Raymond Roussel's Impressions of Africa: An Incomparables Club of One

Several Circles and Black Lines, one of Wassily Kandinsky's two-sided paintings 

Raymond Roussel’s 1910 work, Impressions of Africa, has popped up so frequently on the periphery of my awareness that before reading it this summer I had already formed a view of it as singular, dense, “crazy” (as one acquaintance described it) and above all, intimidating. Singular it may be, but in other respects the book I’d constructed in my head was not at all the one I found in my hands.

Impressions of Africa is a surprising, strange hybrid, straddling novel, poem, and even travelogue, with obvious appeal to the Surrealists yet a concentration of crisp, concrete images that puts it close to modernist poetry. In fact, the book’s narrative shape - at least in its first half - might have been replaced with a poetic list of discrete concepts and images. There’s little in the way of plot and almost nothing in the way of interiority or psychology. Roussel provides a setting – the vast central square of the coastal village of Ejur in the mythological country of Ponukele in equatorial West Africa – but it serves essentially as a vast stage set for a seemingly unending series of rituals and performances, ranging from delightfully absurd to appallingly cruel, in connection with the coronation of the country’s new emperor, Talou VII. An unnamed European observer, one of many Europeans inexplicably observing and participating in these events, serves as narrator, and his recitation is as straightforward and detached as a spreadsheet, registering little in the way of emotion, reaction or opinion.

Descriptions of these events go into exacting detail. This somehow manages not to be boring, in part because so many of the performances involve sequential steps and entertaining complications so much like Rube Goldberg contraptions that the end purpose, however pointless, has nothing over one’s fascination with the operation itself. If at times the narrator conveys these involved accounts as unaffectedly as an instruction manual for an appliance, they carry a similar fascination as with the awkward, blithely translated language of some such manuals: whatever practical information one might glean becomes secondary to the pleasure one obtains from the mesmerizing foreignness of the writing.

I once heard Impressions of Africa described as “hallucinatory.” This does not seem quite right. Though some of Roussel’s performative rituals tend towards surrealistic, purely human productions - for instance, a contralto whose tongue, divided into different sections, allows him to sing all four parts of the “Frere Jacques” round by himself - others involve schematic, mathematical devices and designs of delirious complexity, marked by a combination of playfulness and an almost obsessive precision that calls to mind the determinate, biomorphic shapes of Wassily Kandinsky, the machine-like paintings of Roberto Matta or the playfully delicate, decisive lines of Paul Klee’s “The Twittering Machine.” Roussel’s imagination in creating some of these machines and demonstrations is prodigious; in one scene, he takes several pages to describe a complex loom operated by numerous paddles that dip into a river’s current and weave rich tableaux out of miraculously thin thread, resulting in a scrolling visual narrative of Ponukele history and culture. Another prefigures automatic painting by involving a multi-armed machine connected to a photosensitive plate that, in response to light (and turning photography on its head), causes the machine to execute a painting. Other acts appear primarily involved with demonstrating physical phenomena (amplification, multiplication, friction, gravity, volume displacement, for example) or biological processes (a good number of animals, and not the usual circus variety, feature in the stunts). Still others push beyond the bounds of credulity: a soft-boiled egg is peeled perfectly by a marksman’s shots; a cart containing a whalebone statue of a man with a spear thrust into his chest rolls on rails made of calves’ livers; a giant earthworm, its peristaltic undulations successively blocking and unblocking holes in the long glass vessel in which it lies in water, plays gypsy czárdás by producing drops that fall upon the strings of a zither; there is a spinning pinwheel of tentacles, the suction cups of which hold live, mewling, and apparently not very happy cats. I have only begun. A significant number of these performances involve music. In addition to the earthworm virtuoso and the aforementioned solo “Frere Jacques,” the coronation features numerous other musical instruments, song recitals, and curious tone-producing phenomena, including one in which a father’s voice bounces off the bare chests of his six sons who have positioned themselves in a meticulously determined geometric arrangement.

However enthralling such conceits may be, three hundred pages of them might tax even the most patient reader; thus, nearly half way through the book, at the conclusion of a day and a half of coronation, Impressions of Africa suddenly switches gears. If the first half of the novel presents a baffling chaos of inscrutable ceremonies and mystery concerning the Europeans’ presence in Ejur or what’s behind their role in these curious rituals, the second half brings a controlled explanation. Roussel gives us an annotated list of characters followed by background information to illuminate all that one has witnessed. Some of this narrative helps fill in the plot – or rather, provides one - revealing that the Europeans, shipwrecked off of Ponukele, await the arrival of ransom from Europe to gain their freedom from Talou VII. The reason for their performances and a detailed explication of each one follows. But this exposition, like looking through the backside of a two-way mirror or having a magician reveal his or her tricks, serves as something akin to a caption for an image, providing meaning, altering our interpretation of what we have witnessed, but retaining an uncertain, unstable quality. For a moment we’re seduced into a rational explanation for the dazzling, magical and affronting events that have unfolded before us. But Roussel’s backstories, constructed of anecdotes, invented folklore, elaborate digressions and tales nested within other tales, form a narrative as complex, imaginative and mystifying as the intricate designs of the performances themselves, leaving us even more puzzled.

The novel’s two-part structure comes across as something like one of those early Surrealist games such as “The Exquisite Corpse” or an Oulipian experiment in which the task is first to imagine a bizarre ritual in an exotic land then come up with a more bizarre story to explain it. Were it not for the entrancingly disorienting effect of incomprehension in reading the first part, one might even read these backstories first (one can imagine Impressions of Africa published tête-bêche, like one of those Ace Doubles mysteries that feature two novels bound together, each upside down from the other).

It’s tempting to reduce Impressions of Africa to such a simple, game-like formula, but there’s a lot more going on in this curious narrative than the inventiveness of its conceits and its apparently infinitely cyclic, Mobius strip structure. Translator Mark Polizzotti notes in his introduction that even Roussel’s methods were of a cunning imaginative complexity, at times built around intricate puns and word play. Though this fascination with language is evident throughout Impressions of Africa (texts appear everywhere, starting with the pediment of the stage on which the words “The Incomparables Club” appear), Polizzotti has not attempted to reproduce Roussel’s more esoteric linguistic games, noting that few if any French readers even noticed his clever tricks until Roussel published a book on his own methods.

Moreover, it’s nearly impossible to be reductionist about the sheer magnitude of Roussel’s themes or his book’s visionary, seed bank anticipation of many future developments in literature and art. The scale of what Impressions of Africa contains in terms of its irrigation of subsequent literary currents, concepts, and writers spanning the last century boggles the mind. One recognizes in his conceits ideas expressed years later in movements such as Surrealism, Dadaism and Futurism, and decades later by schools and movements such as the Oulipo, the Situationists, Fluxus, performance art, experimental theater, conceptual art, even contemporary imagistic poetry and digital art. Few subsequent experimental art forms don’t contain at least some grain sowed by Roussel’s inventions; even a contemporary provocateur like Damien Hirst looks tame compared to what Roussel can conjure (not merely a preserved animal in a glass tank, but a living one capable of playing the zither). The conceit in Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” of a sentence being literally written into the convict’s flesh is scooped several years earlier by Roussel. The metafictional multiplication of texts of post-modernism also appears here, most notably in a Borgesian passage in which Shakepeare’s original manuscript of Romeo and Juliet is discovered in a hidden receptacle in an old library. Upon close examination, it’s found to differ slightly from the known version, with stage directions and effects that would make a production nearly impossible.[i] Excitement over the discovery is soon supplanted, though, by the usual sensationalism of the crime blotter, just one of many examples of Roussel’s commentary on the cultural uses and abuses of art as well as its commercial aspects. In another scene he describes a miniature model of the Paris stock market set up in Ejur’s square to allow trading and speculation in each of the coronation performances (with stock orders required to be submitted in Alexandrine form). Even today, artists aware of the ground Roussel paved for them are acknowledging their debt. A clue to understanding the striking inventiveness of Argentine writer César Aira is a coy acknowledgement of Roussel in Aira’s novel El Llanto (The Tears)[ii] in a scene where a poet-publicist is charged with the challenging task of coming up with a “new image” for a popular film star and initially considers “reworkings of Raymond Roussel.”  

But the real magic of Roussel’s work comes from the ways in which Impressions of Africa spins off suggestions and resonances well beyond its inventiveness. There’s something deeply unsettling in his catalog of rituals, unfolding in the square of a non-existent village in a non-existent country in an indeterminate time in an “Africa” of the imagination. Roussel seems to have taken conceptions of the exotic - both those of his own imagination and borrowings from popular misconceptions of Africa - and made of them their own country. “Africa” here is not so much a real continent as it is a repository for imagination and projection. It’s fascinating to read Roussel’s representations of the interactions of the Europeans and mythical Africans, the interplay of cultural assumptions, power, misapprehension, mimicry, wonder, and incomprehensibility (with some performances characterized as “completely inaccessible to European ears”). Impressions of Africa might make for an intriguing text for an anthropology or ethnology professor to use as a way of initiating discussion about interpretation, exoticism, and the function of the observer. Roussel also touches on politics as theater (and vice versa), the performative aspects of the affairs of state, and art as a transformative force: while the performances are instigated by the Europeans largely to alleviate boredom, they also serve to enchant emperor Talou VII and elicit from him, Scheherazade-style, a more generous, forgiving attitude towards his captives.

Perhaps what is most surprising about Impressions of Africa is its essential innocence. Having approached it after many years of hearing about it obliquely, expecting a daunting and impenetrable work, I instead found a captivating and darkly whimsical, sui generis novel with a sense of childlike, infinite wonder. Polizzotti notes that among Roussel’s key influences were his frequent visits to the theater when he was young and a fascination with Jules Verne. Verne’s vision of limitless possibility, of other worlds beneath the sea or beyond the clouds, exists in spades in Impressions of Africa. But Roussel one-ups Verne by recognizing that unexplored frontiers include those of the imagination, and that in the discovery of new worlds, art may be among the bravest of adventures.

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[i] It’s revealing that Roussel attempted to produce Impressions of Africa on the stage. The play flopped, but I can’t help envying those fortunate enough to have witnessed the attempt.

[ii] To date untranslated into English, but available in French.

Innocence Abroad: Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado

If I’d tried to find a book about Paris as far removed from Jacques Yonnet’s Rue des Maléfices as possible, I don’t think I could have succeeded more thoroughly than with Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, Where Yonnet’s peril-filled tales of the Occupation, gallows humor, and intimate, esoteric knowledge of city make for a gripping and penetrating work, all shadows and mystery, Dundy’s book, written a mere four years after Yonnet’s in 1958, is a soufflé baked of “gaiety, laughter, song-and-dance, shoes in the air.” The story of Sally Jay Gorce, an ex-pat 21-year-old American sowing her wild oats and aspiring to be an actress in the City of Light, The Dud Avocado evinces almost zero curiosity about Paris’ old places and traditions. Its characters – mostly other young ex-pats – seem to limit their interests to Paris’ bars and nightclubs and to one another, capable perhaps of naming the bartender at the Select, but unlikely to know the Conciergerie or the apartments of Napoleon III.

A few pages into The Dud Avocado I began to suspect that the reliably good taste of New York Review Books had suffered a hiccup. But I’m glad I persisted; despite Dundy’s book being little more than a bagatelle on a topic (young Americans in Paris) for which I have little interest, Gorce (her name borrowed from a James Thurber story) is a surprisingly appealing young narrator, wise beyond her years, with a sharp wit and sharp tongue. It’s also one of those books in which one’s pleasure derives in part from seeing the writing, from start to finish, become better and better before one’s eyes. It’s also a very funny book.

Another reason Dundy’s novel kept my interest even after taking the stage from as riveting a work as Rue des Maléfices is that it makes no pretense to being about Paris. It does not err where many subsequent tales of Americans in Paris do, by tediously milking cultural differences or rhapsodizing about the place as though no American had previously been there. For Sally Jay Gorce, whatever else Paris may be is secondary to its function as a liberating space to facilitate her fierce drive to live fully and escape her provincial, privileged, suffocating youth. And while most who come to Paris from other shores have neither the means nor the blitheness of Sally Jay Gorce, few possess her determination, social insight, and humor – which as Gorce notes about one of her impecunious ex-pat paramours, is a resource of immense benefit even to those engaged in the “epic battle…versus No Means Of Support.”  Yes, she is but another young American trying out her wings in Europe’s capital, motivated by a sentiment that “The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!” But she’s also unusually self-aware, recognizing that her time there, a gift from a rich uncle, is not only an irretrievably precious quantity of youth but also a flight from herself - the latest in a series of escapes that began at age 13, when, like Maggie in The Mill on the Floss running off to join the gypsies, Gorce let out for the American West hoping to reach Mexico and become a bullfighter.

If Paris comes off in The Dud Avocado as little more than a place for Gorce to stretch her wings, the reward is a focused study of Gorce herself. Her wild explorations are not, despite her search for “a good time,” all air and light. Some of her fellow ex-pats may lead lives as airy as meringue:

Here is the story of Bax’s life: he was born in Canada. He was raised in Canada. He went to Toronto University and has never been out of Canada before. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, but would like it to be something artistic.

By contrast, in Gorce’s fight for her time in the sun, she exposes just enough of the seamy side of the city to give The Dud Avocado some unexpected gravitas. She sees herself as a member of “Les Compliqués: Los Complicados: that’s the only club I’ll ever belong to – though not by choice. I may not have been born into it, but I became a member at a very early age. A life-member.” Her complications largely pertain to entanglements with men, including a young French punk, a married Italian, an impoverished American painter, and her closest companion, an American theater director a bit more louche than he at first appears. There’s a price to pay for Gorce’s risk-taking and adventuring, but she’s an not about to let herself be impeded by any of the characters with whom she gets involved. And unlike her companions content to drift along in their European adventures, Gorce is acutely aware that youth doesn’t last:

What happens when your curiosity just suddenly gives out? When the will and the energy stop and it all seems so once-over-again? What’s going to happen five years from now, when I wake up in the night…take a deep breath to start all over again, and find that I’ve no breath left? When I start running again and find I can’t even put one foot in front of the other? …I’ll be cooked. If I don’t stop it.

If The Dud Avocado offers few surprises and not a lot of depth, it is nonetheless a joy to read, with some unforgettable “bon mots” and, in Sally Jay Gorce, a winning main character who, in her unquenchable thirst to live life to its utmost, comes off as inspiring – even for an innocent American youth in Paris. Towards the novel’s end, Gorce recounts her bullfighter escapade and the understanding young woman at Traveler’s Aid who, instead of calling the police, had given Gorce some money and encouragement, telling the 13-year-old,  “Good luck to you. You are running for my life.” Faulting The Dud Avocado for being what it is not, for its not being Rue des Maléfices, would be to miss the point. The ardor of Sally Jay Gorce’s indomitable spirit and wit, her insistence on staking her claim to youth, adventure, and uncontainable exuberance, can’t help but make a reader admire that fiercely burning flame. There’s enough energy in Gorce’s life to help power more than a few others.

Jacques Yonnet: Rue des Maléfices

One doesn’t have to spend a lot of time in Paris to sense that it holds many mysteries, but the more time one spends there, the more such mysteries begin to manifest themselves: occult symbols in the architecture, centuries-old esoteric societies, marabouts and mystics, a whole secret city. After a quarter century of frequent visits there, I was flabbergasted that I’d never before encountered Jacques Yonnet’s stunning 1954 book, Rue des Maléfices: chronique secrète d’une ville – or, as the title is somewhat more sensationally translated into English (perhaps by the marketing department) Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City[i]. It’s easily the most unusual book I’ve read about Paris and one of the few that has completely jolted me out of any smugness about my own familiarity with the place. No, says Rue des Maléfices, try as you might, you’re not ever really going to know this city. But the door Yonnet’s book opens upon Paris throws an illuminating light nonetheless, permitting unforgettable glimpses of the city’s most shadowy, ensorcelled corners, “into the mysterious fluxes that pulse in the darkest secrecy of the City’s veins.”

I hasten to point out that Rue des Maléfices is not, strictly speaking, a book about occult Paris. I’d probably have skipped it had it been, and had it not come to me through fittingly mysterious circumstances (my own visitation from the past, a vanished Paris acquaintance from 15 years ago who by sheer coincidence showed up again this year living in the apartment directly above me in San Francisco). Rather, Rue des Maléfices stands at the unusual intersection of a personal obsession - a passionate interest “in everything related to Paris as it used to be, and whatever survives of its old traditions” – and the impersonal Second World War, during which Yonnet, a journalist and “technical education supply teacher, curious by nature,” worked clandestinely with the Resistance, relaying radio messages to help coordinate bombing runs on German positions.  Traveling within a fairly circumscribed area of occupied Paris between the Left Bank poles of Place Maubert and “La Mouffe,” Yonnet’s orbits roughly parallel Paris’ “lost” river, the Bièvre (now a mostly subterranean stream covered over by the city’s growth and all but invisible except to the most inquisitive seekers), a unifying element that emphasizes the hidden past lurking beneath the flickering present and lends a depth and gravitational pull to Yonnet’s concentrated portrait of Paris under the Occupation. Many writers might have built their book around their daring exploits in the Resistance, but Yonnet often treats his dangerous work as a self-evident obligation and as almost incidental (at least until its hazards interrupt the narrative with cold violence), and the war as something of an impertinent interference in his excavations of Paris’ past and depictions of its present.

Recording in charcoal as well as in prose (a few sketches are included in my French edition of the book, along with photographs by Yonnet’s close friend Robert Doisneau), Yonnet displays an insatiable curiosity about the characters with whom he interacts in the bars, cafes, flophouses, and secret corners of the city: fellow members of the Maquis, gangsters, gypsies, informers, poets, prostitutes, immigrants, spies, madmen and others from the lower depths: “a gang of Bohemians of whom [he was] in some sense the key player and prime mover,” given his genuine interest in their stories and his consequent ability to win their confidence. Through anecdote, dialogue and historical accounts - and no small amount of humor as well as horror - Yonnet conveys his portraits in a narrative that possesses the drive and suspense of a thriller.

Yonnet’s interests range widely, from insightful explorations of the city’s history to endlessly fascinating casual observations concerning, among other things, origins of idiomatic expressions, locations of crimes and of events almost mythological in their power to enchant, bits of Parisian history spread over a millennium, incidents of bizarre psychiatric phenomena of the sort one might find in an Oliver Sacks book, opinions on art and craft, a digression on tattoos, and atmospheric evocations of Occupation life in the bars and cafes of the area. Among the more memorable portraits is that of Keep On Dancin’, a ruthless but gregarious and heroic gangster on the lam from the Nazis and the police, who, when not brutalizing his betrayers, genially shares with Yonnet his own profound obsession with Paris’ buried mysteries. 

Though Rue des Maléfices manifests a particular interest in the mystical, even cabalistic side of Paris, Yonnet is careful to maintain a skeptical, empirical mien. His book thus comes off not as an account by a believer pre-disposed to the sensational and bizarre, but as that of a sharp observer who has simply left a door open to the possibility of events beyond comprehension - “fantastic but fantastic on a human scale.” Rue des Maléfices is filled with stories of coincidence, the supernatural, and improbable, sometimes inexplicable phenomena: a watchmaker who makes watches that run backwards for nobles determined to remain young; the apparent transformation of a human into a fox; an elderly gypsy who with a look stops an attacking dog, leaving it trembling and sickening unto death; an exploit that involves Yonnet and a distinguished British professor on a furtive series of inquiries that put them in touch with a disgraced priest who performs exorcisms.

An openness to the mysterious also serves partly as a bulwark against the Occupation itself. While Yonnet observes that, “these days,” a cheap employment of the occult is, after all, useful to megalomaniacs - “It requires only the slightest sense of mystification to get anyone acclaimed by any crowd” – his turn towards the mystical acts as another sort of resistance, a conviction that the monstrosity of the Nazi presence is another aberration doomed to failure, especially up against the immense weight of history in a city that has seen as much  as Paris.

Part of the mesmerizing power of Rue des Maléfices stems from this long view, its timeless determination to excavate Paris’ past while a World War is raging. Yonnet’s attention to the mystical is in part a consequence of the derangement of the times, a recognition that “the most innocent words, the most harmless gestures in certain places and at certain times acquire an unwonted importance and weight, and have repercussions that far exceed what was intended,” and in part a more personal response given the necessity of navigating potentially fatal encounters by relying on instinct and intuition. It’s hardly surprising that Yonnet would place stock in such metaphysics, exhibited, for example, through his “sixth sense” hunches that invariably prove right about the dangers of the missions he undertakes. At one point he notes that “just as a war between men is not a human-scale phenomenon, danger that assumes a human form and a human quality is much more related to time and place than to its extremely unwitting vehicles,” and agrees with one of his compatriots that  “…the study of paranormal phenomena ought to be pursued in depth, especially during the times when serious upheavals such as the present war were afflicting the planet.”

Like many of the bars and bistrots Yonnet mentions, the “Rue des Maléfices” of the title actually exists, and in an inquiry typical of Yonnet’s persistent and meticulous investigatory skill, he digs through centuries – and multiple transmutations of the street’s name – to arrive at the street’s tenebrous origins. Tourists who today explore what is now the narrow Rue Xavier Privas, with its cheap Greek restaurants and souvenir vendors, might tread more lightly if they were aware of the strange and lurid events that have unfolded there over hundreds of years. But Rue des Maléfices is perhaps not a book for tourists; one’s rewards in reading it are magnified by a familiarity with the city, not to mention an openness to the city’s innumerable secrets. Yonnet says as much in closing, when he wishes he could one day “follow on the heels of an attentive reader,” who may find among “all the ‘keys’ scattered through these pages…the key to their own front door.” You may be that reader. Stranger things have happened.

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[i] The English translation is by Christine Donougher and published by Dedalus Books. Another French version of the book goes under the anodyne title Enchantements of Paris. 

Caroline Blackwood: Corrigan

One of the more rewarding corners of 20^th century literature must surely be that occupied by darkly comic British women writers, among whom there seems to be a superfluity of talent: Beryl Bainbridge, Muriel Spark, Barbara Comyns, Angela Carter, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor – I am leaving out scores. Wielding an especially sharp knife for carving out (and up) her subjects is the Irish/English writer Caroline Blackwood.

Corrigan, Blackwood’s last, longest novel, features a few well-tread topics - the difficulties of marriage, mother-daughter conflicts, the upstairs/downstairs dynamics of class - but also elements seldom encountered: a main character in a wheelchair; a self-aware fashion model; an inherent sense of fair play, with the emphasis on that last word; and copiously flowing champagne. It also contains a clever plot that made me wonder if Georges Polti, author of the classic The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, had ever encountered a writer like Caroline Blackwood. Those few of his formulations that might apply here – Fatal Imprudence? Self-Sacrifice for an Ideal? Crimes of Love? – undergo such subversion in Blackwood’s hands as to be scarcely recognizable. This is the third Blackwood novel I’ve read, after Great Granny Webster and The Stepdaughter, and I relished being back among her unpredictable turns of plot, deftly drawn characters, biting but humanistic humor, and effervescent, incisive, worldly-wise social observations.

Corrigan’s opening finds the elderly Devina Blunt, bereaved three years before by her husband’s death, still mired in sorrow in her Wiltshire home. Her life undergoes a sudden transformation, however, with the arrival of the wheelchair-bound young Irishman Corrigan – he prefers only his surname - rolling through the countryside to collect funds for a new library for the St. Crispins hospital. Corrigan’s interruption of Mrs. Blunt’s static grief falls like a drop of brightly-tinted solution into water – a gradual diffusion that irreversibly colors Mrs. Blunt’s grey world. His gift for conversation, sympathetic ear and unfiltered frankness affront and disarm at the same time, forcing Mrs. Blunt from her cocoon of sadness. Though Corrigan departs empty-handed this first visit, he leaves a palpable void that Mrs. Blunt fills with hope that he’ll return soon. He does.

A series of subsequent encounters follows, aided in comedic effect by one of Blackwood’s indelibly drawn secondary characters, Mrs. Blunt’s bustling, motorcycle-riding Irish servant, Mrs. Murphy, a necessary but grating presence in the house:

Mrs. Murphy never climbed Mrs. Blunt’s stairs, she always stormed them like a military unit making a headlong charge to gain some useful vantage-point. She was very short and her squat body carried enormous weight. Yet she still moved around the house with a pointless but frenetic speed. When she charged up Mrs. Blunt’s staircase, she always managed to make the carpet slippers that she wore, since shoes hurt her swollen feet, sound just as menacing as the running tread of regimental boots.

With each visit Corrigan seems to nudge aside his Irish counterpart as he draws closer to Mrs. Blunt, now aflame with a desire to do something useful:

She felt that, like someone in the Bible, her eyes had been opened by Corrigan. She suddenly understood that grief had made her cruel and she thought that at last she knew why her relationship with her daughter had become so distant and strained…when she thought about her life as compared to that of Corrigan, she felt that whereas he had found a way to escape from the prison of his infirmity by the use of his mind and imagination, she, who had never suffered from any physical disability, had crippled and imprisoned herself by her refusal to use her brain.

Inviting Corrigan to move in, Mrs. Blunt awakens to activity at an accelerating pace and with expanding ambition: renovating the house to accommodate Corrigan’s disability, learning to drive, and purchasing up adjoining land to create a farming cooperative. In moments of leisure, she and Corrigan recite poetry, converse about literature and life, and pop open one bottle of champagne after another.

Mrs. Blunt’s daughter, the unhappy Nadine, is meanwhile stuck in London in her own domestic stasis, minding twin toddlers and cooking for the “ungrateful young people” her patronizing husband invites to dinner. Neglectful of her mother since her father’s death, Nadine is nonetheless concerned when she hears of Corrigan’s presence in the family home. She takes up the offer of her closest friend, the high fashion model Sabrina (another of Blackwood’s unforgettable characters: a bright young woman acutely aware of the brief shelf life of her career and a complete slob everywhere outside the camera’s frame) to pay a visit to Wiltshire to find out what’s going on.

The ensuing events upend expectations and add depth to Blackwood’s characters, who, as in her other novels, come off the page as singular beings irreducible to simple behaviors. Though Blackwood can be merciless in describing the witless or those who hew closely to convention (an obsequious minor character is “a little squirt of a boy whose energies seemed to have gone into cultivating a crop of acne boils”), her characters are almost always bigger, and often better, than they - or we - thought they were, conveying a genuine interest in the capacity of persons to be multi-faceted, surprising, and deeper than their surface appearances might suggest. Blackwood’s faith in human complexity extends to her characters’ navigation of social situations and problems; in Blackwood’s world, rigidity or reliance on expediency and authority to determine what should be done are intolerable paths. Rather, Blackwood invokes a sense of fair play that, in challenging situations, prioritizes the real life emotional and psychological consequences for people over the distancing technicalities of principles or rules. Even in serious matters - perhaps especially in serious matters - a generosity that rewards playfulness and the use of one’s wits makes Corrigan a wry work that celebrates the triumph of these qualities over conformity, banality, and ploddishness. If almost no one in Corrigan turns out to be the persons we assume them to be – or even the persons we may later suspect them to be – it’s thanks to Blackwood’s magnanimous refusal to underestimate people. And though this magnanimity combines with a particularly black humor in unfolding human contradictions and perplexities, it would be hard to imagine any reader (other than perhaps the most rigid of teetotalers) not enjoying this ride – especially with so much champagne flowing. 

“Humanity turned to jelly” – Léon Genonceaux’s Le Tutu

A few years ago, during an ambulatory conversation interrupted by the need to step around some of the ubiquitous dog droppings that punctuate the streets of Paris, and which supposedly assure one’s return to the city should one happen to step in them, my French companion commented, “It must be said that we French have a very particular relationship with shit.”

As Exhibit A in support of this assertion, it would be difficult to do better than offer an exchange of letters from 1694 between Elizabeth Charlotte de Bavière, Princesse Palatine, Duchesse d’Orleans to her aunt the Electrice of Saxony, Sophia of Hanover (I will conveniently ignore that both wrote in German and neither was French by birth). In conversational tone, the Duchesse and her aunt rhapsodize about the pleasures of defecating, the optimal times and places, its benefits for health and beauty, its democratic ubiquity (“...the entire universe is filled with shitters”), and conclude that “one would as well not live at all, as not shit at all.”

One can skip directly to these letters online, but then one would be miss out on an even more indecorous narrative that surrounds their appearance in an eccentric 1891 French novel, The Tutu: Morals of the Fin de Siècle (Le Tutu: Moeurs Fin de Siècle), written under the pseudonym “Sappho” and described on the cover of a new English translation by Iain White as “the strangest novel of the 19^th century.” According to White’s introduction, Le Tutu was all but lost for a century, published only in 1991 after being brought to light 25 years earlier in an article that revealed its existence and attributed it to Paris publisher Léon Genonceaux (whose Belgian birth I’ll also ignore; Paris does things to people). Genonceaux had accomplished literary feats high and low, including publishing the first unified collection of Rimbaud’s poetry, an important re-edition of Lautréamont’s  Les Chants de Maldoror (excerpts of which also appear in Le Tutu), and a swarm of salacious works that landed Genonceaux in repeated trouble with the authorities. His most serious problems occurred just as Le Tutu headed to press. He was forced to flee Paris, and the few copies he’d printed - only five of which are said to exist today - found their way into the world by being passed hand to hand.

As a particularly madcap example of the style established by Lautréamont and Huysmans, among others, The Tutu cooks up a full complement of Decadent ingredients, including an indulgence in death and the corruptions of the flesh, obsession with the morbid and sordid, irreverence towards morality and religion, pursuit of rare sensation, and an appreciation of oblivion:

A truly happy man is one whose brain has been emptied, whose legs, hands and ears have been cut off, his eyes put out and his sense of taste destroyed. He no longer senses, no longer thinks, he is animalised, he is out of this world.

Le Tutu also serves up all manner of bodily functions and grotesqueries, some of which, even given my tough stomach, leave me nearly enfeebled in contemplation of repeating them. But generally such provocations are so excessively over the top, so clearly designed for shock value and delivered with such capricious delight (imagine a late 19^th century Parisian John Waters) that it’s difficult to be appalled for long.

As the novel opens, Le Tutu’s chief character, Mauri de Noirof, is headed home at five in the morning from a night of debauchery, so pickled that he cannot recognize his cab driver. This inability to recognize those he knows is a recurrent pattern. On the rare occasions when he goes to work (as a publisher), he’s convinced it’s his first day on the job despite everything seeming oddly familiar. Trained as an engineer, he’s also a diletanttish dandy, an amateur of grand, crazy ideas – having a clod cow walk a 500-meter-high tightrope strung between Paris and Marseille, for example – or the effort on which he settles his attentions, building tunnels for lightening-fast trains that can zip from Lyon to Paris in a mere 17 seconds (resulting in a rapid depopulation of Lyon, whose residents fall prey to the now convenient seductions of the capital). De Noirof launches upon a series of adventures, spurred on by his general dissoluteness and debauchery, not to mention an oedipal complex to top all oedipal complexes (he reads the Duchesse and Electrice’s letters to his mother in an Ubu-esque dialogue concerning his desire to marry and impregnate her, as all other women disgust him and as his talk of marrying a tree has left her unenthused). Despite a rich curiosity cabinet of conceits that would have pleased the Surrealists, Le Tutu’s narrative drive is loosely tethered to a fairly linear plot involving de Noirof’s attempts to marry himself to a wealthy, increasingly obese alcoholic and to navigate paternity of a child birthed by his mistress, a two-headed circus freak, while at the same time maintaining his devotion to his mother, with whom he dines on human brains while they dream of loving one another “on high”:

“The only thing in the world that matters is us. Nobody will ever guess at the sublimities hidden within our hearts. Nobody else here on earth eats the brains from corpses and drinks the spittle of asthmatics. Let us act so that we might die in the satisfaction of having experienced, we alone, the True Sensation, of That Which Does Not Die.” Then she added: “Give me some money.”

I’m not giving a lot away with these revelations; there is more than ample weirdness where that came from. And yes, a tutu is involved.

Elements of Le Tutu appear strikingly modern, for example the collage-like nature of the narrative, mixing varieties of text, theatrical vignettes, a musical composition by God (lyrics by The Word, with Saint Paul on third violin and Jesus Christ on cymbals), and dreams (including one in which God appears as a buff young hedonist recuperating from a 700-year orgy among the seraphim), or the kinds of language games played decades later by members of the Oulipo movement. In one scene, an exasperated de Noirof urges his prostitute girlfriend to communicate exclusively via the first syllables of words, a challenge to which she replies by asking how he’d handle a phrase like “the sky is no more pure than the depths of my heart” (a ripost that might well be put to Oulipians in general).

The decadent effrontery Genonceaux heaps upon bourgeois values is pleasantly, even hilariously, balanced by the sheer imagination and wit of The Tutu. One might well wonder, given the book’s odd history and the haziness surrounding its discovery - there are things it would be pleasant to believe - whether it could all be an elaborate, grandly accomplished hoax. But in the deliriously fertile, rebellious period of French literature from which it appears to have emerged, nearly anything seemed possible. And even if Le Tutu were to be a hoax, the fact should scarcely diminish any appreciative reader’s delight in this wild, demented, exultant book. This English translation should count as a significant literary event. 

An Infinite Book? Grande Sertão: Veredas

How is it possible that Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa’s 1956 novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) has been out of print in English for half a century and remains all but unknown in the Anglophone world except to a small circle of academics and those fortunate enough to have been initiated into its cult?

Able at last to count myself among the latter, I can scarcely begin to touch on all this complex book has to offer, especially given my almost complete ignorance of Brazilian literature and the not insignificant matter of having read the book in translation.[i] Those disadvantages do not, though, stand in the way of recognizing that Grande Sertão: Veredas is neither of marginal, esoteric interest nor so dauntingly erudite as to be forbidding. On the contrary, it’s the rare kind of work that might serve as the reward for a lifetime of reading, offering potentially endless exploration in its expansive cosmos, resisting reduction along its boundless curvature, with myriad points of entry for myriad potential audiences despite qualities that could well be intimidating. Among these is a linguistic complexity that has spawned lexicons in Portuguese nearly as voluminous as the novel itself and includes word variants, neologisms, regionalisms, catalogues of flora and fauna, utterances, portmanteau names fabricated from multiple languages, slang, even animal cries. A recursive, digressive narrative jumps about in time and pursues paths as numerous as the “veredas” - the oasis-like depressions and the rivulets that connect them - that figure in the book’s title. Guimarães Rosa also draws from an unusually deep and broad aquifer of influences to irrigate his tale: from modernist peers to the ancient Greek tragedies and epics, Augustine’s Confessions to Don Quixote, Dante to the Tao-Te-Ching, the natural sciences to moral philosophy, archaic backlands superstition to contemporary global realities.

Yet Grande Sertão: Veredas comes across as a supremely engrossing work, and one that makes a great effort not to wear its deep erudition on its sleeve. Rather, not unlike Dante choosing to make his “Divine Comedy” more accessible by writing in vernacular Italian, Guimarães Rosa takes his wealth of knowledge and thoroughly emulsifies it into an ensorcelling, vital narrative in which these cultured elements seem to propagate naturally and organically from the irresistible pull of knowledge and a feverish, infectious love of language (in “Woodlands Witchery,” a revealing story from Guimarães Rosa’s earlier work, Sagarana, a character is obsessed with the sounds of words and refers to their “song and feathers”). Those who heed the narrator’s appeal will likely be amply rewarded:

…think hard about what I have been telling you, turn it over in your mind, for I have related nothing idly. I don’t waste words. Think it over, figure it out. Build your own plot around it.

But in Guimarães Rosa’s world the privilege of language and knowledge is not to be abused by constructing a wall between writer and reader, and his narrator gently concludes the advice above with a gesture of patience and good will: “In the meantime, we’ll have some more coffee, and smoke a good cigarette.” With an openness, immediacy and intimacy that invites trust and humbles one into listening, this captivating voice - rising and falling, emphasizing, warning of zones difficult to talk about and even superstitious to mention, following its own dictates in the way William James described the flow of thought as “like a bird’s life, seeming to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings” - calls upon readers to engage existential and moral questions, fundamentally and recognizably human in a “world beyond control.” 

This beguiling voice belongs to Guimarães Rosa’s unusual choice of narrator, Riobaldo, “an ignorant man,” an unschooled wanderer of the great Brazilian sertão, a retired jagunço (“a member of a lawless band of armed ruffians in the hire of rival politicos, who warred against each other and against the military, at the turn of the century, in northeastern Brazil”[ii]), with a down-to-earth affability, sharp natural intelligence and tremendously inventive, poetic gift for language that invites rather than intimidates. An implicit sympathy with and respect for the practical knowledge and native intelligence possessed by people whom urbanites and academics might regard as simple pervades Grande Sertão: Veredas. Self-effacing and modest about his remarkable narrative skills, which spring directly from his experience, Riobaldo knows that storytelling can only approximate life: “To relate stories full of surprises and deeds of daring may be much more entertaining, but hell, when you are the one who is doing the everyday living, these fancy turns of events don’t work.”

Riobaldo’s account (an oral, even oracular, tale perhaps best read aloud) is a kind of apostrophe to a vaguely sketched listener, an educated visitor from the urban coast who has come to explore the sertão. Having in his old age “invented this hobby, of speculating about ideas,” Riobaldo finds in this newcomer the sounding board that enables his discourse (that a story depends upon both teller and audience, or writer and reader, is a given in Grande Sertão: Veredas): “To talk like this with a stranger, who listens well and soon goes far away, has a second advantage: it is as though I were talking to myself.” And in finding his auditor to be a learnèd outsider, Riobaldo expresses a simple faith in education as a tool for better managing life’s vicissitudes:

How many really fine ideas occur to a well-educated person! In that way they can fill this world with other things, without the mistakes and twistings and turnings of life in its stupid bungling….In real life, things end less neatly, or don’t end at all.

Riobaldo’s recitation of the “real life” he has led - “like a live fish on a griddle” – begins with the intonation of a single word – “Nonada” (“It’s nothing”) - an alpha that will find its omega in another single word and an infinity symbol some 500 pages of uninterrupted monologue later. He seeks to reassure his visitor that the gunshots he’s just heard were not the notorious violence of the backlands, but just Riobaldo himself, practicing to keep up his finest skill, marksmanship. This division between violence and innocence, expectation and reality, will hang like a shimmering curtain throughout Grande Sertão: Veredas. Insisting with magnanimous hospitality, and perhaps a desperate need to unburden himself, that his guest stay - “A visit here, in my house, with me, lasts three days!” - Riobaldo weaves an intricate account of his jagunço life in the sertão: his adventures and trials under various jagunço chiefs; the brutal battles he and his comrades have fought; episodes of violence alternating with moments of great tenderness; dreams of revenge and power vying with a desire to escape the violent hand that life has dealt him; doubts and struggles, both particular and universal, in trying to make sense of a life in which, as Riobaldo repeatedly asserts, “the whole world is crazy.” Two other repeated phrases punctuate his speech: an acknowledgement that “to live is a dangerous thing” and reluctant references, sometimes briefly trailing into reflective silence, to “the devil in the whirlwind, in the middle of the street,” hinting at critical moments of confusion, “memories of things worse than bad,” that still weigh so heavily on Riobaldo that in the first moments of his tale he gets to the point that obsesses him most: Does the devil exist?

Far from being a matter of idle curiosity, Riobaldo’s appeal is the central existential question that plagues him, a need to understand his responsibility regarding the two great entwined forces that have shaped his life: the pact with the devil that Riobaldo may - or may not - have made one cold night alone in the haunting Veredas Mortas in hopes of extinguishing “an irrational evil,” the murderous jagunço Hermogènes; and Riobaldo’s profound love for Reinaldo, or Diadorim, the “different” jagunço companion he has known since a transformative moment of Riobaldo’s youth. These forces come together almost exactly halfway through the novel (the elegant structure of Grande Sertão: Veredas probably merits a dissertation) when two events occur almost simultaneously: the murder by the mutinous “Judases,” Hermogènes and Ricardão, of jagunço hero Joca Ramiro, revealed now to be Diadorim’s father; and immediately preceding this shock, Riobaldo’s first acknowledgment to himself that what he has felt for Diadorim – a desire “to place my fingers lightly, so lightly, over his soft eyes, hiding them, to keep from having to endure their fascination. How much their green beauty was hurting me; so impossible” - goes beyond fraternity and friendship, and is in fact genuine love, a feeling that “had been dormant, unperceived by me, in our everyday living. But now it was springing to life, like day breaking, bursting. I lay still a moment, my eyes closed, thrilled and glowing in my new-found joy” (another dissertation topic: Grande Sertão: Veredas as one of the great depictions of male love in modern literature).

“Am I telling things badly? I’ll start again.”

That it has taken half the book to get to this point is in part due to Riobaldo’s revision and reorganization of his thoughts, occasionally moving backwards or sideways to render important points or informative anecdotes. About a sixth of the way into his narrative, he abruptly halts his story, which has so far focused on his hunt for the Judases with the band of jagunços led by Medeiro Vaz up until the group falls under the leadership of the reform-minded jagunço chief, Zé Bébelo, intent on ridding the sertão of lawlessness. Riobaldo then begins re-telling it starting from his childhood and not returning to where he left off until some 200 pages later. Such temporal recursions find a parallel in the spatial dimensions of the novel as Riobaldo wanders about the great sertão, at times retracing paths he has taken before.

A coherence to the narrative is nonetheless sustained by the unswerving attention Riobaldo concentrates on his listener (in one sense, we remain in a fixed place and time: at Riobaldo’s ranch, enraptured by the spell he casts with his tale) as well as by the constant swarm of questions and ruminations he expresses about his place in the world, his relationship to violence and love, obligation and responsibility, even his own identity and existence:

“Where does my guilt come from?”

“Isn’t nearly everything one does or doesn’t do, treachery in the end?

“Who knows for sure what a person really is?”

“When did my fault begin?”

“Do you suppose there is a fixed point, beyond which there is no turning back?”

“Was I thinking?”

Questions that might in isolation sound ponderous instead become, enveloped in Riobaldo’s earnest inquiry and voluptuous discourse, matters of importance to ourselves because of Riobaldo’s having involved us fully in his life, enlisting our help in seeking answers to questions that resonate universally. Through the words of this complex, simple man of the backlands of Brazil, a mercenary warrior so ostensibly different from ourselves, who has done “deplorable” things but has “come there, to the sertão of the North, as everyone does sooner of later…almost without noticing that I was doing so, compelled by the need to find a better way of life,” we’re unable to turn away our gaze, or escape our essential, human commonality.

Guimarães Rosa’s concentration on the essential renders aspects of fiction such as plot and dénouement almost entirely subordinate to the pointedness of the book’s existential inquiries and the ebullient freshness and newness of the language with which they are delivered. Whether one knows ahead of time the “surprise” revelation of the end of the novel is much beside the point (especially in a book that ends with an infinity mark). In terms of plot, Riobaldo’s story in the novel’s second half winds along the tension between growing acceptance of a love he fears to admit and the burning, hateful vengeance he feels compelled to pursue and justify. These entangled but competing forces, this “devil in the whirlwind, in the middle of the street,” literalized at the end in an almost cartoonish fusion, but also forming a kind of quantum spin-liquid state in which Riobaldo’s ability to make sense of his life’s choices attains a pitch of constant instability - leave him closer to an answer but still asking the question that has dogged him from the beginning. Does the devil exist? This may seem the simple question of an uneducated person, and it is far from being the only question the novel asks. But if we heed Riobaldo’s advice, to “…listen beyond what I am telling you, and listen with an open mind,” it reveals itself as a question of great importance and enduring relevance, however sophisticated or unsophisticated the manner in which we may phrase it. Is not the world that offers beauty, goodness and love filled with jagunços and all who must deal with them, with persons born to or entrapped in violence and conflict, whose struggles to seek a better life involve us in their existence, whose stories demand that we question our own complicity and responsibility?

“The sertão,” as Riobaldo says, “is everywhere.”

I am immensely grateful to my co-hosts for this group reading of Grande Sertão: Veredas: Richard, Rise and Miguel. 

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[i] Having read about 90 pages of the French translation, I switched, without prejudice, to the English translation when it suddenly became available. These translations approach the novel quite differently, with the English translators electing to emphasize clarity over an attempt to recreate fully, as does the French translation, Guimarães Rosa’s linguistic inventiveness.

[ii] Glossary to The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, by João Guimarães Rosa, James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís, translators, Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1963.