The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Way Home: Selected Longer Prose by Harry Mathews
Joseph Tabbi

Harry Mathews. The Way Home: Selected Longer Prose. Atlas, 1999. 215 pp. Paper: $14.95.

At first glance, the presentations in this collection could not be simpler: “Here is an outline of my life,” opens the seventy-page-long “Autobiography”; “Here is an old French regional dish for you to try,” begins “Country Cooking in Central France.” Each paragraph in the memoir about Georges Perec begins with the words, “I remember,” and each item was initially composed without Mathews “trying to be exhaustive or particularly acute.” “Singular Pleasures,” sixty-one descriptions of masturbation the world over, is said to have “emerged without warning when six of its episodes sprang full-blown into being at four o’clock on a March morning in 1981.” With characteristic poise, Mathews is only too happy, at one level, to let words be equal to the things they stand for. For example, the recipe in “Country Cooking,” a farce double (fish encased in clay balls inside a lamb), is itself farcical. For stuffing, it includes a story in the form of a song that is said to be sung by the Auvergnat community during the overnight roasting break. Impossible as a recipe, the narrative is no better able to contain what it presents in any one form or frame; and neither can the matter-of-fact prose conceal a creative exuberance and a not infrequent anguish—as in the “Armenian Papers,” translations without originals which “exist scarcely at all except as a desperate hypothesis.”
Exuberance, anguish, and imagination-in-desperation are all attributes of the speaker in Mathews—a distinctive personality who somehow exceeds the neutral voice, blunt significations, and considerable formal and material constraints that the author chooses to work under (as the only active American in the Oulipo or, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle). Without the constraints, Mathews insists, and without a prose that stays close to the plainness of everyday American conversation, he could not bring his “hidden experiences,” his “unadmitted self into view.” As in the drawings by Trevor Winkfield attractively reproduced among the pages of the volume’s title story, locating the human figure as an “identifiable object” requires activity on the part of the reader, an imaginative ability to move “by angles, along a black line inscribed on a white ground that is itself bordered by blackness.” In Mathews, as in Winkler, “identity as a clear or coded sign” is only an aid to the imagination, “an occasion for rest, something to lean an elbow on while drawing fresh and not necessarily metaphorical breath.” And then the process of self-creation continues through further black marks on white paper—the materiality of written language.
A fitting complement to the novels and edited compendia that in recent years have confirmed Mathews’s position among English-speaking writers, these seven distinctive studies in “constrictive form” also reveal why the way home to autobiography and to recognition, over obstacles apparently of the author’s own making, has taken so long. [Joseph Tabbi]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Way Home: Selected Longer Prose by Harry Mathews Joseph Tabbi Harry Mathews. The Way Home: Selected Longer Prose. Atlas, 1999. 215 pp. Paper: $14.95. At first glance, the presentations in this collection could not be simpler: “Here is an outline of my life,” opens the seventy-page-long “Autobiography”; “Here is an old French regional dish for you to try,” begins “Country Cooking in Central France.” Each paragraph in the memoir about Georges Perec begins with the words, “I remember,” and each item was initially composed without Mathews “trying to be exhaustive or particularly acute.” “Singular Pleasures,” sixty-one descriptions of masturbation the world over, is said to have “emerged without warning when six of its episodes sprang full-blown into being at four o’clock on a March morning in 1981.” With characteristic poise, Mathews is only too happy, at one level, to let words be equal to the things they stand for. For example, the recipe in “Country Cooking,” a farce double (fish encased in clay balls inside a lamb), is itself farcical. For stuffing, it includes a story in the form of a song that is said to be sung by the Auvergnat community during the overnight roasting break. Impossible as a recipe, the narrative is no better able to contain what it presents in any one form or frame; and neither can the matter-of-fact prose conceal a creative exuberance and a not infrequent anguish—as in the “Armenian Papers,” translations without originals which “exist scarcely at all except as a desperate hypothesis.” Exuberance, anguish, and imagination-in-desperation are all attributes of the speaker in Mathews—a distinctive personality who somehow exceeds the neutral voice, blunt significations, and considerable formal and material constraints that the author chooses to work under (as the only active American in the Oulipo or, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle). Without the constraints, Mathews insists, and without a prose that stays close to the plainness of everyday American conversation, he could not bring his “hidden experiences,” his “unadmitted self into view.” As in the drawings by Trevor Winkfield attractively reproduced among the pages of the volume’s title story, locating the human figure as an “identifiable object” requires activity on the part of the reader, an imaginative ability to move “by angles, along a black line inscribed on a white ground that is itself bordered by blackness.” In Mathews, as in Winkler, “identity as a clear or coded sign” is only an aid to the imagination, “an occasion for rest, something to lean an elbow on while drawing fresh and not necessarily metaphorical breath.” And then the process of self-creation continues through further black marks on white paper—the materiality of written language. A fitting complement to the novels and edited compendia that in recent years have confirmed Mathews’s position among English-speaking writers, these seven distinctive studies in “constrictive form” also reveal why the way home to autobiography and to recognition, over obstacles apparently of the author’s own making, has taken so long. [Joseph Tabbi]

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