La Boutique obscure
Georges Perec [Melville House]
Subject to a host of new translations and literary studies, the Oulipo is enjoying a spell in the fickle spotlight of current literary trends. Championed by some as the solution to that other thème du jour (literary failure), the Ouvroir pour la littérature potentielle was established in 1960 by a group of experimental writers, each of whom had at the core of their artistic process the notion of constraint, exactitude and mathematical rigor. Georges Perec, who died in 1982, was perhaps the most prominent member of the group, widely renowned for *A Void*, a full-length mystery novel that eschews all use of the letter ‘e’, and Life: A User’s Manual, a masterpiece of composition whose plot follows the pattern of the famous ‘Knight’s Tour’ around a chessboard.
Consisting of 124 accounts of varying length and lucidity, La Boutique obscure is the strangely intractable result of Perec’s attempt to make faithful written records of everything he dreamt between 1968 and 1972. It is a project whose seemingly unrestrained subject matter places it in stark counterpoint to Perec’s widely celebrated Oulipian output. There, writing is forced to obey its own arbitrarily imposed laws. In La Boutique obscure, by contrast, not even the empirically observed laws of time and space are obeyed. “The alarm clock is unusable,” he dreams in February 1971. Tenses merge: “Your party is, was a smashing success.” The laws of mathematics are likewise ignored: “My boss pays me 82 francs (3×16) instead of 45 (3×15) for having served for three days as a fake subject of his experiment.”
“I give myself rules in order to be completely free,” Perec once accounted for his working methods. It is a nicely counterintuitive riff, just catchy enough as to seem completely meaningless. As La Boutique obscure will testify, however, it turns out to have been exactly right. The dreams recorded here are subject to no rules whatsoever; yet its noted anarchy enslaves the internal play of Perec’s subconscious. The earlier entries are fragmentary, varyingly nonsensical and banal. “Itinerary: known secret maze, doors of chest (round, armored), hallways, very long trek toward the encounter.” By 1970 at the latest, though, Perec has become the “fake subject of his experiment”, dozing out full nocturnal narratives of adventure, comedy and tragedy. “I thought I was recording the dreams I was having,” he writes in the preface; “I have realized that it was not long before I began having dreams only in order to write them.” Where once he dreamt of “sleeping on the bare floor, on a mattress with no frame”, later his dreams are filled with scaffolding, structures and ornament. The stage becomes a recurring motif too, projecting the idea of something being played out for an audience. Told to dream freely for us, his sleeping mind performs as if forced. A project of this sort will always turn out great fodder for psychoanalysts and literary geneticists; what is perhaps unexpected about it is its illustration, per Foucault, that observation constitutes a more effective means of control than simple law enforcement. -KB
First Book of Frags
Dave Lordan [Wurm Press]
In what is perhaps the most obviously allegorical story in Dave Lordan’s new collection, First Book of Frags, a small Irish town builds its entire economy around the tourism brought in by the Cornerboy, a local street performer who, having attracted the interest of so many “scientists and semioticians”, has been transformed from local pariah to community hero. Where once he was subject to ridicule and abuse, now he is the subject of “three separate volumes, which are available for purchase exclusively in our village”. The proximity of culture and commercial interests is a theme typical of this staunchly political collection, where such issues as suicide, addiction and turning a blind eye to evil are all addressed in a pointedly Irish context. “Their techniques of silencing are even further along in some respects than our own,” says the lively old Nazi in ‘Dr Essler’s Cocaine’. The mystically amoral tone within which most of the narrators operate is used to ventriloquize the unfeeling, spectral anti-language of the nation’s power structures. “Public services are being replaced by pre-recorded messages,” says one narrator. When the same narrator later writes of “pain so intense it almost causes speech in dogs,” he is identifying the origin of language in resistance to pain, injustice, and death. This is the language all art must speak. Dave Lordan speaks it with verve. -KB
Go Giants
Nick Laird [Faber]
Colm Toibín called Nick Laird’s To A Fault ‘the most auspicious debut in Irish poetry since Paul Muldoon’. Go Giants, his third collection, doesn’t sustain such gargantuan claims. Too many of the first section’s lyrics betray an attenuation of Laird’s formal dexterity, ‘History of the Sonnet’, for example, counting down to the irreverent but trite ‘Four. / Three. / Two. / What I mean to say is I think I love you or anyway would love to fuck you’. The universals of death and birth are paired with the intimately banal: eating takeaway curry, inteRailing, nipple piercing.
Meanwhile, the title poem’s technical gymnastics can’t hide the fact that – despite moving from Tyrone to New York, childhood to the present – it actually goes nowhere, recalling Beckett’s complaint that the triumph of style over substance, in Irish writing, is like wearing a bow-tie over a throat cancer.
‘Progress’, the long poem that comprises the second half, fares better. Borrowing title sections from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Laird locates modern poetry between the local and the universal, reality and what we imagine reality to be. As such, he operates under the sign of Wallace Stevens, describing poetry on the dust jacket as ‘a juncture of two kinds of real, the act caught in the act’. -JL
