The Review of Contemporary Fiction

A Structure Opera, by Bruce Fleming
reviewed by Eckhard Gerdes

Bruce Fleming. A Structure Opera. Six Gallery, 2002. 195 pp. Paper: $12.95.

Novelist Jim Chapman (In Candyland It’s Cool to Feed on Your Friends) says that novels are food. If so, Bruce Fleming has served up with his latest offering, A Structure Opera, what could best be described as a “nouvealipo sandwich.” Here’s the recipe: take two thick slices of Robbe-Grillet’s Nouveau Roman Meal bread and spread as many neo-Oulipo games in between as the bread will hold. The bread is rich in description, of course all objective, with no visible narrator. The invisible narrator is gender biased (e.g. “the creations of mere men,” “so that to him who sees”—or is this the Robbe-Grilletian absent narrator referring to himself in the third person, à la Jalousie?), which gives us a clue to the narrator’s personality. And then he leads us to games. The difference between Fleming’s games and real Oulipian amusements is that Oulipo’s exercises are to literary purpose—they are mechanisms employed to generate text. Fleming’s experiments have different results: dances for watch hands, pocket calculators, semaphores, metronomes, fingers, photocopiers, playing cards, and chess boards seem less like literary devices than some absurd Peter Schickele/PDQ Bach composition. The final section, the other slice of bread, is served to us while we do some museum hopping (the flavor should remind you of the museum hopping in the first slice) along the Mall by the nation’s capitol. The narrator reveals an almost Harold and Maude-like obsession for museums. And the fragments, to some extent, are pulled together in the novel’s final thrust of film scenario and story narratives. As structure, this opera succeeds. Somewhere, Mies van der Rohe is applauding. The structure of the novel is architectural, and Fleming builds a postmodern sandwich that even Dagwood could admire.