The Loop. Jacques Roubaud. Trans­lated by Jeff Fort. Dalkey Archive Press. $16.95

In his after­word to the second volume of Jacques Roubaud’s “multi-​volume series of auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal prose works” to be trans­lated into Eng­lish, trans­la­tor Jeff Fort help­fully explains that the entire series is called “the great fire of London” (with­out cap­i­tals or ital­ics), while the first volume, pub­lished in Eng­lish under the title The Great Fire of London, is also titled “Branch One: Destruc­tion,” and the entire work is also known as “the project,” which is not to be con­fused with the Project (cap­i­tal­ized and in bold), a grander work envi­sioned by Roubaud that never came to be, which would have included a novel called The Great Fire of London. (I omit cer­tain con­fus­ing details for clarity’s sake.)

One would expect noth­ing less elab­o­rate from a member of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature poten­tielle, or Work­shop for Poten­tial Lit­er­a­ture), a loose affil­i­a­tion of mostly French writ­ers known for their constraint-​based com­po­si­tion prac­tices. The Oulip­i­ans reject surrealism’s cel­e­bra­tion of inde­ter­mi­nacy while embrac­ing the rule-​following aspects of such pro­ce­dures as cadavre exquis. For instance, the con­straint S + 7 requires the author to replace every noun of an exist­ing text with the word that appears seven entries after it in a dic­tio­nary. A throw of the dice, it turns out, abol­ishes chance. Georges Perec’s La Dis­pari­tion, a novel con­tain­ing no instance of the letter “e,” is prob­a­bly the most well-​known Oulip­ian text. I have not read it—“e” is one of my favorite letters—but as the Amer­i­can con­cep­tual poet Ken­neth Gold­smith has noted of his own Oulipian-​flavored works, “You really don’t need to read [the] books to get the idea of what they’re like; you just need to know the gen­eral concept.”

This is truer, of course, of some Oulipo com­po­si­tions than others. Jacques Roubaud—“a com­poser of math­e­mat­ics and poetry,” as he signs one of his essays—is one of the group’s most lyri­cally accom­plished poets. He first con­ceived of the Project in 1961, fol­low­ing the sui­cide of his younger brother. “To put it bluntly,” Fort says, this tragedy “got Roubaud writing”—in order not to follow his brother in “self-​willed dis­ap­pear­ance,” as he has it in the first volume of “the great fire.” In 1967, with the sup­port of Oulipo co-​founder Ray­mond Que­neau, he pub­lished a book of poetry with the title ∈ (Roubaud tells us this is pro­nounced “the book whose title is the sign for belong­ing to a set,” but if anyone has ever actu­ally called it this, I’ll eat my @). The poems cor­re­spond to the pawns in the Japan­ese game of go and may be read in four dif­fer­ent ways, one of which, for­tu­nately for boring lit­er­al­ists like me, is lin­early. Today the col­lec­tion seems a clear pre­cur­sor to the work of Michael Palmer, Susan Howe, and other lyri­cally inclined poets asso­ci­ated with Lan­guage poetry (Palmer turns up in one of The Loop’s “interpolations”):

I belong to the nerves of streets  to moray eels  to hiero­glyphs to the bark of autumn  to the babble of enamels  to the gift of one­self …

the all-sun   the round fire  the blue foam  the long trum­pet the heap of bones the gilded word  the spaniel or the thistle  the nar­whal I am  I am also the late hour that puts flies to sleep  or the ver­sion of stars not more new how­ever not more sure (trans­lated by Kath­eryn McDonald) 

During this early phase Roubaud also com­pleted a thesis in math­e­mat­ics, which led to his tenure at the Uni­ver­sity of Paris X Nan­terre. But the Project foundered, as Roubaud finally accepted, rip­ping the drafts to shreds, in 1978. Destruc­tion (as I shall refer to the first volume of Roubaud’s quasi-autobiography-cum-novel) recounts—if that is the word for a text whose oper­a­tive pro­ce­dures include the inter­rup­tion of the nar­ra­tive by signs direct­ing the reader to turn to “inter­po­la­tions” and “bifur­ca­tions” located in the book’s back half—how “the project” “the great fire of London” came to replace the Project that was to include The Great Fire of London. It is also the story of a second tragedy, the unex­pected death of Roubaud’s young wife, Alix, in 1983. Like its aborted pre­cur­sor, “the project” arose as a willed alter­na­tive to the temp­ta­tions of despair:

This morn­ing of 11 June 1985 (it’s five o’clock), while writ­ing this on the scant space left free by the papers on my desk­top, I hear pass­ing, in the Rue des Francs-​Bourgeois, two floors below on my left, a deliv­ery van which has no doubt pulled up in front of the former Nico­las store beside  the Arnoult butcher shop…. And I am writ­ing only in order to keep on going, to elude the anguish await­ing me once I end…. I am writ­ing that summer has abruptly come upon us, or per­haps that there has been a brief break in the clouds, although the sky is out of view; what­ever the reason, the night seems less dark behind the shut­ters of my window.

The poems in Some Thing Black (1986), writ­ten around the same time “the great fire” was begun, are com­pan­ions to the immense project, an unbear­able trac­tate on the impos­si­bil­ity of going on, the neces­sity of it: “I’m not a necrophile, I don’t desire your corpse. I don’t even know what that is. if it is. I’ve seen you dead. I have not seen you as a corpse. // Yet I desire” (Ros­marie Waldrop’s trans­la­tion). This is one strain of “the great fire,” and espe­cially of its first branch, distilled.

Its other strains move well beyond genre clas­si­fi­ca­tions. Roubaud calls The Loop “the elu­ci­da­tion of, the com­men­tary on, an induc­tive sequence of memory-​images.” These last are pre­sented in bold­face, to sig­nify that “they are descrip­tions based, as scrupu­lously as pos­si­ble, on pure images or brief sequences of images, char­ac­ter­ized by a min­i­mal use of deduc­tive recom­po­si­tion, and which I am able to iden­tify and locate as moments of my child­hood.” The Loop begins with the most strik­ing of these, a child­hood memory of frozen mist on a win­dow­pane in south­ern France. From this secret min­istry of frost a whole child­hood unspools “like a veg­e­tal net­work, an entire system of veins, a sur­face veg­e­ta­tion, a clus­ter of flat ferns; or a flower.” We follow Roubaud’s mem­o­ries, which arrange them­selves topo­graph­i­cally in a manner that delib­er­ately recalls the ancient arts of memory—“architectural mnemon­ics,” in Mary Carruthers’s mem­o­rable phrase—documented by Frances Yates, as well as the spa­tial poet­ics of Bachelard, from this winter garden in the late thir­ties through other gar­dens and parks during the war to the “poetry in action” of his father’s coded mes­sages on behalf of the Resis­tance. Along the way we are directed to con­sult the afore­men­tioned inter­pola­tive pas­sages: expan­sive dis­qui­si­tions, which them­selves exfo­li­ate into fur­ther inter­po­la­tions, on memory and rhetoric that take in Kripke on Wittgen­stein, Nelson Goodman’s “grue” argu­ment, culi­nary theory, Ronsard’s dis­jecti membra, “the genial author of Peanuts,” Hugo’s prosody—everything but the kitchen sink (although at one point in the main nar­ra­tive Roubaud goes on for pages describ­ing a washbasin).

Indeed, a “story” (as Roubaud calls it) that con­sists of man­i­cally elab­o­rated descrip­tions of memories—composed almost impro­vi­sa­tion­ally, accord­ing to the work’s oper­a­tive con­straints, during the pre-​dawn hours with­out cor­rect­ing or revising—invites Rousseau’s self-​rebuke at the begin­ning of his Con­fes­sions: “I am well aware that the reader does not require infor­ma­tion, but I, on the other hand, feel impelled to give it to him.” Chap­ter three, espe­cially, is brim­ming with infor­ma­tion this reader did not require. Here is the merest frag­ment of Roubaud’s descrip­tion of his memory of a child­hood game he and his friends dubbed “Go-​Creeping”:

On the left, a walk­way; on the other side of the walk­way, another clump of plants and trees; like the dense row of spin­dle trees facing the bench (but the bench, in fact, has its back turned to them: it’s only in the game that the spin­dle trees and the bench faced each other), it did not reach, it did not go down to the ter­race (all the regions planted with bushes and trees were (modest) hills); on its lower left edge (think of it as drawn on a map), at the end of the wall, against which the tallest trees stood, higher than the wall, it went as far as the fig tree (this fig tree, thanks to which we were able to leave the house with­out using the door, stood just out­side of it); its east­ern edge (the cen­tral walk­way) was punc­tu­ated by some pulu­muse bushes (veg­etable beings in the form of hemi­spher­i­cal bushes belong­ing to a plant species impor­tant enough for us to have given them a name other than the common name in the lan­guage, which in fact I’m unable to recall). The cen­tral walk­way went around this latter clump, sep­a­rat­ing it at its north­ern limit from the other “hill,” at the lat­i­tude of the cen­tral round­about.

The upshot of which, as far as I’m con­cerned, is: there were some trees lining the walkways.

Of course the point of such pas­sages is not simply to relate infor­ma­tion, but to attempt to convey the rich­ness of what Augus­tine calls “the fields and spa­cious palaces of memory.” Roubaud’s true sub­ject is a fas­ci­na­tion with the work­ings of memory akin to that felt by Cicero, who held, in Frances Yates’s words, that “The soul’s remark­able power of remem­ber­ing things and words is a proof of its divin­ity.” In this con­nec­tion, Roubaud approv­ingly cites the Wittgen­stein­ian pre­cept to describe rather than explain. But one merely has to turn to, say, Proust (whom Roubaud calls “a mem­oirist”) to see how much expla­na­tion there is in many of Roubaud’s descriptions.

This objec­tion, it may be, simply reg­is­ters my own impa­tience with the per­sis­tence of cer­tain hoary avant-​garde tropes. Even in 1993, when La Boucle appeared in French, was there a stu­dent of lit­er­a­ture left for whom it was a rev­e­la­tion that the “real­ist” novel smoothes over the dis­con­ti­nu­ities of real­ity? Roubaud sug­gests at one point that “it might be nice” if nov­el­ists “revealed just the tini­est bit of under­ly­ing dis­quiet, a vague sense of the prob­lem of the ade­qua­tion (or lack thereof) between the meth­ods of the story, its modes and strate­gies of nar­ra­tion (on the one hand), and (on the other) the pos­si­bil­ity, how­ever min­i­mal, of the other worlds that it thus invites us to con­sider.” This from a devo­tee of Cer­vantes and Sterne!

These trep­i­da­tions are aspects of what Alison James calls Roubaud’s “fidelity to the truth of memory in the present”: “invit­ing us to trust in his good faith, Roubaud … marks out the limits of his enter­prise, offer­ing us access to mul­ti­ple truths that unfold in the var­i­ous present moments of his nar­ra­tive.” He has said that one dif­fer­ence between his “project” and À la recherche du temps perdu is that Proust “wants to recover the past, but the past cannot be recov­ered.” We know that memory is not a per­fect record of events—indeed, recent neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal research sug­gests that our expe­ri­ence of the world in the present is itself far less reli­able than we assume—and auto­bi­og­ra­phy espe­cially is an inher­ently slip­pery genre. Augustine’s deci­sion to com­pose his Con­fes­sions in the elab­o­rate rhymes of late Latin ora­tory aroused con­tem­po­rary read­ers’ sus­pi­cions, while Rousseau’s insis­tence that “some imma­te­r­ial embell­ish­ment” may have been nec­es­sary “to fill a void due to a defect of memory” is clearly code for “I fully intend to bull­shit you.” In our own time, one need only men­tion Bill Clinton’s My Life. Roubaud is at pains to dis­tance his work from the “mech­a­nis­tic deter­min­ism” of such nar­ra­tives. But the expo­sure of nar­ra­tive, plot, and other con­trivances as hack­neyed mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions of lived real­ity is, this late in the day, often quite as pre­dictable and hack­neyed as the con­ven­tions them­selves. A little mech­a­nis­tic determinism—as an Oulip­ian of all people should know—can be a lib­er­at­ing con­straint. Fort pro­poses that “the project,” “what­ever it is,” “is not not an auto­bi­og­ra­phy,” which trick­ily sug­gests that it also is not an auto­bi­og­ra­phy, since Roubaud rejects the log­i­cal law of double nega­tion accord­ing to which the nega­tion of the nega­tion of p implies p. But in this it resem­bles all other autobiographies.

Cer­tain ele­ments of what passes for the lit­er­ary avant-​garde are for­ever ques­tion­ing the sources and validi­ties of the plea­sures to be found in lit­er­a­ture. Roubaud is not immune to this puri­tanism, though his obses­sion with games—many of his most cher­ished child­hood mem­o­ries involve their cre­ation and improvisation—keeps The Loop from suc­cumb­ing to its more weari­some moments. What­ever it is, The Loop is not not a good book. There are, in Roubaud’s “recon­sti­tu­tion of sin­gu­lar moments,” pas­sages of writ­ing fine enough to hush all quibblers:

And so the notion came to me of a para­dox­i­cal infini­tude of light radi­at­ing from the snow in my old win­ter­time garden; and then, by asso­ci­a­tion, recall­ing a biol­o­gist who had com­pared mem­o­ries to an end­lessly falling snow accu­mu­lat­ing in crys­talline layers some­where in our brain, I then posited an expand­ing uni­verse of memory, pre­vent­ing us from being blinded by the infi­nite, radi­ant mul­ti­plic­ity of the atoms of our pasts that we carry within us, an out­ward move­ment that would be called, in the tem­porar­ily expand­ing uni­verse of our exis­tence, For­get­ting.