Pastoral Thinking

At Sponge!, Lee Rourke writes about the great meditation on walking in Roubaud's The Great Fire of London, a marvelous bit of writing I neglected to mention in my long post on the novel (which Lee graciously links to):

When walking, he argues (and to paraphrase) we are in ‘possession of time’: each footfall counts its passing. We can choose to stop, to turn, to slow down at our own pace, to meander and wend, to backtrack and shortcut; within this act of possession things are infinitely freer. Whereas on a train, plane, or in a car, time has captured us, we are at its mercy, carried by it with no control, it dictates our decision to be free; we are not free in this sense.

Apologies to Lee for quoting the entirety of his post (but it's very short and my own paraphrastic powers are at an extremely low ebb these days), but I wanted to highlight the freedom associated with this "possession of time". We are so rarely truly in possession of our time, with jobs and commutes and so on. Even when we do have time to ourselves, it is bounded by those demands on our time over which we have little real control. This domination by speed, by time, this unfreedom, affects our very thinking. Some will argue, and do, that this is fine and dandy, a newer, quicker thinking has come into being. I might have made this argument at one point, but these days I find it wanting.

By coincidence, last night I was reading in Kafka's Diaries and came across an entry on Goethe's diaries (would that in Goethe's diaries he were writing about yet another's diaries, but it was not to be). Kafka remarks that Goethe's observations while traveling are different than they would have been in Kafka's day

because made from a mail-coach, and with the slow changes of the region, develop more simply and can be followed much more easily even by one who does not know those parts of the country. A calm, so-to-speak pastoral form of thinking sets in. (translation by Joseph Kresh)

I want this, this calm, this quiet, this slowness, space to think, time to work things out. Down with speed!

Notes on The Great Fire of London

Numbered points or observations, possibly tangential. Cohesiveness is neither promised nor implied (nor, we can be sure, delivered).

1. Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London is, so its subtitle tells us, "a story with interpolations and bifurcations". In the story, there are six chapters, containing a total of 98 numbered sections. Readers are notified of the interpolations and bifurcations (insertions) via symbols in the margins, like thus, indicated in section 2: →I§101. In addition to these insertions, lengthy parentheticals of a sort, the writing is replete with parenthetical remarks, often nested within other parenthetical remarks, and so on--qualifications upon qualifications.

2. I read the book by following the paths set up for the reader to follow. If section 2 pointed the reader to the interpolation at section 101, I flipped to the appropriate place in the book and read, before returning to the source. Occasionally, I would hold off on interpolations till I'd read the full two or three pages of a given, numbered section, and then read all of the interpolations jumping from that section, in sequence. All interpolations are one numbered section each, at most a couple of pages in length, referring back to the original numbered section (such as: 101§2). Bifurcations are a little different. Bifurcations may potentially contain multiple numbered sections. I did not at first realize that the first few contained several sections each, not till I'd read the third one, after which I went back and re-read the opening sections for the first two, following in turn by reading the remaining sections in each successive bifurcation. The interpolations could be seen as parentheticals, the bifurcations as forks, perhaps leading to an alternative version of the narrative, if the reader were so inclined.

2a. Roubaud writes of writing a hypothetical book (perhaps the current book) which, with various such insertions, the reader would construct his or her own version of the book, which in theory would never have been read by anyone else, including the author. Putting aside the idea that this is simply a way of looking at how readers normally read anyway, constructing their own version of the story independent of the writer's intentions, I have serious doubts about this.

2b. For example, I remember reading Hopscotch. I'd been curious, before reading, whether it would be better to read the book straight through, or to read it according to the plan devised and presented by Cortazar. I asked about, and I was assured that it didn't matter. Not interested at that time in jumping around in the book, I read it straight through. I discovered that the material at the back of the book (its interpolations, possibly) seemed both tedious and irrelevant, by the time I got to them. In that case, I would argue that the strategy, far from being this great milestone on the way towards a truly interactive literary art, instead reinforced the primacy of the writer's authority. The sections filed in the back, being of a different nature than the narrative material in the novel proper (being more essayistic, if I recall correctly), would have worked much better if read in the order in which Cortazar had suggested, if I had in fact "hopscotched" from point to point within the book.

2c. I am, in any event, considerably more interested in the problems for the writer writing, than I am in these sorts of ideas about the so-called limitations of the physical book. To the extent that the conception mirrors anxiety about writing itself, I am on board, engaged, interested; to the extent that it represents twaddle about hyperfiction, I lose interest, if not consciousness.

3. The "story" is, in fact, "about" the writing. It is indeed "writing about writing about writing", though not in an epistemological sense. It is literally about this, in the sense of a writer narrating his writing. In the early chapters, I was enchanted by this: the writing about the materials, the time of day, the desk, typewriter, pens, about the handwriting, and so on. Here's a representative excerpt, copied from the Dalkey site:

I find quite obviously a slim yet real consolation in telling how my story gets underway in this circumstance which is the ever-renewed beginning of daytime arriving and nullifying (with increasing noise, with light) the peaceful, desolate yellow glow silently surrounding me on this table: one, two, three mute hours during which everything, in this house, the square, the streets, everything, or almost everything is asleep—this is the self-imposed condition enabling me to relate what, even though doing my best to wander as little as possible from the time of composition, will be above all a work of memory.

And each day, if I succeed in seizing some glint, if I manage, as the old Irish hermit says, to lead the darkness to the light, my basic purpose will be to entangle it with the banality of these lines, wobbly, black, relatively crooked upon the paper, in the yellow oval slicing the table, and where soon, once daylight filters in, and I lay down my pen, it will vanish.

Thus, the conditions in which I place myself, this self-imposed constraint, will express, despite the very elementary nature of the analogy, something of my projected attempt.

I also enjoyed the writing about the vision for the book's appearance, along with the writer's conviction that the book, as he conceived of it, in its fullness, was not publishable in book form.(These sections prompted translator Dominic Di Bernardi to write in his afterward about the possibilities for realizing Roubaud's vision with computers. Few things in literature bore me more than discussions of this sort.)

5. However, the "story" did lose me, did become un-fun to read for a time, in the long fifth chapter ("Dream, Decision, Project"), a chapter I had serious problems wading through. (It is no coincidence, I think, that this is the chapter that includes the no-fun excerpt quoted in the BLCKDGRD post linked to above.) This chapter, as its title gestures toward, involves the writer's detailed recounting, theoretical and otherwise, of the dream that gave rise to the decision to embark on the project which in part involves the novel which we may or may not have in front of us. The sheer length of this chapter numbed me, as did the repetition and the difficult language. In a sense, though, the jumping about made this chapter seem more interminable than it might have, had I read it straight through (admittedly, this appears to contradict the point I made about Hopscotch), especially by comparison with the more engaging inserted material. Though chapter 5 was on balance a slog, it was not without its intermittent charms. (And I do have it marked up in several places, passages of lucidity in what were often, for me, unreadable paragraphs.)

6. The "story" being the narration of the writing, offloaded the more traditional "narrative material", I'll call it, to the many insertions. That is, the writing containing narrated episodes that could add up to some kind of story. In addition, references to the "devastating personal loss" I alluded to earlier (the death of his wife Alix some years before), become at times more explicit, but also more rare (not that they were common to begin with). In a sense, the narrative material, in part writing about elements of the writer's actual life, could be seen to be too painful to include in the novel proper, even if those sections rarely were about Alix in any discernible way. The writing about the writing, about the project, the novel, the dream, decision, etc, displaces any true narrative, though this writing includes writing about the fact of displacement as well as references to the current novel being a falling away from the more grandiose project he'd originally dreamed. It is suggested that the work might have fallen apart, become unwritable, displaced by his writing about the writing, because he was unable to face the project, in the wake of his wife's death. (I keep using the words "novel" and "project" generically, but in fact these words and others appear in numerous ways: with or without italics, inside quotation marks or not, capitalized or not, with definite or indefinite article, depending on which iteration Roubaud is discussing and in what fashion.)

What remains are traces.

7. There is a blurb from Harry Mathews on the back of the book, and Mathews himself is mentioned in passing, in one of the handful of explicit references to the Oulipo (of which Roubaud is, unsurprisingly, a member). Perhaps coincidentally, in the course of reading the book, I was reminded of Mathews' own fiction a couple of times. Roubaud's description of the text (not the structure of the text itself), his ideal vision of it and its recursiveness and the nature of the interpolations and the bifurcations, the obsessive attention to detail, reminded me of Mathews' novel, The Journalist (in which our narrator, writing a journal on advice from his doctor after experiencing a nervous breakdown, gets obsessed with the form his journal takes, with his notational system for keeping track of types of entries, over time becoming more and more fixated on the journal itself, rather than his life, etc.). (The Journalist, incidentally, was the very first Dalkey Archive book I ever saw or read, having much to answer for at this point.) And Roubaud's delightfully obsessive food writing (the bit about croissants, yes, of course, but also the wonderful stuff about the proper way to make jam), primarily in the interpolations, reminded me of Mathews' demented short story "Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)" (collected in The Human Country), which is not to say that these passages are much like that story. . . This paragraph highlights the utter lack of discussion of constraint in this post, a lack that will remain unaddressed, accept to say that the writer writing about writing writes about constraints and the Oulipo (and I have completely left out mathematics, which Roubaud writes about at length, including about the mathematical treatise which is the model for his novel, etc. . .)

8. I professed an instant love for The Great Fire of London in my earlier entry. Did it meet these early expectations? Certainly chapter five appears to knock it down in my estimation (though love implies affection, not a critical assessment). Nevertheless, this remains a very special book, for its many passages of beautiful writing, some of it very funny, and its conception and ideas about writing and fiction. It was mostly fun to read.

9. I eagerly await the upcoming Dalkey edition of The Loop (though I admit that I hope its 712 pages, more than twice the length of The Great Fire of London, are not overly given to writing resembling that contained in chapter 5). (And I find, having read the excerpt from one of them in Bernardi's afterward, that I am also interested in taking a look at Roubaud's Hortense novels.)

Noted: Jacques Roubaud

From The Great Fire of London:

I am always ready to yield to every sort of distraction: reading, daydreaming, romantic thoughts. To accomplish even the least amount of work, to finish even the least number of lines, I must cross an invisible boundary of inward refusal, of disgust, of my desire to escape, to put off till later, until tomorrow, indefinitely. Getting myself started requires exhausting a great deal of energy, of exhortations, self-reproaches. The conditions necessary for a working mood are so hard to come by that I sometimes wonder how I've proved able, on occasion, to manage it.

This is one of my life's constants, for which I'll seek no explanation. At times it's a rather appalling constant, since the passing years don't do a thing by way of improving it, nor do they facilitate my task; on the contrary: I've often imagined that inwardly mustering my forces with a certain regularity, accumulating victorious moments and even days, would build up a sort of reflex, an impetus, habit; and that since growing old would be accompanied simultaneously by the waning attractiveness of distractions, I would enter into a few luminous years when I would be able to do everything that I had decided and planned on doing in the span that I had consecrated to such duties. This did not occur, and I know full well that it never will.

Roubaud's Law of Butter Croissants

I've begun reading Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London. Already I can see that it's going to be a special book. Roubaud describing the project, the novel, he is unable to write; describing in scrupulous detail the tools he uses to write, the notebooks, pens, the desk, the room the desk is in, the nature of the light, the quality of his handwriting in the notebook (close, compact, black, nearly illegible). Already some unmistakable, though understated references to a devastating personal loss ("It's something I continue to do, day after day, less from habit than from my refusal to let a habit die, despite the fact that 'not making a sound' or 'accidentally awakening' have no more importance now than putting the bowl at 'my' place on the table at what was my place.").

But with Interpolation 103 (for it is "a story with interpolations and bifurcations"; the reader is directed elsewhere in the book, not unlike Cortazar's Hopscotch), I know that I am in love. This interpolation jumps off from a brief description of what is currently the writer's regular breakfast, though it wasn't always. It used to involve croissants (quotations from the translation by Dominic Di Bernardi; italics in original):

The ideal croissant (and this has to do, naturally, with the Parisian croissant, since in whatever town I've tried them provincial croissants have been a disaster), the croissant that might be labeled the archetypal butter croissant, presents the following features: a very elongated rhombus, rounded at the tips but with an almost straight body (only the plain croissant, and it alone, has a lunar, ottomanlike look)--golden--plump--not too well-done--nor too white or starchy--staining your fingers through the India paper that wraps or rather holds it together--still warm (from the oven it's only recently left: not yet cooled) [...].

It has three principal components, and three interlocking meaty compartments protected by a tender shell that lends it certain similarities to a young lobster. The center section is, in this croissant-lobster homomorphism, the body of the crustacean; the end parts are the pincerless claws. It's an extremely stylized lobster, a formal lobster, in short. For the croissant to be perfect, a simple tug on each "claw" should easily pull them apart from the "body," each trailing along an oblique, tapering excrescence of inner meat, subtracted from the center, extracted, as it were, effortlessly from the still very warm innards of the croissant, without making crumbs, or any sound, or tearing. I openly lay claim to the discovery of this correspondence, this structural morphism (at least I have found no "anticipatory plagiarism") which I propose calling Roubaud's Law of Butter Croissants.

It is of course impossible nowadays to find a definitive croissant composed in accordance with this axiom and fulfilling my dream. Perhaps the ideal croissant only ever existed as a best-case scenario, a formal essence that could only find its remote approximation in actually existing croissants. Those from the boulevard bakery, even though the best in the neighborhood, only modestly approximated this ideal. Still, I was delighted to have found them, so greatly did the general worthlessness of modern croissants make me shudder. There are bakeries (I could name names!) where you are underhandedly sold day-old croissants (nevertheless set aside tacitly and traditionally for third-class hotels and the most mediocre and stingy cafes). They are lusterless, misshapen, shopworn, smelly, with the look of stale ocean fish at the stall of a Jurassic fishmonger, around August 15th, before freezers were invented. [...]

Furthermore, among croissant eaters (croissants in general, plain as well as butter) there are two contending schools: the dry school and the wet school. As far as I'm concerned, I belong to the drier part of the wet school. This means: after having prepared a bowl of café au lait (I still hadn't given up milk), hot but not scalding, I dipped the croissant wing (the leg rather) (let's preserve a metaphoric consistency) that I'd pulled off (let's a imagine a perfect croissant, satisfying Roubaud's Law for the sake of the description) in such fashion that it becomes moist, saturated, softens, but without dissolving, without coming undone. I proceeded likewise with the other leg; then with the center part of the thus dismembered body (starting with the left leg!). If the croissant were perfect (herein lies and indisputable test of its degree of perfection) (along Roubaud's Croissant scale), provided that the correct procedures were carried out, at the bottom of the bowl there should remain no trace of its disappearance. A true croissant never crumbles. [...] Just as a thin sprinkle of rain on a summer evening at the seashore in the intense heat, dampening the dust at an outdoor cafe, settling the dryness, releasing the sudden fragrance of earth, flowers, shadow, and plane trees gives you a pang of nostalgia, so the perfect caffeinated moistness lending the perfect aroma, the perfect consistency to the croissant, makes you believe, if only for one precarious moment, in the possibility of a good day ahead. By giving up croissants, I had, as is plain to see, made a serious sacrifice for my prose; but I expected no reward in return.

Violently Misdirected Nostalgia

One of the books that I did NOT acquire with the Big Dalkey Get, but wish I had, was The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud (the friend I split the deal with got it, though if I had to wager, I'd guess she has yet to read it, or, frankly, any of her lot). I didn't know much of anything about it when we made the order, but in the meantime I've read stray pieces here and there about it that have intrigued me, about its quietness and strangness, about its form, digressions on the way to Roubaud's literary "Project". I think it was this review by Steve Mitchelmore that first drew my attention to Roubaud's book as one that I wanted to read:

Roubaud's dream was [to] write something as great as anything in the tradition; presumably that would have made him happy. He sensed its possibility in the "irreducible originality" of the Project and the joyous liberty of the dream. But with the death of Alix, and the end of his literary hopes, how could its originality be reconciled with the Romantic tradition with possibility at its core (such as retrieving Eurydice)? Roubaud's originality is to be found in The Great Fire of London's formal confrontation with the death that bears away such possibility. The plotless digressions, the limitless order of reading and obsessive focus on description, analysis and explanation, all take the place of Alix and the space she left behind. For sure, there is a certain liberty in this, but one that means the end of the kind of book that Roubaud loves. He know[s] the novels produced by Dickens' are no longer possible. He does not try to imitate them or to confuse art with a violently misdirected nostalgia.

Of course, I don't have much else to say about it now, since I have not yet read the novel. My reason for posting this today is to refer you to the excellent new blog Slightly Bluestocking, where AC, among other interesting posts, has been writing about her experience reading it:

Memory, and the way it shapes form – this is one of the primary concerns of The Great Fire of London. Roubaud states at the beginning that the book’s mystery is not in its content, but in its ‘formal meaning.’ And it is this latter aspect that slowly unravels over the course of the book. It’s actually the most fascinating part of the book (for me): that exploration of the why of the writing, and the why of the form.

Also, I like the passage from the novel that AC quoted in her previous post so much that I'm going to reproduce it here:

The fact is that a library is always expanding; from the "big bang" of one's first book up until its owner dies. A library can't really dwindle, or be emptied of a part of its substance, then start growing again. At least, not without mortal danger. Each one of the books it incorporates at one moment or another of its existence becomes equally indispensable, even if it will never be read again. A minimal pruning is in order at times, perhaps, but such action is conceivable only in the context of a general strategy of growth. If I maintain the image of the body, the books a library loses are nail clippings, fallen hair. But I find an even more appropriate comparison with plant life: a forest, perhaps, or a garden. You are surrounded by a living being. You yourself belong to this being.