Context
Reading Jacques Roubaud
John Taylor
Jacques Roubaud is a playful, puzzling,
erudite, at times obscure, yet at other times thoroughly moving
"composer" (as he puts it) of poetry and prose. An algebraist by trade
(he long professed mathematics at the University of Paris X-Nanterre
and now directs research at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales), Roubaud has surpassed all other French writers (with the
possible exceptions of his mentor, Raymond Queneau, and his late
sidekick, the ingenious Georges Perec) in entwining these two disparate
manifestations of human mind: on the one hand writing, which try as it
might can hardly avoid dealing with experienced feelings, memory,
perceived reality; and on the other hand mathematics, which involves
not only numbers and calculations (Roubaud likens himself to a
"counter"), but also vertiginous logical constructs. Like the East and
West of Kipling, can the twain ever really meet? In Roubaud they do, impressively and instructively. From his first book, Oulipian experiments
thereby attempt to gain control over subjectivity and arbitrariness,
over mimesis and expressionism. They are, moreover, surrounded by an
atmosphere of schoolboyish secrecy, which Roubaud links—in his own
case—to "Bourbaki," a group of five French mathematicians who in the
1960s overturned long-standing concepts and pedagogical methods by
endeavoring to derive, with the tools of formal logic, all fields of
mathematics from set theory. This topic is developed in Roubaud’s
memoir, Mathematique : (1997), an engaging account of his
fascination, first as a student, then as a young algebraist, with this
revolutionary approach. Evidently, the most extreme Oulipian
language games run the risk of semantic austerity, emotional
chilliness, even a sort of clever juvenile silliness. The contrived
elaborate form overwhelms the meager contents; there is no further
"meaning"—beyond the definition of the form—to unearth, deepen or
interpret; there is nothing but a formula to "reread." A few sections
of Roubaud’s latest collection of poems, set in Paris and given the
Baudelairean title La forme d’une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur des humains (1999), may indeed strike some readers as a case in point. As in all of
Roubaud’s poetry collections, the volume displays a brilliant variety
of techniques, ranging from strange "poem-lists" to funny children’s
rhymes, and also including, more seriously, a series of (sometimes)
classical sonnets devoted to death. These meditative sonnets are
arranged according to a "protocol" borrowed from the English satirist
Joseph Hall (1574-1656), one of those little-known English writers whom
Roubaud likes to disinter from the British Library during his periodic
London sojourns (whose solitary routines are, by the way, touchingly
detailed in The Great Fire of London). Emotionally forcible and intellectually rich, these sonnets recall similar sequences in the author’s poetic masterpiece, Quelque chose noir (1986; translated as Some Thing Black),
composed after the death of his young wife, the photographer Alix Cléo
Roubaud. Yet these grave sonnets are incongruously followed by
whimsical pieces such as the two concrete poems "Il neige!" and "La
neige fond!", each based on a typographical arrangement of Paris street
names; or by, for instance, a permutational, bilingually punning array
of words in which the English word "squirrel" is derived from the
English-French word "square." The death-sonnet sequence and
other subtly melancholic poems aside (including one in which the poet
revisits a favorite childhood site, the "standard meter" of the rue de
Vaugirard), La forme d’une ville change plus vite pales—at
first glance—when perused alongside the work of the stroller par
excellence of Parisian streets, the poet Jacques Réda. Réda’s poems,
prose poems and prose narratives, gathered in Les Ruines de Paris (1977; translated as The Ruins of Paris)
and several other volumes, trace the itineraries of a writer searching
for ambiences, scenes and everyday details suddenly implying hope or
transcendence—serendipities that may well occur at the most ordinary
street corners or near the most unsightly acacias in some untouristic
arrondissement of the capital. Upon second thought, however, no
two Parisian peripateticians are further apart in intent than Roubaud
and Réda. The two contemporaries, like the American root beer extolled
by the former and the Cotes de Ventoux red wine praised by the latter
(in his journey, by moped, to the source of the Seine), are thus not
strictly comparable. Roubaud, who likes the philosophical styles of
Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein so much that he also likes to
parody them, might state it this way: both are poets (or beverages),
but one has several properties (x1, x2, x3, etc.) that the other does
not have—and vice versa. Roubaud’s mature works, each involving
grieving for his deceased wife, constantly presuppose a grim, drab
horizontality on which any aspiration to vertical transcendence is
foreclosed. Such are the geometrics of mourning, and they constitute
the landscape on which the Oulipian fun-making—alongside the elegaic
passages—also occurs. Roubaud, moreover, takes inspiration for this
bewildering volume about Paris—a city he admittedly dislikes, though we
do not entirely believe him—from Queneau’s equally clownish, diaristic Courir les rues (1967). The word-games can thus leave a bitter aftertaste or touch upon the absurd. The harrowing force of Some Thing Black, of parts of The Great Fire of London and its sequel La Boucle (1993; the title refers to a "loop," as in the language of computer
sciences), indeed derives from remittent failures to get beyond the
brute facts of death, to surpass the painful recurrences of memory, to
attain consolation, to enter into some sort of communion with his
beloved. Nor can any tangible hope long be placed in some other
"possible world," a topic explored in the poetry collection La Pluralite des mondes de Lewis (1991; translated as The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis), a philosophically far-reaching sequel to Some Thing Black. "Each time I think of you," he laments in The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis, "you cease to be." The paradox is typically haunting. Roubaud is left
alone with "all you never anymore are," a phrase which, in both the
original and Rosmarie Waldrop’s version, gives out a melodious
Beckett-like sigh. It is in this confrontation between emotion
and constraining form, between a pre-planned literary-mathematical
structure and the painful vicissitudes of personal history, that
Roubaud’s writings raise so many essential questions. Most of the books
written since his wife’s death revolve around phenomena of memory, and
in this respect he forges a different model of remembering than that
underlying the unavoidable landmark for French (and other) writers in
this domain: Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In
contrast to Proust’s notion of memory as expanding from some small,
insignificant detail (like a madeleine cookie, of which the author of The Great Fire of London must surely be thinking when he in turn brilliantly describes a fresh
croissant), Roubaud conceives recollecting as a sort of "forest" in
which branches and twigs of clustered trees overlap and intertwine. The Great Fire of London endeavors to describe why an ambitious project born literally of a dream—in which a novel entitled The Great Fire of London is written—was never realized. Roubaud attempts to recall the
circumstances associated with the various stages of this "failure" and
thereby to make palpable the long "presence of the dream in the
background of [his] life." Almost in passing, he notes that he elected
to take on this project as "an alternative to self-chosen extinction."
Brief glimpses of deep despair and anguish are not uncommon in
Roubaud’s books, by the way. This book about why another book
remained unwritten thus depicts, to use a French expression, an
intentional "turning around the pot," where the "pot" actually
represents one or several central absences: most obviously, the novel
that never came to be, but also, by extension, his departed wife and
perhaps even "something" that neither the body nor the mind can reach.
In this respect, The Great Fire of London contrasts intriguingly with Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, whose intricate fictional scaffolding is completely dismantled at the
end, leaving the reader (and the writer) with no story; in Roubaud,
there is no story to begin with, only the biographical context for the
missing narrative; in both books, one is left with an acute sense of
the void. As Roubaud begins "transcribing" (though apparently
never re-writing) the "prose of memory" associated with this abandoned
project, he discovers that one memory not only leads to another, but
that each single memory branches off into digressions and detours, or
solicits additions, afterthoughts, or explications. Roubaud helps us
envision this "branching" quality by creating an original book-length
form that mimicks it. The main narrative, which progresses not
according to the chronological order of the events related, but
rather according to the order in which the events arise in the author’s
reminiscing mind, is thus followed by two appendixes, one entitled
"Interpolations," the other "Bifurcations." Within the main narrative,
the reader is frequently invited to consult a given interpolation or
bifurcation. This is also the case with La Boucle. The latter
is, moreover, typographically complex, including boldface sentences,
underlinings, italics, and different typeface sizes. Roubaud’s model
for memory thus differs significantly from that informing the novels of
another French writer fascinated by the phenomena of memory: Claude
Simon, whose convoluted perception-crowded sentences convey the
impossibility of mentally grasping or "recollecting" an object, an
event, a person, or an instant of time in any global, coherent way. Roubaud’s method must of course at some point be channeled. The ever-branching "prose of memory" could conceivably ramify ad infinitum. There are communicative limits to the literary translation of this
model. For all his digressiveness, Proust constantly selects and
shapes, for he ever desires to maintain control over the emotions that
he provokes in his reader. In contrast, Roubaud here and there lets too
much "information"—as opposed to vivid novelistic details—into The Great Fire of London and La Boucle. In the former book, for instance, one wishes to keep Alix Cleo Roubaud
almost exclusively in mind (even if her presence is characteristically
discreet), yet in one passage (with its corresponding bifurcations),
the author expatiates on an American girlfriend who hails back to an
earlier period in his life. The narrator’s deep love for his wife is of
course set off by his more superficial relationship with the American
woman; nevertheless, the scenes drag on somewhat; and the risk of
prolixity is present elsewhere, in the very idea of a "prose of
memory." This being said, we are obviously dealing in these recent
books with no "cold formalist," nor gossipy intellectual, but rather
with an exceptionally inventive and sensitive autobiographer who,
through this most unusual kind of artistic auto-analysis, is composing,
as he himself remarks, fascinating and challenging "memor[ies] of the
story of memory."
(1967), of which the mathematical symbol for "belonging" entitles a
volume of multiform "sonnets" arranged according to the moves in a
masters match of the Japanese game of go, Roubaud emerged as an
original voice. Not surprisingly, the author of subsequent collections
such as Mono no aware (1970), Trente et un au cube (1973) and Autobiographie, chapitre dix (1977) is not only a resourceful connoisseur of the history of poetic
forms, but also a member of Oulipo, the French "Workshop of Potential
Literature," a group of writers and mathematicians which was founded in
1960 by Queneau and François Le Lionnais and still remains active
today. As Roubaud explains in his provocative collection of theoretical
dialogues about poetry and fiction, Poesie, etcetera: menage (1995), never has a literary movement lasted so long in the history of French writing.
Oulipians use self-imposed formal "constraints" when writing, the most renowned example being Perec’s "e"-less novel La Disparition (1969; translated as A Void). Sometimes Oulipian constraints are geometric, algebraic or numerological; the plot of Perec’s opus magnum, La Vie mode d’emploi (1978; translated as Life A User’s Manual),
is engendered by means of calculations based on a "10×10 magic square."
Other constraints may be "thematic," such as Jacques Jouet’s recent
exploit of penning a poem per day about a turnip, an experiment that
lasted four years; or "chronological," such as Roubaud’s writing of a
certain recurrent type of passage in his innovatively autobiographical La Grande Incendie de Londres (1989; translated as The Great Fire of London)
only in the wee hours of the morning, accompanied—in a striking image
of inner desolation—by a lukewarm bowl of instant coffee. Some
Oulipians give a spin to an entire literary genre. Roubaud’s witty
"Hortense series" (La Belle Hortense, 1985, translated as Our Beautiful Heroine; L’Enlèvement d’Hortense, 1987, translated as Hortense Is Abducted; L’Exil d’Hortense, 1990, translated as Hortense in Exile),
for example, concocts a wacky pastiche of the English detective
novel—if "pastiche" is a word indeed wild enough to embrace the
perpetually disarming "distancing effects" sustained by the author in
this trilogy. The reader is made so aware that he is holding a
"detective novel" that the "enigma" becomes less a "plot" than a series
of evolving narrative structures. The genuine contents are at several
removes from the "suspenseful action."
