• Comment
• Print
• Email

Context N°2

Return to the full description

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, (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."

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."

Return to the full description