The novelist and critic André Aciman (himself an exceptionally gifted stylist) observes that
the sentence, as conceived—or as practiced—by Proust, was not only a vehicle for speaking his melancholy yearning for things that were, or never were, and might never be again; the sentence was also a medium for decrypting and unpacking, layer after layer, clause after clause, the Russian-doll universe that people turn out to be, Marcel included. The sentence is how Proust sees, or rather how he reveals, that universe. Revelation is key. Description is only interesting insofar as it leads to recognition and surprise.9
That, I think, is a very apt way of talking about the effect the previous passage seems to aim for, a sort of sharp poking or prodding of the reader (with no qualms about indulging in repetition or recursivity) into a situation in which insight must be experienced. James is not so much (or not primarily) a novelist of melancholy yearning, but the other observations Aciman makes here might be as persuasively applied to James as to Proust. The other thing about the sentence is that it is a microcosm, or rather we might say—to use a more modern vocabulary—that it partakes of fractal properties, serving as a miniature emblem or replica of the work as a whole. For Austen or Flaubert, the sentence takes on a peculiar force and sharpness that is qualitatively different from what it possesses in the hands of contemporaries such as, say, Sir Walter Scott—for Austen—or Balzac and Émile Zola—for Flaubert. For James and Proust, furthermore, the sentence (or perhaps the paragraph-length block of prose) becomes the unit in which not just the sensibility but also the shape and goals and effects of the whole work of art can most clearly be discerned.
7
Disordered Sentences
Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Wayne Koestenbaum, Luc Sante
In my forties, I’ve become increasingly preoccupied with the ways that books are like the minds of the people who write them. The TV show Hoarders has recently drawn widespread attention to what happens when the human instinct to accumulate runs unchecked, and it’s clear that the problem doesn’t go away when we move from a real world to a virtual one: MP3s, digital books and pictures, movies and emails can also accrete to the point of impeding their owner’s ability to get anything done. Only a fine line separates being prolific from experiencing a clinically diagnosable hypergraphia (Alice Flaherty’s 2004 book, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block and the Creative Brain, offers the best account I know of this disorder); I think often of the famous experiment demonstrating how spiders’ webs become distorted based on which psychotropic drugs they have consumed: amphetamines lead to high-speed web production but with alarming gaps in the weave; LSD produces beautifully symmetrical nets with extremely poor functionality. A processing disorder like dyslexia or a compulsive tendency can contribute to extraordinary acts of creation: the excesses of Clarissa are intrinsic to the novel’s virtues, and I think of something like Andrew Solomon’s books on depression and childrearing, The Noonday Demon and Far from the Tree, as excellent examples of how one type of dyslexia, combined with a remarkable roving exploratory intelligence, can produce what is almost its own distinctive literary form. Certainly Solomon’s writing gives the sense (as in the case studies of Oliver Sacks) of the most miraculous achievements coming out of the need to compensate for what would commonly be considered deficits.
A moment that has stayed with me was when the British historian Boyd Hilton described himself, in a talk that involved retrospection about the shape of his career, as a “sad hedgehog and a happy lumper,” alluding to the contrast between his gift for generalization and the narrowness of his focus on the British evangelical movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. I had never thought of combining Isaiah Berlin’s fox–hedgehog paradigm (“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”) on a single pair of axes with Darwin’s lumper–hairsplitter opposition, but it was clear to me at once, as it will be clear to the reader of this book, that I am a happy fox and a resigned splitter.1 As writers, we have to work thoughtfully and realistically with our weaknesses as well as our strengths. If a humanities dissertation comes in at six hundred pages rather than two hundred, it doesn’t speak to a simple desire to exceed expectations so much as to something disordered—perhaps wonderfully disordered, but the logic of accumulation can become overwhelming (Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls manuscript is the sort of case I have in mind). At the end of the fourth installment of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice, the author’s afterword reveals that his characters and plot strands have so extremely proliferated that Martin has had to split his draft into two volumes, with the subsequent installment going back to the chronological starting point of this one and following a different set of characters over the same time span (“all the story for half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters”), and reading this, I saw something of why this particular large-scale project has been so beleaguered with delays and difficulties: when everything tends to grow more complex, or where each plot point is recursively connected to everything else in the work by way of complex patterning, it can become virtually impossible to lay down the entire story in anything like a final form. This is one way of thinking about Samuel Richardson’s inability to leave Clarissa alone, or about the difficulties James Boswell had deciding what to exclude from the Life of Johnson—the sheer mass of paper in the Boswell collections at the Beinecke Library in New Haven provides a vivid demonstration of how hard Boswell found it to let things go.
This language of diagnosis may sound dismissive or even disparaging, but it shouldn’t. For certain writers, a condition approaching the clinically diagnosable (a language processing disorder, an obsessive-compulsive streak, a hoarding impulse) can enable the creation of something transcendent, magical, with formal properties both defined and liberated by precisely those constraints. I think of what Roman Jakobson says about metaphor and metonymy in his essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances”: he considers the relationship between contiguity and connection on the one hand and selection or substitution on the other, the former aligned with metonymy and the latter with metaphor, suggesting that almost as clearly as these two poles can be discerned in aphasic language, so they structure literary language, with symbolist poetry standing with metaphor and realist fiction tending to align with the trope of metonymy.2 In these cases, a new dimension of meaning emerges by way of a formal choice that can be thought of in terms of disorder or constraint. In a canon that includes Austen and James, Flaubert and Proust, the name Georges Perec might have the air of an anomaly. He is much less widely read than those great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prose writers, and the novel for which he is probably best known in English is famous less for the elegance or craft of its sentences than for eschewing altogether any word that includes the letter e. Perec’s writings are strongly and idiosyncratically his own, but he is also associated with a Paris-based group called the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo, the Workshop for Potential Literature) whose members were interested in exploring the possibilities of formal constraints in literature, pursuing a playful and yet stringently monastic goal of freedom in constraint.
One thing Perec’s work shows with special clarity is the way in which list-making and voluntary constraints, once they take the place of character or plot, may also assume some of the emotional intensity and resonance associated with those components of realist fiction. Here are the opening sentences of Perec’s e-less novel La disparition (1969, translated by Gilbert Adair in 1995 as A Void):
Anton Voyl n’arrivait pas à dormir. Il alluma. Son Jaz marquait minuit vingt. Il poussa un profond soupir, s’assit dans son lit, s’appuyant sur son polochon. Il prit un roman, il l’ouvrit, il lut; mais il n’y saisissait qu’un imbroglio confus, il butait à tout instant sur un mot dont il ignorait la signification.
Incurably insomniac, Anton Vowl turns on a light. According to his watch it’s only 12.20. With a loud and langu
orous sigh Vowl sits up, stuffs a pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his chin, picks up his whodunit and idly scans a paragraph or two; but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his condition, its vocabulary too whimsically multisyllabic for comfort, throws it away in disgust.3
The name the Oulipo writers coined for a text written under a constraint involving the omission of one or more letters was lipogram, and perhaps the most distinctive thing about these sentences, on first view, is the oddity of diction brought about by the word choices impelled by the missing vowel. I wrote earlier about “mouthy” sentences, those sequences of words produced by writers like Gary Lutz and Lydia Davis that we roll over on our tongues, but Perec’s mode of arresting the reader’s attention derives in the first stance from a visual rather than an oral hyperacuity: “mouthy” sentences feel strange when we speak them, but setting up an arbitrary set of constraints to do with letters or representations on the page snags the attention differently, even if the result in both cases is to prevent us from taking the language of the fiction to be fluid or otherwise “natural.”
The translation is necessarily quite different from the original; where the French text reads “Son Jaz marquait minuit vingt” (the slangy proper name “Jaz” is necessitated by the fact that the French word for watch is montre—horloge [clock] is also obviously banned—and the phrase “minuit vingt” feels truncated, abbreviated, absent the word “l’heure”), the English translator can use the more conventional “watch” (because a name brand specific to France, Jaz, wouldn’t communicate much to American readers), and he also falls back on transcribing the time in numerals due to the impossibility of writing “twelve twenty” in English without contravening the fundamental rule. Adair has also chosen to narrate in the present tense—the French language has a slightly unusual past tense called the passé simple, used only in formal or highly literary writing, that Perec chooses because of the spelling constraint, though it sits oddly with his otherwise highly colloquial style: the passé composée, which would be the more colloquial choice, unavoidably relies on the letter e.
Both the French and the English sentences remain fully comprehensible—odd but not unrecognizably distorted. Without being warned, one might not at first glance notice the absence of e, though I think that the diction alerts the reader to something strange. (Aside from the protagonist’s peculiar name, in the French text it is perhaps that sentence about the watch that first flags the reader’s attention, while in the English translation, the opening words themselves already invite curiosity—why the curious alliteration, elevated diction and “mouthy” density of “Incurably insomniac”?) Far more extreme is the “complementary” or “reciprocal” text Perec subsequently composed, a novella (it is almost impossible to imagine writing a full-length novel under this constraint) composed of words that use none of the vowels except e.4 This is a much stranger production, ably translated here by Ian Monk (I will in this case give just the English text). The work’s French title was Les Revenentes, a necessary misspelling (it is the novel of e’s retern!), and it was published in English as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in a collection called Three By Perec:
Hélène dwelt chez Estelle, where New Helmstedt Street meets Regents Street, then the Belvedere. The tenement’s erne-eyed keeper defended the entrée. Yet, when seven pence’d been well spent, she let me enter, serene.
Hélène greeted me, then served me Schweppes. Cheers! Refreshments were needed. When she’d devested me, she herd me eject:
“Phew! The wether!”
“Thirtee-seven degrees!”
“September swelters here.”
She lent me her Kleenexes. They stemmed the cheeks’ fervent wetness.
“Well, feel better then?”
Hélène seemed pleesed, yet reserved; expectent re the recent news. En effet she then begged me:
“Bérengère’s entered the See yet?”
“Yes.”
“Perfect! Events present themselves well.”
These eyes begged her tell me the deserts she expected. Free jewels?
“Heck, Bérengère’s gems ‘n’ bezels tempt me!” she yelled.
Her extreme effervescence needed relentment, meseemed:
“Yet the gems’ theft’d be reckless! The See’s screened. Endless tent’re there, where expert peelers ‘n’ shrewd ’tecs dwell. We’d be demented…”
“We’ll never be checked! We’ll detect the defences’ breech, then enter. The rest’ll ensew.”
Next, she let me redeter her, then tell her the excerpted speeches the breeze’d sent between the deserted streets: meseemed rebel men eke lechered Bérengère’s jewels. We regretted the news. Hélène set her teeth. Her deep verblessness lengthened. The news’d depressed her? Never, she reneged, then sed she’d persevere, ne temere. Where led her secret, fervent reverees? (60–61)
This is style with a vengeance. At moments Perec has created what amounts almost to a new language; although the fluid in question is sweat rather than tears, there is even a certain poignancy to the Kleenex that “stemmed the cheeks’ fervent wetness.” The fantasy that motivates such literary productions is not a dream of conventional beauty. It is a more cerebral, almost a scientific aesthetic, at times spare but equally capable of playfulness or the sort of baroque bizarrerie seen in the language of The Exeter Text.
Perec always displays a keen sense of language as a system of notation or a means of record-keeping—Perec’s “day job” involved working as archivist in a scientific laboratory—though there is often, too, a sense of the inevitable failure of language to capture every iota of reality. (Jorge Luis Borges was preoccupied in his stories with the same sorts of representational problem, though those stories differ markedly in feel from Perec’s writing.) Here is a paean to miniaturization and precision in “The Page,” published in Perec’s 1974 collection Espèces d’espaces (Species of Spaces):
Space begins with that model map in the old editions of the Petit Larousse Illustré, which used to represent something like 65 geographical terms in 60 sq. cm., miraculously brought together, deliberately abstract. Here is the desert, with its oasis, its wadi and its salt lake, here are the spring and the stream, the mountain torrent, the canal, the confluence, the river, the estuary, the river-mouth and the delta, here is the sea with its islands, its archipelago, its islets, its reefs, its shoals, its rocks, its offshore bar, and here are the strait, the isthmus and the peninsula, the bight and the narrows, and the gulf and the bay, and the cape and the inlet, and the head, and the promontory, here are the lagoon and the cliff, here are the dunes, here are the beach, and the saltwater lakes, and the marshes, here is the lake, and here are the mountains, the peak, the glacier, the volcano, the spur, the slope, the col, the gorge, here are the plain and the plateau, and the hillside and the hill, here is the town and its anchorage, and its harbour and its lighthouse…5
The wonderful concreteness of the phrase “something like 65 geographical terms in 60 sq. cm.” brings the page vividly to us, with its densely realized geographical features—it is, as Perec goes on to observe, a “pretext for a nomenclature,” the list feeling verbal rather than spatial in its conjurations, although the “dictionary space” of the words will be transfigured in the subsequent paragraph into a moving scene (“a long goods train drawn by a steam locomotive passes over a viaduct; barges laden with gravel ply the canals; small sailing boats manoeuvre on the lake”), albeit a scene that still has something of the dollhouse feel of tilt-shift photography.
The epigraph to “The Bed,” which follows “The Page” in Species of Spaces, offers a distorted version of the famous first line of Proust’s novel (“For a long time I went to bed early”): “For a long time I went to bed in writing,” attributed to “Parcel Mroust” (16). The piece opens as follows:
We generally utilize the page in the larger of its two dimensions. The same goes for the bed. The bed (or, if you prefer, the page) is a rectangular space, longer than it is wi
de, in which, or on which, we normally lie longways. “Italian” beds are only to be found in fairy tales (Tom Thumb and his brothers, or the seven daughters of the Ogre, for example) or in altogether abnormal and usually serious circumstances (mass exodus, aftermath of a bombing raid, etc.). Even when we utilize the bed the more usual way round, it’s almost always a sign of catastrophe if several people have to sleep in it. The bed is an instrument conceived for the nocturnal repose of one or two persons, but no more.
This is deadpan, playful, ingenious; the mock-pedantic aspect of the commentator’s voice is less striking, perhaps, than his unusual clear-eyed insightfulness, which lends poignancy to the discussion. (The effect is almost as destabilizing as Gulliver’s disorienting shifts of scale in Lilliput and Brobdingnag.)
The passage is also rendered moving, I think, by the sense of catastrophe being always just round the corner, with that futile “etc.” after the two itemized types of catastrophe, one of them a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon, the other as old as recorded history. Perec was born in 1936 to parents who were Polish Jews but had moved to France in the 1920s. His father died in the French Army in 1940 and his mother died in Auschwitz; Perec himself was sent to live with an aunt and uncle and escaped his mother’s end. The fate of the European Jews in the twentieth century shadows much of Perec’s work, even when his topic is seemingly unrelated, as in “An Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four” (first published in Action Poétique in 1976, and reprinted in the collection L’Infraordinaire, which was published posthumously in 1989). The text is encompassed in just over five pages of the English-language edition Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, and it is my single favorite piece of Perec’s. It consists, quite simply, of a list of all of the things eaten by Perec over the course of that calendar year, loosely organized according to the order in which the items might feature on a menu or as components of a conventional meal at a corner bistro or restaurant, arranged within each subcategory in a fashion that is loosely though not restrictively alphabetical: the first entry reads “Nine beef consommés, one iced cucumber soup, one mussel soup” (244), and the list continues through various forms of seafood and vegetable, meat (“One milk-fed lamb, three lamb cutlets, two curried lambs, twelve gigots, one saddle of lamb”), wines, liqueurs and so forth, including a helpless gesture to “N coffees.” His biographer, David Bellos, has described Perec as “a man always puzzled by memory and sometimes obsessed with the fear of forgetting,” and calls this strange piece an “insane and brilliant inventory-poem” (Perec transcribed the details of what he ate over the course of the year and subsequently organized it into this format): “But even this madly meticulous listing is incomplete,” Bellos continues, “for it omits an otherwise unforgettable bottle of 1961 Clos Saint-Denis, drunk with Harry Mathews, out of huge Baccarat glasses.”6 The compulsion to record, Bellos adds, was linked to a sort of breakdown Perec had recently experienced and that drove him to pursue psychoanalysis, a self-described “memory breakdown” which involved the feeling that “unless I made a note of everything, I would be unable to hold on to any part of passing life”: “Every evening, with great scrupulousness, with obsessive conscientiousness, I made entries in a kind of log,” Perec wrote. “It was an absolutely compulsive procedure! the fear of forgetting!” Lists can perform many functions (canonformation, self-aggrandizement, celebration), but they also often represent the basic human impulse to hold on to things, to fend off loss by compulsive acts of recording.
Reading Style Page 10