As I said, it’s exceedingly unlikely that we’ll ever find answers to our questions. The theater, for its part, continues (because nothing stops it). The smart money is on our taking what we learned that night and parleying it into a future success.
The day after that fateful night — the one Boehlmer now simply calls “The Evening,” with those capital letters he’s so good at pronouncing — Flavy took us all — including the entire production team — out to lunch. It was on this occasion that he asked me to write this account of the events. He reserved a table for eleven, well aware that there were only ten of us. We ate and drank in the presence of an empty chair. Marcel paused a moment before raising his glass for a toast, saying, at last, “Viewed as a performance, it wasn’t too bad. In fact, I think it was one of our best.”
Afterword
The Republic of Jacques Jouet
For readers unfamiliar with Jacques Jouet’s vast oeuvre, a few words on two topics are in order. The first of these is his Republic, the second its constraints.
Since the violent fall of its monarchy in 1789, France has been committed to the idea of the republic. So much so that in this interval it has known no fewer than five republics — which it is the joy and sorrow of French schoolchildren to enumerate and explicate. Jouet, formerly a French schoolchild, is the author of a series of works to which he has given the title La République roman. The books that make up that growing republic vary widely in form, content, and length. What they share is a republican ardor of a special sort.
Jouet’s literary productions are ample, diverse, and extend, in fact, beyond his Republic. He began as a poet and continues as one, most monumentally in Navet, linge, oeil-de-vieux (Turnip, Linen, Oeil-de-Vieux), a collection of verse — in a day when volumes of poetry tend ever more towards brevity — of more than nine hundred pages. Jouet is a practicing playwright and his dramas have been staged all over the world — from Paris to Ouagadougou. He is the author of a lexicographical work cataloging French figures of speech that involve parts of the body (of which there are more than a few).1 All told, he is today the author of more than fifty books spanning the genres of poetry, drama, criticism, fiction, and biography. And in that impressive production La République roman occupies a special place.
To date, the Republic consists of thirty-seven works of shorter and longer fiction (Jouet insists that he doesn’t write novellas, just shorter and longer novels). It began in 1994 with Le Directeur du Musée des cadeaux des chefs d’Etat de l’étranger (The Director of the Museum of Gifts from Foreign Heads of State) and took hold with his next book — and his first to be translated into English—Mountain R, in 1996.2 Since then it has been populated by works of all sorts — from, to pick the productions of a single year, the slim and symmetrical Annette et l’Etna to the gargantuan and sprawling La République de Mek-Ouyes (both 2001).
Jacques Jouet is not the first Frenchman to create such a fictional republic. In July of 1842, Honoré de Balzac, half-dead from caffeine abuse, finished his Comédie Humaine. The inspiration for his title was not humble. It had a precedent in another comedy — Dante’s divine one. Dante, in fact, never referred to his work as anything other than as his “Commedia”; the “Divina” came from a different hand.3 Balzac, however, did not know this and did not need to. His concern was with this world and the life led in France’s new republic. In the preface he wrote for a comedy which spanned some ninety works and featured more than two thousand characters, he praises the wonders of electricity, laments that Walter Scott had not been born Catholic, and announces that his great work was written to serve as a history of morals and manners for France’s young republic. Whereas Dante wrote an allegory of the divine side of life, Balzac aspired to write an account of its human one. Were Jacques Jouet not so modest a writer, he might have titled his series of works The Republican Comedy, as La République roman has a similar aspiration — to offer a comedy both light and dark, sinister and innocent, of this world and its republics.
Jouet has noted that he began his République roman “in thematic terms” with topoi such as the museum, the mountain, the theater, the boardroom, the high school, the hotel restaurant, and so forth. He has recounted, however, that this thematic inspiration soon began to intermingle with a different one, as “impulsions of a clearly formal nature” increasingly shaped his republican works. To understand these impulsions, a bit of history is necessary.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CONSTRAINT
In 1960, a conference was held at Cérisy-la-Salle entitled Une nouvelle défense et illustration de la langue française (modeled on Du Bellay’s 1549 call for the enrichment of the French language). The conference was to honor the French man of arts and letters Raymond Queneau and, in particular, the colloquial richnesses he had discovered in such works as the recently published Zazie in the Metro (1959). This ten-day conference gave rise to one of the most curious French literary groups in a century rich in curious French literary groups — the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, “Workshop of Potential Literature,” or Oulipo, for short. The mathematicians and writers who made it up agreed to meet once a month. While not secret, the group was private, and went seven years before inducting a new member. As a young man, Queneau had been a Surrealist and like many a member left with the door slammed behind him. Informed by his experiences with the temperamental Breton and others in his Surrealist republic, Queneau decided, along with cofounder François Le Lionnais, that there would be no exclusions from the group — the maximum that would be allowed would be “excused absences” for those who passed away. Queneau and Le Lionnais themselves now hold such exemptions — as do Marcel Duchamp, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, and others.4
Jacques Jouet was thirteen at the time of Oulipo’s founding and thus ineligible for entry. By 1983 things had changed and Jouet found himself invited into the amicable circle that Oulipo still forms. But what did this mean? What does Oulipo do? Oulipo was formed not to compose literary works—this was something that its members believed writers could do well enough on their own. It was formed to compose literary constraints—constraints through which literary works might be written. Whether they were written or not was another question — and not the essential one. These constraints vary from the very simple to the very complex. The most famous case of the former is that of Georges Perec and his La disparition (The Disappearance5) — a book of more than three hundred pages in which no word containing the letter e appears. To remain with that author, Perec’s final novel, La vie mode d’emploi (Life A User’s Manual), is a fine example of the latter, composed as it was through the constraints formed by the use of a complex algorithm governing the recurrence of a whole network of objects, situations, themes, citations — and more.
As one expects from the member of such a group, Jouet has proven intensely interested in constraint. A work’s “form,” as he has often remarked, modifying a phrase from Francis Ponge, is “meaning’s tautest string” (la corde la plus tendue du sens).6 For Jouet, this elegant formula expresses the relation of constraint to the work that it produces. Although a constraint might begin as something arbitrary and external to the work, it soon begins to inform and form its content. To say in this context then that form is “meaning’s tautest string” is to say that the use of constraint is no sterile exercise in the manipulation of words, but is, instead, the setting of energizing obstacles, the composing of dynamic riddles for the writer to solve.
Such riddles are not, of course, foreign to Jouet’s republic. In a work not yet translated, Fins (Ends), two Parisian couples pull meaning’s string in a variety of ways. The first way is in a formal constraint that governs the book’s division into paragraphs. It is based on one of the most time-honored and difficult constraints in Western poetry — the sestina (a form that involves the regular permutations of six rhymes). In Fins, the recurrent elements are not rhymes but sentences. The novel contains 216 paragraphs, each of which is composed of between one and six sentences. The first paragraph contains one sentence, the
second two, the third three, and so forth, through the sixth paragraph. In the seventh paragraph, another permutation begins, in which the order is shifted. The pattern is followed until the exhaustion of all of the combinatorial possibilities (6 x 6 x 6 = 216). And it is here that meaning’s taut string begins to resonate. This formal constraint engenders a semantic one. Jouet’s fellow Oulipian Calvino famously wrote a work consisting of only the beginnings of a series of stories.7 Each of the 216 paragraphs in Fins, while fitting into the larger story of which they are a part, is composed as an ending to the brief narrative which that paragraph traces.
What, then, of Upstaged? Was it written in response to a constraint? If so, what is it? Or, if so, do we need to know it? Oulipians have been of two minds on this matter, disagreeing as to whether it was better to share the constraint with the reader, as Perec and Calvino believed, or, as Queneau argued, to remove the scaffolding once you’re done with the building. For some cases, like that of Fins, Jouet has chosen to tell his reader how he reached his ends. In a brief afterword to that work entitled, “To the Formalist Reader (Without the Author Formalizing Himself),” Jouet notes, “I made his book with many obscure things and two formal axioms.”8 Upstaged is graced with no similar afterword and leaves its reader in the dark as to the role constraint played in its composition.
Whereas Fins and Annette et l’Etna are then clearly Oulipian works pulled tight with the strings of constraint, Mountain R and Upstaged are of more uncertain character. This, however, does not mean that constraint plays no role in Upstaged. Whether or not formal axioms were employed in its writing, it is clear that it has much to say about constraint — and that it even offers something like an allegory of constraint. As the reader soon sees, it is a story about the strange fruits of the unexpected. A stranger arrives and his first act is, well, constraint (tying an actor to a chair). His next one is to oblige the troupe to follow his unexpected leads onstage. The ultimate effect of his imposition is liberatory. A walking, talking — and dashing—clinamen, the man they call the Usurper displaces the orderly fall of dramaturgical atoms. He functions as a spur to innovation, an opponent of settled thinking and acting. Constrained to improvise, the actors are removed from a rut they didn’t realize they were in. Deprived of their routines, they discover new possibilities. Each reacts in his or her fashion. One faints, another falls in love. Roles are exchanged and the game of musical chairs they play sends the author onstage where he must come to terms with his actors’ demands (one of which being that he commit suicide).
But, on another level, the Usurper lifts an important constraint: the play itself. For the actor, the play is pure constraint. Instead of speaking their mind, giving free rein to their feelings, following the unexpected turns of heart and mind — that they were born and will die, that they loved a girl with freckles and red hair, that they dream nightly of panda bears with frightening grins — they recite their lines. One way of looking at the stage is: constraints as far as the eye can see, and the French term for rehearsal—repetition—reinforces this idea. And yet, there is at the same time immeasurable room for diversity in the unity formed by a play. This is indeed the glory of the stage — the fine lines of individual interpretation traced by those who give it life. The actor must walk four paces to the settee and say, “But my dear, that simply will not do!” But how one takes those paces and says those lines can make a world of difference. In other words, the stage is the place where freedom and constraint meet and merge, and the reason that life in the theater shuttles back and forth between repetition and novelty. In Upstaged, the pendulum swings wildly in the direction of novelty. And then it swings back.
In the light cast by novelty and constraint, the play’s final line—“Never again!”—appears particularly rich. Spoken by “the President of the Republican Council,” it closes the proceedings and serves as a menacing promise: never again will he allow such an assault on his presidential dignity. Spoken by the actor, it means: never again will he be bound and gagged, knocked unconscious, robbed of his role. Spoken as a member of the troupe, it means: never again will he be cowed by their “debonair dictator,” the author-director Flavy. And, finally, spoken as a privileged witness to the night’s drama, it means that what the audience saw was utterly unique, one of a kind, never again to be repeated.
Returning to republican matters, the upstaged actors at the end of this novel wonder whether they have witnessed a political statement — and Jouet’s readers might find themselves in the same position in Upstaged, in Mountain R, and the rest of La République roman. In his Raymond Queneau, Jouet says of the young writer — in 1927, then a member of the Surrealists—“Queneau shows a clear apolitical bent even at a time when he is, to all appearances, quite politicized.”9 While this is an excellent description of Queneau’s works and days, it might with equal justice be applied to Jouet’s own development. It would be wrong to conclude that Jouet’s works are primarily political ones. Upon closer inspection, one sees that he is far less interested in denouncing the Irrépublique, as he at one point calls it, or bringing about une nouvelle République réembastillée, as he remarks elsewhere, than in exploring the literary freedoms and constraints that a fictional republic offers.
Vladimir Nabokov, a lover of novels and puzzles, once said that “a great writer’s world” is “a magic democracy where even some very minor character, even the most incidental character…has the right to live and breed.” In the case of Jacques Jouet, we might modify this formula to say that what Jouet’s works form is a magic republic where good actors and bad politicians, good daughters and bad fathers, mysterious mountain climbers and secretive curators all have an inalienable and enlightening right to live and breed.
LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE
About the Author and the Translator
JACQUES JOUET was elected to the Oulipo in 1983. He is the author of more than sixty texts in a variety of genres — novels, poetry, plays, literary criticism, and short fiction — including the novel Mountain R, which is part of his La République roman cycle, and was published by Dalkey Archive in 2004.
LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (2007) and Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (2009).
Notes
1 Les mots du corps dans les expressions de la langue française (Paris: Larousse, 1990).
2 Translated by Brian Evenson for Dalkey Archive Press in 2004.
3 Though an illustrious one — that of Boccaccio.
4 For an overview of Oulipo’s activities, see Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, edited by Warren Motte (Dalkey Archive, 1998) and the more recent State of Constraint: New Work by Oulipo (McSweeney’s, 2006). As concerns Jouet, the reader is encouraged to consult Warren Motte’s writings — particularly his “Jacques Jouet and the Literature of Exhaustion” (SubStance, Issue 96, 2001, 45–63).
5 Translated into English as A Void (1994) by Gilbert Adair.
6 Ponge’s remark concerned classicism, which he called, “la corde la plus tendue du baroque,” the tautest string of the Baroque. In Pour un Malherbe (Paris: Gallimard, 1965, 238).
7 This novel is If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), whose working title was Incipit.
8 Jacques Jouet. Fins. Paris: P.O.L, 1999, 119. As concerns one of those formal axioms, it bears noting that the sestina has played an important role in a number of Oulipian constraints — seen with special refinement in Jacques Roubaud’s Hortense novels and in Hervé Le Tellier’s The Sextine Chapel.
9 Jacques Jouet. Raymond Queneau. Lyon: La Manufacture, 1988, 14.
Table of Contents
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Afterword
About the Author and the Translator
Notes
ing books on Archive.
Upstaged Page 4