Occasionally one finds succinct answers to the rather conservation [sic -- obv. we mean ‘conservative’] objections that all this POMO is just self-indulgent game=playing with language, (etc). And, yes, we can blame DFW for earning this lazy accusation so much cred. I really don't want to rehearse all the various variations these kinds of things take on. You know, like with Husserl, that :: The work is the thing. Nevertheless, one might always provide one of those gottcha moments which you always believe would put the matter to rest. (And to head off another one, the request to Please just stop with the dualisms should be addressed to the conservative critik ; the ‘innovative/experimentalists’ aren’t the dualists here, they are the correct ones). Frankly, the first exhibit which should put to rest the accusation that all this POMO is just playing games with language (technical term here should be “noodling”) is the work of Raymond Federman. That he is BURIED really is an indictment of a certain (conservative/reactionary) manner of conceiving reality/etc. And just so you know that what I am about to quote, what I am about to reveal, what you are about to witness which will probably not change your opinion about literature one iota, is not from a neutral source. The thing comes from the pen of Tom McCarthy whom for some reason I had thought of as a student of John Barth. Whether he is one or not, he may as well be. Barth is a POMO author=exhibit who is pretty conventionally middle-class and doesn’t really have anything at stake except for the overwhelming literary question, How does one write fiction after Joyce/etc? And Barth has essay’d over this question. To the degree to which his essays are kind of required reading for this kind of question. All this about a book I haven’t read by an author I’ve never read.And I’m not even trying to omit the ‘e’. I’ll just say that both my parents are very much alive. My grandparents, with the exception of my paternal g-pa, lived to rather rich old ages, given their dirt=farming lives. Perec. Prc, in a poor transliteration from/to the Hebrew. פרץ says my googlator (I’m too embarrassed to claim that I’ve spent even the time learning the aleph-bet ; it’s all been roundly forgotten, my chagrin). Is it significant that Hebrew ‘leaves out’ all vowels? And it’s not really a problem? Even if you try it with English?The digression here is either that I like to hear myself type or I’m embarrassed to offer you yet again the same thing you’ve heard over and over again. And every time this kind of thing comes up you (I? I’ve lost the pronomial order again!) (where’s the English equivalent for the German “man” ; “one” just doesn’t work today on the street) say something about how people just don’t want to read xyz kind of thing. They want to read Dan Brown and that’s okay because what a person wants is what a person wants and there’s nothing one (!, I mean “you” of course (or “I”?)) can say. The digressing here is mostly a function of the absence of my really having anything heavy to say. Whereas usually the digression is a function of avoiding having precisely a very heavy thing to digress around. Federman calls his absence The Unforgivable Enormity.But sometimes the real is more than just hidden: sometimes its significance lies in its absence. Perec’s La Disparition famously contains no letter e – not only the letter most used in French (as in English) prose, but also the core of the words père and mère. Both of Perec’s parents having fallen victim to the Nazis (father in battle, mother in Auschwitz), several critics have heard in the French e its homophone eux, ‘them’. The real that lurks beneath the playfulness thus becomes, in this instance, both personal and historical, the joker-card a marker for the 20th century’s least funny moment. The same real – the Holocaust in particular – impinges on all of Beckett’s work, whose unnameables and catastrophes convey the horror and unspeakability of this event to which they never refer far more profoundly than the directly representational writing of, say, Primo Levi. In other words, this POMO experimental playing language games which Perec does in A Void may have the same kind of heavy duty absence significance as does Federman’s unceasing digressions. That’s the quotation I’ve been dancing around, unsuccessfully avoiding the thing I came here today to share with you. And it’s been bothering me too recently, without really trying to delve into holocaust fiction and the many questions which surround it. In a rather straight forward fictional manner Paul Verhaeghen in his novel Omega Minor rather directly raises some significant objections to the conventional realism established by such as the institutions of the Primo Levi’s and the Elie Wiesel’s about how holocaust fiction ought to be written. The result naturally is the BURIAL of the likes of Federman. I ask you, Why has Federman’s truth been avoided?The quotation, I really should inform you, is from Tom McCarthy in a recently published article in London Review of Books, “Writing Machines: Tom McCarthy on realism and the real”. You should read the whole thing. Here’s the link :: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/tom-mcca... So that’s really all I have to say. Mostly to apologize once more for my logorrhea (words through kidneys, straight from the heart!) but mostly just to apologize (speaking upon my words?) for ramming once again down your throat this apparent (merely apparent, because my side knows that the only way to approach ‘realism’ in fiction is to innovate and experiment (yes, we know the ‘meaning’ of those words is contended, and those who are id’d as “experimental” also like to object to “labels” etc)) dualistic antagonism -- but it’s just that I feel it unnecessarily urgent that once again I want to declare that I prefer to take the word of exciting and dazzlingly new Writers over the word of conservative boring readers. Okay, there’s another relation of Two ; is it dualistic? Dunno, but it is unnecessary. Not all readers are conservative and boring, and a hell of a lot of writers are not exciting or dazzling. Some are confounding and I like them too.
A Void (La Disparition)–Georges PerecA Lipogrammatic Synopsis ---- which with artful constraint will focus savor, nay passion and by addition of vigorous acuity and highbrow purport, may transplant mirth as though a frolicking Pan full of ambrosial liquor.As his country is torn apart by social and political anarchy, Anton Vowl, known capricious kook and insomniac, is missing. Ransacking his Paris accommodation (turning all up and down, all in & out), his top, top pals scour his diary for hints to his location. At first look, nothing is in plain sight, all is myopic, but Vowl's inclination for word play, notably for "lipograms" (compositions in which a particular symbol, pictograph or syllabary is A.W.O.L.) is commonly known. But as his chums start to work out Vowl's word labyrinth’s, tracking through various trails amongst Vowl’s data, his companions start to go missing, 1 by1 by 1, and with mystifying Fortuna. Through this story you and I follow Vowl’s cohorts, trailing (magnifying glass in hand) through a Gordian knot of distractions, convolutions & fog bound motifs, forming a Rubics squarish form of a madcap roaming, with foul play and slayings a constant quandary and a garishly Faustian conclusion. A Void is a philosophical whodunit, a bloodhound, P.I., a shoofly story, chock-full of plots and unfolding's, of trails in pursuit of pathways, it’s as though Dr Watson’s brainy companion was caught running through a phantasmagoric vista, with brushwork by Miró * or his kind .All of which affords this books author occasion to display his virtuosity as a lingual magician, acrobat, and lugubrious buffoon, a mad calculus doctor piling word upon word in a foolish, rash, cloud-soaring ziggurat, a monstrous burj of Babil.It is also a flagitious garrulous stunt: a 280 odd folio fiction that on no occasion puts to work a particular symbol that falls twixt D and F. Adair's translation, is also mind-bogglingly astounding and full of dark art, it also constricts it’s wording choosing to follow its original authors lipogrammatic constraint and in doing so fashions a book that has no ilk, no comparisons, that lights its own trail with lamps and flash bangs, prior to skipping, dancing, tripping, prancing, 1 instant a figurant or Prima, anon a hippopotamus, an aardvark. A non-tabloid with an autonym such as “Chrono” broadcast this summary "a daunting triumph of will pushing its way through imposing roadblocks to a magical country, an absurdist nirvana of humour, pathos, and loss.".http://parrishlantern.blogspot.com/20...
Do You like book A Void (2005)?
I can't choose multiple dates, so instead I'll say here that I tried reading this book in '95, '97, '01, and again in '03. It kills me. Every time. The insomnia that has plagued me my whole life comes from the way I obsessively think about words and combinations of words. This is what goes through my head when I'm thinking of nothing else. Then this guy Gilbert Adair goes and translates a French novel written by Georges Perec in 1969, and I obsess over it. I start reading, and I can't get over how the original was written in French without using any words that contain the letter 'e'. But then I obsess over how the translator could've retained the original intent and still used only words that don't contain the letter 'e'. It's flat-out mind-boggling.I can't help wanting to read it because writing with restrictions fascinates me. OuLiPo literature is some crazy stuff, especially when it doesn't come off as novelty. I'd say that if this novel barely made sense and used no words with the letter 'e', it could be considered novelty. But no, he had to go and create a well-written novel and not use words with 'e'. Bastard.I forgot to add that this book drives me freaking insane. That's why I've tried reading it so many times.
—Jeff
At first sight, this lippogrammatic story is simply a show of authorial skill and wit; notwithstanding, this unusual approach to writing, in which a rigid constraint applying to a glyph from ISO basic Latin script (fifth from start) controls composition, allows for an amusing (although, at particular points, truly confusing) narration to unfold. Both author, of Oulipo acclaim, and translator Adair construct a brilliant compilation of noir motifs into a gripping conundrum. Any fan of wordplay or whodunits should not pass this up.
—Sean
Samuel Johnson (the dictionary dude) said, "a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."So, yes, in that vein, one can indeed write a book without using the letter E, but as a book? it sucks.
—Emma Sea
