical illusions) in the spaces between the page’s markings. In some of his longer fictions, Perec adopts a relatively conventional approach of chronological narrative ordering, but he is clearly inclined to disrupt normal procedures wherever possible, so that the fairly straightforward narrative procedure of A Void (which is in many respects a kind of detective novel) is enabled or licensed only by the wild tactic of suppressing the e. The shorter pieces avoid chronological or conventional forms of ordering almost completely, instead adopting various formal schemes (alphabetic or otherwise) that frequently have a comical topsy-turvy aspect that delights as well as unsettles. In a project inspired by Proust’s use of the madeleine at the end of the Combray section of the novel’s first volume, Perec admits to having undertaken “to make an inventory, as exhaustive and as accurate as possible, of all the ‘Places Where I Have Slept’” and says that he has listed about two hundred:
I haven’t yet finally settled on the manner in which I shall classify them. Certainly not in chronological order. Doubtless not in alphabetical order (although it’s the only order whose pertinence requires no justification). Maybe according to their geographical arrangement, which would emphasize the ‘guidebook’ aspect of the work. Or else, according rather to a thematic perspective which might result in a sort of typology of bedrooms:
1. My bedrooms
2. Dormitories and barrack-rooms
3. Friends’ bedrooms
4. Guest rooms
5. Makeshift beds (settee, moquette plus cushions, carpet, chaise-longue, etc.)
6. Houses in the country
7. Rented villas
a. scruffy hotels, boarding houses
b. luxury hotels
9. Unusual conditions: nights on a train, on a plane, in a car; nights on a boat; nights on guard duty; nights in a police station; nights under canvas; nights in hospital; sleepless nights, etc. (22–23)
Elsewhere, in an appealing and funny piece called “Twelve Sidelong Glances,” Perec considers alternatives to the phenomena of fashion. Fashion is seasonal, he observes, but what if it were instead monthly, weekly, daily? “For example,” he continues, “there would be Monday clothes, Tuesday clothes, Wednesday clothes, Thursday clothes, Friday clothes, Saturday clothes and Sunday clothes,” with the result that “the expression ‘today’s fashion’ would then at last mean exactly what it says” (161).
Perec’s works are often puzzling or difficult, but they are also playful, giving them a certain (admittedly perverse) accessibility. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is a closely contemporary experiment in style, a singularly unorthodox autobiography by the distinguished critic and theorist—also a superlative stylist, and with a playful streak that at times matched Perec’s, but working in a mode that foregrounds an aesthetics of difficulty alien to Perec’s writing.7 The broadest literary and intellectual context for this sort of writing might go back to the classic autobiographical narratives of the Western tradition: St. Augustine’s Confessions and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, Michel de Montaigne’s essays, spiritual autobiographies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, twentieth-century precursors like Jean-Paul Sartre’s compelling The Words (Les Mots). It may be worth briefly gesturing to the widespread move that took place in the middle third of the twentieth century away from the representational practices of modernism to a postmodernism increasingly uninterested in the trappings of realism and naturalism. Moving on from Joyce’s late writings and the prose and plays of Samuel Beckett, the most prominent body of French literature roughly contemporaneous with Barthes’s career might be said to be the nouveau roman, whose practitioners (including Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet) wanted to break down everything about the conventional structure of the novel. Barthes’s choices in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes may also emerge from a tradition that includes the surrealists’ preference for collage; Perec once likened his own practice to William Burroughs’s cut-up technique, while Barthes’s strange autobiography calls to mind André Breton’s troubling and beautiful Nadja, with its pastiche of images and words.
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is a small book, an engaging oddity. The epigraph reads “It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel” (“Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman,” the words reproduced in Barthes’s own handwriting), and while the opening sections feature a curious selection of childhood photos, the author announces there will be “only the figurations of the body’s prehistory,” with pictures ceasing to be reproduced “at the onset of productive life.” The project is distinctly Proustian, but where Proust revels and luxuriates in copious sentences, Barthes is a master of ellipsis; he leaves things out, he breaks off unexpectedly, he works by elision and juxtaposition rather than by elaboration. Barthes had experimented elsewhere with unconventional ordering principles (Le plaisir du texte is organized alphabetically), and there is a strong alphabetical component to the ordering here as well, with few concessions to chronology or to sustained narrative and small chunks of text organized primarily by keyword instead. The play between indiscretion and discretion provides part of the book’s charm, and some of what Barthes reveals remains cryptic, mysterious; there is no guarantee that everything can be decoded.
Some bits, then, to give the feel of the thing. The first is distinctly difficult in terms of the abstraction and subtlety of the thoughts expressed (at times Barthes uses the third person when writing of himself, particularly when discussing his published works):
L’écriture commence par le style ∼ Writing begins with style
Sometimes he attempts to use the asyndeton so much admired by Chateaubriand under the name of anacoluthon: what relation can be found between milk and the Jesuits? The following: “…those milky phonemes which the remarkable Jesuit, van Ginnekin, posited between writing and language” (The Pleasure of the Text). Then there are the countless antitheses (deliberate, farfetched, corseted) and word play from which a whole system is derived (pleasure: precarious/bliss: precocious). In short, countless traces of the work of style, in the oldest sense of the word. Yet this style serves to praise a new value, writing, which is excess, overflow of style toward other regions of language and subject, far from a classed literary code (exhausted code of a doomed class). This contradiction may perhaps be explained and justified as follows: his way of writing was formed at a moment when the writing of the essay sought a renewal by the combination of political intentions, philosophical notions, and true rhetorical figures (Sartre is full of them). But above all, style is somehow the beginning of writing: however timidly, by committing itself to great risks of recuperation, it sketches the reign of the signifier. (76)
I can parse some of these sentences, but the paragraph as a whole remains elusive to me. It might be that I resist following Barthes to his conclusion because it finally asserts that even this form of play may be thought of as having an agenda, an ideology of sorts: Barthes’s “writing” is a very particular kind of engagement with language and the world, not just a name for the most general form of linguistic play, and though I’m attracted to this idea of “writing” I cannot in the final analysis happily engage in it myself. Asyndeton is simply the omission of conjunctions (a classic example can be found in the line veni, vidi, vici; “I came, I saw, I conquered”); anacoluthon involves a swerve in which a sentence that begins as though it will have one structure changes rules midway, sometimes naming an object that then works as a sort of hinge for the swing or swerve. (It can be either an error or something deliberately sought for its rhetorical effect, the textbook example being drawn from Milton’s Lycidas—“Had ye been there—for what could that have done?”; Joyce often used it to capture the feel of the stream of a character’s consciousness.) The parenthetical aside “(deliberate, farfetched, corseted)” is of course itself an asyndeton, with the surprising nature of the third adjective in the sequence enacting precisely the sort of play that Barthes treats. The distinction between style and writing is more idiosyncratic, tendentious, harder to follow unless one has steeped oneself in Barthes’s work more generally: it has something to do with the luxury or excess of which language is capable.
Passages of abstraction that pose some difficulty to the reader are balanced, both here and elsewhere in Barthes’s work, with much more immediately accessible and vivid fragments. The second “bit” I promised appears a page or so after the one I have just quoted (the sequence having progressed alphabetically from L’écriture to L’écrivain—Howard provides the French subheadings for each of these sections so that the logic of the progression will remain clear to the English-language reader):
L’écrivain comme fantasme ∼ The writer as fantasy
Surely there is no longer a single adolescent who has this fantasy: to be a writer! Imagine wanting to copy not the works but the practices of any contemporary—his way of strolling through the world, a notebook in his pocket and a phrase in his head (the way I imagined Gide traveling from Russia to the Congo, reading his classics and writing his notebooks in the dining car, waiting for the meals to be served; the way I actually saw him, one day in 1939, in the gloom of the Brasserie Lutétia, eating a pear and reading a book)! For what the fantasy imposes is the writer as we can see him in his private diary, the writer minus his work: supreme form of the sacred: the mark and the void. (77–78)
One way of thinking about this difference of manner is to say that Barthes is willing to become novelistic, to extrude particular detail and vivid visual example in order to seduce and pleasure his reader. Elsewhere, he writes:
It is a good thing, he thought, that out of consideration for the reader, there should pass through the essay’s discourse, from time to time, a sensual object (as in Werther, where suddenly there appear a dish of green peas cooked in butter and a peeled orange separated into sections). A double advantage: sumptuous appearance of a materiality and a distortion, a sudden gap wedged into the intellectual murmur. (135)
The gesture here, in some sense, is simply toward a criticism that engulfs certain properties of the novel. Sensual objects have a place in criticism after all. The green peas in butter, the peeled orange—they make the mouth water, as it were, appealing to the senses rather than purely to the intellect. Barthes enumerates the double effect: “sumptuous appearance of a materiality” (a sumptuous repast!), a disruption of the “intellectual murmur.”
Elsewhere in the book Barthes characterizes his own style as operating by means of fragments, a choice justified on the grounds that “incoherence is preferable to a distorting order,” and attributes his delight in wrestling matches to the fact that each match is itself “a series of fragments, a sum of spectacles…subject in its very structure to asyndeton and anacoluthon, figures of interruption and short-circuiting” (93). Along with these figures, Barthes praises parataxis (the placing together of sentences without conjunctions or transitions, in the manner of beads on a string) over hypotaxis (the “subordination” of phrases and sentences, a more shapely or architectural construction). At various points during the book, he contemplates the different sorts of meaning that can be created by way of this kind of technique: the parlor game of taking half-a-dozen words and creating a discourse that links them together (in that case, the fragment in which such a parlor game is defined or described may itself fit the stipulations of the game); the juxtaposition of fragments to create meaning in their interstices, like the lyrics in a song cycle. This sort of “antistructural criticism…[brings] objects into view with the help of simple figures of contiguity (metonymies and asyndetons)”:
L’ordre dont je ne me souviens plus ∼ The order I no longer remember
He more or less remembers the order in which he wrote these fragments; but where did that order come from? In the course of what classification, of what succession? He no longer remembers. The alphabetical order erases everything, banishes every origin. Perhaps in places, certain fragments seem to follow one another by some affinity; but the important thing is that these little networks not be connected, that they not slide into a single enormous network which would be the structure of this book, its meaning. It is in order to halt, to deflect, to divide this descent of discourse toward a destiny of the subject, that at certain moments the alphabet calls you to order (to disorder) and says: Cut! Resume the story in another way (but also, sometimes, for the same reason, you must break up the alphabet). (148)
“How will I know that the book is finished?” Barthes later asks.
Having uttered the substance of these fragments for some months, what happens to me subsequently is arranged quite spontaneously (without forcing) under the utterances that have already been made: the structure is gradually woven, and in creating itself, it increasingly magnetizes: thus it constructs for itself, without any plan on my part, a repertoire which is both finite and perpetual, like that of language. At a certain moment, no further transformation is possible but the one which occurred to the ship Argo: I could keep the book a very long time, by gradually changing each of its fragments. (162–63)
The word “uttered” has some of the forceful materiality of the English word “expressed” as it is used to describe the production of breast milk; the process of organization Barthes describes invokes a series of self-generating patterns, as iron filings may be shunted into an array by the invisible action of a magnet.8 Barthes’s memoir is contingent rather than inevitable, it could have taken any number of different forms, and yet its distinctive identity (like that of the Argo) is established regardless of the contingency of its parts. Here is Barthes at his most Perecian, in a long fragment which I will quote in full:
J’aime, je n’aime pas ∼ I like, I don’t like
I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a “nose” make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.’s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.
I don’t like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums, strawberries, the harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, the afternoon, Satie, Bartók, Vivaldi, telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin’s concertos, Burgundian branles and Renaissance dances, the organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don’t know, etc.
The items on each list are concrete, vivid; they give the sense of a personality. More than that, though, the format of the list—its teasing combination of revelation and withholding—tells us more about Barthes than his expressed dislike for strawberries and women in slacks (Ludwig Wittgenstein also hated it when women wore trousers). A shape or structure is then bestowed on the fragment by the turn in the paragraph that follows:
I like, I don’t like: this is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has no meaning. And yet all this means: my body is not the same as yours. Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes, a kind of listless blur, gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma, requiring complicity or irritation. Here begins the intimidation of the body, which obliges others to endure me liberally, to remain silent and polite confronted by pleasures or rejections which they do not share.
(A fly bothers me, I kill it: you kill what bothers you. If I had not killed the fly, it would have been out of pure liberalism: I am liberal in order not to be a killer.)
From “anarchic foam” emerges a figure, and yet it is only “the figure of a bodily enigma”—it is the unreadability of the list rather than its cohesion or comprehensibility that interests Barthes, and the parenthetic aside of the final paragraph represents an arabesque of further definition, one that reminds me of Adorno’s aphoristic suggestion, in Minima Moralia, that “the precondition of tact is convention no longer intact but still present.”9 It is as though Barthes is too courteous to request the reader’s empathy, the inconsequential or unreadable aspects of his notation retaining for the writer a discreet corona of privacy.
Perhaps the clearest contemporary descendant of this Barthes, Barthes the sentence-writer, is the American critic and poet Wayne Koestenbaum; at any rate I cannot think of another writer in English who so strongly combines that level of intellectual sharpness with a baroque, sometimes dandyish style and sensibility. Koestenbaum’s 1995 book Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon is difficult to place, generically. It’s cultural criticism, for sure, but it’s also something like a series of prose poems: the cover of the Plume paperback edition I possess features a familiar photograph of Jackie Kennedy in pink pillbox hat and coat against a luridly acidic green background, the colors drawing the eye and calling to mind the Lilly Pulitzer palette. Each short section has a title—“Jackie and Ordinary Objects,” “Jackie and Synesthesia”—and the order of the proceedings is associative, linguistic rather than argument- or narrative-driven in any obvious sense. In musing on how Jackie infuses ordinary objects with meaning, Koestenbaum suggests that press accounts during Jackie’s time in the White House emphasized her association with ordinary things partly “because icon Jackie was herself objectified, a commonplace petite chose in mass consciousness”:
Everything ordinary that Jackie did, owned, or discovered becomes evidence that (1) Jackie is really just one of us, despite her elite veneer; (2) we, despite our relentlessly ordinary lives, are secretly magnificent, because we share plain objects and practices with Jackie; (3) icon Jackie is an unpretentious object in the American home, and that’s why she is fond of ordinary things—she identifies with them. Whatnots are her peer group.10
It’s the last sentence in which Koestenbaum’s distinctive style can most clearly be heard—that mouthy “whatnots” catches the attention (a whatnot is much the same thing as a knick-knack, a tchotchke, but it is a far more evocative term in its own right, an arch little word that seems nonetheless to express something fundamental about language, its strengths and its shortcomings). Our relationship with Jackie, Koestenbaum insists, works by contiguity and association: by the trope of metonymy, in which the part stands for the whole and meaning is created by proximity rather than substitution.
Someone quotes Jackie using the word “delish.” “Delish”! What an ordinary, slangy word. Jackie said “delish.” Maybe Jackie and I have something in common: we share delish. We share era-specific conversational banalities. (91)
One hears that Jackie said, while on her restoring mission, “Look at that Lincoln cake plate.” What is a cake plate? I didn’t know there was a special variety of plate called “cake plate.” But Jackie knew, and she pointed to it. “Cake plate” becomes another molecule in the Jackie pointillism—another detail, mysterious, unsymbolic, that helps to compose icon Jackie. (93)
“Jackie and Synesthesia” offers a fuller vision of what this sort of cultural criticism might do. Synesthesia simply refers to the neurological phenomenon by which an object conventionally comprehensible in one sense is perceived in terms of another (letters or numbers and colors, smells or tastes and sounds—recent research suggests that mild forms of synesthesia are much more prevalent than previously believed). Synesthesia the term thus becomes the license for unbridled association—synesthesia “permits us to reconstruct Jackie,” Koestenbaum says, and then he moves into an extraordinarily baroque associative fugue: “For example, when I think ‘Jackie,’ or see a picture of Jackie, several objects, confections, or incidental ‘treasures’ (as Jackie might have called them) come to mind. I think of the perfume called Jicky, by Guerlain; I think of Chiclets chewing gum; I think of petits fours; and I think of enameled clip-on earrings” (195). In subsequent paragraphs, Koestenbaum delves deeply into each of these terms (“The name ‘Jicky’ itself seems halfway between ‘Jackie’ and ‘sticky.’ The idea that a product called Jicky exists, waiting to be bought, excites me: icon Jackie behaves like a product but one can’t buy her, she is off the market”). The sound of the words themselves is as crucial here as the senses they serve:
Petits fours: petits fours are the sort of French dessert (like mille-feuille) that in the 1960s I considered fancy. Petits fours are square, with hard butter-cream frosting and soft tea cake inside, lined with jam. The inside of a petit four isn’t a treat; its outside is—for the same reason (hardness, resistance, sheen) that the coat of a Chiclet pleases. I have always liked sugary glazes, and therefore appreciate petits fours, or the idea of petits fours, via the word “glacé,” which enters the sphere of Jackie through the kid gloves she wore to the Inaugural Ball, described in one account as “20 button white glacé kid gloves” which successfully avoided “wrinkle or downward sag.” The gloves’ perfection—no wrinkle, no sag—comes by virtue of the property called “glacé.” A second route through which “glacé” and “Jackie” meet, in my imagination, is through the word “chignon.” I think of Jackie’s classic bouffant as a chignon: the word “chignon” (whose origin is “chain”) recalls a kind of glazed cruller shaped like a twist (were they called “glazed twists” or “French twists”?). (196–97)
This is brilliantly associative, and also willfully unmotivated by anything other than the feel of words in the mouth (it is surely not coincidental that so many of these words are also for things that one savors on the tongue, or perhaps I too am excessively partial to sugary glazes?).
The Jackie book does seem to form a network of meaning; elsewhere, Koestenbaum takes even further Barthes’s injunction to cut things up, to work in fragments. In “My ’80s,” he serves up an autobiography in fragments; it is an essay I mentally juxtapose to an equally striking though quite different short prose piece by Luc Sante, “Commerce,” which also chronicles a time and a place—New York at the end of the 1970s—long gone.11 Neither “My ’80s” nor “Commerce” is an exercise in nostalgia (as Carl Wilson says, “Nostalgia tends to neuter critique”).12 Both pieces adopt a nonchronological method of ordering: Koestenbaum’s sentences are more show-offy, extravagant, while Sante works in an understated idiom that at times seems even to forego style altogether (in the sense that the accoutrements of classic noir proclaim themselves less style than antistyle). Koestenbaum sometimes adopts Oulipian methods (he is partial to the sort of “I remember” refrain pioneered by Joe Brainard in 1970 and played with by Perec and Kenneth Koch, among others, before Harry Mathews adopted it for his “remembrance” of Georges Perec in The Orchard, published in French in 1986 and in English translation in 1988), but here he is surely writing under the sign of Barthes and of Susan Sontag, whose expressed preference (in “Notes on ‘Camp’”) for “the form of jottings, rather than an essay” as she tries to capture “this particular fugitive sensibility” (276–77) provides another kind of license for Koestenbaum’s modus operandi (“I swore allegiance to the aphorism,” Koestenbaum writes at one point [133]). Here are a few of his fragments:
My mind was on écriture feminine as applied to homosexuals. I was big on the word “homosexual.” I read Homosexualities and French Literature (edited by George Stambolian and Elaine Marks). I read Hélène Cixous. On a train I read Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (translated by Richard Howard): I looked out dirty windows onto dirty New Jersey fields. I began to take autobiography seriously as a historical practice with intellectual integrity. On an airplane I read Michel Leiris’s Manhood (translated by Richard Howard) and grooved to Leiris’s mention of a “bitten buttock”; I decided to become, like Leiris, a self-ethnographer. I read Gide’s The Immoralist (translated by Richard Howard) in Hollywood, Florida, while lying on a pool deck. I read many books translated by Richard Howard. In the ’80s I read The Fantastic by Tzvetan Todorov (translated by Richard Howard) and meditated on the relation between fantasy and autobiography. I brought Richard Howard flowers the first time I met him (1985), in his book-lined apartment. He assured me that I was a poet. (128–29)
Too many of these sentences begin with the first-person singular pronoun. Later I may jazz up the syntax, falsify it. (129)
Despite my best efforts, I existed in history, not as agent but as frightened, introspective observer. I began to fine-tune my sentences—a fastidiousness I learned from Moore’s prose. Precise sentences were my ideals, though in practice I was slipshod and sentimental. I began to seek a balance between improvisation and revision. I revised by endlessly retyping. (133)
The balance between mind, eye and ear here is striking and unusual. In the first fragment, for instance, the cerebral flourish of the initial sentence is self-mockingly deflated by its more “mouthy” successor (the meaning comes through because of the feel of the words in the mouth, helped out by those slightly campy quotation marks). The repetition of Richard Howard’s name is humorous and affectionate while the mention of a specific year in parenthesis is undermined by its location immediately following a rumination on the relationship between autobiography and fantasy. The fragment refuses cadence, structure as a whole—it is a paratactic collection of sentences, a sequence rather than a structure. But these longer paratactic fragments are also balanced by shorter, sharper ones, more aphoristic reflections, reflections with a shape: this is the explicit subject, indeed, of the second fragment given earlier, in which syntax is jazzed up and falsified, the kind of cutting or syncopation that Barthes commends. The sentence “I revised by endlessly retyping” is not perhaps an aphorism as such, but it has the cadence of aphorism; it summarizes and punctuates the fragment it curtails. The cumulative effect of the piece as a whole is something I cannot do justice to here, but it produces a curiously moderated form of self-knowledge, a few parts pathos tincturing the near-clinical self-examination: auto-ethnography conducted under the sign of style.
“My ’80s” could never be mistaken for a short story; its allegiance is more clearly to the essay, despite its unorthodox shape and structure. (It is possible that I am predisposed to think this because of its subsequent inclusion in the Best American Essays volume, but the piece was originally published in Artforum, and these two sites of publication confirm the reader’s sense that this is autobiographical criticism, and in that sense non-fiction.) Sante’s “Commerce,” on the other hand, feels much more like a short fiction, though I have the impression, as a reader, that everything he writes there is true to the best of his knowledge. The title conjures up notions of buying and selling and exchange but also that eighteenth-century sense of commerce as something close to conversation: this ethnography will not center on the author himself but on transactions he observed. The whole piece feels more clearly selected, crafted, shaped than Koestenbaum’s (Koestenbaum is an artist of excess, Sante one of concision), so that taking pieces out of it does more comparative violence in this case to the shape and meanings of the piece as a whole, but here are a few of my favorite fragments:
One morning as I was walking up First Avenue, a dog ran past me with a dollar bill in its mouth. A few seconds later a fat man came puffing by in hot pursuit. (102)
For years there was a general store, of the most traditional sort, on 9th and Second. I did my photocopying there, bought aspirin, string, drywall screws, mayonnaise, and greeting cards on various occasions. You could not imagine that they could possibly carry the exact spice or piece of hardware or style of envelope you needed, since the place was not enormous, but invariably an employee would disappear into some warren and re-emerge with your item in hand. In my memory I am always going there during blizzards. Another sort of general store stood on the corner of 14th and Third. It may have had another name, but its sign read “Optimo.” It was cool and dark inside, with racks of pipes and porn novels and shelves of cigar boxes and candy. Of its two display windows on 14th Street, one featured scales, glassine envelopes, and bricks of Mannitol—the Italian baby laxative favored by dealers in powder for stretching their merchandise—and the other held shields, badges, and handcuffs. I often wished that Bertolt Brecht had been alive to admire those windows. (106–7)
Meaning here is created not by the selection of words in the sentence but by the juxtaposition of sentences and the choice—the paratactic choice—to sequence these bits like beads on a string, rather than subordinating them into an essay with a clear beginning, middle and end. The chaos and senselessness of this New York emerge, and yet also the patterns that create meaning out of disorder. I would say that there is no argument here, not even an oblique one. Neither is there a story. It is an exercise in seeing what’s left when we take away all the conventions and continuities of storytelling, leaving only the bare identities of time and place as the framework for stimulating intellectual and emotional response.
The final fragment is deliberately incomplete and yet horribly conclusive:
When S. inherited his father’s estate, although it was not a major sum, he promptly retired. That is, he quit his job, moved into a room in the George Washington Hotel on 23rd Street, and took his meals at the doughnut shop on the corner. He read, wrote, strolled, napped. It was the life of Riley. He might have continued in this fashion indefinitely had he not made the acquaintance of cocaine. (112)
This is a highly ascetic choice for closure—Sante resists even the temptation to use the foreboding dot-dot-dot of an ellipsis in this conclusion in which nothing is concluded. We are left in a curious tense, an ongoing past which we know must have found its period not long afterward, a tense that refuses pathos and melodrama and leaves us instead with the structural sense that this piece is a kind of ourobouros, its tail clamped delicately between its teeth. The emotional drama emerges entirely from the tension between the author’s desire to record and retain these ephemera—“these fragments have I shored against my ruin”—and the spare verbal aesthetic, in which no superfluous word is allowed to remain in the prose. As different as “Commerce” is from Perec’s “Attempt at an Inventory,” both memorialize in list-like format as a way of locating and describing an intense sense of loss. These short prose forms fall between essay and story, and for me they capture something especially pressing and poignant about human life, its compulsions and tics; they also underline the extent to which even the deepest consolations of reading and writing can only ever be partial or inadequate.